The Seven Daughters Of Dupree free digital audiobook - Chapter 7.

smooth skin. But it was always before she would begin walking around with her ngers laced together over her belly that the pains would start. The cramping Emma described as being pulled apart organ by organ. As if something inside her demanded to be set free. Released. If it started in the day, she’d moan through the night, and in the morning the blood. The rst time, Evangeline, rarely one to show aection to her ward, held her close, brushed her ne hair smooth, and told her she and George could try again. “These things happen,” she said. “Nobody knows why.” The second time, Evangeline said the same. But when it happened a third time in the same year, the shiver of cool up her back told her something unnatural was amiss. Instead of taking the bloody bedsheets and nightdress away for a thorough washing, Evangeline smeared the sticky wet refuse above the door frame George had built. “What are you doing?” Emma asked. She had gotten used to some of Evangeline’s ways from learning her own self, but this was new. Evangeline was possessed. As if a spirit, not of herself, took hold of her body and controlled her limbs. Mind set to sle ep, Evangeline only pantomimed the required actions. When she nished the door frame, it looked as if it had been painted red and the color was peeling. The sheets were light pink instead of de ep, rusty iron. In a breathless voice, she said, “You need to give her an oering.” “Who?” Emma asked. But Evangeline was gone, carrying the sheets and nightdress outside for the wash. At least that’s what Emma thought until she smelled the smoke. George came inside and asked, “Why she setting our bed things on re?” “She said we need to give an oering,” Emma said. “To who?” Emma shrugged. When Evangeline came back inside, she carried two pots with her: one lled with fresh water, the other lled with black dirt from the eld and in it a small green shoot. She said, “You got to have balance. Make her feel welcome and let her know you wants to be fertile like this here soil. You wants to grow full like this here

orchid gon’ do. You always want to be specic when you dealing with the wants and ways of them people on the other side.” “Who from the other side?” Emma asked. “Your ma’am,” Evangeline answered unblinking. “She here. Coming for all the things that belong to her. Including yo’ chillun.” “Who’s here?” George asked. “You ain’t tell him, did ya?” “Tell me what?” Evangeline humphed. “Dat’s between you and yo’ wife. Just don’t be meddling with my bidness, if’n you don’t want the blood to come again. Leave it be and let it work.” When Evangeline plodded out of the room, Emma faced an unsettled George with more questions than she had answers. What she knew of her own ma’am was limited. Only given the details Evangeline wanted her to have and even those were more warning than worthy virtues. She looked at him from where she sat in the stripped bed in a new nightdress and inhaled his woody scent. He worked in what used to be the stables. The horses long sold o, George had made it his workshop just like Evangeline had converted the old, detached kitchen from the big house into a storehouse where she and Emma ran the farm. Emma sighed. Wondered how she was going to start the story. Staring away from George, she turned to look in the mirror he’d made for her. Tall, oval, and adjustable. He’d even carved their initials into the wood. “You know how I only use a comb on my hair and never my ngers to pick through the knots?” Emma asked. “I reckon.” “It’s because of my ma’am. My real ma’am. Mama Evangeline, she took care of me. She raised me. She the only ma’am I know, but I didn’t come from her.” “So what happened to your real ma’am? She was sold?” “Mama Evangeline say she died the day I was born. I heard her talkin’ about it to Ms. Claudette in the storehouse one day when I was comin’ in from school and they was going on and on about how to tell me the truth.” Emma closed her eyes as she thought back to that day. One of the rare times she’d seen her ma’am hospitable with someone else. She didn’t know that while

