Wild, Beautiful, and Free

by Sophfronia Scott

Dorinda used to say that cursing someone wasn’t a matter of spittin’ out words. You had to stay focused on the curse, nursing the words and the hurt, and after a while you wouldn’t even know that some part of you was still working the curse, because it got so deep inside you. I didn’t like that. If a thing was inside you like that, it had to be eating you up. Just stood to reason. I didn’t care enough about Madame, even in hate, to let her have that much of me.

“I don’t need no church. I feel God around me all the time, even when I was little. Don’t need no white man waving a big old book at me to tell me about God. And I suspect that white man making up a lot of what he talks about anyway.”

Now you can go round here feeling bad like I seen you doing, or you can walk like you loved. Nobody can touch that

“I wouldn’t want to think like white people do. If being lighter means I might see myself as better than someone else, I don’t want no part of that.”

Miss Maude had taught me not to kill. She’d said it would harm my soul. With that reasoning, all our souls were broken, the living and the dead. Who would pay for this killing?

Seemed like humans were killing humans so that humans could have the right to be humans.

“That’s because I realized”—Silas swallowed and pulled away—“under the uniform his body was the same as all the other wounded. He a man, somebody’s baby. Like we all one.

For all the men I couldn’t help heal, I had taught some of them how to read. And now here was a kind of healing happening because of it. I decided to think of it as another one of those gifts that God surprises you with—another small bauble to help you feel good. It’s like God just goes around and slips these gifts in your pocket. I’m grateful I notice them when they show up.