Promise, page 10
I see Theodore’s hand resting peacefully against the muscular neck of his horse. My great-grandfather was rumored to have been nearly seven feet in height, which was why he needed such an incredible animal.
This evening, Theodore may have relied on the company of his horse and the sight of his well-constructed church for peace of mind. As his acreage increased, he had gained unwanted attention from a group of whites that had initially laughed, waving their hands dismissively when they laid eyes on the small, underdeveloped Black settlement. When those men returned to survey what they hadn’t anticipated surviving, much less thriving, they began an incessant campaign of sabotage. Disbelief and derision were quickly replaced with rage as these Christian men asserted their divine rights and economic supremacy.
Theodore had seen this awful art of rage his entire life. Every colored man in America had received, against his will and his soul, this piss-poor education. Recently, he’d discovered Callie crying over her ravaged flower beds and trampled vegetable gardens. No animal but a white man had the teeth, the hunger, to pull up her roots and seeds so viciously.
Another evening, husband and wife had stood inside the door of their house, staring at the faceless, darkly hooded men who lurked, armed, in their yard. A flickering huddle of muffled voices vowed to threaten my great-grandparents with rope, bullets, flame, or worse. Reviewing his mental index of white terror, my great-grandfather was aware that, at some point, their cowardly talk would turn to action.
Those that gathered under my great-grandfather’s faith embraced the god who lived in the daily dignity of their own faces. Many of them had forgotten what that pride looked like until they stood in the Kindreds’ half-hewn sanctuary. Their recognition of that pride now meant that none of them was willing to turn back from what they were building in Damascus.
Still, tonight, he wonders whether he should have allowed Callie and the children to walk alone in the afterlight of the storm. But white folks did their worshiping on Sunday just like everybody else, said Callie. Hopefully, they would also be at rest.
Alma had been fussy when he’d kissed and nuzzled her satiny forehead before handing her over to Mrs. Whitaker, whose cooing made his daughter’s face brighten into a full, dimpled smile.
Alone, he and Canaan had walked along the backwards river before cutting into the woods, towards the hills where the sight of the simple church always filled his heart with joy. It was nearly time to make a naming decision, and Theodore trusted Callie to choose well. He had ebullient visions of bringing up both of their children in this new church, in their new town, named by their mother.
After Calliope Kindred’s death, the townspeople will find a slip of paper in my great-grandmother’s journal expressing her wish that the church be named Hinder Me Not.
* * *
•••
As he ties his horse, Theodore hears Callie and the children approaching.
He calls to his wife, then walks around to the front of the church to greet her while the children stream inside to dry off from the sudden rain.
Callie’s hair is braided into a soft bowl on her head. She wears a green shawl around her slender shoulders. The black eyes that look out from her oval, freckled face are intelligent, sensuous, and warm.
Theodore presses her wrist against his lips. Their four hands rest on her high, round belly. She asks him about Alma, and he tells her that their baby daughter is fine. Mrs. Whitaker will be waiting for them to pick up the child on their way home. When he turns my great-grandmother’s face up to kiss her, he can see Callie at every age they have ever shared a kiss. One of his sharpest, first memories was trying to kiss her and getting punched squarely in his nose before she kissed him back.
On this evening in 1902, Theodore can feel the full, wet artlessness of Callie’s lips in their youth; he remembers the taste of buttercream frosting left on her lips from the shared slice of cake on their wedding night—a night in spring when magnolia petals blew through the windows of the hotel he’d saved his paychecks to take her to, onto the white, cool sheets where they’d first made love. He remembers, too, the salt on her lips from her labor, which lasted sixteen hours; she kissed him when she finally held their daughter, Alma, in her aching arms. He can recall the full and easy kiss he gave her when she agreed that it made perfect sense for them to build a town from scratch, a town where they could grow old together in freedom.
More than the building rising in front of them, Calliope is his church.
