by Naomi Finley
Who was this Willow Armstrong Oliver mentioned? The darkness I’d glimpsed in Oliver’s eyes had colored his voice as he spoke about the woman. He and his friend had declared their desire to harm her and her slaves, but why?
I’d come to know him as a passionate and fierce man. His lovemaking was the strangest I’d ever encountered, sometimes tender and gentle, other times intense and confusing, stirring unsettling memories of my past and leaving me frightened.
I was born and raised in a San Francisco whorehouse. After Mother had offered me as a young girl to her gentlemen callers, I’d sworn no man would ever touch me again. But circumstances had led me back to a life I’d tried desperately to wash away.
Where other mothers were nurturing and possessed of the maternal instinct to protect their children, mine had seen me as a way to make a profit. “Two for the price of one,” she’d often laughed, pulling me from the shadows of the room, her nails digging a warning into my shoulders, her body warm as she pressed me to her side. She’d peer down at me, her eyes glistening with intoxication, a forced smile on her rouge-stained lips.
The first time she’d clutched me for a suitor’s inspection, I’d stood trembling. As his hands ran over me, and I relived the movements and noises between Mother and her lovers, my bladder released. Appalled, the man stepped back and Mother, seeing the puddle on the floor, struck me across the face and shoved me back into the corner. I was ten at the time.
Life had proven to be hard and miserable in my few years on Earth. I’d witnessed far more than a child ever should. My cleverness and sharp mind had gotten me through the months that came. Each time she would decide to offer me up, I would relieve myself to escape until a caller came who enjoyed such things. I was powerless to stop what happened next.
“Wipe your tears, girl.” Mother regarded me with a look of disdain before walking naked to the door to let the suitor out. After the door closed behind him, she turned to me. “A woman was made for one thing, to pleasure a man.” She stroked her curves and private area, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth and releasing a sound similar to the noises that had come from her earlier. “Use your God-given weapon—your body—and secure their wealth. Learn their weaknesses and secrets, and in the end, you will have ultimate control.”
My insides burned from the violation. I sat curled against the headboard with the sheets tucked up under my neck, the scent of urine, sweat, and the release of the man pungent. That day I was forever changed. I learned to trust no one, least of all the woman who’d borne me. And hate for men wove into every fiber of my body. That night I would recollect as the milder of the assaults I would endure, but it was the rape that took everything from me.
In the years she prostituted me, something changed in her. Now at six and twenty, I recognized the look as hatred. Her visitors had come to her room seeking me—the younger version of the once-striking Madeleine Rougeux.
It was around my thirteenth year that life would change.
My throat tightened, and a shiver ran through me as I recalled how the summer breeze had ruffled the curtains of the open window. The commotion from the streets of San Francisco drifted into the room: the clop of horses’ hooves and the rumble of carriages, the curses and the dull smacks as two men fought, the laughter of a nightwalker as she tried to lure her prey, and a steam whistle blowing in the distance. However, it was the image of Mother and the scent of her cigar that are embedded so profoundly in my memory. Wrapped in a silk robe, she sat in a chair with her legs open to reveal the darkness between her thighs. In one hand she held the cigar, in the other a bottle of whiskey, and her eyes held a hard glint as she regarded me.
I held out a hand for the whiskey. She smiled and held the bottle out to me. I stepped forward to take it, but she snatched the bottle back, placed it to her lips, and took a large swig before her unnerving gaze returned to me.
“No, whore,” she said between clenched teeth. “Tonight you will forgo the habit of numbing yourself with drink. I have a surprise for you.” There was a knock on the door. “Ah, just in time.”
As she walked to the door, I caught a glimpse of myself in the looking glass. My hair was styled in two plaits, and a simple cotton dress concealed the curves transforming my body. Mother had insisted I forgo the usual provocative lingerie, ensuring I resembled a child, except for the rouge aging me beyond my years.
As the door opened and he strode in, my stomach revolted. It was the man who’d robbed me of my innocence years prior. Sweat beaded his brow and dripped into a white beard that swallowed up his face. The buttons of his cotton shirt fought against his massive belly. He was an important man—a congressman.
