Sapphire's Grave Read Free Page A

perfect will be done.
    Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for
me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned
of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child . . .
    LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA
    MARCH, 1874
    I cry in the daytime,
but thou hearest not;
and in the night season,
and am not silent.
    —Psalm 22:2
    This night Sister did not pray. She had deliberately not prayed for weeks now, taking care not to whisper thanks in the mornings or before she ate her meals, as had been her custom; not leading the children in prayer as she tucked them in at night. They looked at her curiously, and she felt all the more the glaring omission, the absence of God in her daily routine.
    But she had felt God’s absence from her heart for some time now. She was angry.
Mama is angry at Daddy,
the children thought.
Or at God.
She kissed them lovingly, the boy a replica of his father, handsome and sly; the girl a reddish brown, testament to a Cherokee ancestor whose name was not recorded in the family bible. Another child, a burnished boy with blazing eyes, had succumbed to cholera in infancy. She wondered if that loss had been the beginning of their end. Her eyes closed for a moment as she queried God for the thousandth time. Then she reminded herself, as she blew out the lamp and closed the door against the puzzled expressions on the faces of her children, of her own resolve not to think on such things, to not think or care or
feel,
and above all, to refrain from prayer, from the thought that anyone would hear her if she prayed. Faith involved risk, and she lacked these days the fortitude to believe.
    Night after night she steeled herself against the need to vent, to cry and labor before God as she had been taught, to unburden herself and fall to thankful, restless sleep. She was angry.
    For a decade, she had done all things correctly, a soldier of faith and humility, her citizenship celestial, her allegiance to her man and her God—not the god of her oppressors, but the God of her longing, her prayers. And
him.
She had withstood his self-indulgences and insults to her personhood, his myriad small betrayals, those countless accumulated injuries. She had been the obedient servant, mopping up his messes, both literal and figurative, defending and excusing his transgressions, stopping just short of calling him Lord.
    She had been studious and attentive to God’s will, careful to select a God-fearing man, and
still,
he had turned suddenly, it seemed to Sister, into someone else; someone who could leave her behind as offhandedly as a man changing his clothes, discarding her as soiled laundry, yet another mess for her to clean up: the wreckage of her own visage to tidy up and hide, again atoning, her own blood covering his sins; the malady of her own spirit to heal alone, unloved, and untouched.
    Wearily she lay down and blew out the single candle that gave light to her room.
    My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?

Why art thou so far . . .
    Slowly, she succumbed to sleep, and a woman appeared quite suddenly, either in a dream or in the backyard. Sister was not certain. Intrigued, she rose to her knees to better view the scene outside the small, square window that faced the backyard. The woman, slight but muscular, with an oddly cunning, almost insane look about her face, was kneeling on a dirt floor strewn with straw. She was quite dark, with striking features and a muslin scarf askew on her short, tight locks. Sister could, she felt, almost reach into this other world, both real and surreal, and touch the bony, earnest face, trace the outline of the bulbous lips the color of raisins that moved silently. The woman leaned over suddenly, doubled over with her face to the ground. She appeared to be praying. Then, she sat up resolutely, and Sister noticed for the first time one small breast exposed by a savage tear in her dress, one ashen knee scraped bloody, and ten broken, dirty