He listens to her beloved schoolchildren giggling as they watch him and Callie. He smiles back, waving at twelve shy faces. He says he will light the lamps to keep the mosquitoes from tasting their sweet blood. “Better mosquitoes than the devil,” he adds while Callie pokes his rib at the place where his heart has burned for her his entire life.
* * *
•••
From the sound, Theodore knows Canaan has suddenly turned two-legged, rearing and dropping down, printing the earth with a warning. The stamping is percussive, fearful, so much so that he can hear his great horse above the upright piano where Callie is playing sideways because of her swollen belly.
My great-grandfather marks his place in his Bible. His eyes meet my great-grandmother’s knitted frown. Getting up, he tells the children, who have stopped, wide-eyed, in the middle of their prayer song, to keep going with the music.
Alone, he goes down the rough, unpainted steps at the entrance of what will later be christened Hinder Me Not. Rounding the muddy corner, he walks quickly along the side of the church. A wild animal must have provoked his horse. He regrets that he doesn’t have his rifle to fire a warning shot because he doesn’t like to have his gun near Callie and the children for no reason.
My great-grandfather has not seen the man who is standing in the shadow. The butt of the man’s gun against his neck sends him to the ground. A wheel of red stars burns his eyes as he is yanked, with some effort, to his long feet.
“Git up, Preacher Man,” says the voice, which belongs to another man who jabs his own gun into my great-grandfather’s side. Theodore shuffles forward. Tears form in his eyes when he hears Canaan snorting and whinnying in distress. “Had yourself a choice, didn’t you?” the voice is saying near the temple of his head. “Ain’t no choice now after all those warnings we gave you. Bet you wished you’d listened to us the first time, you hardheaded preaching son of a bitch.”
Theodore wonders how many of them are standing in the shadows. Sweat pours into his eyes. “Go on then,” says my great-grandfather, smelling kerosene. “Burn me up. Hang me. Shoot me. Eat my balls if that’s what you’re planning. But please, spare them. They’re innocent.”
From the shadows he can see men flinging the kerosene over his dear friend. Theodore’s voice goes hoarse from shouting at them to let the animal live: “Take him alive, won’t you? Worth more to you alive, even if you sold him right off. Go ’head and let ’im live! He ain’t done you a harm. Let ’im live and he’ll be worth more than this! Jesus, let ’im live, let ’im be!”
“Bring him over here, boys,” the voice says. “I’m going to make him eat his goddamn horse.”
When he hears the match, my great-grandfather does not bow his head but looks directly into the broken, bleeding eyes of his friend to ask forgiveness.
The great horse shrieks, leaping like a man, as the fire rides his back. Soft ears flatten against his skull. Heat engulfs the animal from nostril to belly, until, in defeat, Canaan kneels, dropping in a single bow onto his side. Dark flames work over the marvelous body. Theodore sees their friendship collapse in the dying creature’s eyes.
When Theodore turns in horror away from Canaan’s scorched body, he spots Callie’s face in the window. He mouths the word run but one of the men is watching.
“Kindling,” he says, laughing.
* * *
•••
They drag Theodore most of the way back to the church. It takes four or five of them to get him through the entrance because of his resistance. When they have shoved him inside, they laugh and bar the door from the outside.
Callie, pressing her palms against her belly, sinks to her knees and calls her schoolchildren to her, gathering them into the center of the sanctuary.
Theodore begins smashing the windows opposite from the men. He can push the children out, one or two at a time, so that they can run and hide in the woods. “Don’t come back for us,” he tells them as they cry.
He is reaching to shatter one of the windows with a blunt broomstick when a bullet tears through the crown of his head.
Then, torches begin to whizz through the broken windows. Landing in green and red rage, the flares instantly begin to chew the church apart.
Weeping, my great-grandmother crawls away from the children and struggles to pull her husband’s body back towards their circle. The sleeves of her dress rip at the shoulders. She has never carried the full weight of Theodore. Callie closes her eyes and pulls him with all her strength. His broken skull leaves a slicked comet of blood. Some of the bigger boys, crying and coughing, get up and help her to move him while the beams of the ceiling whine in agony.
