In This Light Read Online Free Page A

there in that moment, he was saving our lives.
    “When Mama wrapped my hands in warm rags and Daddy pulled off my boots to rub my toes as hard as he could, I knew that nothing, nothing in the world was ever going to matter so much again.” She punched the clutch and shifted into fourth. “Do you know why I’m telling you this?” Willy nodded, but he didn’t know; he didn’t know at all.
    It wasn’t until Iona Moon eased into her driveway and shut off the engine that she remembered her mother’s chocolate and the ragged dollar bill still crumpled in her pocket.
I think I’ve got to have some pleasure
, that was the last thing Mama said. She rested her head on the steering wheel. A single sob erupted, burst from between her ribs as if someone had pounded his fist against her chest. She fought her own cry, choked it dry, and was silent.

Punishment
    IN 1858, THE SLAVE CALLED LIZE WAS HANGED in Louisville, Georgia, for the murder of her master’s son. I was twelve that day, and now I’m ninety, but I still see her bare feet, scratched and dusty from being dragged down the road. Those feet dangle among leaves so green they writhe like flames. I stand in the garden. The perfume of gardenias makes me dizzy enough to faint.
    From where I hang, I see a woman thrown from a ship because her child don’ come. She screams too loud and long. The others lift her over the rail, let her fall. They all touch her. They all say: I’m not the one. I see the mother of my mother, standing naked on a beach. The men look her over, burn a mark on her thigh. She squats in a cage for fifteen days. Flies land on her face. She don’ swat them away. I see the bodies chained in the holds of ships. Each man got less room than he got in the grave. They panic, break their own ankles, smother in their own waste. They jump if they get the chance. Black sea swallow a black man. Nobody stop to find him. On the distant shore, I see a runaway stripped of his own skin like a rabbit, torn limb from limb. To teach the others. I see Abe’s head. I crawl on
my hands and knees, look for his ears. But Walkerman takes them. Did you see how long a man bleeds? Did you see how his head festers in the heat? No way to clean those wounds though I wash him morning and night.
    Mama died of a five-day fever we couldn’t break with wet towels and ice baths. She left her baby squalling with hunger. That’s why Father brought Lize to the house, to keep Seth alive. My brother, four months old, still wrinkled and nearly hairless, was going to have a full-grown woman slave of his own.
    Mama would not have abided seeing Lize close to her boy. Father owned more than thirty Negroes, but Mama kept an Irish girl, Martha Parnell, to brush her hair and make her bed, to wipe the vomit off the floor during the weeks when her belly first began to swell, to rock the baby during the days when she lay dying. Mama wouldn’t have no nigger woman upstairs, touching her child, fondling the silver-handled mirror on her dresser or cleaning the long, light hair out of her comb. She said they were dirty, first of all, and they had appetites dangerous to men; she didn’t want Seth getting used to the smell of them. Only Beulah, the cook, two hundred and twenty pounds and fifty-seven years old, was allowed to stay in the house while Mama was living. And Beulah was allowed to care for me, to wash the blood from my scraped knees when I fell in the yard, to lay cool rags on my head when my temperature flared, to cradle me in her huge arms when I shook with chills.
    Every day, Mama sat for hours listening to me read from the Bible, making me repeat a verse a dozen times, until every pause was perfect and every consonant clipped. She smiled and closed her eyes, her patience endless:
Again, Selina.
But she couldn’t bear my small wounds or mild afflictions. She had no tolerance for suffering; my whimpering drove her from the room and made her call for Beulah to come with her root cures. And I was