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  “And this is my husband, Prince Junior.”

  Queen Marie started as a tall dignified man entered the room, looking for all the world like the best in Queen Marie, and all that she had worshiped, adored.

  You look like a world

  to me

  like the mountains of Abarim

  my sorrow

  like John the beloved’s

  sea of glass like crystal

  my tears

  you look like the Venus

  of a cloudless heaven

  radiant as rubies

  my passion

  my joy

  “Dis here Miz Queen Marie Fields, an’ dass her lil’ grandbaby.”

  Prince Junior smiled with recognition—of the name, not the woman. “Well, look here!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly at Queen Marie and offering a large, work-toughened hand that reminded her of cured tobacco. “Dis here Vyda Rose mama,” he revealed to his wife, who nodded, mouthing a silent and thoughtful “Oh!” and turning to regard Queen Marie with a knowing look, an evil, judging look, Queen Marie thought, as if Prince Junior’s revelation had clarified something about Queen Marie that Suzanne had been struggling to discern, something nasty and shameful, cause for nausea and distaste.

  “Hah you?” Queen Marie inquired politely of Prince Junior, ignoring his wife, recalling a supply shed at the edge of the woods, and a night long ago; tempted to smile coquettishly—but she was not a girl anymore. She was a tired woman, heavy and haggard, her heart filled with regrets.

  Prince Junior laughed suddenly as the baby caught his attention. “I reckon dass Vyda Rose lil’ gal, ain’t it? She a cute lil’ thang. Ain’ she a cute lil’ thang?” he asked his wife, who did not respond, only regarded the child without interest, her mouth set in a thin line. But Prince Junior had not looked at her. His face became solemn. “We was so sorry to get the news ’bout Vyda Rose. We all loved her. She was a sister to us.”

  Queen Marie looked down at her feet. There was a long silence. Prince Junior sank into the uncomfortable couch beside Queen Marie. Suzanne stood near the beloved curtains. Prince Junior’s forehead puckered as if in concentration, and Queen Marie took his hands in hers, not stopping to consider the appropriateness of her action. Suzanne glared at them, unnoticed by the pair as they shared in their common grief for several moments. “She wanted you to have this chile,” Queen Marie finally blurted. It was not the explanation she had prepared. This meeting was not what Queen Marie had envisioned. But Prince Junior nodded, almost absently, certainly not alarmed. Suzanne remained mute, watchful from her place near the window.

  It had taken Queen Marie some time to collect herself, and her grand-daughter, and to give the child away; this child who was all that remained of Vyda Rose, the only legacy that Queen Marie could claim. She looked up at Suzanne, whose eyes had softened somewhat, thinking, Queen Marie felt, that the child was, after all, a child, and innocent, in need of training in uprightness—if she was to be the kind of woman, Queen Marie thought dolefully, that she had herself expected to be.

  Queen Marie hugged the child tightly, until she began to squirm, then wiped a tear from her eye as Suzanne took the baby without a word. One of the children, or perhaps a breeze from the hallway behind the room, closed a door gently. No one spoke in the darkened room for a long time. Then, Suzanne spoke softly.

  “You come on by and see ’bout us sometime—” A signal to Queen Marie that she should go, and leave the baby, becoming a caller, an occasionally passing shadow, in the little girl’s life.

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA

  JULY, 1904

  Lately, Queen Marie’s vision seemed to be failing. She was thirsty a lot, and given to frequent urination. A yellowish cast tinged her skin, and an acrid, metallic odor settled on her breath. She slept a lot, and woke to strange noises. The house seemed to rock and sway, with a life and will of its own.

  She began to attend church, not out of an interest in finding God, but to fill the lonely spaces in her heart created by the absences: of Fields, of Vyda Rose. Uncomfortable with silence, Queen Marie had never learned to be with herself.

