The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  Assatou slumped, weeping, and the slave woman begged, please, do not blame her. Forgive her, please. Balma, the slave woman was sorry, and Assatou replied she did not blame the woman. And she would bless the woman’s name when she was able to make proper ablutions. Her voice had none of the haughtiness from the time when she had ordered house slaves and concubines to bring her this and bring her that. Assatou pulled Kiné close to her, digging in her nails.

  Come to your mother, child, she said. Come to your mother. Every few seconds, Assatou whispered this. It became a continuous chant as she rocked back and forth on the floor of the room. It became a scream the next day when the men came to the house of the signare to take Assatou back to the imam. The tall man shouted at Assatou that his master was a kind man. He had allowed her to stay with her daughter for this time, in order to make her goodbyes. Then the tall man picked up her like a sack of millet or a newly killed animal as she kicked and bit and reached out her hands to her little girl. That was the last time Kiné saw her mother.

  And then there were many, many days of walking until they came to the edge of the river. Across the river was James Island, named so by the English who had taken over that spot, fighting other white men from other countries for control.

  The men put Kiné and others in a canoe and they rowed to the island, where white men waited. There, their clothes were taken from them and Kiné and the other women and girls were put in a stone-walled room with no windows. There was no bucket for relief, only a corner, and a terrible smell. At times, a white man or two would come to the room to pull out an older girl or woman, and there were new screams. And Kiné put her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth. In the stone-walled room Kiné could not be sure how many days passed—perhaps ten—before she and the other women and girls were taken from the room. Not to satisfy the white men’s desires, but to be loaded into the bottom of a ship that had sailed up to James Island.

  Next came a journey she could not track, because she could not see the moon or the sun from the dark hold of the ship. At times, she was pulled up onto the deck into light. Other times, sailors with appetites visited the female side of the hold, turning women and girls into profane vessels. Kiné was spared this physically, but she bore witness. One of her comrades—if she could call her that—was tossed overboard after she died, succumbing to her bowels. The sailors threw her into the sea without the sheets used as shrouds for the two white men who had perished on board. The sharks tore at Kiné’s comrade, the water filling with her meat. It was the nature of those sea-swimming things: brutality seeks what is nearest.

  After three months of lying in her own mess on wood, Kiné arrived in western land, on this side of the big water. She arrived in Savannah, Georgia, where she was doused with buckets of water to clean her off, and given a rough cotton dress. Then she was put on another ship, a much smaller one, and sailed up the river to Augusta.

  “And then what happen?”

  Kiné’s daughter would ask this over the years until she was old enough to understand her mother’s anguish. Kiné would only look away to the side as the people in her homeland did whenever something sorrowed or shamed or frightened them. She was still an African, no matter how many years had passed.

  Kiné had been purchased that day in Augusta by Baron McCain. He had brought his young son Paul with him, and Kiné was put on a horse with Paul, who held her safe by the waist. They rode a long time through wilderness to a farm that was across a river, a few miles from the new federal road.

  Before Kiné, Paul had been the only child on the farm, and Paul and Kiné played together like any other children. Kiné also helped Paul’s mother, Helen, take care of the three-room house and the chickens and the one pig and the cow and the large vegetable garden and the corn patch. Helen McCain was a mixed-blood Creek woman, as Baron’s own mother had been, and she was lonely out in the wilderness without her family. She had lost several babies, some in the womb, and some after birth, which had brought her much grief. Baron cherished his wife, and so he’d saved for three years to buy her a slave to help keep her company. Kiné was a child who would have time to grow up, a girl who could be devoted to Helen all her life. While Kiné helped Helen with the labors around the small farm, the woman told her stories of the wily rabbit who always tricked the other, larger creatures who wanted to bring him down. The stories reminded Kiné of the tales her mother had told her in their courtyard.

  Neither Baron nor Helen could have dreamed of Paul and Kiné falling in love when they came of age, that the two children who played together after their chores would become inseparable. However, these were the early years of the place that would become Georgia, and after some alarm when Paul informed them Kiné was expecting a baby, the McCains gave in to logic. They were mixed-blood themselves. These things happened and—though there was no marriage in a church, as during that time, Christian ministers would not marry an African and an Indian—the two young people pledged themselves to each other. Then Kiné moved into Paul’s room in the back of the one-story house. When their child was born, she was named “Beauty” by her grandmother, and there was contentment for Kiné working in the garden with her child and her beloved’s mother, as she learned the earth and the uses of plants from Helen. As the older woman told Beauty stories of rabbits on this side of the ocean, so Kiné shared her own tales of creatures, while keeping her pain to herself. And no one ever stopped her from performing her prayers five times a day.

  “And then what happen?” Beauty would ask again.

  “Nothin’ else, baby,” Kiné would tell her daughter. “I’se here now, and so is your daddy. And we both loves you. That’s all you need to know.” And she would take her daughter into her arms.

  A Terrible Journey

  There were years of happiness for Kiné and then tragedy: Baron and Helen died of a sickness that struck the territory, and Kiné died soon after. Undone by his losses, Paul began to take to drink, to go off into the wilderness for two or three days. While he was gone, his daughter, Beauty, tended to the farm, keeping a gun and a long staff by her side to scare off animals.

