JEWEL Read Online Free Page A

hot, felt my face flush at the sudden knowledge that things tumbled down from this photograph, down to me and who I was and the part of me that gave me the same black, fine hair my daddy had, the same thin nose and skin that stayed more tan than any child I knew, even through dead winter, while my momma’s skin turned red after twenty minutes outside.
    I held it with both hands, ran a finger across the soft paper, and I saw for the first time that no matter how much I’d wished my daddy gone, he would always be with me, here in me, just as he was here in his own daddy. This was me I saw in the photograph.
    I stood. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me now, even Momma’s. I said, “This is what I’ll keep, ” and I turned, headed into the kitchen.
    Once in there I didn’t know what to do, where else I could go. From where I stood at the sink-pump I could see into the room to the table my daddy lay on, could see, in fact, his legs from the knee down, boots stiff and shiny, pantlegs black. I knew I didn’t want in there, but outside, right out the back door, was the coop and the garden, beyond that the tree he’d be buried under not long from now.
    Then Cathe ral stood in the doorway. She was holding a huge blue cookpot, her thin, black arms straining with the weight, the muscles there shiny with sweat. I moved to the screen door, the photograph in one hand, and pushed it open.
    She moved in, and already I could smell the food. Chicken, I knew.
    And sweet potatoes, and collards and biscuits. Her teeth were clenched, and I wondered how far she’d carried the pot, as she made her way through the kitchen and toward the room my daddy was in.
    “You can’t” I started, but by that time she was in the doorway. She froze.
    “Lord have mercy, ” she whispered, and turned, her eyes shut, teeth still clenched, sweat across her forehead. She made it to the stove, and set the pot down. She opened her eyes, looked at me only a moment, her eyes never meeting mine, before she brought them to the floor.
    She’d never looked at me any longer than that.
    Her hands were at her sides, and she shook them a little, loosing up the muscles, her arms still glistening. I’d always imagined she was a couple of years older than me, her hips still narrow but her face with a grimace I figured could only come with a little more age, more knowledge about the world as she moved through it. But all I knew of her was that a nigger girl had showed up at our house not a week after my daddy’d left, and had been here three times a week since to weed out in the garden or to clean out the coop, take eggs into town, chop off the heads and pluck the chickens we would eat, while my momma sat on the porch and I practiced my multiplications. One evening a few weeks after she’d started I asked Momma where she’d come from, how she’d gotten her name.
    Cathe ral never spoke to me any more words than she had to, our language a series of nods and glances defining which rows of tomatoes she would work, whether the rhubarb was ready or not, each jerk of a chin or half-word freighted with what we wanted to give it. I knew her name only because I’d asked her after she’d been working for us a week.
    Momma’d answered that Cathe ral’s family’d been owned by Catholics in Bogaloosa, and that she’d hired her on now Daddy was gone, that she’d been paying her a nickel a week. I believed her about the name, but I knew that the money paid out wasn’t true, I’d never even seen the two of them talk to each other, much less exchange any money between them.
    She was only here, standing at the back screen door each Monday, Wednesday and Friday once I was home from school, or there just at sunup during the summer, waiting for me to signal her what to do.
    She gave her arms one last shake, and stopped. The room was choked with the smells of food now, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since the day before.
    Then Cathe ral spoke, and for an instant I didn’t know