They waited for her in the sweet fields above, or so her sister, Etta, had told her. Buncy didn’t know if she believed that, found it hard to believe much of anything good in the world. Etta had been gone for so many years. No other blood family she could recall. Buncy still had the ugly old necklace that Etta had given to her before that horse-faced Sugar Thompson come along and drag her away, but she kept it behind a board by the stove and didn’t look at it much anymore.
Her sister’s voice – always with her, always bright as birdcall – found its way into Buncy’s head at the oddest times. Here she was sitting in her rocker, thinking about maybe stewing herself a chicken, and Etta’s voice snuck up to remind her about that necklace.
“You need us, ever you need us, and we come to call… come to set things right.”
Etta, the pretty sister wearing a fine dress and a look of just plain misery, had handed the weathered chain and charm to Buncy as they said goodbye behind the shed to the back of the Andersen place.
“Ain’t nothing but an ugly old tooth,” Buncy had said, looking at the charm and wiping tears from her eyes because her sister was gonna be gone soon enough. “You best take it for yourself.”
“No,” Etta said, kissing her full on the mouth. “You take it because Sugar Thompson already saved me. He got himself a good business and a fine house in Biloxi. This is for your future, Buncy. This is for your saving.”
Though she hadn’t held much hope for her own salvation, Buncy had taken the necklace, slipped it into the pocket of her tattered housedress so none of them miserable little Andersen children saw the bauble. She’d kept house for the Andersens back then. Their children were a pack of devils that saw red whenever their eyes fell on black skin. They were so evil tempered, sure one of them would try and snatch the necklace from her, even if it wasn’t nothing but an ugly old tooth. Then, Sugar Thompson come along and took Etta away – killed her with his own hands not six months after saying he did and he would at a Baptist church in Biloxi.
Buncy had her own place now, a big draughty shack with a want for some new paint, but it was hers, and it was the only house she ever had to clean again. She had herself a good well, and the river wasn’t much of a walk away. The small garden she tended in back kept her fine with vegetables. Etta had always said that Buncy could grow anything. “You could plant yourself a finger and harvest a whole person come crop time.” But that was so long ago, before Sugar Thompson and the necklace.
Memories of her sister nudged her from her rocking chair, sent her down the dark hall over squeaking boards to the kitchen and the loose plank beside the stove. The necklace hung from a crooked nail and she lifted it free, let its yellowed charm absorb the kitchen light.
Etta had told her that the tooth was from Africa, from the grandmother of the grandmother, said it had come over on the first ships carrying her people from the sweet fields to the painful acres they were meant to tend.
“Foof,” Buncy whispered, making the yellow nugget dance at the end of its chain. “Foof and nonsense.”
They were supposed to be free now. For twenty years, she kept hearing that they were freed people, but she didn’t know this freedom anymore than she knew the President of the United States, because she’d never met either of them.
* * *
Lacey Armitage stared down at the sad, dry pine box that held her boy. She hated thinking of him in there, not just dead but buried like a ragman without a button on his suit and shoes that were more air than leather. Vernon had been a good boy and a fine young man, and he deserved a lot better than a couple of dried out planks and some rusted nails for his final bed. When she’d gone to the funeral house and seen the way he was laid out, his head on that hard old board, she’d cried herself blind, and she kept on crying all night, while sewing a pillow from material cut out of her fraying apron and then stuffing it full of the socks her Vernon wasn’t going to need anymore.
They lowered the pine box into the ground, and she didn’t think about him coming home for a moment; for the blink of an eye she only thought that her son was being buried without a button on his suit.
That was no way for a boy to go see his kin.
* * *
“I want to speak to you, now, not as a writer, not as a woman, not as an African-American, but rather, as a human being.”
The audience in the college auditorium erupted in applause, some of the spectators whistled and others cheered, and a portion of Mira’s anxiety was diluted in the tonic of adulation. She adjusted her notes on the lectern and sipped from the glass of water.
In the front row, a large old man in a fine gray suit, wearing a cottony swab of hair on his big, round head, looked up with pride. Distinguished and substantial, the man was a monument of grace, strength and wisdom.
If only Mira’s mother could have been at his side.
She fingered the necklace at her throat and continued.
* * *
Buncy rubbed the tooth between her thumb and forefinger and felt the oddest sensation on her skin. It was like a warm rain all over her, an absolute downpour of comfort. She looked around her plain, dingy kitchen and thought she saw the dust move. Buncy blinked. She rubbed the tooth a little more, and sure as bacon crackles, the dust whirled and danced from the little cracked table, from the windowsill, from the bare plank shelves.
