1

I ain’t ever felt as trapped and choked as I do right now. When I get this way, when I feel like kudzu is wrapped tight around my rib cage and I’m bleeding a bright heat, I like to slip inside my head. I can forget about this hard-backed pew and all the silk, wide-brimmed hats bobbing to the mourning gospel. I ain’t here. I ain’t in Mountain Bend Baptist. I ain’t even in Tennessee.

I am a little black bean. I am a little black bean in England, 1734, and a boy is carrying me home. When we get to his cottage, his mama says: Boy, I just know you ain’t sell the cow for some beans. Before she whips the white off him with her slipper, she throws me out the window, but I ain’t hurt. I am a little black bean landed in soft loam. I sleep deep in the cool ground. When the morning comes, the sun don’t wake me. The boy wakes me. His skinny fingers grip my sides. I am a stalk: thick, and green, and healthy, and tall enough to touch heaven. But the boy can’t let me be. He wraps his legs around me and pulls up his milk-fed body. His bones dig into me. I say, The fuck you climbing up me for?

A smooth palm rubs my shoulder, tugs me back to the eulogy.

Magnolia, baby. Your granny got peace, now. The dusk-colored woman next to me must have mistaken my laughter for sobbing. She traces loops on my arm, soft as a whisper, with her acrylic, until Pastor Wooly strikes something in her. Hallelujah! She claps. Mama Brown and me, we only came to church twice a year. Easter and Christmas. I can’t remember her name. But she loved my Mama Brown. Unlike most people.

They sure didn’t love her enough to know she’d hate the flowers clustered around her casket: fluffed carnations, limp roses, tongue-colored peonies. Mama Brown would have wanted something like home: garden tulips with sprigs of baby’s breath. They got her face all wrong, too. Her foundation is two shades too light and Bible thick. And she wouldn’t want this rambling sermon. She would want music and happy dancing.

Now, what the Good Lord say? Pastor Wooly taps the head of the microphone on the back of his hand. He is a dark and wrinkled man, with a tuft of dandelion seed for hair. Every Sunday, he starts his routine by hobbling up to the altar with his cane. This funeral ain’t no different. When he catches the Spirit, Pastor Wooly throws his arms up. The sound of the cane smacking against the hardwood floor always results in a resounding Hallelujah. The individual voices of the congregation—the throaty old women; the young men with fire under their toes that make them jump, jump; the sinners that find bits of glory in their mouths—become a uniform voice, strong and deep. When I was little, I thought in these moments he was conjuring up the voice of God. Now I know that ain’t true.

I’ll tell you what the Good Lord say, Pastor Wooly says.

Yes, Pastor! a man in the back shouts.

He say, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.’

Hallelujah, the pretty woman next to me says.

Y’all hear me? Pastor Wooly jumps, loses his breath. Every other word is shot into our ears with a wavering inhale. He say, ‘I am-uh the resurrection-uh and the life-uh! The cane smacks the floor.

Hallelujah! The congregation rises in the fading spirit, churning out a low hum of funeral’s-done chatter.

I can’t stand the thought of standing around, being strangled by hugs and White Diamonds and Old Spice and condolences. All the God Bless Yous the church plans to gift me can’t take away this hurt. Can’t take away me knowing that the only person who would have an answer to my problem is stiff and mute in an oak box.

I slink out the side door that opens to the edge of the cemetery. The horizon ripens with red; it’ll be dark before they lower Mama Brown.

Miss Magnolia, a voice calls from the headstones.

Sugar Foot saunters from the cusp of the open grave, puffing on a wrinkled roll-up. He grins when he reaches me. Ain’t this some bullshit?

I didn’t see Sugar Foot during the funeral. He sure ain’t dressed for one: mahogany suit with a gold tie and a slanted fedora to match. I been knowing this man my whole life, and I ain’t ever seen him out of his deacon clothes: white shirt and slacks. He tosses a disk of butterscotch.

I catch it. He been feeding me sweets since I was little. Sir? What you mean?

He waves his lit cigarette in circles at the door. All this. Your granny would hate this.

Mama Brown’d be fine with it, I say, Church has done their best.

He takes a drag, blows a fat cloud of smoke in the space between us. I seen a miracle in there.

A miracle?

Yes, Miss Magnolia. I seen about ten women in there crying with dry eyes. Not a damn tear. He chuckles.

I smile. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

The church’s side door opens. We been looking for you all over, girl, an usher says.

You drive? Sugar Foot asks as I step in.