  Sometimes, she visited her grandchild, telling her stories of her mother’s life, not hoping that the child understood, but hoping that this repetition of history would keep Vyda Rose alive. But the ever watchful Suzanne always lingered in the doorway or behind the chair where Queen Marie sat with her grandchild on her knee, making Queen Marie feel like an unwelcome guest, an intrusion upon the proper rearing of a child who was to become a lady.

  Most days, Queen Marie felt as though she might as well die, of use to no one, not even herself. She drank incessantly, until she had to drink, and her days became less than a blur, her life an ongoing stupor, punctuated with periods of sleep and hallucination. She visited the witch, telling herself that she had come to effect a blessing upon her grandchild, a shield for her against Suzanne’s cunning and arrogance, protection from the venom of her contempt.

  But when she arrived at the clapboard house, the sorceress chastised her with a penetrating yellow stare, until Queen Marie was shamed to tears. Falling into a straight-backed chair, she sobbed and muttered incoherently. The sorceress watched from her own chair across the small battered table, patient but uncaring.

  The sun set. It rose again. Queen Marie could not recall sleeping. But she awoke with her head resting on the table, to find the sorceress still sitting, still and silent. Queen Marie noticed that the sorceress did not blink, had never blinked in Queen Marie’s presence, the yellow eyes phosphorescent and hard as marbles.

  It was rumored that the sorceress had lived since the beginning of time. Queen Marie shifted nervously in the hard wooden chair. Others said she had come to be two centuries ago, the product of a white man and a conjure woman from dark Africa. It was said that she had run a brothel, where devil-children were schooled into magical whores, their services phenomenal and costly.

  It was said that she knew all things. This, Queen Marie believed with all her heart.

  “You brought it on yourself, you know,” the sorceress told her without speaking. “You and your helplessness, your selfish greed.”

  Queen Marie felt defenseless. “But nobody told me—”

  “Your mama told you. You shoulda heard her actions, not just her words. Sister showed you. All you ever needed to know, you knew. And you still ain’t come yet to faith. You never will.”

  Queen Marie closed her eyes. They ached, as if heavy weights were pressed against them. She saw Vyda Rose, a teenager. Vyda Rose had been here several times, desperate and afraid, her face the face of an ancient woman. Queen Marie shook her head; but she saw Vyda Rose’s babies, rudely ejected, unequipped for survival, into a world that did not want them, a world they did not want. She saw their bodies lifted from the hard, wooden floor of this room—

  “I fault you for that,” the sorceress said.

  —and buried in the soil of Queen Marie’s heart. She had not known that Death was there. She had not known of the babies. Her heart bled. She felt her tears becoming a sea. She felt a tugging, as if she was drowning, the sea opening up to swallow her.

  She wished that it had been her.

  But it had not been her. And now it was too late.

  “Help me,” she begged, as the waves began to lap at her chin. Couldn’t the sorceress see that she was drowning in tears and the blood of her granddaughters?

  “I can’t help you,” the sorceress answered, her face stone. “You will have to help yourself.”

  And the sorceress left the room. Her body remained upright in the straight-backed chair, her eyes fixed upon her guest. But Queen Marie knew that she was gone, as surely as she knew that she had just conversed with the devil, without once opening her mouth.

  “You selfish ol’ hag!” Queen Marie screamed aloud. “You took my Prince from me! You took him! You killed my Fields and my baby, and you took my grandbabies away! You hateful ol’ woman! I know where you come from! I know you come from
hell!” Her throat felt constricted, aching and raw. The waters receded. She got up to stumble blindly out the door, past the church where the voices of young women much like herself had urged her to grace, but she had not heard; past the home of her mother, and the woods where she and Prince had first made love, changing irrevocably the course of her life, setting her feet upon a quest to find her calling in another, her affections upon a false and wooden god, the gifts of her heart, her spirit, and of her hands hidden, unknown to her daughter, and to her daughter.

  Queen Marie began to run. She would share the gift. The child would not understand, but Queen Marie would share it now, while there was breath in her body, and inspiration in her soul. She turned abruptly to cross the road. She never saw the truck coming. She heard the horn, her calling to another plane.

