The Cutting Season

Mothering, she learned the hard way, was about loss as well as love.

The decor was attractive and strong, but blander than she would have thought his wealth and position afforded him. Caren couldn't see the point of having that much money if all of it led to beige.

Belle Vie was a cipher, really, a place in whose beauty one might find pleasure or pain, leisure or labor. People saw, in its iced columns, in the magnolias and aged oaks, what they wanted to see, what their own history told them to.

The law, she knew, is a narrow little box, and it takes only a single misstep to find yourself on the outside of it.

Lorraine had come to honor a woman she didn’t even know, simply because she had walked among them, no matter how invisible. Dell and Pearl and Ennis Mabry had also come. ’Cause that’s just what black folks do. Southerners, too.

Years later, when he thought Caren was old enough to understand, to accept his version of an apology, he would say he felt he owed something to the people with whom he had set down roots. Family is fate, he'd said; but it's also a choice.

She'd known lovers to hide away in Belle Vie's most private corners - stealing kisses, and much more, the cottages or the storage shed and, yes, even the quarters - which she'd always thought a strange and twisted choice, but perhaps no stranger than choosing to marry, to seal a hope, on the grounds of a plantation.

Helen would smoke cigarette after cigarette, waiting, blowing smoke through windows cracked open a fraction of an inch, and sometimes she would grow sleepy and let Caren drive, all the way into town, even though she was only fifteen. "Oh, 'Cakes," her mother would say. "You got my life in your little hands either way, behind that wheel or not." Something Caren never fully understood until she'd given birth, until her mother was already gone, and she had a girl of her own.

In some ways, Caren understood Donovan. She understood his pining for a history he could take some pride in. She was the daughter of a plantation cook, after all, the great-great-great-granddaughter of salves, facts that had caused her no small amount of shame when she was Donovan's age. She just didn't like him much. She didn't want to be his sister.

Drunken wedding guests, she had learned, were by far the horniest, most unscrupulous people on the planet: neither a sense of the macabre nor common decency would stop them once they got their minds set on something, or someone. And Caren didn't think any third-grader's first school trip ought to include a messy, impromptu lesson about the mating habits of loose bridesmaids.

She felt a soft wind at her back, cold and wet, like a spook’s breath.

The origins of the bottle tree were African, Helen had once told her; it was a folk tradition brought to this country by slaves, who, working with whatever materials were at hand, devised a crude method of catching and trapping malevolent spirits, to prevent their passage through human doors.

(worthy of state funding), and not a period or comma had changed in the twenty-five years hence. It was as soapy as Gone With the Wind, full of belles and balls and star-crossed lovers, noble Confederates and happy darkies and more dirty Yankees than you could count.

We navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them. —REBECCA SOLNIT