After taking what he’d come seeking from me, he rolled over and fell asleep with a satisfied look on his face. Mother lay on the bed, passed out from drink. Wiggling from between them, I slid off the bed. The cotton dress lay in a heap on the floor, the buttons scattered. I walked to the small closet, removed one of Mother’s dresses (too large for me), and clothed my bruised body before slipping on a pair of her boots. I retrieved the congressman’s felt hat, piled my waist-length curly red hair on top of my head, and pulled the hat low over my ears.
I stood over him. For a long moment, I looked at him and the naked form of my mother—the woman who had played a significant role in stealing my youth. My virtue. My innocence. A tear fell as the yearning to be loved by her swelled, but I quickly pushed it away.
She had held me down while the man crushed me beneath him. I’d called to her in desperation, but she’d stroked my hair and cooed, “It will be over soon. Be a good girl and lie still.”
“No,” the congressman had said between panting breaths. “I like the fight.”
At his words, I slumped face-first into the bed, my tears soaking into the sheets as I fought to calm the fight within me, seizing the only control I had. I wouldn’t add to his pleasure.
In a drawer under Mother’s lingerie, I found the blade she kept for suitors who attempted to cheat her. Pulling open the bottom drawer, I retrieved a tin can holding all the money she had and emptied the contents. I removed the man’s pocketbook from his discarded clothing.
At the bedside, I pressed the knife to his throat, barely visible between his broad shoulders and his jowls. Stirring, he blew out a weighted snore. Taken by surprise, I jerked, scraping his flesh with the blade. My heart pounded in my ears, but he never woke. Hatred bubbled within me, and before I lost courage, I made one quick swipe with the blade.
His eyes flew open. He gurgled and grabbed at his throat as the blood oozed over his fingers and melded into his white chest hairs. Fear, pain, and bewilderment flashed across his face, his body flailing as he fought against a fate deemed his from the night he had chosen to take my innocence. Then his body ceased thrashing and his hands fell away, and his lifeless eyes gazed at the ceiling.
Mother moaned and turned onto her side, revealing perfect curvy buttocks embellished with a single mole on her left hip. At one time in her life she had been beautiful, with her mane of dark hair, her blue eyes, and flawless ivory skin.
I moved to her side of the bed and let my gaze run over her. A life of fornicating with hundreds of men had given her the disease. Years of drinking had also taken its toll on her. At scarcely thirty, her face was a map of the life she had led. Soon the disease would kill her, and regardless of the torment I’d lived at her hands, I wouldn’t be responsible for her death. No, she would suffer soon enough.
I wiped the blade on the sheets before slipping from the room and out into the corridor, hazy and stinking with cigar smoke, cheap perfume, and copulation. The gleeful laughter of patrons and their ladies echoed up from below, melding with the lively thumping of the piano. I slipped out unnoticed.
For the next several years I wandered from town to town, taking on the alias of Amelie Laclaire. I’d come across the last name in a newspaper clipping I’d found in the streets, and the name Amelie had sounded French enough. I hitched rides in the back of
wagons and stowed away on a steamer headed to Georgia.
It was there that I met a runaway who lived in the swamps. He went by the name Big John—an African prince and medicine man. He’d trudged all the way from Alabama on a hunch that his son Pete had been sold to a plantation in South Carolina.
He found me in the backcountry, lost and near death from starvation. Lethargic and dazed, I lay on the ground, petrified, as he towered over me. He stretched as tall as the highest building in San Francisco, and he had glistening, dark flesh like that of a prized black stallion. But the way his shoulders slumped as though life had defeated him, and the emptiness in his eyes gave me pause. Hoisting me into his strong arms as though I was no more than a small child, he said in a low voice, “Ain’t nothing to worry ’bout. Name’s Big John.” He carried me to a stolen boat and gingerly lay me down on burlap sacks of food before clambering in and rowing us deep into the swamps.
