New Year, New Me, New Upcoming Books to Devour in the Year 2021!

When it comes to the streets, there’s rules.

They ain’t written down, and you won’t find them in a book. It’s natural stuff you know the moment your momma let you out the house. Kinda like how you know how to breathe without somebody telling you. 

It there was a book though, there would be a whole section on streetball, and the most important rule would be at the top, in big bold letters:

Don’t get your ass beat in front of a fine girl, especially if she your girl. 

But that’s exactly what I’m doing. Getting my ass beat in front of Lisa. 

“It’s okay, Maverick,” she calls out from a picnic table. “You’ve got this!”

Thursday, July 26—3 Months, 9 Days Since the Arrest
Chicago, Illinois

She was mine before she was anyone else’s. All mine. Partly mine. Now she belongs to you and them and shirts and rallies and songs and documentaries. They say she had A Bright Future Ahead of Her and She Was a Star Whose Light Burned Out Too Soon. She Was Going to Make a Difference. That’s all true, but it’s not the Truth. Kezi was more than her brains and her grades and her voice. She was more than her future. She had a past. She was living her present.

She could have been mine.

Should have been mine.

She was my sister before she became your martyr, after all.

Even as I sit as still as a lion stalking her prey, inside, I’m racing. My mind is buzzing with the thoughts I don’t say. My heart is knocking erratically against my sternum and is always one beat away from bursting through my chest. I should be used to it. But you never get used to strangers sliding their arms over your shoulders in solidarity, to apologize for something that isn’t their fault. Not when Kezi being gone doesn’t feel real to begin with. How can it, when I didn’t get a chance to see her face one last time before they incinerated her body and put her essence in an urn?

My parents are already inside the auditorium, seated in their place of honor in the front row. I will join them eventually, but not until the millisecond that I have to. When everything went down, we made an agreement. I will play along and be a cheap carbon copy of the daughter they lost, a constant reminder to the world that she was One of the Good Ones. But before the lights shine on us and cell phones are trained at our brave, heartbroken faces, I will be me. The Prodigal Daughter.

I glance at my own phone. Nothing. New phone, who dis? I guess.

I sink into the hard bench outside of the Harold Washington Theater where the National Alliance for the Progression of Black People’s Chicago chapter is hosting its annual Salute to Excellence ceremony. I try to breathe. I don’t want to salute anything. I don’t want to be in there. I just want to pretend that this slab of wood is a cloud, that I’m a regular girl laying outside and soaking up the final drops of sunshine at the end of a mundane day. They call it the golden hour, a photographer told me a few weeks ago, when we were waiting for my mother to be finished with makeup for a photoshoot that Essence Magazine was doing about “America’s New Civil Rights Leaders.” The new normal.

He was fiddling with his camera, removing and reattaching the giant zoom lens of his Canon, and was apparently one of those people who couldn’t stand silence. Others see me and can’t help but speak. I can read the panic in their eyes when the realization crawls into their psyches: Come on, say something nice, don’t sound stupid. But instead of the I’m so sorry’s and the You’re so brave’s, he prattled on about the magical moments just after the sun rises and right before it sets. It was a breath of fresh air, actually.

“Way less shadow,” he said. “Nowhere for your subject to hide.”

“I think my sister mentioned it to me once,” I volunteered. “She was a YouTuber.”

His eyes widened in terror. Of course.

“Oh yeah! Oh, man. I’m so—”

“It’s fine.” I had spoken too soon.

That was then. Now I’m wondering how long you have to sit outside to get a tan when I sense the shifting of light through my closed eyelids. Someone is standing over me and blocking the sun. My heart is no longer knocking at my chest; it is about to crack through my rib cage, my guts, my skin, my top. Like a bullet, only bigger. My eyes spring open, and I hurl my purse across my body reflexively. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Any deranged rando can recognize you out here and—

“Ow!”

It’s even worse than I thought. It’s Genny.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. She’s an integrative biologist and basically lives in her laboratory. Mom, Dad, and I had been visiting Chicago for a few days, but Genny stayed behind in Los Angeles. I didn’t mind.

“I just got in,” Genny says as she rubs her shoulder. Bummer. I was aiming for the face. She hands me my bag. “Why are you not inside? They’re about to start.”

