The Black Rose by Tananarive Due

The sight nearly made her gasp; she’d never seen a colored man talk back to a white man. The boldness of the colored town men both excited and frightened her.
    “What they care for?” Sarah said. “Seem like white folks don’t want us ’round nohow.”
    “Sho, some of ’em don’t. But look like plenty of ’em do. They been writin’ ’bout it in the newspapers, callin’ it the Exodus. See, they figger if they ain’t got niggers to work for ’em, who gon’ do it?” With that, she cackled cheerfully, and Sarah smiled, too. “I hear ’em always talkin’ ’bout bringin’ them Chinese coolies over here to take the place o’ niggers. They say Chinamen don’t eat but once a day, and say niggers got too many complaints. But ’til that happens, I guess they stuck with us. Oh, Lord—we better keep a distance, chile.”
    The rumble from the crowd turned to a roar, and Sarah took a frightened step back when she saw half a dozen white men rush toward the Negroes with sticks in the air. As shouts erupted, the white men began to strike at the Negroes, who either threw up their hands to try to defend themselves or immediately began to run and scatter. Although the turmoil was more than thirty yards away, Sarah clearly saw a Negro man knocked unconscious when a heavy stick landed squarely at his temple. A white man had hit him from behind. From where she stood, Sarah even saw a spurt of blood from the man’s head. At the instant of the impact, she’d felt all of her nerves pinch tight, as if she’d taken the blow herself. Her mouth fell open, soundless, as the man crumpled to the ground.
    “You see that?” the fish lady said. “An’ the sheriff ain’t gon’ do nothin’ ’bout it, ’cept lock up what niggers they can find an’ say they’s vagrants. No suh, they don’t want us goin’ nowhere yet. Chile, you stand out here sellin’ fish long enough, you’ll see plenty o’ blood spillin’ in these streets. An’ you know the worst of it?” At this, the woman leaned closer to Sarah and spoke to her conspiratorially, and Sarah could smell the spruce gum on her breath. “I know a fella come back from Kansas cuz he missed his mama. He say there ain’t nothin’ out there for niggers, neither. The Promised Land ain’t nothin’ but promises, he say.”
    Sarah realized her hands were shaking. Watching the Negro man lying motionless, unattended, it occurred to her that Alex might not have written to them because he’d gotten himself killed somewhere. She hoped the man on the street wasn’t dead.
    “I don’t unnerstand …” Sarah whispered, near tears.
    “What you don’t understand?”
    “How come … they don’t want us to get nothin’?” Sarah said.
    “What you said?” the woman said, cackling again. Her laugh, which had seemed pleasant to Sarah at first, had turned ugly to her ear. “Go find yo’self a mirror one day an’ take a look. You a nigger, that’s why. That’s all we ever gon’ be to white folks, cuz if we ever get sump’n, that’s less for them. You better learn that quick.”
    But Miss Dunn and Miss Brown did have something, Sarah thought stubbornly. Miss Dunn was a schoolteacher, the smartest colored woman Sarah had ever met. And Miss Brown was a Prize Medal washerwoman with her own laundry business, and four women worked for her, including her and Louvenia. With that thought, Sarah suddenly realized that her diversion had made her late to work. Nothing made Miss Brown madder than workers who weren’t punc-tu-al , as she always put it. She’d told Sarah more than once that if she couldn’t make it back from school on time, she’d better stop going to school.
    And nothing was going to stop Sarah from going to school. Nothing and nobody.
    “I read three words today in class,” Sarah announced over her shoulder to the fish lady before she turned to run back toward Miss Brown’s house on Pearl Street.
    “Good for you, chile! I read ev’ry newspaper that come out in