Evangeline had been friendly with everyone who came o Z ephaniah Foster Dupree’s plantation, that all changed when Emma was born. Since then theirs had been a lonely life lacking laughter other than their own, and now George, who could only add but so much to their pitiful chorus. Emma learned from Evangeline to stay with your own kind, never having any friends outside of the Dupree line. “What happened?” he asked. His eyes jumped from Emma to the blood-smeared door frame and back again. But Emma didn’t answer. She shook her head, unwilling to give voice to what she’d heard. Credence to conjecture. Like Evangeline, she had her own superstitions. Just as some things weren’t meant to be celebrated, she believed some things weren’t meant to be r epeated. Some things weren’t meant to be remembered. “She felt me near,” Emma said. “She turned her head to the corner where I was hiding and ordered me in to help. We never did talk about it, but she knows I know something.” “Something enough to think it’s your ma’am taking our babies from your body from the other side?” Emma nodded. George, with only half a story and none of the details, could only follow the lead of the women he’d made family. It was under the protection Evangeline built from blood that he and Emma found themselves in the family way for a fourth time, though none of them acknowledged it until Emma’s belly swelled in her sixth or seventh month. They’d held their breath waiting for the pain, the blood, waiting for the life to be snatched away, but it grew. Like the orchid sitting in the door frame, Emma’s body changed, curved, and bloomed full. “You carryin’ low,” Evangeline remarked, one day when she felt it safe. “You know that means it’s a girl.” “You think so?” Emma asked, from where she stood chopping vegetables for the stew they were pr eparing. “I knows so,” Evangeline said. “Girls got to be closer to the earth. Fertile begets fertile. Conjured by the hands of God, we come from the soil, fashioned

complete in the mud. That’s why we’s known to create thangs out of nothing. To make a way outta no way.” “I thought it was ’cause men always like to rule over us. Can’t get no lower than a woman. Even if’n you is colored.” “It’s some truth to that too.” Emma nodded in time as Evangeline hummed. She didn’t tell George Evangeline’s new myth about their baby or even her own projected regrets. Some things you have to ke ep to yourself and just wait and see what comes to pass. Whether it was a boy or girl, the three of them were all just tickled that for the rst time Emma had made it to the point where she had a right to complain. Her back ached and her feet hurt, swollen as they were. Everything George made with his hands was uncomfortable. She craved soft instead of sturdy. Seeing Emma e volve from afraid to joyfully crotchety, persnickety even, about every little detail set a stillness in Evangeline’s stomach. Something akin to peace but not quite. She tended to the altars she erected in honor of Emma’s real ma’am, watering the orchid every week from the leftover in the oering pot beside it before relling it fresh. The orchid opened and blossomed, and so did Emma. But Evangeline left nothing to chance. In her own room, she had George build her a small table. She covered it with a white cloth that had four inches of lace she’d sewn herself, draping the oor. A candle burned in the evening; a bowl full of fresh water never went empty or stale. A mason jar always held owers picked from the verdant garden in front of the expanded quarter shack where Evangeline grew her herbs, plants, and little pops of color for something pretty to behold. And there was always a plate of corn bread and sweet potato pone reminiscent of her favorites Evangeline stole away for the short time she was on the plantation. The entire installation as well as the threshold of every doorway was surrounded by a circle or line of salt for protection and healing, purity and breath. Both Emma and her ma’am were well-fed and tended to. What all the lingering long for. Someone to care. Someone to remember. When the day came for Emma to push even it was bewitching. In the hour between dusk and nightfall, Emma’s labor began. George demanded he be in the room instead of outside. Not used to men meddling in women’s work, Evangeline used him as her assistant to fetch water, sheets, towels, and whatever

