The House Girl (10 page)

He talked of running. It was Louis who first made it seem to her like a thing that could be done. When she visited with Lottie and Winton late in the evenings, with the musty smell of wet woodsmoke from the fire and the spray of red sparks when Winton poked a log, Louis whispered to Josephine of how, one day, he would run.
Philadelphia,
he said.
Boston. New York
. And he had spoken the names of northern cities as if they were sweet drops rolling in his mouth.
Come with me?
he asked and he had thrown back his head and laughed as though it were a plan they could make, to go for a picnic, to run for their lives.

The last time Josephine saw him, he lifted his brows, inquiring as to how she had been keeping. Josephine in the house, Louis in the fields and the cabins; only yards separated them, but rarely did they pass each other to speak. They had never touched. It was late morning, Josephine sent out to fetch Mister, and Louis had stepped away from his row when Jackson’s back was turned.
Watch me go,
he had whispered to her.
Soon. Philadelphia
.
I’ll call outside your window. A dove, they don’t call at night. You’ll know it’s me
.

I’ll know it’s you,
Josephine had said. This was before Mister and his drinking, before Josephine’s breasts grew so tender, before her belly began to swell, and she had imagined the streets of Philadelphia, she and Louis side by side amid the crowds, just another boy and girl making their way along the road.

A few days later, Louis was sold off. Sometimes at night she’d listen for the dove’s call, but it never came. Doves don’t call at night, she knew as much.

Not long after Louis got sold, Hap died, and it seemed all the light of the world was snuffed out for a while, those two strong boys gone in an instant, and the women and old men left weeping. Josephine mourned in her own way. She did not kneel down with Lottie, she did not visit the place where Hap was buried. Lottie asked her: Why do you reject His light? Why do you scorn Him? Lottie’s religion was grounded in Papa Bo’s sermons and the tragedies she herself had suffered. A man she once loved taken from her in a way that Josephine had never learned, Lottie never told of its particulars; Lottie’s mother and the three little sisters, scattered somewhere in the cotton states, so Lottie supposed; other children, Lottie never spoke their names, born before she came to Bell Creek, Josephine could only guess at their number; and then Lottie’s last, her beloved Hap, a spot the size of a dime. It was only the Lord who would not leave her.

Josephine had pondered Lottie’s faith. She had stood beside Lottie and Winton in the old meat house as Papa Bo preached and moaned, shook, and sometimes fell to the ground. Time and again Josephine had tried to feel their fervor but she had looked upon them and felt nothing. Missus too believed. Josephine had seen her lips move without sound as her finger traced along a gilt-edged page. But Josephine was not transformed; she had never felt an ecstasy or heard a call. Her body was hers alone, not belonging to Mister or Missus Lu or to the Lord above. And it was only with this true belief that she could tolerate the putting of one foot before the other, the drawing of another breath and another and another.

Standing in the hall, the sun lengthening across the floorboards, Josephine saw her mother’s body stretched across the hills, and Lottie on her knees at Hap’s grave, and the sheen of Louis’s skin by firelight; she heard the doctor’s words:
It was a pity. A disgrace,
and that terrible breathless silence. The things you can control and the things you cannot. And Josephine knew she could not wait, no, she would not stay for the dying Missus Lu.
Run
.

F
RIDAY

E
leven thirty
P.M
. and Lina was working at home. Conversation fragments, laughter, and hoots filtered into her room from the sidewalk below, but for Lina the weekend seemed as distant as the moon. She sat in bed, a pillow on her lap, a book on the pillow, and read. As promised, Dan had shifted all of her client work to other attorneys. During the course of the meeting with Dresser, Lina’s desk had been cleared of all papers relating to her old cases and a pile of books and binders had replaced them: information on class action lawsuits, histories of U.S. slavery, economic treatises, financial models of farm worker wages and earned income, and case precedent—reparations for Holocaust survivors, for Japanese Americans, for East Germans post-reunification; decisions from the International Court of Justice, the Nuremberg Tribunals, the British Foreign Compensation Act.

