Specter say to Grover, You got blood on your hands.
Grover sleep say, Now GET! I ain’t passioned you. NOW GET!
Specter say, We ain’t never truly leaving. You ain’t never truly leaving.
Grover commence to snore. But I do run away, treading in that pitch night, feeling with Grover’s walking stick for any water moccasin in the footpath.
All that I learnt from my mama and my daddy and my best friend Marion from Elizabeth City—gone. My head’s on fire. A damn right shame, but Grover Devine not the man for me.
That’s how I be thinking in those days.
From Evelyn Sweetbriar Hill, The War Bride (novel) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936):
—I love you with my heart and soul, the suitor told her as he slunk into her bedroom. The night vines shivered with animal love. The pair was impassioned with the fever of passion, though all around them, the world was in a tailspin. It was the End of Days, as the Bible stated. But did these two lovers think of that?
From Farrelly-Johnson, Are We God’s Children of Ham?:
CHAPTER THREE
Poe’s Mammy, and Other Tales of Superstition
Dear Readers: This bit of research was Guaranteed Overheard at the “Weddin House,” an establishment on the Cow River which was once run by a certain Miss Marvella Dunbar as a sort of honeymoon hotel for local newlyweds (Dunbar, 1938). One night in early July, shortly after the War of the Nations had begun, Miss Marvella heard strange noises coming from her rental cabin (she lived in a small shed out back). Around daybreak she put her ear to the door and heard (to her everlasting dismay) a group of dead babies tromping on the floor. They mashed up all her good corn bread with their soft baby heels.
This is her claim. Naturally she was too frightened to look in.
Miss Marvella couldn’t make out the words, though to her ear it sounded like a mixture of Latin and Swahili (Buxom, 1942). From her last residence (Social Plains Rest Home, where she was gently committed in 1915 at the tender age of forty) she did claim that their racket stopped the birds from truly bringing in the day (Dunbar, 1938).
That very day, Miss Marvella Dunbar escaped from her own property, making for the tracks of the Norfolk Southern Railway, where she hid out until one of the slow trains happened by.
Weddin House was demolished in 1936.
Photograph 2, UNC-Chapel Hill, Special Collections;
Catalogue Listing 336A-45N,
Negro Man at Stricklands Crossroads, North Carolina, undated.
The morning after he got married, when he was a single man again, Grover Devine packed his few belongings (Dolly Mae’s father’s machete blade and the marriage certificate and a sliver of goldenseal root) and dashed out the front door. Some say he headed back to his foster mother to beg her forgiveness. Some say he buried himself in a little silver box and stayed in the ground for a hundred years. You know how our kind will wag their tongues. His exact destination has never been accurately ascertained.
In this photograph he stands alone in the dust road. The clouds hang like draperies. Not a drop of rain for three whole seasons, as you can tell from the skeletal trees in the back.
Grover Devine was not heard from again. Over the years, a few roped-up bodies were dragged from the bottom of the Cow River, but none belonged to him.
From Look Who’s Talking
A Publication of the Vancouver Plains Rest Home
ST. VALENTINE’S DAY, 1978
“As told to,” recorded by the former Mrs. W. Wilford Milkman, now Widow Geneva Milkman, chief cook and bottle washer
What I dreamed him to be? Anything, really. I was old, poor, loveless. He was young enough to be my child, but when he put his hands on me, there was nothing child about him. I had me my dreams, you know. I was expecting to be put somewhere on a farm. Cows, pigs, that sort of thing. I could do it all. Milk, cheese, butter. Pork, lard, candles, soap. I could do it all.
What done surprised me, though. Fire and frozen at once. Being with Grover Devine for one night was like being born again.
Licked my toes with his tongue. Told me we was heading out to the coast. Was I up to man’s work? I said I was.
Smothered my titties in love. Said he would passion me forever. Was I up to that? Lord help me, was my reply.
Traveled my body like it was Route 1 in the nighttime. Stopped his passion to ask me would I be interested in flying back home? You mean Lizard Lick, I ask? He frown, a veritable Devine frown. I can tell he fed up with my lack of brains.