She coughs, feeling the baby kicking frantically inside her. Callie spreads herself on the floor next to her husband. In the glass gaze of his dead eyes she can see the furnace of their dreams and faith. Callie kisses him intensely, as she has always kissed him, tasting again the beautiful years they shared. Then her fingers close his silent eyes.
* * *
•••
Between her death and crossing, Callie recalls her own mother and father kneeling in southern cane fields deep in Georgia. She remembers how a white man once dragged her mother away from their table at suppertime, and how her father was forced to let his woman go.
Callie can see her mother now, walking out of the dark moonlight to beckon her daughter. Her eyes are red as rubies. She holds something like a basket in her hand.
It is her master’s head.
The fire climbs Callie’s hair. It licks her ears, parting her skin from her skull like the crimson sea a prophet once parted to free his enslaved people. Later, those fugitives would become tribes. The hands of twelve children fasten to Callie’s sides. The burning hands of twelve children become millions.
Then she thinks of one child: her daughter, Alma.
My great-grandmother’s last breath is her daughter’s name.
The entire roof of Hinder Me Not collapses. The innocent night, revealed. Callie breathes a single word until it sings its memory back to her—Alma?
Alma!
Alma?
Alma! Alma!
Al—
Like a scream, she crosses with one word to the underworld.
* * *
•••
Carrying twelve burned children in her arms, my great-grandmother Callie meets her husband, Theodore, at the river of eternity.
He explains to her where they are and what they must do, as he always has. “We must cross now, honey,” he says. “The children are too young. They don’t have as much time to cross as we do before they are lost.”
“Alma?” says Callie. She is still refusing to die even though her soul is with Theodore and the schoolchildren.
“There’s no time left to say goodbye,” my great-grandfather says, unable to let himself think about their other child, their unborn child, who is unable to cross, lost in the cinders of darker earth.
My great-grandparents are at the mouth of a roaring river. Theodore sits on the saddle of his beloved horse, Canaan, whose sockets are blinking green fire. My great-grandfather takes the children into his arms, places others across his broad shoulders. Some of them are too small to cross over. They, too, are lost. He must help the rest, so that ancestors can hold them, breathe their short songs into starry symphonies.
Before stepping into the river, Theodore and Callie turn, looking over their shoulders to see their old world, and nestled within it, a small raw speck named Damascus, where they meant to make their own freedom.
10
It was Saturday morning, and there were only a handful of people besides Ruby on the local bus. The sunlight pressed against her face, and she closed her eyes, savoring the shadows that dotted across the inner red glow of her eyelids. She wasn’t sleepy, anything but. She clutched the small bundle wrapped in a canvas bag on her lap. Her skin was scrubbed clean, and she’d washed her hair, though that didn’t matter because no one could see it. Ruby had pushed it up inside the sweat-stained mesh cap that her ma used to make her own black hair lie flat, before she tugged on the bouncy, blond wig that Ruby called the Bombshell. I’d give Jayne Mansfield a run for her money, Ruby’s mother always said. She’d bought it after she and Ruby had gone to the Gunn Hill Cinema to see The Girl Can’t Help It.
Ruby’s scalp itched, but she was afraid to scratch her head the way she wanted to, worried that her fingernails might disturb her ma’s well-preserved coiffure. She’d seen her mother rub her face against the hair as if she were rubbing her face against a kitten.
Ruby thought about the money she hoped she’d get from selling a few of her teacher’s belongings in Briggley. There were a few pairs of earrings and necklaces that appeared to be valuable. There was an old watch, perhaps given to Miss Burden by her father or a male relative. There was a checkbook too, but Ruby knew there would be no safe way, not yet, to explore what might happen if she wrote herself a check. She’d need to learn how to write a check, to begin with. And maybe the bank already knew that Miss Burden had died. Trying her luck with the woman’s valuables made more sense. Nobody in Briggley would have a clue about how Ruby had gotten her hands on these things, and more important, nobody at a pawnshop would care.