  A blue-gray transparence enveloped and absorbed her. She was aware that she was lying down, aware of a light weight resting upon her body. She was aware of her neck, that she could not move it. She wanted her grand-daughter. She wanted to die.

  There were people—somewhere. She heard hushed voices in conversation. She wanted to move. She wanted to die—though not in any tragic way. She wished no ill upon herself. She simply wished her life to end, quietly here, in this blue-gray transparence, where no one would notice and hushed voices would continue in conversation. She wanted the world to end, the tragedy of living erased, having never been. What was the point, anyway? She wanted the curtain called, her life a mere satire on something meaningful and real.

  She thought that she was dozing. Her mother appeared, shaking her head sadly. Queen Marie reached for her grandchild, who did not recognize her. Suzanne was there, a serpent spewing venom; and Prince Junior, without judgment. She felt profoundly the absence of Prince; but Sister, who had neither needed nor wanted him, was there to testify to this. Queen Marie understood her now, and understood her own error. She wished, now, to die peacefully.

  But the child would live, and Queen Marie would live within her. Queen Marie saw her, a toddler, a precocious child, a confident teenager, a woman unafraid of fear, unafraid of her Self. Queen Marie would live within her, all her genius dormant, preserved for posterity.

  chapter 9

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA

  DECEMBER, 1930

  Because he hath set his love upon me . . . because he hath known my name.

  —Psalm 91:14

  It was December, and cold. Jewell hesitated for a moment before raising the knocker on the great Gothic door and letting it fall with a single, clamorous clack.

  She seemed apprehensive, the man was later to tell her, holding her buttonless coat closed around her ample figure. He noted the slender, tarnished ring that encircled the fourth finger of her left hand, before his eyes moved back to the woolen coat, and down to her large feet clad in army-issue boots.

  “Do come in,” he said. “You must be freezing. May I take your coat? Please have some tea.” He motioned toward the cherry buffet which held a silver teapot and silver-edged cups. Her eyes widened and he realized she was actually quite young, perhaps not yet twenty-five.

  “Please,” he said. “Sit down.”

  “Yessir,” she barely whispered, and lowered her thick black lashes in a manner no doubt intended as deferential, but unintentionally coquettish. She offered him a brief nervous smile, revealing a deep dimple in one plump cheek, and moved hesitantly toward a stiff chair that stood before a blazing fireplace. Perched primly on the edge of her seat, she glanced up at him expectantly as he filled a silver-edged teacup from the pot.

  “Cream or sugar?” He turned to face her and found her staring at him, her mouth agape. She really was lovely, he noted, in that way some Negro girls are lovely, her skin brown and clear as maple syrup and her eyes as large and luminous as twin full moons. There was about her an innocence, though a Negro girl of twenty-five, he thought, must certainly be far from chaste; an amazement—perhaps with the opulence of her surroundings, he realized, envisioning the shanties in which the Negroes lived.

  “Sugar,” she said abruptly when she realized she had been staring.

  He was aware that his actions, in treating her as his guest, were causing her some discomfort. “Sugar,” he repeated. What a fitting name that would have been for his new employee had their relationship been less formal, more . . . personal. It certainly suited her, he thought, better than—what was her name again?

  She smiled suddenly and disarmingly, a smile as broad as a cane field and as blissful as a honey bee; sweet and lingering, like molasses from the icebox in a warm kitchen on a cold, cold day. His own aristocratic, clean-shaven face came within an arm’s length of hers as he carefully presented the steaming hot teacup to her. She accepted gratefully, holding the teacup tightly with all ten of her cold, pudgy fingers; and puckering her full lips softly, she leaned forward and kissed the hot tea gently with her breath, her blackened eyelashes resting on her cheeks, her breasts falling, then rising as she took in another breath and opened her eyes. She did not seem surprised to find him still standing, leaning toward her with his arm extended. She smiled again, and he drew away from her with an exaggerated clearing of his throat.