A clump of fear tightened up in her belly, and Buncy stopped caressing the tooth-charm. But having been awoken, the dust rose upward like fire smoke; it danced and shook and made a silent commotion all about the kitchen.
And the women appeared, forming from the agitated cloud. Two dozen of them crowded into her kitchen, wearing dresses; wearing trousers with frayed cuffs cascading over bare, broken feet; wearing shapeless rags that barely covered their private places. The dust women looked at Buncy with different expressions – anger, joy, pity, and love (Yes, there was love there. More than anything else. Love.) Trembling and with a prayer on her tongue, still doused in the warm shower of emotion, Buncy looked to the hall and saw a procession of women stretching all the way to her front door.
A hand fell on her shoulder, a hand of such comfort and familiarity that Buncy might have drifted off like a tired babe under its touch.
“You best get your chicken knife,” Etta whispered.
Buncy craned her neck and looked up at the face of her sister. The necklace and its charm were forgotten as Buncy traced the plump cheeks and full lips with her gaze. She had missed this face. Only now, seeing it again, did she realize just how much pain its loss had brought her. “What I need a knife for, Etta?”
“He comin’ down the road. He been out by that old oak for a good part of the morning, saw you down to the river, and he means to come call.”
The air in the room shifted, and Buncy forced herself to look away from her sister’s face. One of the women draped in a shapeless rag stepped forward. Her hair was cut close on her oval head. Her eyes showed like stars at midnight.
“You a free girl,” the woman said. “No call for you to let him do his nastiness on you.” The woman made a slow turn to reveal the web of scars, some so deep as to be crevices to either side of her spine like the bark of an old pine tree. Completing her turn, the woman grasped the edge of the rag falling over her breasts and belly and pulled it aside.
Buncy clasped the necklace to her throat and clicked a sob in her throat. The woman’s private place was revealed, shorn of hair. The skin there had been cut and torn, a clot like sliced liver where her legs met.
“Master Loring liked my blood on him when he did his nastiness.”
“A lot of ‘em like blood,” another woman said from her place at the corner of the kitchen.
Buncy leaned back into the warmth of her sister’s legs and felt a smooth palm petting her head. “So you best get your chicken knife,” Etta said as if telling a child to fetch a rag doll. “He’s comin’ to call soon enough.”
* * *
Lacey looked at the hot dishes, the smattering of ham and the dirty glasses on the kitchen counter. Nobody in the neighborhood had much in the way of food, but when somebody died everybody ate good so that the comfort of a full belly might lull grief, maybe make it sleepy so it let loose a bit of its grip.
“Momma,” her daughter said from the doorway. Her beautiful girl had tight, neatly braided ponytails over each ear, fastened with old bits of ribbon. She wore her only dress, a withered garment of pale blue that hung just below her knees. “Lester’s outside.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Just went walking.”
A flare of panic scorched a path from Lacey’s navel to her throat. Her youngest boy shouldn’t be wandering out in the world, none of her children should be wandering. The world was a hateful place that ate children.
Lacey ran through the front room, which also served as the family bedroom.
And there was her Lester, standing on the porch and looking in at her through the screen door, his eyes full of cold, confused nothingness. A man stood behind her boy; Mr. Forest Jordan was his name. He lived a few houses down and taught out to the Negro university.
“Thought you might want this back,” Forest Jordan said with a warm, rich voice. He placed his hands on Lester’s shoulders and smiled a proper smile, filled with dutiful remorse and pleasantness. “Can’t imagine what I’d do with him.”
Lacey invited the older man in and instructed her children to play in the kitchen, though neither of them seemed in the mood for play. “Don’t get yourselves dirty,” she said, before returning to the living room.
Lacey offered to fix Forest Jordan a plate of food leftover from the repast, but he shook his big head and said, “No thank you, Lacey.”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t have come earlier when more folks were here.”
“I had to give an exam this afternoon,” Jordan replied. “I’m sorry I had to leave the services so early. Vernon was a fine boy.”
“Yes,” Lacey said, patting down the hair over her ear.
They chatted; his warm, understanding voice almost soothed Lacey’s agitation. But no voice, not even an angel’s voice, was going to take away the fact that her boy, her Vernon, had been buried in a suit that had no buttons.
That wasn’t right.
“They said some terrible things about Vernon,” he whispered, again shaking his big head.
“They lied,” Lacey said simply.