“This is my alone time,” I say. I stretch with my arms wide above my head until I notice a blond man parked in a car across the street watching in interest. Our eyes meet. He smiles. I frown and hunch over instinctively. We are never alone.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“And that’s my cue.” I stop the alarm and switch my phone to silent. Any messages from Santiago will have to wait. Not that he’s gonna answer anyway. “Sorry,” I mutter.

She shakes her head. “Naw, I get it. I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

We’re never on the same page. This is weird.

I shrug as I heave myself up to smooth the black cigarette pants I convinced Mom to let me wear and adjust my tucked-in ruffled beige blouse.

“I thought you said you couldn’t make it.” I glance at her from the corner of my eye. She’s rolling an enormous hardside spinner suitcase back and forth on the sidewalk. It’s a sensible black, of course. But surprisingly large for an overnight trip. And I’m supposed to be the vain one.

Genny pauses midspin.

“I moved some things around…Kezi was always going on about how important Chicago is to Black history. She told me over lunch that Obama moved here before law school partly because of this guy.” She looks at the doors of the theater behind us, at the clunky neon letters that spell Harold Washington, the first Black mayor of Chicago.

“Oh. I thought it was because of Michelle’s pheromones.”

She blinks.

Over lunch.

I hate when she does this. Gushes about all the sisterly things they had without me. Resentment oozes through my pores when I remember that so many of Genny’s memories with our middle sister are more recent than mine. I was only a year younger than Kezi and had lunch with her exactly once since starting high school. Genny and Kezi were about seven years apart, and they had a standing weekly date.

I hate myself for wanting to compete for the title of Closest to Kezi. And for what? I lose every time. None of that will bring her back.

We enter the theater, and I don’t stop to wait for Genny, who is asking an usher to store her luggage someplace safe. I keep walking, on the brink of jogging, anything to make the gazes that follow me down the aisle of the auditorium a blur, inhuman. I plunk down into my seat with none of the grace and class that years of ballet, tap, and jazz lessons would suggest I have. Or what seventeen years of having Naomi Smith as a mother would demand.

“Let the public consumption of our misery begin,” I whisper as I cross my arms.

“Tut.” My mother doesn’t need to use real words for me to understand her. Clicks and side-eyes suffice to get her point across: You better get your act together, girl. She turns in her seat and grabs my father’s hand. Their fingers meld into one on her lap. I ignore the flash of a camera that goes off to capture the very casual, completely unstaged exhibition of their courageous love.

The lights dim and funky soul music jingles to life as Genny slips into the empty seat beside me. She looks forward decidedly and remains silent, but I know the tap, tap, tapping of her index finger on her armrest is because she wants to tell me off for abandoning her outside with the overly chatty usher. But she won’t. Because acting right in public is first nature to her. It doesn’t have to get nose pinched and poured down her throat, like with me. It’s another thing she and Kezi have in common.

Had.

August 8, 9:09 a.m.

It was supposed to be twenty minutes.

That’s what I told myself when I woke up that morning. It would be just twenty minutes. We’d meet in the bank parking lot, we’d go in, we’d make the deposit, and it would be awkward, it would be

so awkward, but it would be twenty minutes, tops.

I could survive twenty minutes with my ex-boyfriend and new girlfriend. I could handle the awkwardness. I was a freaking champ.

I even got donuts, thinking maybe that would help smooth things over after last night’s make-out interruptus, which I know is downplaying what happened. I get fried dough can’t fix everything, but still. Everyone loves donuts. Especially when they have sprinkles . . . or bacon. Or both. So I get the donuts—and coffee, because Iris is basically a grizzly bear unless she downs some caffeine in the morning—and of course, that makes me late. By the time I pull up to the bank, they’re both already there.

Wes is out of his truck, tall and blond and leaning against the chipped tailgate, the bank envelope with all the cash from last night next to him. Iris is lounging on the hood of her Volvo in her watercolor dress, her curls swinging as she plays with that lighter she found on the railroad tracks. She’s gonna set her brush-out on fire one of these days, I swear to God.

“You’re late” is the first thing Wes says when I get out of my car.

“I brought donuts.” I hand Iris her coffee, and she hops off the hood.

“Thanks.”

“Can we just get this over with?” he asks. He doesn’t even look at the donuts. My stomach clenches. Are we really back to this? How can we be back to this, after everything?

I press my lips together, trying not to look too annoyed.

“Fine.” I put the bakery box back in my car. “Let’s go.” I snatch up the envelope from his tailgate.

