By the time I grab a plate and sit down, I’m famished! There’s oyster rice, spicy shrimp and grits, fried okra, roasted fish, and sweet salty corn cakes. Take all my home training not to lick my fingers clean. Beside me, Sadie moans, rubbing her belly as across from us, Chef and the German widow argue up a storm.
“What they going on about?” I ask.
“What they always going on about?” Sadie replies.
She picks up a New York tabloid—Emma has them delivered to her store—with pictures recalling the 1920 Wall Street bombing, and hands me a small pamphlet. It got a drawing of three men—colored, white, maybe Chinese—swinging hammers at a chained globe. WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! it reads. One of Emma’s for sure. Chef don’t care much for it, what she call Bolshevik rantings.
“And I don’t want to see colored folk as shock troops in your revolution,” she’s insisting. “This ain’t Moscow.”
“Nein,” Emma responds. “But there exist all the inequities of the tsar’s Russia. Sharecroppers like serfs. The debasement of workers. Race prejudice. All which socialism would eradicate!”
“Socialism going to solve white folk?”
“Once the poor white worker sees his commonality with the colored—”
Chef laughs. “Your poor white workers be the first ones at a lynching. Up in Chicago they chase colored folk from their unions.” She leans in. “When I was small, white folk rioted because Jack Johnson outboxed a white man on the Fourth of July. They hunted Negroes from New York to Omaha. Slit a colored man’s throat on a streetcar, just for saying who won the fight. You think Marx can fix that?”
Emma frowns. She ten years older than me, though hard to tell with her small features behind those round spectacles. “We must strive to show them they too are exploited. And not by those they are taught to hate, from which they earn nothing.”
“Oh see, I disagree,” Chef retorts. “White folk earn something from that hate. Might not be wages. But knowing we on the bottom and they set above us—just as good, maybe better.”
“But can you not imagine a better society?” Emma pleads. “Where colored and white work for the greater good? Where women are the equal of men? I did not support the Great War—it being a capitalist venture. But you fought. Yet you had to do so playing the part of a man, to join these Harlem Hayfighters.”
“Hellfighters,” Chef corrects.
“Ach! My point remains, we must dare to imagine a more equal world.”
Chef shakes her head. “Imagining a thing don’t make it so. Me, I say let Negroes hoard up money like white folk been doing; let us get a few Rockefellers and Carnegies. My people got enough troubles without getting tied up with Bolsheviks. Ever think maybe your people might fare better if you wasn’t going around touting communism?”
Emma puts on a sad smile that pokes dimples in her cheeks. “My people make money and we are ‘greedy capitalists.’ We call for an equitable society, and we are ‘dirty Bolsheviks.’ Those who wish to hate Jews will always find justification. They hung poor Mr. Frank here in Georgia after all, despite reason or the law.”
Chef grunts. “Reason and law don’t mean much when white folk want their way.”
I turn from their conversation, putting aside the pamphlet and pulling out my book. It’s bent up and creased, but the front still visible—NEGRO FOLKTALES. I flip it open and let the words drown out the world until Sadie nudges me.
“How many times you read that thing already?”
I shrug. “Never kept count.”
“You ain’t got no new books?”
“It was my brother’s.” First time I tell anybody that.
“Oh. He write it?”
“No. But he used to read it to me.”
“Stories ’bout Bruh Rabbit and Bruh Bear?”
“And Bruh Lion and Tar Baby…”
A smile tugs my lips remembering his voice, all excited in the telling.
“Grandpappy had stories,” Sadie says. “Not no talking animals. Stories of haint lights, river witches, and people who could fly. He say slaves from Africy had wings, but white folk cut them off so they couldn’t fly home. When I was little, he say my mama fly away like that. Took me a while to know he mean she run off.”
Sadie’s mama used to clean some big white man’s house back in Alabama. One day he get to watching her close and he … well, he done a very bad thing. After her mama leave, her grandpappy raise her. He never say who her daddy was, on account of Sadie being good with a rifle and Sadie being … well, Sadie. She catch my look and shrug in them too-big overalls.
“Maybe my mama did spread wings and fly like a bird. Gone where she can’t be hurt no more. I ain’t mad at her for that.”
She says that as casual as relating the time. But there’s a hitch in her voice that tell me she carrying her hurt deep, the way we all do. In my head, I remember my own mama, her humming lulling me to sleep and filling up the morning. Me and my brother would just lie around listening, drinking her voice in.
“What we doing tonight?” Sadie asks, switching topics.
“Nana Jean got a run for us, maybe.”
“Pfft! On the Fourth of July? Bet your man’s joint gon’ be jumping!”
“Oh?” I return to my book.
“Oh? Best you got is an Oh? We running Mama’s Water for two weeks. Come right back to hunt Ku Kluxes. And you ain’t thinking on him?”
“Maybe I is, or I ain’t.”
A long wicked Sadie chuckle follows. “I had a man fine like that, I wouldn’t be thinking on riding around running Mama’s Water. I’d be thinking about riding his—”
“Sadie Watkins!” I exclaim, looking up in exasperation.
“Don’t be no prude. What you think Nana Jean and Uncle Will doing up in here tonight—”
“Sadie! I’m asking you to stop. Please!”
She’s grinning like a cat with no such intentions, when her eyes move behind me. I turn to find Nana Jean herself coming our way, one of Molly Hogan’s apprentices in tow. We stand up when she reaches us, and even Chef breaks off her debate.
“Molly dem ready fuh see we,” the Gullah woman says.
* * *
“You can see the epidermis has grown a second sheath.”
We in one of the barns that serve as Molly’s laboratory, watching her cut open the arm of a Ku Klux. Her gloved fingers peel back pale skin, showing muscle that turns gray as one of her apprentices douses it in preserving fluid that drips down the wood table.
“Notice also the hand, the claws becoming more prehensile, almost feline.”
She wipes at her face, forgetting it’s under a metal helmet—only her eyes peeking behind smoky glass. Molly ain’t got the sight. Few do. So she built this contraption, which her apprentices charge by cranking a metal wheel. It allows her to see like us—or something close.
“You saying this Ku Klux turning into a cat?” Chef asks.
“I’m saying that the organism—the Ku Klux—is evolving.”
“Evolving?” Sadie looks up, fiddling with the knobs of a microscope. “Like that monkey man’s book?”