Work Text:
Lisa Chow's hands shake lighting the match, one, two, three times, unlucky four. Ye Ye's shrine will have to do for Ma and Ba now both. There ought to be a funeral, but Ruthie says her neighbor says that Sammie said there wouldn't be bodies. That nobody who'd gone to the mill last night was coming back, but they couldn't bury them neither. Lisa figures that means fire, which is better than swept away in a mudslide or left for dogs. Feels cleaner. If they're smoke then the incense can find them in the air and they'll know she was filial.
She can't take the altar. She can take what's left of the package of incense, she guesses; it's light enough. Really they should burn some every day but it comes from Back Home and has to come up from New Orleans so they have to save it for festivals and special occasions. Lisa can't read the package and doesn't know how she'll find the right thing when this one runs out. She looks hard at the curl of smoke and tries to make it really count. Breathes in deep so she'll remember the smell, so it will come with her in her lungs.
She doesn't have much to gather up. Her good dress. Fruit and saltines and canned ham for the road. Everything from the tills in both storefronts, all their savings from the hidden box. There was shouting in the street an hour ago. All the white Misters are dead, they're saying, and maybe Sammie lied in church that morning: maybe the missing people did it. An insurrection like Elaine, or maybe a Choctaw uprising like the old days and Clarksdale people joining in, melting away into the woods with them like they say fugitive slaves used to do.
Lisa doesn't believe it. Ba says Elaine was a lie, and the Choctaw who come to the store just seem like anybody. And white Misters are her parents' customers, at the white storefront. What sense would it make, working all day and uprising at night. Her Ma had told her to sleep well, that she and Ba would come back in the night and be there in the morning like always. Lisa had dreamed about monkey kings and dragons, things from stories, and woken up to Ruthie knocking at the back.
My parents didn't come home, Ruthie had said, and Lisa had put her arms around her before she'd even realized the storefront was silent and her parents hadn't come home either. They had huddled there until the shouting.
When Ruthie comes back with her things, they're going to leave. Lisa doesn't think their parents killed anybody, not hers or Ruthie's either, but it doesn't matter. Whatever happened, these stories don't end with white bodies on the ground and no colored ones. "They lynch women sometimes," Ruthie had said, shaking. "Like Mrs. Stevenson in Columbus. Smoke talked to me on the street. Everybody saw. When the sheriffs get here, they'll say who spoke to the suspects last and that's me because everybody else is dead and Sammie is halfway to Chicago by now if my neighbor is right."
Maybe it would be like that, or maybe it would be like Tulsa. Everything burning until nothing was left. Ruthie had had an uncle, she had told Lisa once. She had never met him. He had left Clarksdale looking for better opportunities. Some people from his church in Tulsa had written afterwards to say he was missing.
Lisa looks around her house, these few rooms at the back of the store. Let it burn, she thinks. Let it burn like the incense, like an offering to her parents, the whole store flying up to find them in the afterlife. She can't run it herself; she can't defend it if a mob comes. It's 70 miles to Greenville and she has an aunt down there and she'll pay her rent for herself and Ruthie both if Guma tries to say Ruthie isn't family. They can sleep in one cot and eat from one plate if they have to. Lisa isn't letting Ruthie leave alone and she isn't letting Ruthie be alone. They'll go where the mill is a distant mystery and nobody wonders what their parents did and if Greenville isn't far enough they'll go all the way down to New Orleans where the ships come from Back Home.
A knock on the back door. Ruthie, with a sack and a straw hat and a pair of shoes on. "I got my mama's Bible," she says in a whisper. "Couldn't find any money, just scrip. Only cash I got is what Smoke paid me."
"It's fine," Lisa says. She's whispering now too. "You see any trouble?"
"I heard they're gonna call out the Army," Ruthie says. "My neighbor said she'd try to get to Batesville." She shakes her head. "Didn't invite me along. Guess I'm bad luck already."
Lisa takes her hand and squeezes it. "Lucky to me," she says. "Lucky I'm not alone. 70 miles to Greenville - you think we can get you to church next Sunday?"
Ruthie lifts her chin. "You're talkin' numbers now," she says. "Numbers got to be in conversation. Thursday by supper."
Lisa isn't really sure what Ruthie is talking about, but she sounds more confident than she has since she first woke Lisa up. Like something has reminded her that even with everything she isn't helpless.
"If you say so," Lisa answers back. "But I can out-walk you any day, Miss Ruth." Ruthie makes an indignant little noise, and if Lisa isn't quite calm-faced when she leaves her home, at least her eyes are dry.