No, sir. I walked here, I say.

I’ll take you after.

Yes, sir.

The usher leads me back to the front pew; the pallbearers lift Mama Brown like she’s light as a wish.

I follow the shuffling crowd out to the dirt, this tiny fenced-in graveyard. How would I feel if I could weep? Silly. Wetting the earth with tears ain’t ever made anybody sprout. The last light of the day sinks into the ground with her.

Sugar Foot finds me before the repast, his arm snaked around the small of my back, and walks with me to the church’s basement, to the banquet hall. On the long white folding table made for fellowship are aluminum foil trays. Baked spaghetti, fried catfish, angel eggs. Yeast rolls, green beans, fried chicken, potato salad with mustard. Off to the side, a pound cake. I ain’t got a hunger. There’s a polite wait for me to fill my plate, so I do, then walk to a table near the exit and nurse my soda. Someone fires up the sound system, and Lauryn Hill starts singing, and I know Mama Brown would at least be happy with this part.

Sugar Foot joins me in a dance-walk, only some potato salad and a small roll on his plate. He waves his plastic fork over my food. I wouldn’t eat that if I was you. He stabs at his salad, looking like a damn fool eating before the blessing. Miss Wanda cooked that fish. Last time she ’bout gave the whole congregation cholera.

Ain’t that from water? I ask.

Ain’t that where they live? He jabs me with his elbow, chuckling.

Everyone finds a seat with loaded plates. Pastor Wooly, standing at the head of the serving line, says, Let us bow our heads.

Sugar Foot sets aside his fork.

A stomach-growling prayer, an echoed amen.

For an hour and a half, I sit through it all, this parade of good intentions. People trying to remember Mama Brown in a way they should, ending the same way: calling a woman an easy heifer with kindness. For an hour and a half, I bite my cheeks.

Pastor Wooly stands, signals the end of the feast.

Sitting in the front seat of Sugar Foot’s car, I still got gospel ringing in my ears. How can they sing about freedom, about flying away, when they covering somebody with dirt? We ride slow in the humid black, down the road, down House Mountain, this forested knob separating North Broadway from the East Side.

How old you now, Miss Magnolia? Sugar Foot asks.

Nineteen, I say.

No disrespect intended here, and I sure do hate to bring up business on a day all riddled with grief, but I ain’t made my money being worried about kindness. He lights a roll-up. I crack the window.

What business?

Well, you nineteen and work at a gas station. You ain’t got your granny around no more to pay me my rent.

I’ll have it to you on time. Always do. I poke my arm out the window and let the breeze cool my wrist. We pass a patch of honeysuckle, and the sugared scent fills the car.

I cling to it when he asks: Where your mama at? I ain’t seen Miss Cherry in a minute.

Me neither, I say.

His thick-bodied car lumbers down the gravel driveway to my home. It’s a damn shame she hooked on that shit. You pretty like your mama. Got them light eyes.

Thank you, Sugar Foot. I force a smile and open the door. He grabs my wrist.

Now, I know it’s hard living alone young as you are, making ends meet. We can work a little something out when you ready. He licks his lips like they sticky with molasses and drives off.

This house got a hollow feel. The puzzle we ain’t get to finish on the coffee table: half a donkey in a flowered pasture. We must have glued hundreds of puzzles together before the dementia got her and chewed her brain.

I sit in her scarlet recliner, where I can smell her memory most—peppermint lotion, her occasional cigar, and the humidifier she let puff out stale mist. Growing up, the only time I sat in this chair was on Mama Brown’s lap. The velvet arms pocked with charred craters from her cigar. In the end, she’d forget she had lit up and would crush the embers almost anywhere. Mostly on the furniture. Twice, her thighs.

Before the dementia, she breathed and talked like a June thunderstorm. If she’d been around to see Sugar Foot in his cheap suit, and the way he wet his lips like he was parched for my spit, we wouldn’t have to worry about rent. She’d have his dry tongue slick with grease, frying in the skillet. And if she seen that funeral! Pastor Wooly sounds like he got the answer, like a car salesman or one of those jeweled psychics on TV. But he don’t. Mama Brown do. But she’s gone.

I ain’t bled in a month and a half. Maybe it’s stress, dealing with this love carved out of me. I could believe in loss messing up my tide. Maybe it ain’t stress. Maybe I got a lump of life growing in my belly, no bigger than a sweet pepper seed. Pregnant. I don’t like that word. It’s got a swollen sound to it.

