Natashia Deon: Grace

Massa tol’ Momma that he give her a better life than the others on the row and say he can keep a good eye on us where we is. He’s particular about everything — how they hang clothes on the line to dry and how Miss Dean spin the cotton and stitch the clothes. He make a rule that Hazel got to keep her candle burning on the nights he come so he won’t mistake her for a rat or a coon and shoot her. She never forget. The candle she got burning now is brighter than ever.

Massa brung that black man with him tonight, too. The one who started the knockin. I can feel him thumping Momma through the wall. It sets a pace in my chest like a drummer ’bout to lead a marching band. When I close my eyes, I imagine I see ’em, black boys dressed in raggedy clothes, holding fourth-hand instruments, ready to please the crowd.

Knockin’s stopped.

That means Momma’s through.

Me and Hazel tiptoe fast to the split in the wall. Hazel always beat me to it cause she don’t never want me to see Momma after the knockin. Say it’s private. But I want the light from the other room to slide over my face, too, so I cheat and step back a little, just behind her.

I can see Momma sitting on the edge of the bed wit no clothes on. That black man that was on top of her don’t have no clothes neither, just walking ’cross the room like he ain’t got no care in the world even though he black like us.

He make the light disappear when he pass us.

Massa Hilden’s in there, too, standing in the corner watching. He don’t never wear the jacket to that brown suit. His whole body’s swole up in the material, making it cinch tight around his waist like a blouse. A gap in his shirt spreads open where the button’s gone. It mouths silent words when his gut moves from breathing. The hair on his belly is poking through the gap, thick and coarse and tangled like a pile of wadded thread, brown and white. It loops and crisscrosses over his shiny pink belly fat.

Cain’t see his silly shoes, though.

Those make me laugh cause they long and skinny and ugly like the pillow bandages Hazel make for our monthly flow. He’s walking in ’em.

On the back of his trousers, a lump sticks out above his butt where he keeps his pistol. Its off-white handle, the color of new teeth, is showing just above his waist and it keeps everybody in order, even white peoples. He always got it on him, can get downright dangerous when he’s drinking. Killed a white man a few years back. He tells people it was an accident but Hazel say he meant to. He shoot at a lot of people. Even my real daddy. It’s why Hazel knows my daddy was fast. Massa said my daddy wasted his time, wouldn’t sign the papers to buy that land, coulda sold it to somebody else so he shot at ’im. He called the law on Massa. Didn’t nothing happen, though.

“Naomi, get back! You gon’ mess around and get us all killed,” Hazel whisper.

“I just want to see his shoes, is all.”

“Shhh. .” she say, waving me away.

I ease back a little. “They leavin? Momma ready for us now?”

I hear Massa. “I need males. Nine months of waiting needs to pay off bigger for me. These girls ain’t pulling in nothing. No more girls, you hear me? Else they gon’ end up like you.”

“Yes’sa, Massa Hilden,” Momma say. “God gon’ bless me wit a boy this time.”

“And how’s Hazel?” he say. Hazel slides away from the wall slow like she don’t want to hear. She come toward me and I step aside, pretend I ain’t interested in getting in front of her to see Massa’s long baby feet.

“She should be of age now,” he say.

“No suh, no suh,” Momma say in a hurry. “She’s just a baby.”

“You just make sure it’s a boy this time.”

“Yes’sa, Massa Hilden. Yes’sa.”

I tiptoe around Hazel fast so she cain’t catch me before I get to the wall but she don’t race me this time. I smash my face in front of the opening. Cain’t see nothin. I get on my knees and look through the bottom hole. All I see is Momma sad and Massa gone.

Hazel’s on the other side of the room now, sitting close to the candlelight, flipping through the pages of her Bible. Massa’s mother gave the Bible to Hazel and two cousins. Said it would keep every one of us from being a heathen. But Hazel’s the only one she taught to read it. Just the first page before she died. The rest Hazel figured out on her own.

“‘In the beginning,’” Hazel say with tears seeping through her lashes, “‘God created the heavens. .’” Her voice cracks from the tears caught in her throat. The free ones roll down her face and drip on her page. She looks at me, whispers, “You see that poker near the fire where Momma is?”

I turn back ’round on my knees to see through the hole again. “The one you found?” I say.

“That’s it. You see the end? It’s sharp. I grind it myself. It’s strong now. It’s ready.”

“Ready for what, Hazel?”

The door slams shut in the other room and I jump up. “Come on, Hazel! Momma’s ready for us!”

Hazel reach out to stop me even though she ain’t close enough to get me.

I stop anyway. “But I want to see her, Hazel.”

“Not now.”

“I want to see her.”

“Not now, Naomi!”

I stomp my foot, twist up my arms.

“Momma needs more time,” she say. “Not like before. She gotta try harder, make a baby. A boy baby for Massa Hilden. Get the most money.”

“I know she wanna see us.”

“Naomi, look. . what Momma’s doin. . what he make her do. Changes women. Makes ’em different.”

“Somethin’s wrong wit Momma?”

Hazel sighs the way she do when we daydreaming on the porch at night, when she’s telling me about her North. I go close to her, dress myself with her, slipping under her arm and resting there. “North,” she say, “is a place where we could belong to ourselves and to the people we choose, in love and kindness, and in the sharing of God’s good things.”

“Let’s go North,” I tell Hazel to make her happy again. “Let’s find that star. Take Momma and go that way.”

“Ain’t just a direction,” she say. I hold her hand up to the end of my corded braid and she takes it between her fingertips, unbraids it, and combs her fingers through. “The North Star don’t mean nothin to those who cain’t read it. Could mean south or east or west, just the same.”

“That’s why I got you,” I say. Hazel’s my guide, my light in darkness, one of them stars that like a handful of little moons were shrunk to pebbles, then flung to the heavens where they sat.

“Then I’ll teach you,” she say. She wraps her arms around me and pulls me into her softness. “One day, we gon’ go to Boston where it’s safe. We gon’ wear the pretty dresses Momma made us and drink sweet tea all day long.”

SINCE ME AND Hazel had our birthday four months ago and I turned fifteen, I started to notice thangs. Like how every spring the musty smell of grass and dew warmed by the sun clogs my nose and makes me sneeze. And how the cotton fields throw small balls in the air and twirl ’em around in the wind. The boys trample ’em under their feet and the girls make doll babies with ’em. Sometimes I imagine the cotton pieces are alive ’cause of how they chase me.

I notice how Mama Dean always sits in the same place in the middle of the quad next to that spinning wheel, talking to it. She look young even though her gray hair say she old. Been white since she was fifteen, she told me. Her skin is still smooth and it’s charcoal black — a color only God could paint and make look right.

I been sitting with her for hours today, studying how she move with that machine, holding firm to that cotton, pacing it through its big wooden wheel when it zip and creak around.