  Still standing, he began to babble. Duties. Wages. Working hours. She lowered her head, turned her incandescent eyes up toward him, nodding her comprehension. She assumed that there was no wife, and that she would answer only to him. She recalled stories, whispered around outhouses and kitchens, of lonely white men venting their passions on Negro women, and quickly dismissed the thought. She was a married woman, respectably immune to the hackneyed image that had plagued Negro women since the tobacco-filled days of chattel bondage and sexual servitude.

  He was done, at last, with his litany of details they had spoken of the week before, when her predecessor, an ancient Negro woman called Mae, had announced her retirement from his service and gone to live with nieces in New Jersey. She knew that the old woman had kept a clean kitchen, but asked to inspect it and her room. He obliged with ceremony, pointing out where Mae had kept her cast-iron pots and large iron tub; how to operate the wood-burning stove; the time at which he took breakfast and tea. Her room was a tiny alcove beneath the sloping eaves of the attic. He was apologetic in explaining Mae’s wish to remain in the attic even after the boys were grown and had moved away, and suggested that perhaps she would like to sleep in one of the larger better-insulated rooms. No, really, the boys were long married and off on their own, and it really would be no trouble if she chose one of their rooms. In fact, he insisted. “Just choose one.”

  She chose the smallest room, farthest from the master bedroom with a door that led out onto a balcony. She had dreamed of a room like this but never hoped to have one.

  Not even as a servant in borrowed quarters.

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA

  JUNE, 1931

  The early days of Jewell’s tenure as maidservant passed without incident. He was kind to her, and gentle when his eggs were slightly overcooked or his collar was not pressed just so. He would talk to her in the evenings, making awkward conversation across the great chasms of race, caste, gender, and power that separated them, as she dusted, polished, and attempted, tactfully, to discourage conversation. Oblivious to her lack of interest, or perhaps mistaking her curt “yessirs” and “nosirs” for respectful restraint, he would ask her opinion on matters that she supposed were of concern to white people. She rarely had an opinion, or knew what to say, or how to say it diplomatically.

  Occasionally, he would make her have lemonade or tea with him when she served him on the porch. These interviews were agony for her. Had she possessed the vocabulary and dared to be impertinent, she might have pointed out to him, as he seemed to forget, that she was a Negro, and far too much about the business of her own survival, and that of her children, to trouble herself with philosophical abstractions; that she only wanted to be left alone in the evenings to rest her weary feet and that, by the way, another night or two off to be at home with her
children would be nice. That was her opinion. But then, she would look at his long, equine face, so intense as he droned on and on in his clipped, Yankee locution, and feel badly for him and for her unkind thoughts. He paid her generously for working all day and attending to his comfort into the night, drawing his bath and serving him warm milk, and listening to the prattle of a lonely man too far removed, in distance and in time, from the company of a family he loved and longed to share these evenings with.

  And he was gentle toward her, she reasoned one early evening in late winter as she polished the mammoth piano that dominated the dining room. It had belonged to his late wife, and he cherished it. Sometimes, his eyes became glassy as he gazed at the piano, recounting to her some story of his wife’s adventures as a concert pianist. These open displays of emotion, coupled with his genuine concern for her, were a distant departure from the gruff and hardened dispositions of the men in her life: her father, loving when she was a child, but stubborn and, as she reached adulthood, withdrawn; her adolescent boyfriends, groping and insensitive; her husband, unkind, unloving, and uncaring, unreachable and immovable despite her efforts to please him. It had been a long time since someone had been gentle toward her. Lord knows, she admitted to herself with a sigh, sometimes her children’s shrieks and the crude demands of her husband made her want to run; run far away and be free. Sometimes she wanted to be a girl again. She paused, held the dust cloth over the gleaming grand piano, and studied her reflection in the rich, polished wood. She wanted desperately, sometimes, to be a girl again, protected and diminutive in her father’s arms; to believe that no peril could befall her in his arms.