For the next year, we lived in a hut he’d built like the ones in his homeland in Africa. At night, his chanting in his mother tongue and the harmony of the swamp creatures lulled me to sleep. He taught me to fish, live off the land, and create medicines from plants and herbs. Conversations about his motherland, family, and mission to find his son revealed this ex-slave’s gentle spirit.
“We can’t hide out in the swamps forever,” I said one evening as we sat by the fire pit inside our hut.
He crouched beside the open flame, scooping stew into a bowl he’d carved from a fallen cypress tree. Keen, dark eyes met mine over the fire as he handed the bowl to me before resting against a log and stretching out long legs. “You right,” he said, the deep, soothing sound of his voice calming. “Only planned to lie low for a few weeks, till de slave catchers moved on, but den you came along, and I reckon you needed me, so I stay. Bin thinking ’bout moving on soon.”
I felt a twinge of sadness. I slurped back a spoonful of stew, and it burned all the way down. I suppose I’d always known the day would come when he’d move on, but I never expected to feel a sense of utter loss. “You risk your life to find him. How do you know he is still at the plantation in Charleston? He could have been sold again. I’ve heard stories of how Negroes are sold off, most never seeing their families again.”
“I find him, or I die trying.” He stared into the coals. “He my son.” The pain in his voice made my throat tight. “I his pa.”
His yearning filled me with envy. If only my mother had cared for me with such passion. As for my father, I would never know which one of Mother’s…or her…suitors had created me.
“Dis life ain’t worth living widout him,” he continued. “When de whites sold my Rita and her baby seeded by her masa’s rapes, dey sold my heart wid her. After dat, de masa decided I be a good breeder, and I seeded many of chillums. Pete de boy by my second wife. I raised him. He de only good I have left in dis world.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Who?”
“Rita.”
He sat quietly for a moment, staring into the flames before releasing a deep sigh. “She de purtiest ’oman I ever saw. Dat what I notice ’bout her first,” he said with a chuckle—a sound that hadn’t come from him often, and it delighted me when it did. “She had de spirit of a lion. I never forgot her, but I suppose she done found a new man and has a family of her own.”
He rose, and from beneath a blanket removed a pouch before turning and presenting it to me in his outstretched hands.
“For me?”
He nodded, his dark eyes intense with anticipation.
As I took the offering, I recognized the leather scabbard of a dagger. Glancing at him, I furrowed my brow. He gestured for me to continue. I removed the blade he’d fashioned from scraps of metal in the past weeks. Intrigued, I had watched him make it, never once suspecting that he was constructing it for me. The side profile of a woman of strength, her face tilted to the stars, had been carved into the wooden handle. Tears pooled. “Thank you,” I said, my voice ragged with emotion.
“I give you de African name, Otobong.”
“Otobong.” I rolled the name on my tongue. “What does it mean?”
“From God,” he said.
I swallowed the tears building in my throat.
“You are strong in spirit. May dis dagger protect you from dose who seek to harm you.”
That night marked five years and three days since I’d murdered the congressman. I recalled it because it was the next day that Big John didn’t return from venturing out to obtain supplies. Three days later, I knew something was wrong and set out to find him. I waded through the alligator-infested swamps until I reached the road and made the long journey into town.
I spent the next days inquiring about him until a newspaper boy said, “Yeah, I seen him all right. He a runaway. They got him locked up in the jail until they can transport him back to his master.”
When it grew dark, I crept along the outer wall of the jail and peeked into the dimly lit cells through the barred windows. Then I heard him. The light chanting in his native tongue gripped my heart. I found him sitting on the edge of a cot with his head buried in his large hands.
Lying flat on my stomach in the grass, I hissed, “Big John.”
Dropping his hands, he squinted up at the window. “Dat you, Miss Amelie?”
“Yes.” I cast a look over his shoulder to the sleeping officer I’d scouted out earlier, sitting with a hat shielding his face and boots propped on the desk.