“They did. And I know they did.” Jordan leaned forward on the tattered sofa, his weight sinking the cushion nearly out of sight. “I don’t know if I should tell you this, Lacey. Don’t know that I should tell anybody. But you’re his mother and you deserve to know.”
“Know what, Mr. Jordan?”
“It’s that Deavers girl.”
* * *
The audience sat rapt with eyes revealing their admiration of her. Mira spoke with care, almost snail-paced, knowing the easiest way to lose balance was to move too quickly. When her nerves began to thrum, insisted she speak faster, Mira stroked the bauble at her neck and took a deep breath.
“My novels,” she continued, “have come under criticism by a substantial number of my peers. They insist that I have trampled the memory of the men and women who have come before me, those that have sacrificed to give me the freedom to speak and be heard.
“As the women in my family are so fond of saying… foof and nonsense.”
The audience laughed appreciatively, as Mira knew they would. She sipped from her glass of water until the audience quieted. “In my work, I celebrate the power of freedom, the right to be a fully realized human being without clutching to the chains of the past. I do not deny the struggle, nor do I believe we have fully arrived. But I do believe that the harm done within our community is far more damaging than any imposed from outside. My characters acknowledge this; they refuse to accept the damage of their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, neighbors or children. They expose it, fight it, and they move forward, ever forward.
“In Sweet Fields, Sabrita Neil escapes from the coiled roots of rotted ancestry. She excises herself from a cloying, dissolute family to build a life of her own, free of the tragedies that her father, her mother and her two brothers have embraced as excuses to stay low.
“Some have already come forward to denounce Sweet Fields, because they believe that I’ve demonized African-American culture for the simple reason that I do not make excuses for the ignorance and cruelty Sabrita finds in the home of her youth. Again, foof and nonsense. What I have done is celebrated human strength through a character who refuses to make excuse or lay blame.”
Heads nodded. A respectful and enthusiastic applause filled the auditorium.
“In chapter three,” Mira said, pretending to search through her book for the proper page as a means to pace her presentation, “Sabrita is packing her belongings into a paper grocery sack… “
* * *
Buncy saw the man taking awkward steps down the dirt lane. He had a limp in both legs, and he jerked from side to side as he ambled toward her front porch. The top half of his face lay under the shade cast by the brim of his old, gray hat, and he looked like a haunt, shuffling and eyeless, moving through the lace of light and shadow cast by the trees.
She stepped back from the window and touched the necklace at her throat. The women were gone now; they’d faded back into dust, blown about the house and settled back to the floor, the tabletop, the shelves.
Her fingers worked over the old, yellow tooth. The man stopped in the dirt and swung his head slowly from one side to the next, taking a nasty, snakelike look at the world around him. Then he pulled the brim of his hat even lower so that only the very tip of his nose, his lips and his pointy chin were visible.
He took one limping step forward. Then another.
* * *
Lacey ushered Mr. Forest Jordan to the door, thanked him with tears in her eyes and a jagged layer of ice in the empty place behind her rib cage, as if the cavern of her grief had frozen over. She told her daughter to watch her surviving son and sent them into the front yard. Once certain they were occupied with the talk of children, Lacey crossed to the small chest against the wall.
Pushing aside rags and an old newspaper that had a picture of her dead boy, she reached to the bottom of the chest and lifted a souvenir of her late husband from its depths.
He’d been issued the pistol while serving in Korea. He’d left a leg behind to pay for his admission to the war, but he’d brought this gun home, and some nights he pulled the weapon out to enjoy its weight and maybe dream about something heroic. Lacey had always hated the sight of the gun, more so since it was always held in the hand of a man who had found glory in his own crippling.
She’d never been able to sell the hateful device; no other article of her husband remained. Now, seeing the smooth polished box, she was grateful that she hadn’t let her distaste for the gun force its sale.
What that Deavers girl had done couldn’t go unpunished. She couldn’t just let the horrible child live while her selfishness had promised that Lacey’s Vernon wouldn’t.
Mr. Forest Jordan had told her the truth. This much she knew.
Her father came home early from the office; that’s what I think. And since she couldn’t figure out a way to explain Vernon, or maybe she just didn’t want to have to explain him, she got her daddy’s gun and shot him rather than have her father find out she was messing about with a black boy.
A thin, tarnished chain dangled from the leg of the pistol case. At its end, an ugly bauble swung like a pendulum, and for a moment Lacey found herself entranced by the unattractive little wad of tooth, now the color of dust. Once her fascination passed, she pulled the chain and charm from the box leg and held it in her palm. She set the box on the floor at her knees and turned the necklace over in her hands.