else she hollered for while she sat watch between Emma’s legs. Back straight as an ironing board on her little three-legged stool, she k ept time between labor pangs waiting for the water, but the bag never broke. Even when the contractions intensied and quickened, no preface owed from Emma’s body to announce the baby’s arrival. Evangeline had never birthed a baby dry. She’d have missed the transition had it not been for Emma’s own warning. “It’s time,” she gritted through bared teeth and sts balled in sheets. Having assisted in enough births of her own, Emma read her own signs while Evangeline sat momentarily stupeed. It was Emma’s rst push, uncoached and unassisted, that brought the baby into view. Crowning at the gates of life, Evangeline hollered for George as she arranged the water and towels. She massaged Emma’s opening with her ngers to let the baby pass through. “It’s a girl,” Evangeline said. Veiled en caul, the baby didn’t cry, and Evangeline didn’t force her. There was no urgency to pound her back or clear her lungs. She let the baby oat in the bowl of water until the cord connecting her and Emma stopped pulsing. Only then did she usher her into the world from the peace of the other side. “You gotta name?” Evangeline asked, when she nally presented the swaddled baby girl to the parents. “Jubilee,” George said. “We have been set free,” Emma echoed. She looked between the high-yellow girl in her arms and the tall orchid she thought swayed in the still air. After latching the baby to her bosom, Emma focused on the altar of oering in the doorway and mouthed T h a n k y o u to the dancing shadows. “It worked,” Emma said. “She’s gone.” Evangeline followed Emma’s gaze and saw the shadows playing around the orchid. She smiled, knowing Emma had the sight. Most women did upon giving birth, whether they felt a hand wrapped in their own, a breeze by the leg, a pool of light above their head, or something else entirely unuttered. Birthing is rooted in feeling and emotion, timing and tension. It is reex. Base-level instincts of creation, entirely ineable. Some say God is in the room. Others the heavenly

hosts. And who can deny those accounts when the women are the ones in balance between Earth and the other side, the body rendered a portal? Evangeline nodded, knowing she’d have to wait and see if Emma’s discernment stayed. If her sight developed d epth of vision. The kind of clairvoyance Evangeline was endowed with without ever having birthed any living babes of her own, though she and Henry had tried mightily, led her to look past the orchid and beyond the shadows. She read the ripples troubling the water. “We’ll see” was all she could muster. Though she wanted to agree with Emma, to say, Y e s , s h e ’ s g o n e , optimism wasn’t her specialty. Especially when she knew the girl’s hardheaded ma’am, even in spirit, wasn’t going that easily. The baby girl was a gift, wrapped as she was. They’d be fools to expect another. But you don’t say that to young folk cradling their baby, less than an hour old, and trying to get her to coo. It would be a long time before Evangeline said, and Emma acc epted, what they both would grow to learn to be true: spirit was stingy, selsh, and stubborn as the days. A LMOST A FULL YEAR PASSED before Emma and George got the itch to try again with intention. They k ept a pot of water beside the main entrance of the quarter shack—which was now more home with George’s additions—and in the door frames of each bedroom. Flowers and greenery were abundant inside and out. Orchids and sunowers, ferns and cus waved from the garden, the newly added front porch, the living area that was the only room in the original quarter shack, as well as in George and Emma’s doorway and on Evangeline’s altar. But there was no blood. Not fresh anyway. The last smear had been for Jubilee. Whatever was left was barely recognizable. A thought that crossed both Emma’s and Evangeline’s minds but neither of them said out loud. How could they go to the trouble of building and tending their altars, spreading salt, and presenting oerings if they didn’t believe? As it would happen, Emma got big in the summertime. She didn’t say anything at rst. Didn’t let on that her and George’s routine practice had

provided possibility. She k ept on in her work of the farm, ke eping track of the seed lent, the crops harvested, and who was owed what for their labor and service. But the heat got the best of her. In the storehouse one August afternoon, Emma keeled over from where she sat on her stool and landed on the hard ground. “Somebody run get George and Evangeline,” hollered one of the men in line. A woman behind him set to running the land yelling, “Emma fell. Emma fell,” as loud and obnoxiously as she could. It was a voice that carried both concern and exuberance, and not the kind created when anxiety attacks and makes you nervous. Though felled and trying hard to focus on ke eping all her feeling, especially about her belly, Emma heard the unmistakable sound of glee. With a glance toward those once waiting in her line, she detected mischief alight in their eyes. Something akin to delight. She’d heard tell that some of the folk minding crops and renting space on the Dupree women’s land didn’t feel right about their landlord being a colored woman. Even if they did pay fair. What they wanted was what Emma had. A chance to own. Not rent. While their grumbles never reached her personally, she knew they talked, passing judgment all the same. Their jealousy left them bitter as unripened vine fruit, a taste memory stored in the mouth, always available for quick recall. With Emma on the oor, knees balled into her belly, the bitterness turned sweet as some thought to themselves, S e r v e s h e r r i g h t . D o n ’ t n o t h i n g c o m e f o r f r e e . By the time Evangeline and George reached her, the shock of her fall had worn o. “Are you hurt?” George asked. “I don’t think so, but...” Emma let her eyes do the talking. She didn’t want to let on to the crowd that had now gathered in the storehouse that it was more than herself who could have been hurt. They didn’t need her business, and she didn’t need their ill intent. Emma didn’t want any of their antagonism or hostility to dissuade her purported beliefs. Like Evangeline said, “Spirits ll the shift. Dey knows when your heart ain’t in it and it’s only your head making you go through the motions.”

