1
“Ready for this?” Dad asked across our thick wooden dining table. “You don’t have to go to school.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say in response. Instead, I stared at the extra-large stockpot of cheese and veggie eggs. He’d perfected them, because that was his way of dealing with things.
I checked his clean-shaven face. He’d perfected that, too. In the days after Virginia, constant YouTube videos blasted from his bathroom on how to get rid of his beard. He’d grown it long and scraggly before and I’d liked it. Coupled with his red-rimmed glasses and neat sweater vest, he looked like the African American history professor that he was. Ever since that horrible day, he’d gotten rid of the scraggle and hung the sweater in the back of the closet, exchanging it for pressed suits.
Now, he looked like a banker.
“You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to,” he said before getting back up to stir the eggs. “They’re getting clumpy just sitting here.”
For the sixth time since we’d sat down, he began whipping the nonexistent lumps away.
“More OJ?”
He bounced up. I shook my head and kept quiet. I’d begun counting my daily words again. It wasn’t quite seven in the morning and I’d said none so far. I don’t know why I was doing it. Maybe I was saving them for a larger moment to release all at once.
Dad sat back down for exactly four seconds, hummed a tune, and jumped back up. Polar opposite of me, he hated stillness and silence with a passion.
“Do you hear the baby crying?” he asked, chugging extra-hot coffee without flinching. “I think I do.”
He took off, leaving me alone with the eggs and the OJ that I didn’t ask for.
Virginia had been his favorite, but I couldn’t blame him. Virginia was everyone’s favorite. She knew what to say. Always. She didn’t overthink it. Empathy flowed directly from her heart and through her lips without taking any stops on the way. Virginia and Dad especially, their souls matched. Orange and blue. Yellow and purple. Red and green. Complementary. He and I, on the other hand, well, we were different.
He sprang back into the room holding Melody, my one-year-old sister. She was more like me than anyone in the world. Another quiet storm on the horizon. I smiled at her and she smiled back.
“Ruuuuu!” She reached and leaned for me and I took her.
I wanted to tell her good job for getting my name right on the first try, but I didn’t want to waste words. Melody had started accidentally calling me other names. She’d stutter through Virginia and Ruuu and Mama and Dada until she’d finally give up and go quiet like me. Melody’s smile never lasted all that long anymore, either. That morning, she sat in my lap, calmly and deliberately picking apart my plate of eggs with her fingers and frowning.
She missed our mom.
“Your mother should be home next weekend,” Dad said, sensing it, too. “Senate recess is coming up soon. Hopefully.”
He added hopefully to the end because the last three recesses had been canceled. The nation was coming apart, so my mother had stationed herself in Washington, DC, to help put it back together. I saw her face every night on the news. She rotated now from MSNBC to CNN and sometimes even FOX. I was proud that my mom had steel balls enough to raise her voice on the network’s highest-rated evening show, Todd and Tracy Talk About the Day. She was a badass. Dad was a badass. And somehow they had a coward like me.
“Sure you’re ready for this?” Dad asked again. “Everyone will … The school knows that … It might be…”
I nodded and got up from my chair.
“You’ll drop off Melody, then?” he asked with both sympathy and pleading in his eyes.
He looked so much like Virginia when he did that. They shared the crooked worry-wrinkle just above their left brow and a frown dimple on the right cheek. His was visible again, now that he looked like a banker with no beard. It was both beautiful and heartbreaking.
I hoisted Melody into a wrapped scarf I used as a sling and made my way downstairs. Melody’s day care was a block away from my school, and both were walking distance from our apartment building. Before leaving, Melody forced her head back to lock concerned eyes with me.
“Virgin … Mama … Dada…” Melody sputtered her way toward my name. She gave up just before she reached it and hung her head on my chest in frustration.
Ten years ago, my parents moved us into downtown Birmingham. It’d been a ghost town back then—all empty buildings and blight. Everyone told them it was a horrible idea to buy a whole building downtown. I remember sitting around the Thanksgiving table, listening to aunts and uncles and friends say they were making a mistake. But my parents were stubborn, as most brilliant people are.
With two small children in tow, they sold the cookie-cutter cul-de-sac monstrosity and bought the brick shell of what used to be a radio repair shop with two apartments above it. Virginia and I thought it was an adventure. Running loops around the dusty concrete. Up and down rickety staircases that were probably not safe. We loved it and so did our parents.
Most parents might have fought constantly in such chaos, but mine were never more in love than they were back then. Building something together—a family, a home, a life unique. We all were. Now, ten years later, Melody and I walked the street that used to be empty buildings and homeless tents, past quaint coffee shops, lofts, and law firms. Gentrified. Our building alone was now worth at least a couple million dollars. But our happy family broke. Mom ran away to Washington. Dad looked like a banker. And Virginia, well, Virginia …
As I walked the newly power-washed sidewalks, it occurred to me just how long it’d been since I’d left my building. Time got away from me sometimes, especially now.
Approaching Melody’s day care, I spotted a nearly faded BLACK LIVES MATTER sign crooked in the front window. When I opened the door, everyone inside stopped and stared at us. No one knew what to say, and none of them wanted to be the first to say the wrong thing. Silent gloom came over the place.
Feeling pressure to help them feel comfortable, I spoke my first word in days. “Hi,” I said, and they all said it back.
Melody remained silent, and I wondered if it was a good idea to leave her there. This was a fishbowl and she was the fish to be gawked at. But I had no choice; I couldn’t take her to school with me. I signed my name and tucked her in at a table of staring one-year-olds. It seemed that even they knew she was the sister of the girl who had died.
It took me less than six minutes to reach the front doors of my high school. I’d never been noticed there before and had no desire to be seen. Actually, I rather enjoyed making my way through hallways unacknowledged. Or if I was, only as the kid sister of beautiful, charismatic Virginia.
