LITMIR.BIZ

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a long way to walk, honey,” he said.

      “I ain’t got much choice, do I?”

      He shook his head. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth. “How’d you get off out here by yourself?” he asked.

      “My familia put me out,” she said.

      “Yore what put you out?”

      “My familia . . . my family.”

      “Lord Jesus,” the old man said. “They just put you out longside the road? What they do that for?” She didn’t answer him. “When?” he asked.

      “Yesterday,” she said.

      “And you just slept out here in the cold last night?”

      “I ain’t slept none, I don’t reckon,” she said.

      He shook his head again and clucked his tongue. “Well, come on here, then,” he said, “ride on into Rosewood with me. Ruby fix us somethin to eat.”

      “Who’s Ruby?” she asked. She made no move to stand up and leave the ditch.

      “My wife. She ain’t gonna hurt you. Lord, you like a little wild thing, ain’t you? Skitterish as a doe.”

      She did not want to be as trusting and gullible as she’d been yesterday with old Alexander Mossback Frill. But she felt herself giving in. The man was old, harmless-looking. He seemed gentle. She realized in retrospect that Frill had not seemed innocent and harmless at all. She had been a fool, and she didn’t want to be one again. But she wanted to trust this man. She had to trust someone. “What’s your name?” she asked, still not moving toward the wagon.

      “My name Silas,” the old man said. He removed the hat from his head, put it over his chest and bowed toward her. His smile was as wide as his face. “Silas Frost.”

      She stood up and brushed the back of her dress off with both hands. She had been wearing the dress over a week and it smelled bad; it was covered with dirt and it still reeked of smoke, whether her fire last night or old Frill’s house. She skipped down through the dry ditch and crossed the road to the wagon. She climbed up onto the seat, and it wobbled and she almost fell.

      “Look out, now,” he said. When she was settled he looked curiously into her face. “What ails your eyes?” he asked. She just stared back at him, levelly, her eyes narrowed to slits. Finally he looked away and said, “All right, now you better ride back in the back there, on that pile of sacks.” She did not hesitate nor question, just climbed over the seat into the back and settled against the tailgate. He shook the cotton reins over the mule’s rump. “Hey up, mule, hey up, Maylu!” he said. The old wagon creaked ahead, squeaking like a nest of mice, and the coon hound stood and shook himself and began to amble along underneath them.

      Ruby Frost was a light-skinned woman; she was as old as her husband but looked much younger, her skin as smooth and unwrinkled as a baby’s. She was tiny, with a hint of a stoop, just a little taller than Minnie, and her black hair was limply wavy and oily. She was the daughter of a Seminole Indian and an ex-slave woman, and she and her husband Silas had lived in Rosewood—an all-Negro town in the west of central Florida—for many years. They had lived through the notorious race riot, the massacre and burning of 1923, in which they lost their home and their son Carl, but they had eventually returned and continued to make Rosewood their home, rebuilding. Silas replanted his kitchen garden in which he grew corn, watermelons, tomatoes, peas, and turnip greens—and in the fall pumpkins—for their own larder and to be sold. Indeed, Silas had been returning from carrying a wagon load of pumpkins to a farmers’ market in Gainesville when he had come upon Minnie resting on the bank that morning.

      They had a milk cow, several hogs and a chicken yard, so they were self-sufficient, and they felt relatively safe, existing as they did on high ground—or what passed for high ground in that part of Florida—surrounded on three sides by salt marshes, and they no longer feared the white people. “They always doin somethin,” Ruby would say, “but maybe they done got their devilment at us out they system.”

      When the wagon pulled into the yard that morning Ruby was on the porch churning. The dogs under the porch heard them first and came boiling out, barking and yapping. When she looked up she saw Silas guiding their old mule Maylu around the house, a little white girl sitting in the very back of the wagon, as far away from Silas as he could get her and her still be in the wagon with him. “Sweet Jesus above,” Ruby muttered, keeping the pumping rhythm of the churn going. Though it was twelve years ago she couldn’t help flashing back to that New Year’s day in 1923 when that white girl Fanny Taylor claimed she’d been raped by a colored man, a man whose name she did not know, a man she couldn’t even describe, even as to how old he was, how tall, anything, just that he was colored, and Ruby supposed that it really didn’t matter finally if she was telling the truth because it set off the massacre anyhow, two hundred killed and almost every house in Rosewood burned to the ground, the rampage going on for seven days. She and Silas had escaped on the train to Gainesville that the governor finally sent on January fourth, but their son Carl had already died by then, shot down in the street and then hung from a tree, doused with gasoline and burned. Ruby and Silas had finally returned to Rosewood because they had no place else to go, and, besides, as Ruby would say, it was their home. And their history, too, like it or not.

      And now here comes Silas with a white girl propped up in the back of his wagon big as you please. “Sweet Jesus above,” said Ruby again. At least Silas had sense enough not to let her ride up there on the seat with him, but he probably would have done better to let her drive the wagon and him sit back there on that pile of croker sacks, in case they met some white folks on the road and she could say, “I’m givin this poor ol colored man a ride.” Ruby kept the churn going, feeling the thickening under the plunger, smelling the clean butter smell of the clotting milk. Where in the world Silas had found a little white girl out here she could not imagine. Maybe he had brought her all the way from Gainesville, in which case he was dumber than Ruby had thought or he had lost his mind, one of the two. Of course, Silas would have an explanation. There would be some logical reason, but Ruby, for the life of herself, could not imagine what it might be. She kept churning, not missing a beat, her wiry arms like steel cables.

      The girl’s complexion was not all that much lighter than Ruby’s. Her hair was so black it reflected dark blue in the sunlight coming in the window, but it was straight, not a kink nor a curl in it. She sat at the table with Silas, both of them shoveling in the grits and chewing away on biscuits. When Silas finished and brought his plate to the sink and pumped water to rinse it, Ruby whispered to him, “She dusky, but she ain’t colored.”

      “She say she a Gypsy,” Silas said. “Say her people put her out on the side of the road.”

      “Put her out? Lord Jesus.”

      “What you make of them eyes?” Silas said.

      “They ain’t right,” Ruby said. “I never seen that before.”

      “Me neither,” Silas said.

      “Well, I do know this,” said Ruby, “a Gypsy is a lot more white than colored. That’s a fact. What we gonna do with her?”

      “I don’t know,” Silas said. “I couldn’t just go on off and leave her out there.”

      “No, you couldn’t do that.” Ruby touched his hand gently then walked over to the table and sat down across from the girl. The girl looked up and put her fork down quickly, almost guiltily. “You know where you are?” Ruby asked her.

      “No, ma’am,” the girl said.

      “You in Rosewood. It’s an all-colored town.”

      “Yes, ma’am,” the girl said.

      Ruby glanced over at Silas, who was still holding the dish towel he had dried his hands with. “Don’t no white peoples live here,” Ruby said.

      “Gaje,” the girl said. “I’m gonna be gettin on towards Tallahassee soon as I rest up a little bit. I thank

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