The bank’s just opened, so there are only two people ahead of us. Iris fills out the deposit slip, and I stand in line with Wes right behind me.

The line moves as Iris walks over with the slip, taking the envelope from me and tucking it into her purse. She looks warily at Wes, then at me.

I bite my lip. Just a few more minutes.

Iris sighs. “Look,” she says to Wes, propping her hands on her hips. “I understand that the way you found out wasn’t great. But—”

That’s when Iris is interrupted.

But not by Wes.

No, Iris gets interrupted by the guy in front of us. Because the guy in front of us? He chooses that moment to pull out a gun and start robbing the freaking bank.

The first thing I think is Shit! The second thing I think is Get down. And the third thing I think is We’re all gonna die because I waited for the bacon donuts.

It is the absolute shittiest day for a walk.

Rain has been pouring down all morning, making my drive from Center Point out here to Mountain Brook a nightmare, soaking the hem of my jeans as I get out of the car in the Reeds’ driveway, making my sneakers squelch on the marble floors of the foyer.

But Mrs. Reed is holding her dog Bear’s leash, making a face at me, this frown of exaggerated sympathy that’s supposed to let me know how bad she feels about sending me out in the rain on this Monday morning.

That’s the important thing—that I know that she feels bad.

She still expects me to do it, though.

I’ve been walking dogs in the Thornfield Estates subdivision for almost a month now, and if there’s one thing I’ve definitely figured out, it’s that what matters most is how everything looks.

Mrs. Reed looks sympathetic. She looks like she absolutely hates that I have to walk her collie, Bear, on a cold and stormy day in mid-February.

She looks like she actually gives a fuck about me as a person.

She doesn’t, though, which is fine, really.

It’s not like I give a fuck about her, either.

So I smile, tugging at the bottom of my army-green raincoat. “Came prepared,” I tell her, taking Bear’s leash. We’re standing in the front foyer of the Reed home. To my left is a giant framed mirror propped against the wall, reflecting me, Mrs. Reed, and Bear, already straining toward the door. There’s also a distressed wood table holding a bowl of potpourri as well as a pair of diamond hoop earrings, flung carelessly when Mrs. Reed came in last night from whatever charity function she’d been attending.

Charity functions are big around here, I’ve noticed, although I never can figure out what they’re actually raising money for. The invitations I see lying on end tables or fastened to refrigerator doors with magnets are a word salad of virtue signaling. Children, battered women, homeless, underprivileged: various euphemisms that all mean “poor.”

No telling what Mrs. Reed was supporting last night, really, but that’s another thing I don’t actually care about.

And I don’t let my eyes linger on the earrings.

Bear’s leash is smooth in my hand as I give Mrs. Reed a little wave and head out onto the wide front porch. It’s painted cement, slick in the damp, and my ancient sneakers nearly skid across it.

I hear the door close behind me, and wonder what Mrs. Reed will do this morning while I’m off walking her dog. Have another cup of coffee? Chase it with a Xanax? Plan some other charity function?

Maybe a brunch to raise money for kids who don’t know how to yacht.

The rain has tapered off some, but the morning is still cold, and I wish I’d brought gloves. My hands look raw and chapped, the knuckles an angry red. There’s still a light pink burn mark splashing across my skin between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, a trophy from the last day I worked at Roasted, a coffee shop in Mountain Brook Village.

I remind myself that walking dogs sucks, but at least it doesn’t carry the threat of second-degree burns.

Bear tugs on his leash, sniffing every mailbox we come to, and I let him pull me along behind him, my mind more on the houses, the neighborhood, than on my charge. Behind every one of these McMansions is a bright green backyard, so it makes no sense that anyone would even need a dog-walker. But need is not a word people like this think of. Everything with them is want.

That’s what all these houses are about.

You slid your chair over and tapped my textbook with the end of your pencil and I stared at the page, hesitant to look up.

“Hello?” I had answered you like a phone call. This made you laugh. And so we sat there, giggling, two strangers in a school library, studying for the same elective subject. There must have been hundreds of students in the class-I had never seen you before. The curls in your hair fell over your eyes and you twirled them with your pencil. You had such a peculiar name. You walked me home later in the afternoon and we were quiet with each other. You didn’t hide how smitten you were, smiling right at me every so often; I looked away each time. I had never experienced attention like that from anyone before. You kissed my hand outside my dorm and this made us laugh all over again.