They all knew me now.
Snaking through the halls, every one of them looked and weren’t nearly as cautious as the day care staff.
“There she is!”
“Ruth! Ruth! Saw your mom on the news! Your dad, too!”
“That’s her! That the sister!”
The sister, someone had said. That’s the sister.
Insensitive fucking morons. I didn’t even make it to first period. Eight minutes later, I was back at Melody’s day care to sign her out. She dug her nails into my arm the entire walk home and squealed with joy when I opened the front door.
She waddled to her room, surely to find her beloved Qai Qai doll, and I noticed a single letter had been dropped through the mail slot. Well, not a letter in the traditional sense. It looked more like an old-timey scroll with a black wax closure marked with an H. I picked it up to find my name handwritten on the side of the beige parchment. And underneath my name, the golden seal with a loopy S in the center surrounded by the blocky-type words—WE ARE THE SCRIBES.
I opened it.
2
“I was born a slave.”
That was the first line of my book, you see? They call it Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
I’m Harriet. And like you, I write to keep from screaming out. You have a fancy thing to write with. Just a tap of the fingertips and words appear perfectly, beautifully before you. I would have loved such an instrument. Surely, that would have benefited me greatly in the attic. But we’ll get to that later.
I truly was born a slave. A fortunate one, however, if you can believe that there is such a thing. I imagine you can’t grasp the concept, but it surely existed for a short time.
When my parents lived, I had no idea I was enslaved. They sheltered us, you see? My brother, John, and I. With kisses and warmth and even sweets. Where’d we acquire sweets? Ah, my grandmother’s mistress allowed her to bake if she finished all of her chores. And John and I got the broken crackers, and too-brown crusts. Our bellies never roared and our faces never dried from the kisses of our mother. But, oh dear girl, when slavery hit, it hit hard.
I write you this because that is what we do—we write. We are the Scribes, you see? And alone, terrified, and trapped in the attic we’ll talk about later, a Forescribe sent me letters just as I’m sending letters to you now. Those letters kept me breathing in the tightest of spaces, and more importantly than breathing, those letters kept me writing.
Even way back in 1861, the book I wrote altered the world as I knew it. You too have a work within you that will change everything for you. This, I know, must feel like an insurmountable charge. And you will want to quit every day.
Don’t.
You must write. It is what you were placed on this earth to do.
Your Forescribe,
Harriet
3
“Harriet Jacobs,” I inadvertently said out loud, studying the loopy handwriting.
I ran my index finger along the perfect circles and coils and twists of the writing. Actually, it was more calligraphy. Unrealistic in its precision. The type of writing that takes too long to bother with these days. A writing from a different time.
Then, I thought, 1861. I was born a slave. Incidents in the life of a … Untouchable memories nearly knocked me down. I grabbed ahold of the kitchen island and squeezed for stability. I forced my eyes shut and heard my father’s voice in my mind, but it was his voice before Virginia had been snatched away from us. Filled with optimism and hope for tangible change. I heard Virginia, too. Young and twirling Virginia—eight or nine years old.
I heard him read, “‘I was born a slave.’” And then his voice became more and more distant, like I was falling asleep as he spoke.
Then, for the first time since she left me, I heard Virginia. She said, “You are the scribe of these times. An illuminator. Our Harriet…”
I leaped when Melody tugged on my pant leg and signed for hungry. With the recent stuttering, she’d been reverting back to the few signs I’d taught her when she was smaller.
I wanted to reread this strange scroll another four times. I longed to investigate how it arrived and where it could have come from. What strange trick was someone playing? What cruel joke?
But when Melody was hungry, I had to jump to it. Not because she was a demanding child. The opposite, actually; she rarely ate at all so when she wanted to, I took immediate heed, abandoning the scroll.
I reached into the freezer and pulled out an unopened FedEx box of breast milk that Mom had pumped and shipped from DC, thawed a pouch, and mixed it with squash and peas picked from Dad’s rooftop garden. Melody had only eaten food either grown with our hands or extracted from our mother’s body. Of that, I was proud. After a quick temperature check, Melody bounded off, balancing her bowl with such concentration. I watched her until she settled in the recliner.
Then I read the letter again. And I reread it before rolling it back into a tight cylinder. I placed the letter on my clean dining room table and watched it, waiting for it to do something. When it didn’t, I picked it up again and reread it.
I opened my laptop and searched the words Harriet and attic.
The first page was dominated by two bald eagles mating on something called an attic branch. I kept searching and only found more bald eagles, attic insulation, and information on how to remove branches from one’s attic. I closed my laptop before swirling too far down that rabbit hole.
I longed for Virginia. She would know without having to look it up. She would speak without worrying if she was wrong because she’d be right. About everything. And then I remembered. She’d called me Harriet Jacobs once. Months ago, before she … left.
After a quick look at Melody, I headed to the upstairs library. In the early years, it was my favorite place in our apartment. Dark green shelving covered every wall, and every space was filled with books.
Back then, my mother obsessed over transforming the space into a hobbit hole. Pinpoint twinkle lights, plush plaid overstuffed armchairs, and squatty lamps with sheer fabric draped over them. She succeeded so epically that Architectural Digest requested a four-page spread featuring our third floor.
I hated going in there lately, though. It was marvelous, there was no denying that, but Virginia was still in there. So much so, I could hardly concentrate on the beauty of the space. All I saw was Virginia everywhere I looked.
She was in the antique wooden desk that had been locked for years, and no one knew where the key was. Virginia believed the key would turn up. No way they’d just throw such a thing away, she’d tell me. It’s in a drawer somewhere or a jewelry box or one of those Christmas cookie tins, I swear it is, Sis, you’ll see.
Copyright © 2022 by Randi Pink
