She picked up two logs and headed for the stove, which sat near one of the doors. The kitchen had two doors. The one closest to the stove faced west and led to the covered porch where she slept. The other, facing south, led into the dining room, beyond which was the foyer, the living room, and the sitting room where Ruth entertained when she was up to it. One of the windows in the sitting room faced the cotton fields. Ruth often sat and stared through it for hours. On her face, a smile so delicate Maggie couldn’t be sure it was a smile at all.
At the back of the house was Paul’s study, which contained more books than Maggie had ever seen in one place. Glimpses of the room only intensified her desire to be able to open one of the books and recite the words, any words, as long as she could say them herself.
On the second floor, four large bedrooms anchored each corner of the house. Paul and Ruth slept in the two rooms facing east, adjoined by a balcony from which they surveyed most of the property. At the back of the house, Timothy, their only surviving child, slept in the northwestern room when he wasn’t away at school in the North. Ruth insisted that his bedsheets be washed weekly and his bed be turned down every night despite his absence. The last bedroom was for guests.
Perceptive folks called the Halifax plantation by its rightful name: Empty. And there was no escape. Surrounded by dense, teeming wilderness—swamp maple, ironwood, silverbell, and pine as far, high, and tangled as the mind could imagine—and treacherous waters where teeth, patient and eternal, waited beneath to sink themselves into the flesh, it was the perfect place to hoard captive peoples.
Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky. Maggie sweated so profusely that the scarf wrapped around her head was drenched by the time she began gathering the cookware. She would have to change it before the Halifaxes got up to eat. Her neat appearance was important to them, these people who didn’t even wash their hands before they ate and who didn’t clean themselves after leaving the outhouse.
With powdered hands, Maggie rubbed her sides, content with how her figure—not just its particular curves, but also how it never burned and became red under a beaming sun—separated her from her captors. She loved herself when she could. She regretted nothing but her limp (not the limp itself, but how it came to be). The world tried to make her feel some other way, though. It had tried to make her bitter about herself. It had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things. Instead, she fancied her skin in the face of these cruelties. For she was the kind of black that made toubab men drool and her own men recoil. In her knowing, she glowed in the dark.
When she felt her shape, it evoked in her another outlawed quality: confidence. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was a silent rebellion, but it was the very privacy of it that she enjoyed most. Because there was precious little of that here—privacy, joy, take your pick. There were only the four dull corners of the kitchen, where sorrow hung like hooks and rage leaped in from any opening. It came in from the spaces between floorboards, the slits between doorjambs and doors, the line between lips.
She threw the logs into the belly of the stove, then grabbed a pan out of the cupboard above. She went back to the counter and removed the dough from the bowl. Tenderly, she molded. Properly, she spaced the shapes into the pan. Then into the oven. But that didn’t mean she could rest. There was always more to do when serving people of invention. Inventors for the sake of inventing: out of boredom, solely to have something over which to marvel, even when it was undeserved.
Their creativity puzzled her. Once, Paul called her into his room. When she arrived, he was standing near the window, the sun rendering him featureless.
“Come here,” he said, his calm laced with venom.
He asked her to hold his manhood while he urinated into a bedpan. She thought herself lucky considering the other possibilities. And when he ordered her to point its slit at her chest, she left the room splashed yellow and drawing flies. She counted her blessings, but still: how confusing.
She tried to remember something Cora Ma’Dear—her grandmother from Georgia who taught Maggie who she was—said to her. She was just a girl then, and their time together had been so brief. But some things printed on the mind cannot be erased—made fuzzy maybe, but not gone. She tried to remember the old word from the other sea that Cora Ma’Dear used to describe toubab. Oyibo! That was it. There was no equivalent in English. The closest was “accident.” Then it was simple: these people were an accident.
Maggie didn’t much mind their brutality, though, because it was what she had come to expect from them. People rarely deviated from their nature, and although it pained her to admit, she found a tiny bit of comfort in the familiarity. Their kindness, however, sent her into a panic. For it, like any trap, was unpredictable. She rejected it and risked the consequences. Then, at least, the retaliation took on a recognizable form and she wasn’t rendered a fool.
When she first arrived at Empty, years ago, she was greeted so warmly by Ruth, who looked to be about the same age as she. Both of them still girls despite the newly flowing blood.
“You can stop crying now,” Ruth said to her then, eyes cheerful and thin lips pulled back into a smile, revealing crooked teeth.
She rushed her inside what was the biggest house Maggie had ever seen. Ruth even took Maggie upstairs to her room, where she pulled a dress out of the bureau. Maggie had the nerve to adore it. She was seduced by its pattern of orange rosebuds so tiny they could be mistaken for dots. She had never had anything so pretty. Who wouldn’t quiver? Ruth was with child at the time—one of the ones who didn’t survive—and used her body’s new shape as justification for giving away such a fine thing.
“They say I’m due in the winter. Terrible thing to have a child in the winter. Don’t you think so?”
Maggie didn’t answer because any answer damned her.
“Well, we’ll just have to make sure the death of pneumonia don’t reach here, now won’t we?” Ruth said to fill in the silence.
Now that was a safe one to answer. Maggie nodded.
“Oh, you’re going to look so pretty in this dress! You so shiny. I always thought white looked better on niggers than it did on people.”
Maggie was young then and couldn’t know the price. How dangerous to be so accepting. The dress could have been reclaimed at any moment, accompanied by an accusation. And, indeed, when it was said that Maggie stole it, after Ruth had been nothing but kind to her, Maggie didn’t deny it because what would be the use? She took her licking like a woman twice her age with half the witnesses.
Oh, Ruth cried her conviction, imagining that it would make her sincerity indisputable. The tears looked real. She also spoke some silliness about a sisterly bond but never once asked Maggie if it was an arrangement she desired. It was assumed that whatever Ruth wanted to piss, Maggie wanted to cup her hands under and drink. So Ruth cried and Maggie learned right then and there that a toubab woman’s tears were the most potent of potions; they could wear down stone and make people of all colors clumsy, giddy, senseless, soft. What, then, was the point of asking, So why didn’t you tell the truth?