No, silly girl. Flying BACK HOME.
You so full of surprises, I say, and he know I don’t mean it goodly of him.
Then he start mumbling, pushing me away from him. Said he was done killing. Did I still think I could love him with all this blood on his hands? Mainly it was Miss Jerlean—just look at any photograph. Just look and see her eyes.
He say he wasn’t anything like his foster mama.
Lord, I wanted to run. But then he was back to kissing me in this way that prevented my immediate running. Fire and frozen at once. But I wanted to run.
How can a murderer passion anyone this good?
Back then there was no words. Still ain’t no accurate ones. I just have to say it agin: fire and frozen. Do you understand?
Photograph 3, UNC-Chapel Hill, Special Collections;
Catalogue Listing 336A-43J,
Negro Couple, Elizabeth City, June 1914.
Before their marriage at the Zebulon County Courthouse. Before they slipped away in the night from her father’s property. Before she looked out the window and admired stars made from goat’s milk.
They’d locked eyes over bolts of calico, muslin, and flower crape: love at first sight. He whispered that he was going to wander the promenade in Elizabeth City that evening, and would she care to join him? At night no one never did bother colored folk much.
Maybe they could just walk.
Photograph 4, UNC-Chapel Hill, Special Collections;
Catalogue Listing 336A-72R,
Colored Matron, 1909.
The photographer’s date in the corner is clearly marked 1903 though the Chapel Hill students claimed that date was a forgery. Here she wears a dress made of stiff black fabric, perhaps a cheap velvet. Miss Jerlean wears a long key chain around her crimped waist with a monocle in the one eye; her other eye, a glass marble, had been lost in one of the fires. Her head is done up in an old-fashioned turban, the towering kind you associate with pinprick slave portraits. You never knew her either.
In the photograph, Miss Jerlean drapes her arms around a line of brown-skinned boys and girls, all glassy-faced and composed in front of the institution. The Chapel Hill students (all completing assignments for the seminar “Origins of Recent Blaxploitation Films”) have identified the orphanage, smack in the center of Elizabeth City, as being on West Main, in one of those postbellum structures whose architecture had been designed to give distinction to the city. In fact, Miss Jerlean has been credited with saving it from the wrecking ball. It and the children; her hands rest doggedly on their shoulders.
Miss Jerlean Fanfaria Devine ran the Elizabeth City Negro Orphanage from 1905 until 1914. But did you know that before that, in 1903, she ran the Baltimore Home for Colored Foundlings, for about six months? And that earlier, about 1896, when she was fresh out of Morris Park Normal, she had worked as a matron’s helper at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, New York? In those days, the Riverdale asylum was still reeling from the famous torching of the colored orphanage on Fifth Avenue some decades before. Miss Jerlean Devine stayed at Riverdale until its demise in 1902.
How old was this woman? Impossible to pin down. Rumor was she’d saved all the children from the angry mob during the Civil War draft riots. Rumor was she’d taken on the angry crowd with a shotgun, that she went about New York City torching places where white children slept peacefully. But rumors are not facts.
While working at Riverdale as a matron’s helper, Miss Jerlean met her favorite charge, a
baby she christened Grover. Nothing is known about his blood kin.
Things went smoothly at the Colored Orphan Asylum—Miss Jerlean was heralded by all as a true “natural”—when, in December 1902, a blaze broke out killing nearly all the inmates. Forty-five dead out of forty-seven. There was an inquest, a sleepy investigation. Hardly anyone noticed when Miss Jerlean pulled up roots, leaving Riverdale at first for Ossining and later for points south. Rumor was she carried little Grover in the palm of her hand, on pain of death.
You never knew her. In the photograph, there is no river breeze to be felt, though Miss Jerlean’s turban seems ready to topple from her head from some sort of hidden gravity.