Soon we were twenty-one and we were inseparable. We had less than a year left until we graduated. We spent it sleeping together in my raft of a dorm bed, and studying at opposite ends of the couch with our legs intertwined. We’d go out to the bar with your friends, but we always ended up home early, in bed, in the novelty of each other’s warmth. I barely drank, and you’d had enough of the party scene––you only wanted me.

Nobody in my world seemed to mind much. I had a small circle of friends who were more like acquaintances. I was so focused on maintaining my grades for my scholarship that I didn’t have the time or the interest for a typical college social life. I suppose I hadn’t grown very close to anyone in those years, not until I met you. You offered me something different. We slipped out of the social orbit and were happily all each other needed.

The comfort I found in you was consuming––I had nothing when I met you, and so you effortlessly became my everything. This didn’t mean you weren’t worthy of it-you were. You were gentle and thoughtful and supportive.

You were the first person I’d told that I wanted to be a writer, and you replied, “I can’t imagine you being anyone else.” I reveled in the way girls looked at us, like they had something to be jealous about. I smelled your head of waxy dark hair while you slept at night and traced the line of your fuzzy jaw to wake you up in the morning. You were an addiction.

For my birthday, you wrote down one hundred things you loved about me.

14. I love that you snore a little bit right when you fall asleep.

27. I love the beautiful way you write.

39. I love tracing my name on your back.

59. I love sharing a muffin with you on the way to class.

72. I love the mood you wake up in on Sundays.

80. I love watching you finish a good book and then hold it to your chest at the end.

92. I love what a good mother you’ll be one day.

“Why do you think I’ll be a good mother?” I put down the list and felt for a moment like maybe you didn’t know me at all.

“Why wouldn’t you be a good mother?” You poked me playfully in the belly. “You’re caring. And sweet. I can’t wait to have little babies with you.”

There was nothing to do but force myself to smile.

I’d never met someone with a heart as eager as yours.

One day you’ll understand, Blythe. The women in this family . . . we’re different.

I can still see my mother’s tangerine lipstick on the cigarette filter. The ash falling into the cup, swimming in the last sip of my orange juice. The smell of my burnt toast.

You only asked about my mother, Cecilia, on a few occasions. I told you only the facts: (1) she left when I was eleven years old, (2) I only ever saw her twice after that, and (3) I had no idea where she was.

You knew I was holding back more, but you never pressed-you were scared of what you might hear. I understood. We’re all entitled to have certain expectations of each other and of ourselves. Motherhood is no different. We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers.

1939-1958

Etta was born on the very same day World War II began. She had eyes like the Atlantic Ocean and was red-faced and pudgy from the beginning.

She fell in love with the first boy she ever met, the town doctor’s son. His name was Louis, and he was polite and well spoken, not common among the boys she knew, and he wasn’t the type to care that Etta hadn’t been born with the luck of good looks. Louis walked Etta to school with one hand behind his back, from their very first day of school to their last. And Etta was charmed by things like that.

Her family owned hundreds of acres of cornfields. When Etta turned eighteen and told her father she wanted to marry Louis, he insisted his new son-in-law had to learn how to farm. He had no sons of his own, and he wanted Louis to take over the family business. But Etta thought her father just wanted to prove a point to the young man: farming was hard and respectable work. It wasn’t for the weak. And it certainly wasn’t for an intellectual. Etta had chosen someone who was nothing like her father.

Louis had planned to be a doctor like his own father was, and had a scholarship waiting for medical school. But he wanted Etta’s hand in marriage more than he wanted a medical license. Despite Etta’s pleas to take it easy on him, her father worked Louis to the bone. He was up at four o’clock every morning and out into the dewy fields. Four in the morning until dusk, and as Etta liked to remind people, he never complained once. Louis sold the medical bag and textbooks that his own father had passed down to him, and he put the money in a jar on their kitchen counter. He told Etta it was the start of a college fund for their future children. Etta thought this said a lot about the selfless kind of man he was.

One fall day, before the sun rose, Louis was severed by the beater on a silage wagon. He bled to death, alone in the cornfield. Etta’s father found him and sent her to cover up the body with a tarp from the barn. She carried Louis’s mangled leg back to the farmhouse and threw it at her father’s head while he was filling a bucket of water meant to wash away the blood on the wagon.

