The lord of fire was so disgusted by all these skulls that he sent out a cold wind to blow out their candles. When all the candles of the world had been blown out, he gathered up the skulls and built fine bodies around them and wrapped skin around the bodies and gave them all eyes and mouths and ears. “You are the people I meant,” he said, considering them as they rose and began to walk about. Then he went back to his palace to sleep. While he slept the people put on clothes and built themselves houses and ploughed the fields and harvested their grains. It was while they were working, and while the lord of fire was sleeping, dreaming his dreams of fire, that in some of their skulls, some of the candle flames came flickering back.
It took Cleome quite some time to tell me this story, and when she had finished her eyes were closed and she was so quiet I thought she must have dozed. It was closing in on dusk, and I knew we both needed the rest, so I wrapped my arms tight around her and closed my eyes too. It wasn’t more than a few seconds later though that she said, “I saw those candle flames burning in his eyes. That’s how he could see his way to us in the dark. You think there are some can see in the dark up there in the North too? Some to come heavy boot down the hallway toward you?”
After Prosper had returned and I had had my rest, we hired another wagon and rode up from Indianapolis to Clinton County so that I could return to Ginny Lancaster what all those years before she had given me. Lilly Fairbanks and her husband told us, as they had told Prosper some days before, that we should not go up to Clinton County, where they were as likely to put a rope to colored people as help them on their errands, no matter how light-skinned they might be, but I said that I must go, and Prosper said that if I was going he was going, and that at any rate he’d already been up there and had only been treated to a few ill-colored words. After we had ridden away I asked him if it was true that he hadn’t been too badly treated, and he said it was true, although that might have been because he was on a good horse and had tried to look like he was on somebody else’s business, which he was. He said he knew that some of them had seen what he was, there were always some, but no one had tried to stop him, no one had interfered.
It took us until the middle of the afternoon to reach the fine house of Lucious Wilson, deep in the green cornfields of Clinton County, Indiana, and this time, when we had reached our destination, I found I did not need to stay in the cart, but walked straight up to the front door and knocked. My knock was answered by a small white woman in her middle years, who smiled up at me. I had been prepared for her to shut the door in my face or to tell me that the servants’ entrance was around the side or to treat me or Prosper poorly in some other way, but she did not. In fact, she turned her smile over to Prosper, who had stayed with the wagon. She even gave him a wave.
“I am here to speak to Mr. Lucious Wilson,” I said. “I do beg your and his pardon for any trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” she said. “Will you come in?”
It was as fine a home on the inside as it had looked on the outside. The floors had been stained and swept clean and there were no cobwebs in the corners. Books lined the walls, and there was a long curl to the banister that led up the stairs. The woman offered me a comfortable chair in the parlor, but I stood in the entrance hall with my travel hat in my hand. While I waited, I looked at a piece of stitchwork made by someone who had known her business. The stitchwork had a silver frame and a border of flowers. In the middle of it, curled around a sleeping child, was the Lord’s Prayer.
“You will sit with me as we speak,” said Mr. Lucious Wilson when he came. There wasn’t any question to it, so I followed him into the parlor and sat. His daughter, for that was who the woman was, brought us cool blackberry tea, then went out the front door and carried a glass of it to Prosper and told him to take his cart over near the shed where the horses could stand out of the sun.
Lucious Wilson was every bit as old as I was and had some trouble with his breath. When he had caught it, he said, “I saw that fellow the other day and thought he was white, now I can see that he is not.”
“My nephew.”
“I expect I would have to see you stand together.”
“There is a resemblance. Some have said he takes a good deal after me.”
“You look like you’ve been on the road a spell.”
“Yes sir, I have.”
“And where have you come from?”
“Chicago.”
“Went there once. Long ago. Before the big buildings. What I wanted to ask you was where you come from.”
“Below the river,” I said. It was the simplest way to say it.
“Kentucky,” he said.
I nodded. We sat quietly. The house had many a modest creak. We breathed and listened to them. Or I listened to them. After a time, he spoke.
“You were down there with our Sue, weren’t you?”
“Sue, sir?”
“Ginny. Ginestra Lancaster. Down there with her.”
Lucious Wilson shuddered just the tiniest bit as he said this. I did not shudder, not even that small amount, nor did I answer, but thought of the stitchwork in the entrance hall. I had the Lord’s Prayer on my own wall in Prosper’s house in Bronzeville. We said the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday at my church. The Lord’s Prayer, I had always found, could never be used up. All I ever had to do was lay my eyes or mind on it to feel refreshed. With the Lord’s Prayer, I was stronger than it all.
“Isn’t that what this is? Isn’t that who you and that nephew of yours looks like a white boy are?” he said.
There wasn’t anything mean in his voice, only a harshness because of the breath that was leaving him, which was the same breath that was leaving me, that is leaving all of us on this earth.
“A place in Charlotte County. By a stream. The owner, Linus Lancaster, was a pig farmer. There were several of us to start. Then just a few. We called it Paradise,” I said.
“Paradise?”
“A greensward out of the old days. I have something to return to her, something she gave me down there. I got my use out of it and have never touched it since. There’s more on the coil. I should have left the whole and not just part of it with her in the long ago.”
He squinted his eyes, raised a long white eyebrow. I reached into my bag and pulled it out, held it up.
He cleared his throat, took a breath, nodded.
“You know that is her needlework you have been looking at over on the wall yonder,” he said.
“Miss Ginny’s?”
“Sue’s. She hasn’t been called Ginestra Lancaster in fifty years.”
“Sue’s,” I said.
“Would you say it with me?”
“Yes sir.”
So we bowed our heads and said the Lord’s great prayer together, then he stood and told me where she lived.
Cleome’s time came as we were crossing a ditch next to a barley field gone badly to seed. It flung her down onto the hard dirt and would not let her rise. They had told me there would be a woman who could help us at the crossing place, but it was still some miles away and I did not dare leave.
She smiled, did my younger sister Cleome, in between her screams. She said the rocks were still falling out of her pockets, that she felt lighter each minute, that everything now was soft and sweet. She pushed and she pushed. “Pray with me,” she said near the end. I put my face against hers and I did. “Sing to me,” she said. I gathered her into my arms and sang. There was a song she wanted from her girlhood. A song from our mother. “Yes,” she said as I sang it. She was as brave in that ditch as anything that ever walked through this world.