From Civil War Legacy: Oral Histories of the Southeast, recorded and edited by Burton Foss, Ph.D. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980):
MARION CHANEY, ELIZABETH CITY,
NORTH CAROLINA, 1977
She was my best friend even when I watched her like a hawk for her mama when she came to buy her cloth. Dolly Mae Devine never thanked me.
[…] years, and then she finds me in a newspaper advert, we write. 1935 I come down to Elizabeth City to visit—I’d been living with my second husband’s people in Richmond. Dolly Mae’s face as big as a moon. Looked like she had some sort of disease. No, she says. Just years of tending children. Collecting papers and photographs. Writing my manuals. I’m lonely, Marion. Missed you something awful.
I want to stay longer but she bring me to the wagon the next day. Then between me and her, years of nothing.
[…] the next time I see her was up there at the Vancouver Plains Rest Home. That was 1976. I had got word that she was ailing—and me, near a hundred years old but never fitter—and then I travel up to Canada with my granddaughter Lenore.
Dolly Mae looked the spit and image of her mama, bless her soul, who had entrusted Dolly Mae to me years before, but the girl done run off with that boy. She being a grown woman so what did she have to find in a boy?
Please don’t ask me anything else. Please ask me in five minutes.
She lost four babies in her life. Poison, she claimed. Goldenseal root given to her by her mother-in-law. In the nursing home she told me about how she had wrote the Irishman in Baltimore and said, Come to Elizabeth City, I got the old bitch ready for you to arrest.
[…] I come sit with her every day in the home.
She kept her oxygen mask on high-speed air, mainly to keep the girl students from Simon Fraser from getting too close. Whenever they come by, they ask me would she be up for a day of cameras and makeup, everything paid for, by the Rainbow Student Coalition of Simon Fraser University.
—She ain’t up for that sort of thing, I say.
The one girl in cornrows says,—From all our research, we believe this lady was an early black feminist. We think she invented the term “passion love” that everyone throws about so carelessly nowadays.
—Lord have mercy!
—We want to know for sure.
—Foolishness! I’m her best friend and I should know!
I want to tell them that she actually saved all those orphans in Elizabeth City from dying at the hands of Miss Jerlean. I want to tell them Dolly Mae took care of those orphans till they was all grown and in Elizabeth City she was a bona-fide hero even though forty years she never saw my friendship as anything significant. But those girl students already working another angle.
The one in cornrows say,—You mind if we return those photographs and things to Chapel Hill? We promise on a stack of Bibles.
This girl I know she come from the South, passing herself now as pure Canada.
—I can’t, I tell them.
—Please, Miss Chaney. For your best friend’s sake—for history’s sake. Let us have those documents. It’s a matter of life and death.
—What is?
—We believe Dolly Mae Devine was the author of a book entitled A Black Lady’s Manual to Passion Love. The first of its kind, probably from around the late 1920s. You know anything about that?
—Never, I answer.
The cornrow student say to me,—Dolly Mae Devine was the first to talk honestly about the sexual desires of black women. What can you tell us about that?
—Nothing, I say again. They know I am lying. And in the Bible the Lord says, Take not my name in vain three times, and here I done did it.
Laughing at the olden ways. I tell them,—You know, there used to be this lady in Elizabeth City had a shop. Sold fabric to us when no one else would. Lena was her name—now over 120 years old, God’s truth!
—You mean when no one else would…what?
—Sell bolts of cloth. To darkies. Lena was only shop in Elizabeth City.
—Lady, no one says “darkies” anymore.
—I’m sorry, girls. I have to send these pictures back to Chapel Hill tomorrow, special delivery.
—You’re not being fair to the black feminist community! This comes from the other girl student, a white one. French accent.
—Please, I say.—The past belongs in the past.
—Traitor, Frenchie say right back in my face.
From Hill, The War Bride:
He told her he was full of desires. Desires that needed to be unfolded in the warmth of her sable body. He asked her if she knew what it meant to be totally gratified. Not a human being with feet on the ground, but an angel dangling by the chains of heaven.
I can cook, clean, nurse, and lie, she answered in the pale moonlight.