She hadn’t told her family yet about the child growing inside her. She was a big woman, seventy pounds overweight, and hid the pregnancy well. The baby girl, Cecilia, was born four months later on the kitchen floor in the middle of a snowstorm. Etta stared at the jar of money on the counter above her while she pushed the baby out.

Etta and Cecilia lived quietly at the farmhouse and rarely ventured into town. When they did, it wasn’t hard to hear everyone’s whispers about the woman who “suffered from the nerves.” In those days, not much more was said-not much more was suspected. Louis’s father gave Etta’s mother a regular supply of sedatives to give to Etta as she saw fit. And so Etta spent most days in the small brass bed in the room she grew up in and her mother took care of Cecilia.

But Etta soon realized she would never meet another man lying doped up like that in bed. She learned to function well enough and eventually started to take care of Cecilia, pushing her around town in the stroller while the poor girl screamed for her grandmother. Etta told people she’d been plagued with a terrible chronic stomach pain, that she couldn’t eat for months on end, and that’s how she’d got so thin. Nobody believed this, but Etta didn’t care about their lazy gossip. She had just met Henry.

Henry was new to town and they went to the same church. He managed a staff of sixty people at a candy manufacturing plant. He was sweet to Etta from the minute they met-he loved babies and Cecilia was particularly cute, so she turned out not to be the problem everyone said she’d be.

Before long, Henry bought them a Tudor-style house with mint-green trim in the middle of town. Etta left the brass bed for good and gained back all the weight she’d lost. She threw herself into making a home for her family. There was a well-built porch with a swing, lace curtains on every window, and chocolate chip cookies always in the oven. One day their new living-room furniture was delivered to the wrong house, and the neighbor let the delivery man set it all up in her basement even though she hadn’t ordered it. When Etta caught wind of this, she ran down the street after the truck, yelling profanity in her housecoat and curlers. This gave everyone a good laugh, including, eventually, Etta.

She tried very hard to be the woman she was expected to be.

A good wife. A good mother.

Everything seemed like it would be just fine.

“Come at the king, you best not miss.”

– Omar Little, The Wire

The moon was just rising when Sankofa came up the dirt road. Her leather sandals slapped her heels softly as she walked. Small swift steps made with small swift feet. When she passed by, the crickets did not stop singing, the owls did not stop hooting and the aardvark in the bushes beside the road did not stop foraging for termites. Yards behind her, in the darkness, trotted the small red-furred fox rumored to follow her wherever she went. This type of creature wasn’t known to live in Ghana, but stranger things were always afoot when Sankofa was around.

Sankofa was fourteen years old, but her petite frame and chubby cheeks made her look closer to ten. Her outfit was a miniature version of what the older more affluent Mamprusi women of northern Ghana wore– a hand-dyed long yellow skirt, a matching top embroidered with expensive lace and a purple and yellow headband made of twisted cloth. She wore the gold hoop earrings, too. She’d done the head wrap exactly as her mother used to when her mother visited friends. Beneath the head wrap, Sankofa covered her bald head with a shorthaired black wig. She’d slathered her scalp with two extra coats of the thick shea butter she’d recently bought, so the wig wasn’t itchy at all. She also applied a thin layer to her face, taking care to massage it into where her eyebrows used to be. Despite the night’s cloying heat, the shea butter and her elaborate heavy outfit, she felt quite cool…at the moment.

A young man leaned against a mud hut smoking a cigarette in the dark. As he blew out smoke, he spotted her. Choking on the last puff, he cupped his hand over his mouth. “Sankofa is coming,” he hollered in Ewe, grabbing the doorknob and shoving the door open. “Sankofa is coming!”

People peeked out windows, doorways, from around corners and over their shoulders. Nostrils flared, eyes were wide, mouths opened and healthy hearts pounded like crazy.

“Sankofa come, ooooo!” someone shouted in Pidgin English.

“Shia! Sankofa a ba!”

“Sankofa strolling!”

“Sankofa, Sankofa, ooo!

“Here she comes! Aaa ba ei!”

“Beware of remote control, o! The most powerful of all witchcraft!”

“Sankofa bird landing!”

Women scooped up toddlers playing in the dirt and ushered their older children inside. Doors shut. Steps quickened. Car doors slammed and those cars sped off.