To begin her research, Lina had lugged home a briefcase full of transcripts from interviews conducted in the 1930s to record the memories of the last surviving American slaves. The nature of the harm, Dan had said. One individual’s experience to represent the experience of the many. Lina was hoping some potential leads might emerge from the interviews. Using census data, public historical records, and the biographical information contained in the transcripts, it would be easy enough to track the descendants of an interviewee. And Garrison had offered to put her in touch with some friends who had already traced their antebellum family roots. He’d stopped by her office after the meeting with Dresser, standing in the doorway, a pen behind one ear. “They’ll be happy to talk to you. Just use my name,” he’d said, and winked.

Tomorrow Lina would make some calls, arrange some meetings, and by early next week she would have a few candidates for Dan and Dresser to review. This would not be a tough assignment, Lina thought, and she felt a flash of pity for Garrison.

Lina’s bed was king-size, a giant white raft positioned in the center of the room, facing three large sash windows that looked out over Sixth Street and the linden’s sturdy gray trunk. Only the gooseneck lamp on her bedside table was lit, but the circle of light was wide and bright at the center where Lina sat. The rest of the room—the painted white dresser bought by Oscar when she was seven, the potted ficus grown nearly to the ceiling, the forgotten guitar in its dusty case, the overflowing bookshelves—remained in shadow.

Duke wandered into Lina’s room, eyed the bed appraisingly, and jumped. At the foot, he circled out a nest in the blankets and began to clean himself with long sweeps of his precise pink tongue. He finished with his left foreleg and moved to the phantom right, his tongue licking air, his empty shoulder moving in circles.

On the open page of her notebook Lina wrote, “Nature of the harm—slavery.” She turned to the transcripts, beginning with the index of slave interviews. The listed names were musical and endless: Larkin Payne, Millie Barber, Sarah Odom, Sidney Bonner, John Payne, Lina Anne Pendergrass, Cella Perkins, Marguerite Perkins, Andrew Boone, Amanda Oliver, Robert Bryant, Rachel Perkins, George Washington Buckner, John Coggin, Neil Coker, Amy Perry, Lizzie Davis, Louisa Davis, John B. Elliott, John Ellis, Helen Odom, John Ogee, Lewis Ogletree, Daniel Phillips, Nathan Gant, Clayborn Gantling, Jenny Greer, Henderson Perkins, Andrew Gregory, Benjamin Henderson, Molly Hudgens, Carrie Hudson, Jesse Meeks, Nathan Neighten, Sam Kilgore, Lucy Key, Ella Johnson, Edward Lycurgas, Ballam Lyles, Jane Oliver, Annie Osborne, Victoria Adams, Dolly Whiteside, Belle Robinson, Ellen Polk, Dina Beard, Nathan Beauchamp, Irene Poole, Harrison Beckett, Annie Beck, J. H. Beckwith, John C. Bectorn, Prince Bee, Mary Poe, Enoch Beel, Welcome Bees, Matilda Poe, Anne Bell, Oliver Bell, Cyrus Bellus, Sam Polite, Carrie Pollard, Edgar Bendy, Minerva Bendy, Allen Price, Willis Bennefield, Carrie Bradley, Logan Bennett, Fannie Berry, Kato Benton, Henry Probasco, Ellis Betts, Jack Bess, James Bertrand, Alice Biggs, Jane Birch, Jenny Proctor, Carrie Binns, Ransom Simmons, Rosa Simmons, Andrew Simms, Millie Simpkins, Ben Simpson, Fannie Sims, Senya Singfield, James Singleton, Billy Slaughter, Alfred Sligh, Peggy Sloan, Samuel Smalls, Arzella Smallwood, Sarah Smiley, Anna Smith, Clay Smith, Francis Black, Ank Bishop, Nelson Birdsong, Josephine Stewart, Elvira Boles, John Price, Marshal Butler, Titus Bynes, Annie Stanton, Tanner Spikes, Solbert Butler, Laura Sorrell, Nathan Byrd, Granny Cain, Rosa Starke, Maggie Stenhouse, Charlotte E. Stephens, Laura Caldwell, Jeff Calhoun, Mariah Calloway, George Scruggs, Abram Sells, Sarah Sexton, Alice Sewell, Roberta Shaver, Mary Shaw, Nelson Cameron, Chaney Spell, Jessie Sparrow, Easter Campbell, Patience Campbell, Patsy Southwell, Elizabeth Sparks, Fanny Cannady, Sylvia Cannon, James Cape, Tille Caretaker, Susan Snow, Albert Carolina, Cato Carter, Frank Reed, Esther King Case, Charlie Rigger, Julia Casey, Susan Castle, Zenie Cauley, Ellen Cave, Dora Richard, Lula Chambers, Amy Chapman, Charity Riddick, Cecelia Chappel, Harriet Cheatam, Alice Rivers, James Childress, Mary Anne Patterson, Solomon Pattille, Carry Allen Patton, Martha Patton, Amy Penny, Sallie Newsom, Pate Newton, Lila Nichols, Margaret Nickens, Margrett Nillin, Fanny Nix, Cora Torian, Neal Upson, Dolly Whiteside, Sam T. Stewart, Mark Trotter, Ellis Strickland, Jim Taylor, Luke Towns, Addie Vinson, Charlie Van Dyke, John Wesley, Ophelia Whitley, Alice Rivers, Susie Riser. The names went on and on and on.