“Let’s get you to the house,” Evangeline said, helping George hoist Emma from the ground. “You can lay in the bed beside Jubilee. She still napping anyhow.” “What happened?” George asked, swe eping her full body into his arms. “I’m not quite sure,” Emma began. “One moment I was helping Abe gure how much more he needed to make a decent prot and the next I was on the ground.” “It’s the heat,” Evangeline said beside them. “Neither one of you need to be out here in it. Y’all ain’t built for eld work. Ain’t got the color or even the disposition to handle it.” “I don’t know what you talking about. I does right ne in the workshop,” George retorted. Evangeline grunted and k ept on toward the house. Inside, George laid Emma beside Jubilee. He asked, “You sure you all right? Don’t need nothing?” “I’m ne. Mama Evangeline here. She’ll take care of me. Won’t you, ma’am?” “I got her,” Evangeline said. They waited until George had cleared the doorway and they heard the front door rake against the wood of the porch and close with a clang. Clearing her throat, Evangeline spoke rst. “How far along are you?” “Only a few months. Two, maybe three moons.” “You feel any wetness between your legs?” “No. Was there any on the ground after y’all picked me up?” “No.” Their sighs lled the room heavy with the hot air of what wasn’t spoken. The fears they refused to give voice to. On the one hand there was relief. No blood. But on the other, a little could’ve gone a long way. A few drops of fresh wet smeared above the door could have bolstered the protection they were building around them. Would’ve signaled to the spirit ma’am that they hadn’t forgotten gifts required sacrice. Soul for a soul. Despite the lack of injury and the missing blood, Emma and Evangeline continued not acknowledging the present growth beneath Emma’s dresses and gowns. That is until they couldn’t hide it any longer. While George may not

have had gifts, he was still astute. Forever a student, he noticed the curve carving itself from Emma’s belly. He also noticed the demeanor of the Dupree women. Careful. Not fawning. One evening, in the living area, where they were pr eparing for dinner, a jug of water in his hand, George asked, “So it’s a girl or a boy this time?” Emma didn’t have an answer. Evangeline only tsked. She said, “Her belly stuck in the middle, like the baby deciding what it want to be.” Now, neither of them would tell you that it was George with his acknowledgment out loud of what was happening that set the pain in motion only a week later, but it was all they had to go on. They had been tending the altars, even without the blood, convincing themselves of their own belief. There should have been no reason for her to feel ignored. But the knots formed and felt to Emma much like labor. With the baby too early to live, she spent a week in bed with her legs vertical trying to ke ep whatever she was having in, but it was no use. Between the fatigue and the misfortune of it all, the knots tightened, the cramping worsened, the pulsing intensied, and her cervix opened, breaking water and delivering a baby boy who refused to breathe. No matter how Evangeline pounded his back or thumped his chest, cleaned out his nostrils or tried to make him choke up any uid he may have swallowed, he did not cough. He did not wail. Eyes closed, he belonged to the other side. “He was too early,” Evangeline said. “I had a boy?” Emma’s voice was light and airy, disoriented as she was. Her body, processing, released let-down milk to feed none. Evangeline saw the circular stains at the nipples of Emma’s dressing gown, and it was enough to ood her eyes with tears she didn’t want to fall. Choking back her own cries, she asked, “You wanna hold him? See him?” “What for?” Emma asked. “To remember.” “I’d rather remember when he was alive, a utter in my belly, than see him now, knowing it weren’t even real.”