He moved to the window in one quick stride and slipped his hand through the bars. I slid my hand into his, soaking in the warmth of tenderness I never thought I’d feel again. Tears spilled over my cheeks. “How are we gonna get you outta here?”
“Don’t worry ’bout dat. I bin mighty worried ’bout you, out in dat swamp all by yourself wid no boat or food and thinking I done run off, leaving you.” His eyes glistened.
“We need to get you outta here,” I said again, reefing on the bars in frustration. “I’ll find chains or a rope, and maybe we can pull these bars off.”
“No,” he said in a voice filled with defeat. A sound that frightened me. “Ain’t no use, gal. Ef we could git dese bars off, I too big to fit through.”
“We have to try.” I blinked back tears of desperation and panic.
He shook his head. “Et over. In de morn, I go back to my masa. But you free. A gal lak you too smart and young to live a life on de run. Et dangerous out dere and et ain’t no place for a gal. Reckon et time you put aside what hurt you so bad. Folkses will continue to do unthinkable things to each other, and we never gwine to understand why. Dey seek to shatter our spirits, but you de keeper of dat flame inside you,” he said with a sad smile.
“No, I can’t lose you. I won’t.” Determination swelled in my chest. “I will get you out.” I scrambled to my feet.
“Where you gwine?” He pressed his face to the bars.
“To get you out.” I raced to the front door of the jail.
When I threw open the door, the officer leaped to his feet, his face heavy with sleep. I took in the three jail cells, all empty but the one holding Big John.
“Something I can help you with, miss?” the officer said.
I closed the door behind me and walked to the room’s window and drew the sun-bleached gingham curtains shut.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?” His voice hitched.
As I turned back, I looked at Big John, who stood gripping the bars of the cell, his eyes filled with concern, his expression perplexed. I swallowed hard and blocked him from my mind. What I was about to do would’ve been impossible if I allowed the knowledge that he was watching me take precedence in my mind.
I turned my alluring smile on the officer as I undid the top button of my dress. “Why, I saw you sitting in here all alone, and a man can get lonely cooped up in a place like this.”
“No!” Big John cried, his voice agonized. He shook the bars of his cell. “Don’t do dis.”
The officer sent a confused gla
nce his way but swung back to look at me as I moved closer.
Narrowing my focus to the officer, I allowed everything else in the room to fade away, blocking all sounds around me as I’d so skillfully learned to do in my life. It became only the officer and me in the room.
His eyes widened with surprise as I wiggled my arms out of the sleeves of my dress, allowing it to slip to the floor, revealing my full breasts and the curves I’d inherited from her. “It must get lonely here at night with nothing but the chanting of that nigger to keep you company.” I jutted my chin toward Big John, a blur in my vision.
He shrugged. “It’s my duty.” Gray eyes trailed over my body, and he released a sigh of appreciation.
Though I’d successfully seduced him, nausea swirled in my belly. I can’t do this. No, you must. Now that he was distracted, I glanced at the keys dangling from his belt.
I sucked in my bottom lip as I’d seen her do, and sashayed toward him. When I felt the heat of his closeness, I ran my fingers down his chest, playing with the brass buttons on his coat. A groan escaped him.
“Do you like what you see?” I fluttered my lashes as I’d seen her do.
He swallowed and bobbed his head. I felt the hardness of his manhood press against me. Pushing down the bile threatening to erupt, I unbuttoned his coat before removing his belt, and he hurried to help me. I noted the clang of the keys hitting the floor. The officer’s thin lips curved in a grin almost hidden under a blond mustache bearing traces of his last meal. He smelled of garlic and sweat. Dropping his trousers, he turned me around. Gripping the edge of the desk to steady myself, I eyed the pistol lying unguarded.
His desire made the act fast, and when it was over, I laughed as flirtatiously as she had. He stepped back, and I turned around. He eyed my nakedness with satisfaction, as though I was a prize a man like him was usually incapable of winning.
My fingers gripped the cold metal of the pistol, and without hesitation, I swung the gun up and pointed it at him.
“What the hell?” he gasped.