The girl called Sankofa walked up the quiet deserted road of the town that was pretending to be full of ghosts. Her face was dark and sweet and her jaw was set. The only item she carried was the amulet bag a juju man had given her five years ago, not long after she left home. It softly bounced against her hip. Its contents were simple: a role of money that she rarely needed, a wind-up watch, a jar of shea butter bigger than a grown man’s fist, a hand drawn map of Accra and a tightly rolled up book. For the last week, her book had been an old old copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a paper novel she barely understood yet enjoyed reading. Before that, a crumbling copy of Gulliver’s Travels.

The town was clearly not poor. There were a few huts, but they were well built and well kept. This night, though dark as a cave, Sankofa could see hints of bright light coming from within. People feared her but they still wanted to watch television. These mud huts had electricity. Beside them were modern homes, which equally feigned vacancy. Sankofa felt the town staring at her as she walked. It was hoping, wishing, praying that she would pass through, a wraith in the darkness.

She set her eye on the largest most modern-looking home in the neighborhood. The huge hulking white mansion with a red roof surrounded by a large white concrete gate topped with broken green bottle glass was easy to see. As she approached the white gate, she noticed a large black spider walking up the side. Its long strong legs and hairy robust body looked like the hand of a wraith.

“Good evening,” Sankofa said in Mampruli, as she stepped up to the gate’s door. The spider paused, seeming to acknowledge and greet her back. Then it continued on its way up, into the forest of broken glass on top of the gate. Sankofa smiled. Spiders always had better things to do. She wondered what story it would weave about her and how far the story would carry. She lifted her chin, raised a small fist and knocked on the gate’s door. “Excuse me, I would like to come in,” she called in Twi. She wasn’t sure how far she’d come. Better to stick to the language most understood. Then she thought better of it and switched to English. “Gate man, I have come to call on the family that lives here.”

When there was no response, she turned the knob. As expected, it was unlocked. The gateman stood on the other side of the large driveway, near the garage. He wore navy blue pants, a crisp white shirt and a blank look on his face. He carried prayer beads, counting them along with shaking fingers. There was a light on over the garage and she could see his face clearly. Then he turned and spat to the side, making no move to escort her to the house.

“Thank you, sir,” Sankofa said, walking to the large front door. The doorway light was off. “I will show myself in.”

Up close, the house looked less elegant, the white walls were stained at the bottom with red soil, splashed there as mud during rainy season. There were large dirty spider webs in the upper corners where the roof met the walls. A shiny silver Mercedes, a black BMW and a blue Honda sat in the driveway. The garage was closed. The house was dark. However, Sankofa knew people were home.

Something flew onto her shoulder as she stepped up to the front door. She stifled the instinct to crush it dead and instead, grabbed it and then opened her hand. It was a large green grasshopper. She’d seen this creature in one of the books she’d read. These were called katydids. She giggled, watching it creep up her hand with its long delicate green legs.

She softly glowed a vibrant leaf green. Not enough to kill, but enough to bathe the grasshopper in a shade of its own lovely greenness. If a grasshopper could smile this one did. She was sure of it. Then it hop-flew off. “Safe journey,” she whispered.

She knocked on the door. “It is me,” she called. “Death has come to visit.”

She woke.

She yawned.

A burial place. This house is a fucking burial place, Maggie whispered, before it was time to go to the other room, the kitchen that she was chained to even though not a single link could be seen. But yes, there it was, snapped around her ankle, clinking nevertheless.

She mumbled the curse to herself, but it was meant for other people. She learned to do that, whisper low enough in her throat that an insult could be thrown and the target would be none the wiser. It became her secret language, living just below the audible one, deeper behind her tongue.

The sky was still dark, but she laid in her hay pallet an extra moment, knowing it could cost her. The Halifaxes each had their own way of communicating their displeasure, some less cruel than others. She could tell you stories.

She climbed out of the pallet and rolled her eyes at the hounds that lay on the floor by her feet. Oh, she slept on the back porch with the animals. Not her choice. Though it was enclosed and provided views out onto Ruth Halifax’s garden. Beyond it, a field of wildflowers bursting with every color, but the blues were the ones that were perfect enough to hurt feelings. Several rows of trees marked the end of the field and gave way to sandy ground that opened onto the bank of the Yazoo River. There, the people, when permitted, would scrub themselves down in the sometimes muddy water under the watchful gaze of the man whose name Maggie stopped saying for a reason. On the other side of the river, which seemed farther away than it was, a mess of trees stood so close together that no matter how hard she squinted, she couldn’t see past the first row of them.