Evangeline nodded with intimate understanding. Unlike Emma’s, her body had been a complete failure. One that could create babies, nine in fact, but never carry to term. It’s what Z ephaniah Foster said made her the perfect mammy. With no babies of her own to feed, she had nothing but milk tinged with grief to give. She nursed the naked young until their teeth buds dropped and they could swallow gruel. Now she felt mush pooling in her own mouth as she held on to another dead thing. Dead baby. Baby boy. “I’ll bring him to George to build him something nice.” “Where’s my Jubilee?” Emma asked. “In the workshop.” “Send her to me. The milk for her now.” W ITH HIS OWN HANDS , G EORGE built his son a con too ne for the ground. It was the rst of three. All babies. All boys. Though it was the third boy that did them in. Unlike the rst two, born without breath in their bodies or life in their lungs, the last one had the nerve to live. Though early, about the time between the seventh and eighth month, he pushed into the world an arm and an elbow in the air, with feet and legs running from the womb. To be so small, his ght was big. Eyes open, screams piercing and loud. There was no need to pound his back or reach ngers down his throat to clear his airway. He did that all on his own. When Evangeline placed him in Emma’s arms, she named him immediately. Jeremiah Christopher Dupree. George, anxious and outside with four-year-old Jubilee, was drawn into the room by his own son’s cries. His own son’s cries. Just the thought, the reality of what he was witnessing, made him we ep. Too pr epared he was to build something beautiful whose only purpose was decay. To be feasted on by the land. He set Jubilee down at the door marked with salt between the bowls of water and pots of owers when he saw Emma holding a bundle with a smile spread across her face. “Come meet your son,” she said.

They were the sun and George a planet trapped by their gravitational pull. He didn’t remember walking over to their side, but he was there. He didn’t remember the sle ep he lost for the ve days and nights Jeremiah cried with all his might, but he was there. On the oor, in the bed, around the house, his presence steady and willing. Anchored as he was by the boy he’d longed for. The one he’d dreamed about so vividly he awoke achingly empty knowing it wasn’t real. Until he was. For ve days and ve nights he was there. Until the crying stopped and he wasn’t. It happened in the night. After he’d been nursed to solid sle ep. Emma, radiant but exhausted, turned over and drifted with him. The sle ep enveloped the whole house. Jubilee with Evangeline in one room. George, Emma, and Jeremiah in the other. Everyone sl ept until morning. Emma didn’t even arise when her milk dropped three times in the night. It wasn’t until she opened her eyes to see Jubilee playing in the shadows of the doorway, smearing the salt lines, that she registered her engorged breasts and reached out to nurse Jeremiah. But he was gone. Already on the other side. Skin cool to his mother’s touch. She didn’t acc ept what she felt. Instead, Emma lifted his heavy body to her teats and tried to feed him anyway. She oered one and then the other. Her nipples leaked milk over her ngers as she jostled her dead baby, trying to get him to latch to her aching breasts. “My brother’s over here, Mama,” Jubilee said, from where she played. “Nooooo,” she moaned. Emma looked to her daughter in the doorway. The owers wilted. The water still. Jubilee played amid it all, unaware she was dancing with death. That’s when Emma chanced a look at Jeremiah’s face. It wasn’t the closed eyes that told her he was gone. Or his lips, turned on their own into an undertaker smile. It was the cool. The lack of heat. The chill that seemed to shift from his graying esh to her own body. It pulled up her back like a ngernail tracing from the base of her spine to the middle of her neck. Emma screamed before life could be choked from her too. Her lips trembled as she r epeated, “No no no no no no no no no no no.” Snot ran and eyes