  One morning after an extended, drunken absence, Paul returned with a woman, riding in front on his horse. Paul didn’t say where the woman had come from, but she was neither a Creek woman nor a mestizo. She was white and, based on her rough manner and reddened hands, she was not from a family of means. Paul seemed bewildered by his new wife’s presence even as she moved into the larger room where his parents had slept. When Beauty went to her father, complaining that her grandmother had told her this bed would go to Beauty after Helen’s passing, Paul told her she was being selfish. He had been very lonely. Yet the white woman didn’t stop Paul’s drinking and in months he sickened and died.

  After the burial of her husband, Beauty’s stepmother pretended not to know that the small farm now belonged to Paul’s daughter. One morning she told Beauty she had a great surprise for her. Beauty was relieved; perhaps she and her stepmother would finally be friends. They rode the horse together until they came to the federal road that had been cut through the lands of the Cherokee and the Creek. There, a white man and a young mulatto stood by a wagon. The mulatto grabbed Beauty. As she struggled, she saw the white man hand her stepmother money, and she understood: Beauty had been sold as a slave to a trader.

  It was a weeklong journey in the wagon as the slave trader stopped other places and acquired more slaves. During the day, there were only two corn cakes apiece for each slave. At night, cooked streak-o-lean to chew on. Throughout the day, blessed sips of water. It snowed in stingy specks or they were plagued with freezing rain. The two little girls were lucky; they were allowed to sit in the back of the wagon. Beauty and the other woman walked behind without fetters. There were purchased men, too, chained together behind the horse of the trader. Beauty was also lucky; she’d been wearing shoes when she was sold. The others in and beside the wagon were barefoot, and the other woman caught frostbite. The mulatto boy held the wo
man down while the trader did the ax work. When the screaming started, Beauty made a bare spot in her mind. She crawled into it.

  Now the woman with no feet sat in the wagon. She cradled the little girls and gave them their water. Beauty slowed her walking and held hands with the woman. During the times of rest, Beauty braided the hair of the little girls in rows like corn, as her mother had worn her hair. When the wagon stopped for the next to last time, a white man came out from a large cabin and picked up the woman with no feet. The rags wrapped around her stumps fell away, exposing raw meat to the cold. The woman dropped into a faint. Beauty fainted, too, and when she awoke she was in the wagon and the woman with no feet was gone. The little girls were gone, too.

  Beauty crawled back into her bare space, and when she was sensible again, she saw that she stood in the middle of a field. Woven between the twigs of the plants was whiteness, though not as pure as snow or as beautiful as the tail of a deer. She shielded her eyes. There was a voice behind her, speaking English.

  “All this be cotton.” She turned to see a very small man: he was the height of a child and his short legs were bowed, like twigs bent before breaking. “All that over there be cotton, too. Ain’t no way to get away from it. It’a follow you into your dreams and it’a be sleeping beside you on your cooling board.”

  Beauty was wary. This man was the size of a child, but as such, he might be “one of the little.” She had to be careful. Helen McCain had spoken of these little people—powerful supernatural beings who would walk through ordinary people’s lives, but who could not be trusted. If disrespected, they could cause terrible events.

  Then the small man surprised her: he spoke in the language of Kiné, who had taught her child the simplest of greetings in the Wolof of her African home.

  “Salamalaikum,” he said.

  “Malaikum salaam,” Beauty said haltingly.

  “Na nga def?” he asked.

  She could not pretend she didn’t hear him. It would be bad manners to do so. “Ma ngi fi. Na nga def?” Beauty replied that she was fine, though she lied. And how was he?

  “Jamm rek, alhamdulillah.” The small man told her he only had peace, praise God. He continued to talk in English—about this and that—before he told her his name was Joe.

  “My name be Beauty.”

  “Naw, baby. That ain’t your name no more. You be called ‘Ahgayuh’ now.”

  “My name be Beauty!”

  She stamped her foot. She didn’t know much Cherokee—they were not the people of her grandparents—but she did know that “Ahgayuh” meant “woman.” If her grandmother Helen were alive, she would have been outraged at the insult.

  Joe bowed in defeat. “A’ight, then. But let’s go now, ’cause a storm be coming soon. Hear that thunder roll?” He grabbed her hand, but she snatched it away. Shook loose her mind, trotting. She ran to the fields. There was no place to go. She ran one way and there was a white man blocking her. She ran the other way and a white boy came toward her. She turned and there were red lights in her eyes and then she wasn’t in the field anymore. Beauty was in a ship somewhere, wood upon water. So much water. So many folks and they were naked and they were shaking chains and there were sharks following the wood upon water and the folks were holding out their hands to her but she couldn’t help them and they were lost from their home and she was lost from her home and everyone she loved was dead and someone was whispering leave this place and there will be too much sorrow here but there was no way she could leave and the red lights lifted from her eyes and Beauty saw the field and that’s all she would remember.

