Soon as them Yankee horses snorts up to this Big House, soon as Northren torches find us, I can shuck my apron, do one serious jig on it. Here at the end, I can afford to talk of my folks’ coming out into evil. But, Fancy Nancy, you best listen good. This my last run-through, ever. You perch right there, fretting if you pretty enough to get captured. Spread that fine white satin all round you big old feets (oh, Castalia knows how huge). Your Castalia’s gone paint Africa, gone try. Be my final gift to you.
PICTURE it. I seems to recollect a certain perfect root-bound jungle. Picture it like through smoked eyeglasses, lenses cured green, mustardy and gray. Castalia were most definite a princess over there. Oh yeah. Everybody what floated from our village to work for you here, they says so too.
Now, in this particular Africa, Mrs. Picky Eater, we had us more trees than you could shake somebody else’s stick at. You think this plantation’s two thousant acres of woods be wooded? Ha. Africa feel ways more thicker/older than here. Our trees? why every one wore forty good-sized coconuts up top. Vines hanging every which a ways, drooping so you didn’t know if roots was fastened in the sky or steaming up off jungle floor. Now, on them vines, growing free of charge, bunches of the flowers you folks calls “orchids.” For us, they bout like weeds. In Africa, luxury’s second nature.
So, while I dust you English figurines, while I dabs lemon and linseed on this mahogany, try and notice me a bit better than usual (meaning: start to). You forever says what’s “bad form,” “good form.” Castalia’s kidnap might help you get, good form, through yours. Yours gone happen in thirty-seven minutes. Watch.
Our coming out—it hinge on one old lady, King’s great-aunt, my great-great-one. We talking the meanest thing this side of a open grave, a doubled-up antique croaker, name of Reba. Reba would disappear for weeks, she live off by herself. Right when you first notice Aunt’s been gone so long, right when you figure she done finally died from snakebite (Auntie’s body shown a scoreboard of fang marks), just when you believe she been claimed by quicksand, here come the scratch of her knob-topped stick. Here into sight do Reba hunch, scolding you for some tiny silly thing you done—a slip-up you figured hadn’t one soul but yours noticed. Reba been so weaned on Legend, she nearbout creaked with all that she done tried and ceremonied over and then spit out as “wrong.”
You think my disposition’s nasty when I get into my door-slamming fits? Should of seen Miss Reba’s dark-day moods. Throwed stuff, and not just around, I talking at folks! Chucked rocks towards teasing children. Good aim, too. When you spied Auntie in her gloomy figuring state, you’d best run.
NOW, Miss Sick Headaches, in our time, we all done seen some messed-up fish-faced folks stumping round. But this Reba were so ugly it almost got honorary. Been clubbed around the head and shoulders with the Ugly Stick so many times, Stick broke, splintered. Some people they so bad-shaped and crookedy, it almost starts to come up on the slippery side of beauty all over again. You seen it?
You know them things you call crow’s-feets? ones you been fighting with every import balm-salve known to God? Well, Reba’s each wrinkle ended in a three-way tie to start another set, and on and on till she look to be a regular schoolhouse for creasing deep. (Not like you, that wants your face to be a stopped clock. Which ain’t natural.) Lack of teeth meant Reba Woman’s nose most chafed against her chin. Poor thing had nostrils so wide open, they about like spare eye sockets waiting for eyeballs to roll down in there on vacation. Un-hunh. Her little eyes be twin flint judgments cushioned into sacks of feathery folds, all earned. Every soul what’d knowed her in her life’s first half, they long since gone total dust. She alone. She living in that Old past pretty old. It the spot where the worst done long back happened. Time’s just keeping you around—a chained pet—feeding you table scraps (the odd half-days). Our tribe claimed Auntie acted so cross cause she way too smart. Hurts, that high-up of a mind.
Everybody considered that she fed mostly off the meats of these huge snakes she kilt. Wherever Reba padded barefoot, guided by her walking pole, you’d hear the jungle shudder, frying with snakes sneaking off, grumpy over kin snakes lately stomped into being Reba snake steaks. Folks went to Auntie for advice.
She too lizard-quick not to mostly know, too cruel to ever lie. Sometimes, during a fine late-night dance, you’d look up from shaking you new parrot-feather anklets, and you’d spot her, most hid by leaves, squinting right at you, little pointy eyes ever smirking in a way that seem halfway admiring you, half finding you flat pitiful. Miss Reba eyeballed warnings at the world. Come time, Aunt looked right into the face of that great judging thing what grabbed and changed us all for good. Was Reba led us over here.