Then again, maybe Mama Brown wouldn’t have helped. I was fifteen the last time I saw Cherry. I was in my bed. My body ached and was heated by a virus. Mama Brown had just brought me scalding boneset tea, a pink tablet of Benadryl. I gulped it and cuddled up to a notebook to write poetry about a boy I can’t remember. There was a muffled knock on the front door. We never got visitors, unless it was Sugar Foot dropping by for rent and a cigar or one of Mama Brown’s boyfriends—but they knew to come only if she called. I heard a woman’s voice weighed down with rasp and knew it was Cherry. Their conversation started cool, unheard, but then grew rowdy as church.

There was a moment of silence. I remember because I could finally put my pen to the paper. My eyelids drooped, even though I thought the medicine hadn’t had enough time to sit in my stomach. I wanted to drift off. I wrote instead because ain’t love best written when it’s sleepy and fevered? There were footsteps on the hardwood, three knocks on my door.

I shoved my half-finished poem beneath the quilt. Come in, I said.

Cherry crept in, shut my door. She wore rags too big for her gaunt self. Skeletal in all the shadows. Her white skin: jaundiced. A wilted tulip.

Maggie, she said. I ain’t ever liked her calling me that.

Hey. I made sure to strain my voice through my throat so she knew I was sick with no patience.

She sat on the edge of my bed. I could smell her: an alleyway next to a fast-food joint. How you doing?

Sick, I said.

Just thought I’d pop in. Cherry had a boyfriend, potholed with acne scars, named Quarry Jones. A white, scrawny man. He beat Cherry sometimes, but mostly he watched TV. The way she shuffled her feet and eyed the door, I knew his pickup truck waited on our driveway. I knew he was sitting and scowling with impatience in the idle. I’ve missed you.

You, too, I said.

Maggie, could you do me a favor?

I closed my eyes.

Could you ask your granny if she’d give me a loan? She won’t do it for me. You’re her baby.

Mama Brown said no? I asked.

Cherry tilted her head, expectant. Come on, now, Quarry’s out there waiting, and we’re low on gas.

I ain’t doing it. I don’t feel good, I said.

I’ve done so much for you. She shook her limp hair. You know how young I was when I had you?

I don’t feel good.

Should’ve known I wouldn’t get no help. Last time I asked her for money was when I found out I was pregnant with you. She stood. But, apparently, a woman wanting to be free goes against God.

Why she got to help you? She ain’t even yours. She’s Daddy’s.

Your daddy been dead so damn long. Who else she got to be a mother for? Can’t count on nobody in this motherfucker. She slammed my door.

I wasn’t there to hear her footsteps retreat, or the fuck you she probably muttered to Mama Brown. I wasn’t in bed. I wasn’t even in the house.

I was a loaf of baked bread. I was a loaf of baked bread in a wicker basket, and a girl was carrying me to her granny’s cottage. When the girl neared her granny’s cottage, just when I got lulled by the sun and the smell of cinnamon cookies beneath me, a wolf sauntered in the path from behind a pine tree. That fur-cloaked beast said: You fine, Little Red Riding Hood. What you doing after this? The girl carrying me tight in the basket said: Thank you, Big, Bad Wolf. I’m going to my granny’s. I was only a loaf of bread, but I still knew danger. When the wolf pretended to leave, I said: Bitch, are you dumb?

That probably made me laugh then. It don’t seem so funny now. Anyway, if Mama Brown didn’t help Cherry with her problem, she probably wouldn’t have helped me with mine. I wish I had time to think. I wish I had time to sit in this hollow quiet and let all my sadness curdle in me. But I ain’t got no time. I got to go to work.

2

I lean against the register, floating somewhere between awake and asleep, when in walks a whistling man with blood-smeared hands. I straighten my posture and look at his glossed knuckles. I like summer music when it comes from bullfrogs and cicadas and fat warblers. Hearing a man whistle when he walks in a place he don’t own ain’t natural. Like finding a chipped tooth on concrete. An omen.

He looks at me and stretches his smile, says, Ma’am, do I need a key for the restroom? in a sap-thick drawl. He goes back, no key needed, and he better not leave that mess on the doorknob for me to clean. Before this, it’d been a typical night at work.

It’s a weeknight, so I’m by myself. The place sits in the middle of Halls Crossroads and stays steady until ten. After ten, I get maybe one customer every half hour; that’s when the men in this area eat pages of the Old Testament, tuck their bodies in bed, and sleep.