A pointless heirloom, she thought. Just another reminder of poverty and struggle. This was the legacy of her family, and it was cheap, battered and disgusting.
Even so, holding the necklace gave her comfort and soothed a bit of her pain, though it did nothing to melt the chilled hole in her chest.
Vernon loved that girl, and she treated him worse than a dog. Rape? The only crime committed that day was murder and there isn’t a single one of those Deavers who doesn’t know it.
Clasping the charm in her palm, Lacey lifted the box’s lid to reveal the pistol her husband had carried so proudly. Black velvet swaddled the gun. Bullets nested in a neat row along the bottom of the case.
“And what you think you gonna do with that?” a woman asked.
* * *
Mira finished reading the passage. Her hands trembled a bit, and she forced herself to take several deep breaths before looking up at her audience.
“Sabrita’s revelation is not one of internalized racism any more than it is a declaration of hatred. She is packing her bag; she is moving forward. She has seen the illness and rage and hopelessness that has suffocated her since birth, and she is casting it off. Yes, her mother has shown more affection for her crack pipe than for her daughter. This mother is not redeemed, never becomes heroic, just as the father is never more than a weapon constantly wounding his daughter. So be it.
“To deny the damage in our culture, or rather one facet of our culture, to lay the blame for our faults at the feet of others, is in effect embracing weakness. We build faulty crutches from inadequate material and then shout out our rage that these supports have collapsed and failed us.
“The tragedy is that we pass these broken crutches to our daughters and insist they somehow fashion them into functioning foundations on which to build their lives.”
* * *
“Ma’am,” the horrible intruder said from his place on the porch. Even close up, his eyes were hidden. The brim of his hat had a deep brown stain the shape of a carrot that pointed at the tip of his nose. When he spoke, the small teeth, nearly as discolored as the charm at Buncy’s breast, flashed meanly.
“You’re not welcome here,” Buncy said from her chair. “You best keep moving.”
“That’s not very Christian,” the man said in a voice as dry and airy as a snake’s warning.
“Neither’s what you been thinking ‘bout.”
He raised his head, finally revealing the dark little nuts of his eyes, and it was nastiness she saw there. Pure devil-sent nastiness. “How you know what I been thinking?”
“You a man, ain’t ya? I know what men think. Think they can just take what they want. And sometimes they right. Yes, Lord, sometimes they just as right as the rain, but I’m telling you that you ain’t taking nothing from me except maybe a bit of hurt.”
He stepped forward, right up to the threshold of her house, and poked his head in. He did that hateful snakey craning of his neck, first looking one way and then the next. “You all alone, girl?” he asked, his voice now high and amused.
“Just think they can take whatever they want,” Buncy announced to the room as if her dust women still held conference about her. “Don’t hear a word. Just come around to take and then be on their way. No more sense than pigs.”
“You gonna like me just fine,” he said stepping into Buncy’s house. He left dirt prints on her floor as he limp-walked toward her chair. The evil little nuts of his eyes locked on her like she was a helpless egg in a deserted nest.
The dirt of his footprints spun and rose, became a narrow column in the door behind him and then settled into the shape of a sorrowful woman dressed in a shapeless rag.
Her master had liked blood.
The dark dust-woman made a slow nod of her head.
“Well that’s that,” Buncy said.
She sprang from her chair, the point of her chicken knife guiding her toward the intruder.
* * *
“And what you think you gonna do with that?” the woman asked.
Lacey chirped a sound of surprise and turned to see a young, robust black woman, clad in a dust-gray dress with tiny daisy blossoms printed on the fabric. Behind her, a dozen more women stood like an audience.
“You think you gonna shoot that girl?”
“My boy’s gone. She… ”
The crowd of women hummed a wordless chorus. Their bodies moved and shook. “Lost me eight boys,” one woman said. Lacey could not see the speaker, could only hear her dry voice carried over the nonsensical song. “Two to the rope and three to the gun. Three just went on away and disappeared like frost at noontime. We all lost our people, girl.” The chorus broke apart into words of agreement and sympathy.
“It isn’t right,” Lacey whimpered. She hefted the weight of the gun, looked at its lethal barrel, wanted to hear it shout.
“True enough. It isn’t right. But it isn’t gonna stop,” the woman in the daisy print dress said. “Not today or tomorrow or all at once, but there’s time enough.”
