Grace Read Free Page B

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.
    From far away, the wheel looks tacked in the sky on nothin. From here, though, I can see its two wooden hands reaching up from the bench, pinning the wheel between ’em, coaxing the cotton from MamaDean’s man-sized hands. It slip through her fingers like webs sliding out of spiders. “Simply trial and error, Naomi. Would you like to try?”
    Mama Dean speaks better than us. She spent three generations in the Hilden household, teaching and cleaning and caring for Massa’s momma ’til she passed. His momma hired a doctor to come daily with vials of pain medication and had him stay to make sure she’d die of natural causes and not them.
    Massa stayed bitter about how the doctor’s visits subtracted from his inheritance.
    Then she died.
    That’s when Massa told Mama Dean that he needed the spare room to “organize his affairs.” She was slow, he said, and taking up space, he said, and he could use Violet in the house and the field, he said.
    So she’s with us now.
    â€œNo, Mama Dean . . . all I do is tangle it right up.”
    â€œYour mother started off tangling things like you. Then she became the best. She could spin the most beautiful textures for you and your sisters’ dresses.”
    I look over at Momma sitting and rocking on the porch all blank-faced and quiet, the same place Hazel put her this morning. Hard to imagine her moving any other way. My mind ain’t like Hazel’s. She remember thangs from when she was two years old. I might have a pocketful of memories from before eight. That was about the time Momma stopped talking all together, the same time Hazel put the sixth and seventh marks on the wall—twin girls.
    Hazel say pain’s got a way of etching memories into people’s minds, even a child’s, and holds its place there for a lifetime. That’s why she remembers. She say her memories keep her guilty, blame her for not doing the thangs that only grown folks woulda known to do. She say she’s aged into her bad memories, helpless as the day she got ’em ’cause she still cain’t go inside ’em and fix nothin.
    â€œNaomi!” I hear from behind me. Hazel’s flying out of the woods, calling me and grinning, and calling again. I get up and smile, too,’cause I know she got something good to say. Trailing behind her is her skinny, big-eyed beau, James. They holding hands even though he ain’t supposed to be here. They been sneaking through the woods together since last summer, going to secret meetings. I followed her one night and saw her meet eight negroes from the plantation down river where James come from. All of ’em was boys except the two piss yellow green-eyed girls and Hazel. All but Hazel was house negroes.
    They sat around the fire, real close and quiet, talking private. Hazel started off the group praying, reading the Bible and that was all right, I guess. But after then, they got to talking crazy, talking ’bout running North. But I don’t understand. What do house niggas got to run for? What they got to lose? They live in the big house, get treated good. Now they trying to trade an easy life and a kind master to starve. Worse, get kilt. “Freedom,” they said. “North,” they said. I keep my freedom in my mind.
    The more I listened to Hazel, though, I could see her almost fooled by ’em. They probably want to leave her somewhere, make her the ’scape donkey. She nodded her head with ’em saying her um hum s, and thas rights. I knew she didn’t mean none of it, though. The only reason she go to them meetings is