As with every one of her cases—breach of contract, restitution, fraud—Lina began with a chart. Within neat rows and tidy columns, the facts became more than just a list of names, a catalogue of tragedies and mistakes; they became usable, valuable, revelatory. Was there a pattern? An anomaly? How did events unfold? Who were the key players?

Lina titled her chart “Nature of the Harm” and labeled the columns with general types of harm as she found them in her reading.

As she located a specific example of a type of harm, Lina wrote the initials of the individual involved and the relevant page number. She skimmed as she read, not dwelling on the facts she found.
Law is the bastion of reason,
Lina’s criminal law professor had always liked to say.
There is no place for feeling. As lawyers, we reason, we observe, we analyze
.

At three thirty
A.M
., Lina examined her work.

The once neatly organized transcripts had become a sprawling white paper landscape across the bedspread and over the floor. The chart alone remained ordered and clean. Lina studied the names, the frequency and types of harms; she cross-referenced gender and location, age and origin. But no pattern appeared. The harm was everyone and everywhere.

Lina’s eyes hurt, her fingers hurt, her laptop lay heavy and hot against the top of her thighs. A waking dream of all that she had read flashed in colorless cutout silhouettes across her vision. Lina wrote on her yellow legal pad:
The harm is
immeasurable
.

Outside a car passed; the arc of its headlight roamed the ceiling and disappeared. From above came the dull thumps of Oscar’s footsteps as he wandered the fourth-floor studio. Lina had not seen or spoken to him since the night before; she had tried not to think about the pictures of Grace. The dinner-plate eyes with the empty centers.

Enough
.

On Lina’s wall hung a series of pictures Grace had made before Lina was born. Four small pencil sketches, portraits no larger than an apple, but the detail extraordinary, each wrinkle and eyelash precisely drawn. An old woman pursing her lips, annoyed, her hair a helmet of tightly wound curls. A teenager with a Mohawk and a row of earrings, a placid, satisfied smile curling his lips. Each was labeled with an obscure family reference scripted in elaborate scrolling letters:
Sister’s Nephew’s Son, Fourth Cousin Once Removed, Grandmother’s Uncle
. Lina had no idea if these people were actually Grace’s relations, and thus also her own, or Grace’s friends, neighbors on their block, or people Grace had passed once on the sidewalk. Lina grew up envying these strangers, for they had been the subjects of Grace’s attention in a way that Lina had not: Lina had never seen any pictures of herself made by Grace, a fact that still managed to cause a mystified little jolt of hurt whenever she considered it.

Upstairs, the studio door opened and closed, followed by the sound of Oscar’s feet on the stairs and then moving down the hall to Lina’s door.

“Come in,” Lina called before Oscar had a chance to knock on the half-cracked door.