BEFORE getting stole, we didn’t understand what Sin meant. No missionaries yet been kind enough to paddle upriver, point out what-all we doing wrong. Plus, nobody’d ever laid eyes on any Wedgwood china needing careful scouring after dinner. (Remember how you had me whipped, Madam Sassy, for busting that gravy boat by accident, ten lashes cross my back in front of all the others? You don’t recall? I can take my blouse off, smack you memory a bit. You already forgot how my mother lived here at The Lilacs with me? She blonged to you, along with me. By the time I got ready to axt Queen Mother my full history, she gone. Momma left me alone here, to make up a truth, homemade as me. So true it’d seem like what she might could have told. This that truth. Recollect what you had done to her? Castalia remember. A good servant, I gone carry that around for you.)
But, back over there, come dawn for miles of jungle, won’t one Wedgwood salt dish to wash, no boll weevil needed pulling off a local boll. And, Missy, just to show you how backwards we done truly been, we didn’t miss either Bible wickedness or hard labor. Not yet invented: Sin or Work. Now, won’t we simple!
SEEM like I were quite a princess over yonder. I said that, but it do bear a certain mount of repeating. Each morning here at The Lilacs when I goes to empty you nasty chamber pot, I chants to myself, “Were one, were one.” It help. Even here, I gots to keep some them old slave folk (my cousins) from bowing down to me. Bad form. Say we out working the collard patch. I’ll hear a muttering in some language I don’t half know no more. I look over, there they is, kneeling mong the ruts of a field, just bending low and calling me the newer queen of our old-timey misused tribe of Reba the Wiser. Well, I just won’t have folks rolling round under my feet. (Unlike some people.)
Strange as it might sound to you, Lady Chilliness, onct I been brung over and was working like something store-bought, I didn’t feel the leastway surprised to recollect my royal blood. I could feel the kingly squish in my arms, a joyful extra doodad pounding in my throat. Even while you sits over there hitting patchwork chords (I glad I made a dent in that Stephen Foster tune, your usual weed and orchid), even while I stands dusting things not rightfully mine, why I is yet a princess. Maybe you can’t see it. But no weak Blue eye can see Brown blue blood true.
Today, with Yanks bout to bust me out of housework’s jail, I done quit being overmodest. It tiring.
If folks stays as far off and alone as our tribe done, you ain’t got no earthly picture of how outsiders might could view you. For them, is you gods? is you all Reba catfish faces? what? The only tribes living roundabout us (ones sharing this holy river that brung us water, fish, and the steady trickling we figure was the sound of everyplace on earth), they our enemies. Sometimes us wandered far to the edge of home territory, us find strange fiber ribbons and crossed bones tied to home-owned trees.
Some nights, we heard the hated strangers’ drums get rolling. Bad tribes be signaling among theyselves. Bout us! One hot evening when this far-off pounding rode the trough of river, Miss Reba decided us should talk right back. Playing hippo ham bones. Using our own genius drums. Slapping forty holy rhythm instruments, we begun right brilliant pounding, sure. Our steady pulse just seek to say, “Look out, we here.” Thing is, once you starts competing, you can’t quit till others does. All night, enemy shake and knocks keep cutting through m
iles of vine and bog, kept lulling mosquitoes big as you fist. Two days later, quiet settled. Nobody could say which tribe had left off message making first. Afterwards, evertime we heard war thumping from whatever direction, we challenged it with smart noises of our own. We got excellent at it. We meant such pounding to stand for long-distance warfare, only safer. But what happened: What start out as war turned into everyplace music. Answer, answer back. Sound good. We ain’t full enemies. We more a duet.
Us soon captured one skinny foreign-tribe girl, copper-colored, trapped while gathering fruit on our land. We felt shocked that so stranger a young lady spoke a language most like ours.
The King axted her many hard questions. She a mess of shaking, begging. Finally old Reba poke up from nowhere, “What does your folks call us?”
All us listeners look hard at one another, puzzled. Took a leap of mind to know that—past ourselfs—we might, by others, be named something.
Girl, she heavesome quivering, “You ones is called … ‘The Tribe That Answers.’”
Reba cough with joy, then done a satisfied jig. “And, child, what the name of you own folks?”