There’s a sharp clanging outside. It’s midnight. Cigarette Sammy, the only other Black person I see on this side of town. He’s rummaging through the trash cans next to the pumps for cigarette butts, muttering and laughing with the angels that flutter in his head. The plastic bag next to me, already full with our nightly routine: L&Ms, a chocolate MoonPie, apple juice. When I got extra money, I’ll key in a fake birthday and throw in a Pabst. Tonight ain’t one of those nights.

I take the bag and a wood-tipped wine Black & Mild, going outside. That bloody man still ain’t come out the bathroom. I know I shouldn’t leave him alone in the store, but whatever he’s up to can’t be holy. If he wants to take, let him take. I won’t shed nothing for it. Maybe if he sees me outside smoking, he’ll understand the store is his until I kill the ember.

Cigarette Sammy, elbow deep in the can, don’t look up at the sound of my footsteps.

Hey, I say. I smile, reach my hand to him, bag swinging from my wrist.

He stops searching and sits on the pavement next to me, nurses his apple juice. Ever since I’ve known him, looking at the sky and laughing: his way of saying thanks.

It took a few months for me to get these midnight bags to Cigarette Sammy’s liking. My coworkers trade rumors about him: before the synthetic weed fucked him up, he was a good man, they say. Like he done up and died. Told me after that bad blunt, he got on the hard stuff, and now he touches children. When I first saw him, I knew it wasn’t true. The night of our meeting, I noticed him scavenging the garbage. He pulled out a ketchup-coated Styrofoam cup and chugged. I rushed outside with a bottle of water, but he wouldn’t look at me. I said: What is it, Cigarette Sammy? What you like? He kept shifting his feet on bits of torn straw paper, eyes on his toes. You want a Coke? Milk? Juice? He stopped his shifting. I came back with apple, orange, and fruit punch. He picked apple. After that, I paid attention to his feet and obliged. But he ain’t ever stopped digging in those cans, and because of that, I know he a little too used to being left alone.

I light my cigar and lick my lips. The first puff always sweetens my mouth. I can only smoke half of these, though, before my tongue and throat and lungs feel like they been doused in cleaning chemical and fire. Awful, but if there’s one thing I can be proud of, I don’t crave the nicotine. I can pick up a cigar any time I want and put it down any time I want. I ain’t nothing like Cherry. Ain’t an ounce of addict in me. Still, I know it’s awful for me. Awful for the baby that might be in me. I got enough apologies to last my life, and the might-be baby’s, too. I should buy a pregnancy test. Not knowing is what’s killing me most but also the only thing comforting me.

I went to a funeral today, I say.

Cigarette Sammy crinkles his MoonPie wrapper, points to the neon sign on the roof: People’s Gas Station. Maybe his way of asking, Why you working with this hurt? White moths flock to the neon-red glow. Mama Brown had it in her mind that if a white moth landed on someone, death was soon to follow. She had all kinds of superstitions she believed. One time, she strung glass bottles on the branches of the maple in our backyard to protect our home from evil spirits. She’d say: My nose itches. Somebody about to visit. And she wouldn’t ever put her pocketbook on the floor because she thought the lower it sat, the lower the income. She must have let it slip once or twice because in all her carefulness, what we got to show for it?

Cigarette Sammy crinkles his wrapper again, points to the storefront. The man with now-spotless hands stands at the counter with disinfectant wipes and Twizzlers in his clutch. I don’t want to go in. When he whistled his way into the bathroom, I kept my eyes on a crushed beetle on the terra-cotta. I could feel his eyes on my skin, knew by the slow drum of his shoes that he was taking his time drinking me up.

I look back at Cigarette Sammy. Graham cookies and marshmallow and chocolate sit in the corners of his mouth. Most importantly, he got still feet.

See you around, I say. I take one last puff from my cigar and head inside.

I shuffle behind the counter. Sorry, I say, Figured you would be in there awhile.

He grins, and I look at his face for the first time. Milk skin. Pine-green eyes, deep dimples, and a sandy freckle on his nose. Ringlet curls and good cologne. I’m guessing late thirties, early forties. His fingers rest on the counter. Manicured nails.

Sorry for the way I came in, he says. He sounds like he’s from here, but he don’t dress like it. A nice, dark suit with a silk blue tie. I can tell by the look and smell of him—he got money. Maybe he’s a businessman downtown. Maybe he makes laws and writes checks. I bet he sells something with those pretty teeth. Maybe he’s a pastor at a castle-church, a mortician for famous