  The Changing of Beauty’s Name

  Beauty was not allowed to recover from her losses. Her grandparents, her mother, her father. To grieve the day that she had been sold for the first time. Or grieve the day in the wagon when the women and the girls had been taken. Or grieve the day she was sold to Samuel Pinchard, the owner of the plantation called Wood Place.

  Slaves were not allowed to lie on a quilt-covered dirt floor and weep. Neither women nor men nor children. They weren’t allowed to sleep for days on end, so that blankness would cover the soul or at least take away a memory briefly. Tears and sleep were not luxuries cast to slaves. There was only work. When the cock crowed for work. When the sun rose for work. When the sun fell until the stars cut the dark. Beauty hadn’t learned this in her grandparents’ house, but her senses knew it now. And when she heard the work bell ringing the morning after she was sold, she washed her hands and feet as her mother would have bidden her. She whispered a prayer to the God who had ninety-nine names according to the teachings of her mother’s people. And she followed the folks from her cabin as they drifted outside.

  When Beauty approached the Negroes who lived in the three Quarters cabins, asking them the whereabouts of the small man who called himself Joe, she was told no such person lived on the farm. They were sure, and Beauty suspected that the small man had been a vision, as the ship had been. Such as her mother would see when Kiné had stared into the distance for minutes at a time. Sometimes, when Kiné had roused, she’d shaken with the authority of her knowledge.

  Beauty’s daily work on the farm was tedious, but her grief was alleviated by a man who lived in her cabin. He was gentle and spoke with the wisdom of the elderly, but he appeared as young as Beauty’s father had been before he died. The folks in the Quarters called this man Pop George and said he was much, much older than he looked. Yet, incredibly, all his teeth were in place. It was a wonderful thing when Pop George smiled, and when he laughed, even more so.

  In the evening, Pop George told stories to the children, whose parents sat a distance away. They pretended that they were watching their little ones, when really they were listening to the stories, too. The Quarters-folks insisted that Pop George was nearly one hundred years old. When Beauty told him this, though, he laughed his entrancing sound and said folks in the Quarters were funning her. None of these peoples knew how to count, and he didn’t neither. He would chuckle as someone protested, uh-uh, Pop George. They won’t lying. He knowed they was telling the truth.

  Pop George told Beauty that, indeed, he had been born over the water in that place known as Africa. And he had been purchased by the father of their mistress, the girl the Quarters-folks called “Miss Lady.” This had happened before Lady had married their current master, Samuel Pinchard.

  Since her arrival, Beauty had seen Lady a few times. She appeared as a white girl, but one day, Beauty had seen the girl with her father, Micco. Instantly, Beauty had recognized this man as a mulatto, for his features were a combination like her own. When she imparted this information to Pop George, however, he put a finger to his lips.

  “Don’t be saying nothing like that again, chile, ’less you want to feel the whip.”

  And Beauty felt her skin chew over with anger that Lady, a girl who appeared no older than fifteen—a girl with Negro blood—was allowed to live as a white woman. That Lady lived free and high above others and lived in a house with a wood floor, instead of dirt. That here this girl was called Lady, while Beauty had been given a new label, “Ahgayuh,” which wasn’t even Creek!

  In time, Beauty’s new name was shortened to “Aggie,” and she decided that she would answer to this, to keep pure the name her parents had given her. For she had been made by two people who had loved each other, and each night under the tattered quilt that she had been given she would take out her memories and wrap herself tightly in them. She was owned, but her memories were not.

  III

  Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground.

  —W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Black Belt,” The Souls of Black Folk

  Deep Country

  When I was little, I had ex
pectations of the seasons. Summer was for joy: the ride with my mother and sisters down the interstate to Chicasetta and seeing the Peach Butt in Gaffney, South Carolina. The tall structure that was supposed to look like a piece of ripe fruit but instead looked like somebody’s ass. Picking weeds with my granny, my sisters, and sometimes Aunt Pauline, and sitting on the porch after supper. Running through the peach, pecan, cedar, pine, and oak trees. Nothing barred my way, within reason. So long as I was with one of my sisters or, if alone, within earshot of my mother’s voice, I went wherever I wanted. I was free.

  Autumn, winter, and spring contained my trials. There was contentment during the week at home with my sisters and parents. But on the weekends there were the hours spent at the house of my father’s parents. Those terrible Saturday intervals when Miss Delores took her half day and Nana went shopping. When those women abandoned me to the baths that Gandee would draw for us. When he threatened me that, if I ever told anyone about what he did to me, he would kill everyone I loved. I believed him, so I kept his secrets.

  I had trusted the adults around me: my parents, the elders down in Chicasetta, Nana, even Gandee. Because I was a child, I’d believed what they told me, no matter how kind or cruelly they behaved. I lived surrounded by a fence made up of trust, one I’d assumed couldn’t be knocked down. But the day I heard Lydia yelling in my grandmother’s foyer, I walked up to that fence. The barest of touches and it fell so easily. This was the barrier separating my childhood from some other place. I wasn’t yet an adult, but my childhood was gone forever.