Flower walked across the backyard, through the wash pots and clotheslines, and entered the back door of the laundry. The widow's bedroom door was open, and on the dresser was a leather-bound edition of the King James Bible.
It took her less than five minutes to find the lines Jubal Labiche had read aloud from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Labiche had carefully avoided reading the passages that followed his selective excerpt, namely, that Christians should live and perform "not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."
And a bit farther on: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
She closed the cover on the book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as yet quite understand.
Before sunset she walked downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny. She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars rolling in the shallows. The western sky was red and black now and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out on the rim of the earth.
She stood up from the bank and brushed off her dress and started to wal
k back to the quarters behind the laundry, before the paddy rollers came out on the roads. But now, for some unexplained reason, the thought of encountering them did not fill her with apprehension.
Then she realized the origin of the feelings that had flooded through her after she had gone into the widow's bedroom and hunted through the New Testament for the excerpt from St. Paul. She could read. No one could ever take that gift from her, and no one could hide knowledge or the truth about the world from her again.
AT sunrise the next morning she heard Rufus Atkins' horse in the yard, then heard him swing down from the saddle and approach her door. She was undressed, and she gathered up her clothes and sat on her bed and held them in her lap and over her breasts. He stepped inside the door, smelling of tobacco and cooked bacon, steam rising from his uniform in the morning coolness.
He removed the bent twenty-dollar gold piece from the watch pocket of his trousers and began working it over the tops of his knuckles.
"I got to go to bell count," she said.
"No, you don't."
"All the niggers got to be there, suh. The widow don't abide lateness."
"Not you, Flower. You can do almost any goddamn thing you want. You're a juicy bitch and you know it."
"Ain't right you talk to me like that, suh."
"I'm not here for what you think," he said. He walked to the back window and looked out on the cane field. The sun had just broken the edge of the horizon, like a soft red lump of molten metal.
"Marse Jamison is establishing a slaves council on all his plantations," Atkins said. "That means the slaves will lay out the punishment for anybody who breaks the rules. Marse Jamison reserves only the right-to overturn a punishment if he thinks it's too severe... are you listening?"
"I'm not dressed, suh."
Atkins took a deep breath and went outside the door. She heard him light a cigar and lean against the railing on her small gallery. She put on her work dress and lit the kindling in her stove and washed her face in the water bucket, then pushed the coffee pot over the flames that leaked around one of the iron pothole lids. She heard Atkins clear his throat and spit and then felt his weight bend the floorboards in the cabin.
"You're going to be on the slaves council for the laundry and two of the plantations up the road," he said.
"This don't sound like Marse Jamison," she said.
"What do you care? It gives you a little power you didn't have before."
"What if I say I don't want it?"
"I'd say you were a mighty stupid black girl."
"Tell him the stupid black girl don't want it."
He removed the cigar from his mouth and tossed it through the back window.
"You're a handful, Flower. In lots of ways," he said, biting down on his lip.
"You been in my bed, Marse Rufus. But it ain't gonna happen again."
"Say that again?"
"You heard me. I ain't afraid of you no more."