I don’t believe in conjures, Lord, I say in my mind. Just so you know. This being a church and all, it’s best to make that plain.
I say to Juneau Jane, “How can a little paper keep a conjure off?” I don’t believe it, Lord, but it might be the quickest thing if I just do what she says. I sit down in that chair, start kicking off my brogans. “If it’ll get you to movin’, I’ll do it. But it ain’t conjures that brung us all this trouble we’re in. It was bad men, and you and Missy Lavinia and the addled brain plan you two hatched, and me being fool enough to dress myself up for a boy and go along with it.”
“You need not have them if you prefer none.” All of a sudden she’s right talkable in that high-tone way of hers. Maybe even got a little sass. That’s a good sign for her health, at least.
She tries to take my shoe newspapers.
I grab them up before she can. “I’ll do it.”
She pulls some more papers off the wall, folds them and tucks them down the boy shirt that bags where her new britches are tied up. The shirt rides so loose on her, the shoulder seams hang to her elbows.
“Hadn’t oughta be stealing from a church house,” I say.
“For later.” She waves a hand toward the wall. “They have many.”
I look up at the slab logs, at them pages stretched floor to ceiling. All that writing sectioned up in little boxes. I hadn’t noticed them much while we been trapped in this room. Too busy. But somebody took the time to put them up there real careful, so that not a one covered over any part of the other. Don’t seem like the way you’d do it to keep the weather from coming in.
“What’s all that say?” I’m wondering it to myself, but I speak the question out loud.
“Have you not read them?” She goes on with fitting newspapers in her shoes. “Not in all this time?”
“Can’t read.” No shame in admitting that, I figure. “Some of us don’t get a house to live in and money for clothes and food just handed out. Some pay our way in toil and sweat, since before the freedom, since after the freedom. Before the freedom, if Old Missus was to catch us trying to learn reading, she’d have us whipped good. After the freedom, we work from see to can’t see every day of the planting time and the hoeing time and harvesting time. In between them times, light up the tallow candle or the pine knot, go to making socks, darning socks, or sew up clothes to wear, or clothes to sell. Whatever money we get goes to buy our goods at the plantation store and the seed for next year, and to pay the contract to Old Mister so the land will be ours one day. Glory! That day is comin’, if I ain’t wrecked it all for you and Missy Lavinia. No, I can’t read. But I can work, and I can cipher good. Can do numbers in my head faster than most folks will on paper. What do I need to know past that?”
She lifts her skinny shoulders, keeps lacing up her shoes. “If you were to purchase your land, for instance, and there would, of course, be a paper requiring signature, how would one, unable to read the paper, avoid being hoodwinked?”
She’s a smart-mouth little thing. Full up with herself. I think I liked her better when she was sickly. Quiet.
“Well, now that is the dumbest question. I’d just ask somebody to read it for me. Somebody I know’s truthful. Save taking the time to learn reading, just for one little paper.”
“But in what way would you be assured of the faithfulness of this person?”
“Well, ain’t you a suspicious little thing? There’s people that can be trustable for reading. Colored folks, even. More all the time, with them teachers from up north coming down and setting up the colored schools. Why, you can’t turn over a rock these days, but you find somebody who