“Safety and prosperity for the rest, if you give me but one?”
“I done told you no,” Emmaline said. She was forgetting to pretend polite; well, Sample hadn’t gotten it only from his father. “How many more times I got to—”
“What kind of safety?” asked Pauline.
“Lord, have mercy, I’mma have to kill this girl,” Emmaline could not help muttering. But Pauline had set her jaw in that tight, stubborn way that meant she didn’t care if she got a smack for it. She persisted: “How much prosperity?”
Oh, and if that didn’t spread the White Lady’s grin nearly from ear to ear.
“Why, lots, sugar. Bless your heart!”
“Girl, shut your mouth,” Emmaline snapped. But the White Lady held up a hand, and all at once Emmaline found herself unable to speak. Oh, Mercy!
Em knew, then. Stupid, stupid girl.
“Pauline, don’t!” blurted Jim, but the White Lady eyed him too, and he was shut up as firmly as Emmaline herself. Sample just stared from one to the other of his siblings and from them to the White Lady, his hands flexing as if he wanted to hit somebody, but wasn’t sure where to start. “Children should be seen and not heard,” said the White Lady, gesturing gracefully with the fan. “But ladies with that blood like wine, sweet and high and so fine, get some choices in the matter ’til it’s taken from them. What say you, Miss Pauline?”
Pauline, to her credit, glanced at Emmaline again. Her belligerence had faded by now, and her small face was properly anxious and afraid. Then, though, her jaw firmed, and she faced the White Lady squarely. “You said trouble was comin’.”
“Oh, indeed.” The White Lady let her gaze drip left and right, syruping all over the boys. “So much trouble! Folks getting uppity from here to the Carolinas. De-seg-gregation! Non-discrim-ination! And don’t you know them bullnecks will be hitting back fast, beating y’all back into your place.”
She stopped her gaze on hotheaded Sample; Sample set his jaw. “Hitting back hard, I tell you, on boys who think to be called men.”
Pauline caught her breath. Then, though, thank the Lord, she bit her bottom lip. “I want to speak to my mother.”
There was a moment’s long, pent pause. Then the White Lady flipped her fan back up into a blurring wave, dropping into a mocking curtsy. The servant child moved jerkily back behind her, taking hold of the parasol again. “Seeking counsel is wise, and within the rules besides,” the White Lady admitted. “Not too much counsel, though, little miss. Some deals don’t last long.”
With that, she flounced off with the child in tow—though Emmaline noted that she skirted wide around the sycamore fig before passing behind a pine tree and vanishing.
The instant Emmaline could speak and move she did, hurrying over to Pauline and slapping the tar out of the girl before she could speak. “Didn’t I tell you about folks like that?” she demanded, pointing with a shaking hand after the White Lady. “Didn’t I tell you they’ll put a pretty orange in your hand and snatch it back with the hand attached?”
It had been happening more and more lately that Pauline defied her—but then, this was only proper, was it not? A girl coming into her womanhood, and her adult power, should speak her mind sometimes. “I know, Momma,”
Pauline said, without a trace of apology. Her voice was so calm and strong and even that Emmaline blinked. “But I had dreams.”
“Well, you should’ve told me! And you should’ve told me about the blood coming, I know how to make you safe for at least a bit of time, and—” “You can’t make me safe, Momma.” Pauline said it so sharp, her gaze so hard, that Emmaline could only flinch back. “That’s why you told me what to be scared of, ain’t it? So I could make myself safe. And I know, ’cause you taught me, that it’s a woman’s job to fight for hers.”
“That’s a man’s job,” Jim said, scowling—though he too should’ve been quiet, cowed by the slap. Sample nodded fiercely. Emmaline groaned and put a hand in the air for strength; all of her children had forgotten how to mind, all at once.
“Decent folks’ job, then,” Pauline said back, with a little heat. “But Momma, I saw it in the dream. People marching! Big ol’ redneck bulls, standing up like men, holding dogs and billy clubs. Blood everywhere.”
Emmaline’s skin went all a-prickle with remembered fear. Yet there was no fear in Pauline’s face as she went on, her voice rising in excitement. “At the end of it, though, Momma, at the end... I saw white children and black children sitting by each other in school. It was yellow and brown and red children there, too! Black people at the front of a bus! Momma...” Pauline bit her lip, then leaned forward to whisper, though there was no one to hear but family. “I saw a black man in a big white house.”
There were always black men in the big white houses of downtown Birmingham. Who else was going to tend their gardens or wash their cars?
And yet... there was a fervor in Pauline’s gaze that warned Emmaline there was something more to her daughter’s dreams.
Didn’t matter, though. The world didn’t change. And somebody had to protect her fool children from themselves.
Seething with pent-up anger and fear, Emmaline herded the children inside.
She made them go to bed early, with no supper for smarting off, because they had to learn—Pauline especially. Wasn’t no prosperity worth a girlchild’s soul and what little innocence life allowed her. Wasn’t no safety for black boys beyond what humility bought them, little as that was.
And while they slept, Emmaline burned sage, and she prayed to every ancestor of three continents who might listen, and then she set herself up in a chair before the door with her grandmother’s old musket across her knees.
She would stay up day and night, if she had to, for her children’s sake. After a few hours had passed in slow and taut silence, and the candles burned low, and the weight of drowsiness pressed on the back of her head like a blanket, Emmaline got up to keep herself awake. She peeked in the boys’ room: they were snoring, curled up, though Jim had a half-eaten peach still in his hand, sneaked out from some hiding place or another against just such an occasion of their mother’s wrath.
Pauline’s room, though, was cold from the open window wafting sharp bitter wind over the girl’s empty bed.
THERE WOULD BE only one place the girl could have gone: the Fairgrounds, in the shadow of Red Mountain.
Emmaline ran to Renee’s house, since Renee had the only working phone on the street. There she called Frank, who came over bringing his mule. The mule ran like it knew what was at stake, so fast and hard that Emmaline’s bottom was raw long before she reached the place.
The Fairgrounds were only Fairgrounds once a year. The rest of the time it was just a fallow field, occasionally used for harness racing. Long ago, though, it had been the breaking ground of a plantation—the place where new slaves, freshly force-marched up from the port of Mobile, got branded and stripped of name and spirit before being sent into the fields. As Emmaline halted the mule and slid off its back, she felt all that old blood there in the ground, mixed with old tears and the red dirt beneath her feet. White Folk fed on that sort of magic. This would be a place of power for them.
As Em reached the top of the hill, she saw that Pauline stood beneath a pine that was being strangled by a carpet of kudzu. Before her stood the White Lady—shining even more now, her skin catching the moon’s gleam in the way of her people, ears gone to points and mouth too wide and full of sharp fangs. They both turned as Emmaline thumped up, out of breath, her legs shaking from holding so tight to the mule’s sides. Still, she moved to stand between them, in front of Pauline and facing the White Lady. “I ain’t gon’ let you!”