hemorrhaged tears as her voice cracked. Broke. Reached a pitch to shatter glass as her heart had been shattered. She pierced the veil of silence that had befallen the house in the sle ep and forced everyone awake with her wails, including George. Her low moans and fevered howls pinched George through skin and muscle to bone. He fell to the oor, startled as he was from his slumber. Evangeline even sprang into the room despite the girth of her build and the tendency of her ankles... and knees to ache in the morning. “What is it, chile?” Evangeline asked. “He’s gone,” Emma shrieked. Those were the only words Evangeline and George could make out between her cries. Wet heavy sobs that began in her gut, gurgled up her throat, and fell out of her mouth without any control. The sound mothers make when they lose their young is distinct and distinguishable from any other on Earth. A cry greater than grief, wider than mourning, and de eper than distress. Animalistic is the sound of a mother bereft after losing a cub. Whether the child is ve days or fty years, children aren’t supposed to go before their parents. A trip to the other side was supposed to be a path paved by elders. Not babies who’d barely learned to blink. Clutching her son, screaming and crying, Emma didn’t know when Evangeline removed Jeremiah from her arms or when George retreated with Jubilee to his workshop to build his best yet for his boy. Racked as she was, she drank what Evangeline gave her, praying with some other part of herself that the tea would take her too. Emma stayed in bed under clouds of unconsciousness as Evangeline cleaned the blood smears from the door frames and dismantled the altar she had built in her bedroom. The owers and their pots, the bowls sans water, the table, its plates of food, and its lace cover—she set it all ablaze. As the re consumed, Evangeline watched the ames rocking back and forth on her feet and nodding her head in conversation with no one and someone all the same. In three days’ time, when Jeremiah should’ve been a little more than a week old, Emma came from under, coaxed out by another one of Evangeline’s teas. Dressed in all white, from her silky hair tucked in a turban to the dress

Evangeline made her wear, she lumbered outside to the yard, where George, still in his work coveralls, had dug a hole and placed their boy beside his brothers. Restless, Jubilee wanted to run, but Evangeline held fast to her wiggly frame. None of them had words to say. No eulogy or benediction, calls to Christ or remarks to wield r epentance. All they had were themselves. All they could hold on to were themselves. George, unmoored, drifted, a planet without a star. A galaxy without a universe. Wearied and d epleted, he was unknown even unto himself. They all were. That’s how vast the heaviness hung. Standing in front of two tiny white crosses and another hole in the ground, Emma st epped forward and grabbed a handful of dirt from the mound piled beside George. She tossed it onto the pristine pine box, murmuring, “Your ma’am’ll see you on the other side.” Emma made her way home beneath the blue, cloudless sky. The sun above mocked as she swayed across the ground that still reeked of smoke from the re where their dreams were scorched, their future selves incinerated. Sensing her girl’s need, Evangeline released Jubilee to run while George was left with his shovel to bury their boy. Side by side the women walked to the house where they’d been forged. Babe and ma’am. Ward and guardian. Almost mother and daughter. Breaking through the quiet of the day, Evangeline said, “It’s best y’all be satised with what you got.” Emma remained mum. “A girl is good. One is all you gon’ get. All she’ll allow.” “Why is my ma’am doing this?” Emma asked. “Why she ke ep takin’ my boys and ke eping ’em for herself?” “It ain’t about what she takin’ or what she ke epin’. It’s what she didn’t get to have.” “What’s that?” “You.” Emma stopped and held on to Evangeline to be still with her too. She looked at the woman who raised her; worry, weary, and grief etched in her face, Evangeline appeared even older than her years. Emma searched her for what she didn’t say. What she’d heard tell to be true.