She wanted to hate the fact that she was made to sleep there on the porch, low to the ground on some makeshift bed she piled together herself from the hay she got from Samuel and Isaiah, whom she referred to as The Two of Them. But so often the smell of the field calmed her and if she had to be in the damn Big House with Paul and his family, then it was best she was in the space farthest from them.

The hounds were Paul’s choice. Six of them that got to know every living soul on the plantation in case any of those souls tried to drift. She had seen it before: The beasts chased people into the sky and managed to snatch them down no matter how high they thought they could float. Them dogs: Ears just a flopping, woofing in that gloomy way that they do, sad eyes and everything. You almost feel sorry for them until they got a hold of your ass and bit it all the way back to the cotton field—or the chopping block, one.

They whined the minute she sat up and she detested the sound. Why they kept the animals enclosed was beyond her reasoning. Animals belonged outdoors. But then again, the Halifaxes were indoors so that meant all of creation had some right to be inside as well.

Maggie got up.

“Go on,” she said to the hounds, unlatching the door that led out to the garden. “Go find a hare or something and leave me be.”

All six of them ran out. She inhaled deeply, hoping she took in enough of the field to last her through the day. She kept her hand on the door so that it would close quietly. She limped over to another door on the opposite side of the porch and went into the kitchen. It could have been its own cabin given that it was twice the size of even the largest of the shacks people lived in at Empty. Still, she felt cramped in it, like something unseen was pushing her down from every direction.

“Breathe, child,” she said aloud and dragged her hurt leg over to the counter that ran underneath a row of windows that faced east and looked out onto the barn.

She grabbed two bowls and the sack of flour stored in the cupboards beneath the counter. She removed a jug of water and a sifter from the cabinet left of the counter. Once combined, she began kneading the ingredients into dough for biscuits: a heavy thing that, with heat, time, and her bruised knuckles, became yet another meal that failed to satisfy Halifax appetites.

She moved over toward of the front of the kitchen to get some logs to heat the stove. There was a pile of them under another window, one which faced south. During the day, that window allowed her to see past the row of willow trees in front of the house, down the long path that led to the front fence and intersected with the dusty road to Vicksburg’s town square.

She had only seen the square once, when she was dragged from Georgia and hauled off to Mississippi. Her old master had loaded her up onto a wagon, chained her feet, and sat her amongst some other frightened people. The journey took weeks. Once they got past the lumbering trees, the road opened up upon a great number of buildings, the kind of which she had never seen. She was marched from the wagon onto some platform, where she stood before a great crowd. A toubab, filthy and smelling of ale, stood next to her and shouted numbers. The people in the audience looked at her, none raised their hands in pursuit of her—none except Paul, who she heard tell his young charge that she would make a good kitchen wench and companion for Ruth.

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 north and led to the covered porch where she slept. The other, facing west, 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 south, 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 northeastern room. The last bedroom remained empty 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 sweat 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 own 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. 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—narrow, hard—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 was 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 that 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; fuzzy maybe, but not gone. She tried to remember the old word from the other sea that Cora Ma’Dear used to describe toubab. Oyinbo! 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 a dresser drawer. 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 never had anything so pretty. Who wouldn’t quiver? Ruth was with child at the time—one of the ones that 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 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 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?

Winter came and Ruth gave birth, a girl she named Adeline. She brought the child—pale and discontent—into the kitchen and said to Maggie: “Here. I’ll help you unfasten your dress.”

Maggie had seen other women submit to this and had feared this day for herself. Only with a great deal of restraint could she act as a cow for this child. It had dull eyes and eyelashes so close to the color of its own skin that it might as well not have had any at all. Maggie detested the feel of its probing lips on her breast. She forced herself to smile just to keep from smashing its frail body to the ground. What kind of people won’t even feed their own babies? Deny their offspring the blessing of their very own milk? Even animals knew better.

From then on, all children disturbed Maggie, including her own. She judged harshly all people who had the audacity to give birth: men who had the nerve to leave it inside; women who didn’t at least attempt, by hook or by crook, to end it. She regarded them all with great suspicion. Giving birth on Empty was a deliberate act of cruelty and she couldn’t forgive herself for accomplishing it on three out of six occasions. And who knew where the first or the second were now. See? Cruelty.