Two weeks passed and she didn’t take out the cards once.
She was thinking about what it meant to be an oracle, to see but to be unable to act. She hadn’t understood that burden when Aunt Winnie taught her the numbers. She hadn’t known that what they did was connected to how people like Phyllis turned their little bit of luck between clever fingers. But while those hands might be theirs, they didn’t entirely belong to them. They were possessed, just as Walter had said, but not by luck—or at least, not luck as she had imagined it to be, impartial and unpredictable.
In India, Dev once told her, people started getting the dreams after a failed rebellion against British rule called the Mutiny. In Haiti, it had happened right before their revolution. Maybe the American Indians got them earlier than anyone on this continent, in those days when the pilgrims were stealing their land and slaughtering them for sport. But in the former territories of the failed Confederacy, the dreams came down the day the slaves were free.
She could not avoid it, any more than her grandmother could. Those old souls, they suffered too much. What did they suffer? The million indignities of a human being sold and worked and raped and culled as property. And when they saw their brothers and sisters and sons and daughters at last freed, what did they do? They sent them a gift. Or something like it—a little bit of luck, a little bit of hope, a chance to lift the weight. It was almost enough. But the weight came back with horses and hoods and red fire. And in each generation, the hands touched fewer and fewer—while the spirit that animated them grew angrier and angrier.
Their fury was consuming Phyllis. She had killed who she shouldn’t and failed to kill who she should. They were not forgiving. Not eighty years later, and the weight heavy as it had ever been.
The oracle did not feel equal to that. She did not want to confront the judgment of those implacable old souls.
But if her grandmother’s story was true, if she was like her nana, like her great-aunt Winnie, then it was her duty to bear witness. And without her, Phyllis would face whatever was coming alone.
So one night, after Mrs. Grundy had left and Phyllis had gone to bed with a strangely knowing look and a warning to be careful, Tamara sat on the floor in front of the cold fireplace and unwrapped her neglected cards. They ought to have been eager, desperate for attention after so long in the dark, but they moved sluggish and heavy as she bent them into their tricks. As if they knew.
The oracle fixed the question in her mind and repeated it out loud: “Spirits of my ancestors, guardians who have guided our hands: what must she do?”
She shuffled three times more, repeating the question each time. Then she took the top card and laid it at the point of the star pattern. Queen of diamonds, the African queen, with her blue-black face and wise eyes. The ancestor. She took the next card and laid it on the point to the right. King of diamonds; one of the suicide kings, African like the queen, with his axe swinging down toward his head.
She touched the top of the next card—
—the earth growled and trembled—
—blue fire all around her—
—a crash upstairs, something throwing itself against the wall—
—the one who had fallen, the once-beloved, the now-despised, who carried on her shoulders the fury of their thousand disappointments, who could have been a savior of her people and now would never be saved—
—she called out the oracle’s other name—
—called it out of love.
Tamara broke from the cards and ran upstairs, ran through the remnants of her oracle’s sight, the hot wind of blue light. A fork from the tray Tamara had forgotten to take downstairs flew over her head and speared itself into the hallway wall. Phyllis grabbed the plate, broke it into shards. She was silent, tears and sweat mixing and dripping down her chin. Tamara stood there, paralyzed and useless, as her friend aimed to kill her. Tamara braced herself. But in a movement so fast it did not seem human, Phyllis jumped and twisted her entire body in the second before her fingers released. The shards shattered against the floor. Pea fell to her knees then, before the hands could find some other tool, and swung her arms against her belly.
“You want her, don’t you?” she panted. “Don’t you? You can’t kill me just yet.”
Her right hand lifted itself up, as though in peace. Or like the axe hand of the suicide king.
Then it lowered itself to the floor. Pea shuddered. Sweat dripped steadily from her nose while she hauled in rasping breaths.
The hands were hers again; her own tired flesh.
9
A second letter from Clyde arrived during spring’s first bloom, that last week of April. Tamara sat on the front stoop with a stole around her shoulders and steeled herself. She figured he hadn’t thrown her over after all, if he was writing again. But she worried, in any case. Would he give her an answer, at last, to her impossible dilemma?
Dear Tammy,
I apologize for my last letter. I haven’t been thinking very clearly these days. You’d think it was the fighting, but it isn’t that so much as the waiting. You stagger back to camp and every missing face hits you, you check the casualty rolls, you sit around waiting for your next chance to get them back. The boys here are something else, Tammy. Cracking, sharp as tacks, all ready to go. I got us to put on a production