Evangeline continued, “She couldn’t have you, so now only her girls can have her.” “You saying I’m cursed? Me? My Jubilee? All our girls to come?” “What’s a curse but a christening by another name?” Evangeline heaved her sigh. She’d already lost so much. Her own babies. Her husband. Emma’s real ma’am. Friends. She was already set apart because of the work she did enslaved and the work she inherited free. Now with Emma losing babies there was even more reason for the Black folk of Land’s End, the ones who came up in the same quarters with her, to steer clear. Those who remembered, those who were there, those who had known Emma’s ma’am— however briey—knew some version of what they’d witnessed years past was back and possessing the present. They knew the same as Evangeline. Back rounded, chest concave, she walked away, leaving Emma with what she’d learned from the re. The blackened ground of the burnt oering belied the answers to questions asked of the dead. Its whimpers and whispers were stolen by the wind to be enshrined in the earth, where the brothers were buried by their father. By the time George nished lling the third hole in as many years and placing the tiny cross to forever mark the memory, he was awash in a mess of muck and mire. His body and clothes were covered in dirt, shellacked to his skin by his own sweat and tears. Headed home, he longed for a cleansing but was barred from entering his own bedroom door. It was his memory that k ept him at bay. All he could hear were Emma’s screams. Shrieks that pierced the dawn of a new day, woke him from sle ep, and greeted him with grief. All he saw was his daughter, the girl named Jubilee, dancing in the doorway with the salty shadows, the broken blessings of the altar burdens before them. He couldn’t go in the room where they’d sl ept, Jeremiah between him and Emma. He was well divorced from acc epting that he’d never have, let alone hold, another son. Prevented even from building in his workshop, George moved his space outside. Tore down the walls and roof so he couldn’t be haunted by the baby ghosts whose dead eyes shot their souls into the beams of his barn. But it was of no use. He remembered. The wound closed over time, sure, but the crosses in the yard and the burnt earth where grass no longer grew were a reminder. Emma asked George to hide

them. Make their loss less conspicuous. So he built her a fence, incorporating the crosses into the design so that you couldn’t tell where in the length of the open barrier the memorial began. That is, to the untrained eye. Before he hid the resting places from his wife, George etched a notch in the gnarled wood of the original crosses to mark the remains of his dead baby boys. In their own way, sometimes one more than the other, they remembered. When Jubilee ran o... they remembered. When George tried to swing his ax for the last time... he remembered. When Jubi, neé Jubilee, was forced back across the tracks... she remembered. And when some young ones came a-calling, an enterprising man and his wife, asking Emma to buy the land to the left of the main lot for a new venture that would get them out of farming, Emma was all too eager to give them what they asked for. It was only her, Jubilee, and baby Ruby then. But she remembered. With Ms. Teena’s sitting far back from the road and the wide-open space between its door and the fence post used for parking, Emma had no use for looking over to the left. Didn’t need to see the ground where her babies were buried being deled with drunk piss and debauchery. Losing children, three snued out before they could even be considered, was a kind of pain Emma wore every day. She knew it well. She had gotten used to the cold spot in the bed; it had been there ever since Jeremiah. In life she learned that all you love you lose. Everything ends up on the other side.

S e p te m b e r 1 9 9 5 “You know Tati went to her rst homecoming dance last night,” Nadia said. Laid across the basement futon, hair still wrapped in her scarf, wearing leggings and a Roxanne Shanté T-shirt, Nadia initiated the line of conversation for the morning’s session with Mimi. Tati stood behind the client chair in an undershirt, sweatpants, and socks, ready to take Nadia’s place for the morning. A spur-of-the-moment decision Nadia made as Tati left with Desirée for the dance. “Why don’t you do Mimi’s hair tomorrow,” Nadia had suggested. “Especially since you did so good with your own.” Tati’s bangs and ponytail had been curled under, the hair she’d left hanging in the back ipped up. Her face shimmered with eye shadow that accentuated the d epth created by eyeliner and mascara. On her lips she had worn liner and gloss. Nadia had taken one look at Tati’s made-up face and shuddered internally as if her blood temperature had dropped three degrees. “What was that about?” Desirée had asked. “I don’t know. She on one tonight.” “She wanna make sure you don’t have no kind of fun.” But fun wasn’t Nadia’s concern. She had looked in the face of her former self and was determined to ke ep history from r epeating. So she shook Tati awake though she’d only been asle ep a few hours and told her to get up and get ready for Mimi. Tati had trudged to the basement. Her perfect style from the night before was smashed and attened to the sides of her face. She gured she’d x it when Mimi left; she just had to make it through the morning. Her M i s s T h a n g CD pulsed from the stereo as they each staked their positions for whatever side of the shit