But now this girl look mighty troubled, staring round. “My tribe? … be onliest … my tribe. It … just … us.”
“Same here,” nods our quick-to-answer Auntie, hobbling off humming.
OUR ROYAL work been mostly leisure. We took pride in getting good at it. That’s how come they caught us off our guard that day it happen. Of course, I personally were just a baby. Age three but still at suck. Now, some black folks out in you quarter, they’ll try and tell you (if they dared talk to you at all) that I been far too young for remembering all I swears I can. Some claims I won’t even born till we wobbled off that ship at Charleston’s pretty harbor. But, part my memory (some of everybody’s) is what I overheard. I always been one nosesome little child. (Who else round here done listened to your “Debut” lies and braggings umpteen million times?) You know them jigsaw puzzles—views of Europe—you forever lingered over out on the veranda? Well, it’s the same with my patching Mother Africa together. Find outside corners mashed to be a frame—two parts sky, two lowers land—then the rest just fall so neat in place. And every last trace of the whole picture I gone puzzle forth in high and fiery colors, it true. Trust me here. I’d stake my own six hundred dollars life on it. Castalia’s bout worth that now, ain’t she? You better listen hard—because, in thirty-two minutes, Owner Mine, I gone to be flat worthless. Once them Yankees hit here—on the open market—I ain’t going to bring one penny more than you would.
2
COME the night before they grabbed us. Big dance, a few privileged elders (all uncles mine) wore outfits what tried looking like our holy local bird. Uncles’ getups never come no closer to the bird’s perfect color than say grape purple. But, for then, for that late on a humid jungle night, it’d pass for red, it’d do.
The Festival of Our Rare Red Bird, we talking. Round home parts, this one flying creature ranked as the most beautiful and hardly-seen. The only bird couldn’t nobody shoot no legal arrow at. That was owing to this sparrow-sized thing’s feather shade, a color we didn’t have one berry, no tint of clay nor any ground-up mussel shell to help make. I speaking Red here, Lady. Picture it.
Now for you, pale as mail-order powder, ghosting round this white room, wearing that blank satin wrapper and playing them mostly white keys (with a few black ones sneaked in on the back row to do the dirty work), Red must sound a wee bit raw. It were! So full of heat and hoping, about as cheap as life. That bird stayed so all-out for us, owing to how pretty Red look flying alive in a world made from a trillion greens. Seem like every tribe along our river had one color held to be most holiest. It been the tint most hard to make. Times, some local child’d find a dead one of our precious birds, it feets up, eyes missing life’s smart shine. Child’d stay famous for a day or two, folks axting her where she turned it up, how come she checked that spot.
Only Reba, oldest person on record ever, only she got to save up bodies of every red bird what’d yet been found. In her way-off hut, she stowed some birds been dead fully thirty spans her own musty age—all handed down. By now, just greasy fluffs we taking Time’s word for.
Till the earth turned tables on us, was only three ways we could look on the holy red we craved so bad: When neighbor tribes made night raids and cut or kilt our own, or better, when us hurt them. (Though no blood looks redder than you own—expecially when it flow cause you done dropped a gravy boat!) Another was the red seen in once-a-month personal lady blood. But our favorite unslashed uncramping way stayed how these flamish droplets of birdlife sputtered past on high, making us fall onto our knees, heads tossed back, gaping.
Well, seem like the Bad Ones learnt about our tribe’s longing for redness. Soon as others figured how one hot color were such a craze with us, why we won’t safe no more. (Be careful bout letting anybody know what you loves most, Lady Ownership-9/10-the-Law. Whatever’s sweetest to you gone get turned to perfect bait.)
Happen the morning after our Dance of the Rare Red Bird, second-biggest “do” of our jungle social year. We been mostly dozing under different palm trees or deep inside cool palm-wood huts. Of a sudden, all dogs everywhere start barking louder than us ever heared and in a different whinnying pitch. Every child out making mud pies start quailing like the world’s done ended and this shrill sound be one last echo rolling back from then. Sleepers wakes, even some what’s been missing deep down with the sleeping sickness for long weeks now. We come to—expecting all our enemy tribes is raiding us at once with perfect timing, right when we the most hung over from our fine palm wine.