“That Deavers girl killed my boy.”
“But that was yesterday, girl. You got to think about tomorrow, and revenge ain’t nothin’ about tomorrow; it’s everything about yesterday. What going to happen to your babies if you go to jail? How they gonna learn from you if you choking on a rope?”
The other women nodded solemnly, a devout congregation hearing the divine word, hearing it and making it their own, though they’d owned it throughout their whole existence. “Tomorrow breathes you life,” a small woman with bright, star-like eyes said. “Yesterday is all breathed out.”
“My Vernon is dead,” Lacey cried. “He doesn’t have tomorrow!”
The woman in the daisy print dress stepped forward and put her hand on Lacey’s head. The touch drew away pain and violence, combed it through her hair and let it rain on the floor like so much dandruff. “What I tell you when you was on my knee, and I give you that charmed thing?”
“On your knee?” Lacey asked in confusion, staring at the sturdy face and seeking some recognition of its features.
“That’s right, Lacey baby, I sat you on my knee and I told you: Ever you need us, ever at all, and we’ll come to call.”
Lacey wiped tears from her eyes and gazed at the youthful face. She imagined the hair – now dark and set and lovely – white and wiry as a brush; she pictured the full, beautiful cheeks, time-carved with wrinkles and dusted by a thousand yesterdays. And she saw those caring eyes, burdened with too many sights but still able to carry joy. She had sat on this ancient woman’s knee, her oldest kin and the woman had given her a necklace, had told Lacey that she never had to face the world alone.
The woman smiled and nodded her head, combing away the remnants of anger and sadness from Lacey’s head. “That’s right, Lacey baby.”
“Duchess Buncy?”
* * *
“If you cling to the burdens of the past, then you make them your own. You have not been wronged, nor have you been oppressed, unless you have taken it upon yourself to wrong and oppress yourselves. Neither you nor I have the right to claim injustice just because it was done to our grandmothers, or great grandmothers. We are our own people, and we should raise high our strength, our accomplishments and our success.
“I was a child when my brother was murdered, and he was demonized and made to look guilty of one crime so that another could be perpetrated against him. When I was old enough to speak to my mother about this, I asked her, ‘Mother, how could you know what really happened and do nothing? How could you walk away and find peace with yourself, knowing what they did to him?’”
Mira paused, gave the audience a chance to simmer in anticipation of the story’s moral. Again, she looked at the monument of wisdom sitting in the first row of seats, saw tears gleaming in his eyes and the grand pride of his stature cloaked in the tailored, gray suit. He’d come into their lives soon after Vernon had been shot. A widower who taught at the University, Mr. Forest Jordan had brought knowledge into their home and raised them from poverty.
And he’d brought such happiness to Mira’s mother, God bless her soul.
For a moment, stroking the charm, giving the audience time to absorb her next statement, Mira thought she saw her mother there, at Forest Jordan’s side.
But her mother’s lips were drawn down in disapproval. Mira cocked her head to the side, wondered on this illusion. In doing so, she noticed another frowning woman, and another. They appeared throughout the auditorium just behind or to the side of each rapt audience member like condemning shadows.
Mira cleared her throat. She blinked. Several of the women crossed their arms – parents awaiting a child’s excuse.
“She told me…” Mira began, but her voice faltered. She sipped from her glass of water; it burned like bile in her throat. “She told me that there was no life in yesterday. The past was as irrelevant as a field of blank tombstones, marking the quietus of nameless, evanescent flesh. Tomorrow was life and every step had to be taken in the direction of the future. Living in the past was living with the dead, and the dead have nothing to share but their decay.”
The ghost of her mother looked wounded, saddened; she shook her transparent head solemnly from side to side.
The women in the audience, a hundred dark faces, now made darker, closed their eyes. They shook their heads as if controlled by a single mechanism; they stood and filed toward the aisles, their misty bodies passing through the applauding students, the men and the women.
Mira trembled, her voice coiled in her throat, the charm on her necklace – once solid and comforting – turned to dust and salted the low stack of notes, frosted the swirling grain of the lectern like sifted flour.
None of the women – the daughters of daughters of daughters – again looked at the stage. Mira watched them go, having insulted their memories by misinterpreting their importance.
They were a strength to lean upon, to learn from, not a burden to carry, and Mira had gotten it wrong.
The realization came too late, and she could not have called them back, even if she had voice for the calling. Unwanted, the women of dust, the sisters of history walked in thick procession, a single body, a united soul that faded into the shadows at the back of the hall.