There is ever so much more, he answered, preparing his musket.
From Look Who’s Talking
A Publication of the Vancouver Plains Rest Home
EASTER, 1978
“As told to,” recorded by Geneva Duncan Milkman, resident secretary
I left from my wedding night. What manner of girl leaves on her wedding night? But I believed he was not the man for me.
I traveled on the Norfolk Southern for a bit, summer 1914. Raleigh, Asheville, Charlotte, Wilmington, Plymouth. Elizabeth City by August. Stop and asked my friend Marion would she help me but she too upset. Say I’m no way for a married lady to be acting. Call me fast, a heifer. That was the end of my friendship for then.
So I went over to my mother-in-law that lived in Elizabeth City and I say to her I seen a bunch of dead babies in the room on my wedding night and what did you have to do with it? Just like that, I didn’t make no introduction, all I say was, Why did you put those babies in my wedding cabin and like to scare me to death?
And she say back to me, Girl, you best be watching that mouth.
I asked her if it was true, did she set fire to all those orphanage homes and kill all those babies?
She say, Some of them wasn’t babies.
Riverdale? Baltimore? I call her a FIEND.
My dear, I’m no FIEND. I’m simply preventing these babes from being killed by future mobs that are all too happy to do such things.
Why not save them? Why kill them? Why burn them to the ground?
Honeychild, I was saving them! I would rather it be me that leads them to greener pastures than some stinking filthy white mob. White men. White women. White children. My stomach is turning. I wanted to spare those babes a tragic death at the hands of such creatures.
You are stone crazy.
Watchtower has been predicting Armageddon for this year October. You know what that means?
Crazy behind Witnesses! Don’t blame them for what you did!
I’ll tell you: it means more white folks coming to do harm.
Stone cold crazy bitch!
Watchtower predicts the end of all things, and I know that means for the first time in history: COLORED IN FRONT PLEASE! YOUR TURN TO BURN IN HELL FIRST.
Stone cold fiend!
I’m sending those little ones to a place where no earthly Armageddon will do them harm.
Well, you know. If I’d a had the strength, I’d a killed her on the spot. Honeychild my ass. But then she give me a tea, put me in a sleep for four days.
When I wake, she tell me it’s the four babies I’m carrying in me that got me sleeping so.
She tell me I should make my way back to Grover, but I can’t. I can’t find any energy but to lie back down and pray to Lord Jesus I won’t burn in hell for possessing this knowledge.
From Farrelly-Johnson, Are We God’s Children of Ham?:
CHAPTER FOUR
Love in the Time of Ringworm:
The Mulattress and the Irishman
In 1863, it was a certain Mr. Cyrus Farrelly—the lone white voice waving the flag of peace before the angry draft riot mob on Fifth Avenue, begging them to halt their violence and not burn the orphanage. All those poor colored children!
His voice, however, was in vain, though the children were saved and eventually moved up to Bronx County.
Years later he stood at the scene of the Riverdale fire. He was working as a detective for the county police, and had taken it upon himself to interview a number of employees. He recorded his findings in a small diary (Lewis, 1966). Then he sat up many nights, trying to solve the mystery.
Once during that spring—four months after the fire—he went back to the site of the blaze and unearthed a small silver box, no larger than a chocolate tin. How could this have escaped trained eyes? He broke its lock and studied its contents till he knew them by heart. He did not share his findings (Wallace and Marcus, 1971).
Sickness and other personal misfortune kept Mr. Farrelly from truly pursuing the mystery of the Riverdale blaze. Time passed (Nod, 1972).
Then one autumn day he received an anonymous missive begging him to “come and arrest the greatest fiend known to mankind.” In September 1914, Detective Farrelly arrived in Elizabeth City, where he found Miss Jerlean at 420 West Main (a real beauty of an edifice, but craggy and old) serving tea and crown roast to her daughter-in-law, a Miss Dolly Mae Washington Devine, who had on her a mouth as foul as any sailor’s (Nod, 1972).
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