“The lady is white,” Tamara said, haltingly. Even now, the words stuck in her throat.
The nurse who had first seen her pursed her lips. “Dr. Nolan,” she said in a stage whisper, “I grew up in Virginia, and I know a nigger when I see one. She might be half-caste, but she’s a nigger all right.”
Phyllis started laughing. She laughed so hard that she started leaking again, and this time it wasn’t rosy, it was red.
“She needs a doctor,” Walter said.
The doctor hesitated. It was a hanging moment, the inhale before the clapper hits the bell, a second whose memory would return to her in dreams for the rest of her life—and what is that space, if not where the hands have always lived? When one group tries to grind out the existence of another, to enslave them for generations, to pretend to give them freedom while forging a dozen new kinds of chains, to kill their children and cite the inevitable meanness of their condition as justification, and not a most deliberate result—when the scales of justice have been so grossly weighted in the favor of those who have almost everything and who eye with deadly jealousy that meager portion which eludes them, where else might one fight back but in the spaces, the inhales, the numbers?
The doctor shook his head. “Go. We don’t want any trouble with you people, but we’ll call the police if we have to.”
Walter’s arms twitched, as though he would put down Phyllis to reach for his gun.
“Leave it, Walter,” Pea said. She sounded so tired. In all the time they had known one another, Tammy had never heard her so tired.
All that power they’d collected between them, all that cowing strength. Saint’s hands, an oracle’s deck, a mobster’s gun. Useless, useless. This was power. Jack of diamonds, running milky hands through thinning hair, going home to dinner that evening, drinking a scotch to relax, and never once thinking: I killed a woman today.
Much later, when it was over, she sat alone in the kitchen after the baby had cried herself to sleep, and she read Dev’s letter.
Pea—
There’s so much I can’t tell you that I think they’d prefer I not tell you anything. I’m safe, and healthy. The danger isn’t as much as it could be, though they try their best. I suspect you’re in much more.
I know you think you have failed the hands. But their demands always exceed what we’re capable of giving. Forgive them. Forgive yourself.
You are like a goddess with Durga inside you, a creature inscrutable, with four holy hands that reach into our future and our past. I dream of her, growing and moving in that fluid which is to her a universe. Pressing against its limits the way the best of us do, entirely unaware of how she hurts you.
I dream of our house by the river. Of a stubborn, wild little girl with her hair bound in thick dark plaits that have caught bits of grass and dandelion fluff. There is mud on her hands and knees. She hunts fossils and tells stories over bones. She will live half in the present and half in an unformed future, she will see her own death and face it as she faces the muddy current of the March river. She will know too much about us and out of love protect us from it.
This is battle: Men speechless with terror, expelling their consciousness in grunts and prayers and last cigarettes. They cloud the air but don’t linger like the gun smoke, which comes later. It is the moment before the breath that could be your last, when you shit your pants and keep running across the line. Or drop where you stand, felled by terror a second before the bullet. It is screams and blood and death, of course, but it is mostly the sharp cold of the last moment you will ever feel the cold. Fighting in spite of it.
When men go into that thinking that they don’t deserve to live, then they die. I deserve to live. You deserve to live, Pea. You deserve that more than anyone, no matter what you’ve done. What they call a labor is a battle, maybe the purest kind.
Tamara has her cards, and yes, they are a kind of power, but they aren’t the only one. They predict the future, but they don’t decide it. Whatever they have told you, don’t bow to it. If there is such a thing as destiny, it can be changed. It can be fought.
Fight, Pea. If we die, let it be screaming, not with a bullet to the back of the head because we hid behind the line. Fight, Pea. I love our daughter more than I should, more than any logic can explain, and she doesn’t yet exist apart from you, and I am telling you to fight her, our sweet Durga, if in entering this world she tries to take you from it—
And if she does, or if one of those bullets finds its mark on me, please believe, Phyllis—we are connected by more than this love or this lifetime. When we return to the wheel of life, you and I, we will find one another again and again, seven lifetimes and seven lifetimes more, until the colonized and the enslaved and the abused will rise up with the holy strength of the gods behind them and, together, we will make it right.
Your
Dev
Tamara lifted a knife, one of the rusted ones from the garden. Why not? She’d been wondering since she stumbled from Poughkeepsie’s colored hospital with bloodstains on her dress. (A dry laugh in one of Pea’s last moments of lucidity: “You made a bargain with them, maybe I can too.”) Tamara tossed Dev’s letter in the air. Then she speared it to the wall in one uncanny throw.
Tamara left it