If Ruby had money, she could begin saving for pilot school. But there would be things she’d need before that—better clothes, three hot meals a day, a room in a boardinghouse where she’d be viewed as a decent, hardworking young woman. She shook away a memory of herself lying exposed on the rocks.
As the scenery blurred outside the window, Ruby’s mind loosened into vivid daydreams. She tried to imagine climbing onto the bus and looking down the aisle at a young, plain-faced blond girl staring dreamily out of the window. The girl’s dress was old but clean. Because she was sitting with her arms pressed tensely against her sides, the holes beneath her armpits were concealed. Her tousled curls looked as if she’d just lifted her cheek from a pillow (not a wig box). She wanted anyone who looked at her to think she was a star in a love story. She was in pursuit of the possibility that her love interest might love her back. The place where the hair was matted and darker at her nape could not be detected from the way she held her head high above her bladelike shoulders. Her sense of determination was palpable, heady as the pungent scent of marigolds. There was something lovely and awful about her.
Ruby stood, blinking and shaky, when she realized the bus had pulled into Briggley’s depot, which was already crammed with loud mothers and their hollering children. Ruby remembered that on Saturdays, most normal families went to the market, or had picnics with their relatives, or enjoyed double feature matinees together.
As she descended from the bus, she liked how women smiled at her. It was like she was Cinderella, but instead of wearing enchanted glass slippers she had stolen her mother’s magic wig. And why couldn’t she be both princess and pilot?
* * *
•••
She sat alone in a red plastic booth at the Cedar Street Diner. The sunshine poured through the large square window. No amount of wiping could make the table look new. Dulled tin cutlery gleamed on a thin napkin. Waitresses in daffodil-colored uniforms danced between the kitchen and dining room, as the frequent chime of a bell sounded and a greasy, bored male voice called out orders.
“Honey? Aren’t you pretty as a doll! Your parents joining you?”
“They’re shopping,” Ruby said quickly. “But they gave me money to have some lunch.”
The waitress nodded, smiling. A rumpled notepad was wedged in her palm. Without a beat, she set a sticky menu in front of Ruby, winking as she spun away. “My advice to you is a milkshake, honey. We got the best malteds. Ask anyone.”
Ruby looked at the menu, but her mind was on the woman’s compliment. She did look like a doll, didn’t she? With her ma’s hair and the new dress she’d bought next door in a small boutique that reminded her of a dollhouse? Everything had worked as smoothly as she had hoped. The man at Second Chance Pawns had carefully appraised the earrings, bracelets, and necklaces Ruby had offered him. The only thing that wasn’t costume was a delicate sapphire ring that she’d been tempted to keep for herself because the man at the store said it matched her eyes. Instead, she’d walked away with seventy-five dollars. A fortune.
When she’d turned the corner at Cedar Street, thinking about her rumbling stomach, she’d been startled by her yellow-headed reflection in a storefront window that displayed rich, jewel-colored dresses and tweed suits for ladies. Ruby had serious-lady money tucked in the waistband of her underwear. If she could wear a wig that drew smiles, what would a decent dress do? A nice dress needed new shoes, a new hair ribbon, perhaps a scarf with a lovely print. The dress might match her eyes, which she’d always secretly felt were her best feature. This ain’t you, a voice in her head growled. Don’t fool yourself, Ruby. Not a bit of this lady stuff got a thing to do with you. Another voice countered: Well, what if it does now? I can’t get nowhere in life without looking like I got a good life.
“Won’t you come in, dear,” a woman’s voice had floated towards her. Ruby took her eyes away from the wonder of her reflection and found herself greeted by a slender, auburn-haired woman who wore a brighter-than-money green summer dress. The elegant, thin gold belt that cinched the woman’s middle-aged waist sent a spiral of envy through Ruby as the woman extended her bare, freckled arm and her pink manicured nails to take Ruby’s hand in hers.