In your dark hut, you can’t help but notice, by ear, past dogs’ stunned yappings, our whole jungle—upriver and down—have grown still as death is dead. Cat’s got the tongue of every monkey, screechy bird, and wild boar, too. Scared air feel about to bubble like on boil. Finally, out our huts us run, we stops, then seen it. Most folks dives right back in. Once hid, our breaths just heaving, we looks to one another, not considering it possible that all this might be happening at bald-headed and everybody’s noon. No.
Because,
Along our brown slow river in plain sight during the bare-assed brassiest of broadest day, here rides one dugout canoe built bigger than our village’s whole straw council hall. Not a soul aboard it, here drifts a island-sized pontoon/tree house/temple thing rigged with rails and windows, with great palm-high poles spouting out the lid of it, these hung with broad stained sheets, each one blowing the floating place nearer nearer us and to our one home.
Till this, all we knowed bout floating was—things we made by scooping innards from logs, leaving such side bark as might keep water out and let us sit safe in. So a boat this big, unpaddled, was big news. But, oh, White Lady Mine, what make this thing the most outstanding and terriblest and way most beautiful of all, be its color. Because this huge slatted thing, bowed like a drum, point-ended as any anteater, it done been painted. And you know what shade? Good guess (you getting quicker with Man-cipation rolling in!). Why, yes, it bout as red as red can be.
Imagine you only seen maybe one gold coin in you whole life and then, up our local river Tar out there, glides the entire gleaming Confederate Mint (if they got one). A choir of cash registers clinking towards you, pay-drawers full of glitter yellow. Hurt you eyeballs. And oh, to feel Red coming, without a single sound (not one oar slapping).
Somebody’d guessed how good we dearly loved even one rouge cake’s own amount of what you white folks calls crimson. Made the village stomach turn with a most pleasuring fear, most fearful pleasure.
LADY, I talking redder than the shiniest line of fresh blood moving down the driest blackest dusty leg in Africa.
CAN TOTAL stillness get even stiller? Cause, it did. Even old Reba—what lived in her own snake-skinned shanty set way far off from us—even Reba got tuggled downhill towards this quiet. She finally stick/drag into a village what seem empty of all life, including
dogs’. Hounds done barked first, then—following examples—jumped behind us. Now, in huts, dogs just eye-watered. Dogs smart sometimes. Not in the whole jungle were a single birdsong squirting. Expecially still, the simple-tuned red birds, stunned to know that, in the world of rainbow, they won’t near so rare as our jungle’d figured. Nothing but river gossip miles upstream.
Using her knobbly-topped walking stick, old body bare as anything, here come our pinched nerve of a blue-black Reba, late. Never married, never wanted, she look to be a sweet potato left some ages out in hurting jungle sun. We studying one what’s got three teeth left, but is still vain enough to brag bout them date pits. Her black legs so skinny they like snakes what’s swallowed rocks. From behind canoe-sized leaves, we all watch our tribe’s one unwed and most grouchy woman. She usually a-scared of nothing but how stupid others act.
Someway we hoping that, this once, Aunt gone scream and double over like we done done. Maybe Reba ain’t so brave, just nosy. We bet when Miss Reba sees that redness yonder, her stringy heart won’t hold. She now mumbling bout something, one stiff seed necklace chattering round her falling-off neck. We keep gripping heads and shoulders of the loved ones we hid with, we holding on to dogs, letting the smarter of scared dogs hold on to us.
First, her usual crotchet frisky, then she slown a bit—then crank, to, full, stopping. Her hollow gummy mouth glump open, her old body grown dead stiff. But seem her crooked walk staff’s just way too interested for letting Reba stop. Stick itself, a good one she found when she was six then waited to grow into, it now drag Auntie nearer water where the Red Visitation wait.
Usually Reba only enjoy others’ accidents or fits. Now, in plain view, our Miss Mind Over Matter start materially jumping up and down, necklace made of common garden seeds just chippening every way it can. Cept for river whisper, these dried pods pepper forth the only sound for miles. Reba carrying on like a bad baby—meaning, yes, ma’am, she wet her own self, then start striking her very Reba mud puddle with that stick’s knob end. Arms doing wing flaps, she shout, “I dreamed all this. And, friends, it now so. Come out and see what Reba done thunk up.” Just like her, claiming. But the strangest part was hearing Reba call us “friends.” In two seconds, Queen Eater of Serious Snakes done got out “friends” and smiled. Strange. Her face wedge open like with its own first blinky look-see at the world.
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All Page 84
