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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  After those twelve days of Christmas, Matthew was uncertain, but he knew that he could not abide another year until he saw Rabbit again. And he made a choice that was admittedly immoral: he continued to visit Samuel’s plantation, under the pretext of seeing Gloria. As young men in love will do—during one tormented night when Matthew touched himself and pictured Rabbit’s exquisite, stone-chiseled face, he finally admitted that he was in love—Matthew reasoned that the rules of society were made to be broken. There were no rules, except those he made in pursuit of his affection. Thus, he did not flinch when Samuel suggested that he begin to formally court his daughter.

  Matthew didn’t know where this deception would end, but he didn’t care, either. He only knew he had to be with Rabbit again. Each visit with her was a chaste one, and he was proud of this. They sat at the table in the guest cabin for an hour and ate the food she prepared. Matthew took out his pocket watch to be careful of time. By his fourth visit to the plantation, they had begun to share secrets, but these two were bound by more than their feelings. Rabbit was a slave, and thus, she would not tell Matthew about the stories every Negro on the premises except the smallest child knew: that Samuel Pinchard was a monster who kept a series of little girls to harm in the cabin on the left side of the big house. That her own sister had been scarred in order to protect her from Samuel’s abuse. Or that her father had run away from Wood Place with her grandmother’s help. And Matthew did not talk about how he could not imagine an honorable future for them, because she was a Negro and a slave. Or that he had become more sensitive to his role as someone who owned human beings.

  The First Lover’s Sin

  You should know that Matthew and Rabbit mightily tried to avoid consummation during the times that Matthew visited Samuel’s Wood Place three days each month on the false pretext of courting Gloria. That Matthew and Rabbit continued to sit at the table together or outside on the porch, chaste yet burning for an entire year.

  They shared more secrets. Matthew confided that he still missed his youngest sister, a baby who had emerged dead from his mother, but had been so loved that Mrs. Thatcher had insisted on naming her and refused to speak to Mr. Thatcher until the man had paid for a gravestone for the dead baby. The little girl had been named Judith and was buried on the family farm. Rabbit finally revealed to Matthew that her father had run away from the plantation—though she still withheld the details—and that Tess had dreams about Nick, as if they were together, instead of separated by distance, and even perhaps death.

  And Matthew committed the first lover’s sin: he didn’t admit that he had tried to help Samuel retrieve Nick from wherever he had run to. He was afraid that Rabbit would despise him for a betrayal that had taken place before they’d ever met. And this was a valid concern, for even Matthew’s own sister had scolded him all the way from Boston.

  And then we know that these two sweethearts finally gave in to each other, after a year. Sitting closely led to handholding. That led to brief kisses. Those led to longer embraces, and the warmth of need, and that next winter holiday, Matthew crept one night and met Rabbit at the barn where she waited with a lantern: he hadn’t wanted her to trek the long distance to the guesthouse. They walked together to the creek, stopping to kiss and whisper endearments. On the creek bank, they lay down together, fumbling and ignorant. He was twenty-seven to her eighteen, but neither of them had known another. And there was pain that first time for Rabbit but a happiness: this was the union her parents had known.

  The night of Rabbit’s bliss, Aggie awoke suddenly. Instantly, she knew her granddaughter had become a woman, though she didn’t know Rabbit’s beloved was a white man, and a slaveholder at that. And that Sunday at dinner, she took Rabbit aside, telling her she needed to know how a woman took care of herself, to keep from having a baby. Rabbit’s eyes flew open—how did Aggie know?—and she tried to deny the accusation, but her grandmother put up a hand. Then she gave Rabbit a cloth-wrapped bundle of wild carrot seeds to drink for seven days, after she had lain with her beau. This was the safest way to keep a pregnancy from taking hold, for if that happened, then other solutions had to be sought to bring on her bleeding, and they were not as safe. And Aggie went further, embarrassing her granddaughter: Rabbit should learn to take her happiness before her man’s, and to make sure he interrupted himself before his final pleasure arrived. For when a man took that final pleasure inside a woman, that increased the likelihood that he would leave a baby behind.

  Aggie spoke to Rabbit not exactly as an equal, but there was a conviviality to her tone. And the tiny young girl—no, woman—felt pride. She had crossed over into a territory she had not known existed. And the next times that Rabbit met with her lover at the creek, she began to learn what pleasure was, and to feel the power in that joy. Yet forbidden love between two people who must keep their secret is full of strain.

  And there came the night when Rabbit and Matthew were lying together at the creek, when finally, she revealed to him her deepest wish: she wanted to run away from Wood Place with Leena and Eliza Two and go north to seek her father. She didn’t ask Matthew for help, as she’d assumed it was assured; thus, she was dismayed when he was silent. Her head was upon his pale chest, and she rose onto her elbow and looked at him. And Matthew told her such a thing was forbidden, for there was a law that had been passed eight years before to retrieve runaway slaves, who were called “fugitives.” Not only were owners allowed to chase their slaves into the clutches of the north, but any white man who helped a slave escape was subject to losing his property—if he didn’t possess one thousand dollars to pay the fines for assisting a runaway—and to suffer imprisonment besides.

  He stumbled these words out quickly, for he’d had his own plan to reveal: he wanted to purchase Rabbit from Samuel and set her up in a small house in Milledgeville, and visit her several times a week. He’d started to save the money for her price as well as the house. And then he searched within the pocket of his jacket—discarded beside him in his lover’s haste—and pulled out the present that he’d brought her for Christmas. A cameo brooch surrounded by pearls. He told Rabbit, he knew the brooch was not a ring, but he wanted to give her something as a promise. But Rabbit did not take the brooch. Instead, she asked him, what about her sisters—for she now considered Leena as kin, as much as Eliza Two. What would they do, while she was living in Milledgeville? And Matthew stammered on, explaining that they would have to be left on Wood Place, but he was sure that Samuel would treat them well, as he was certainly a very kind man.

  And Rabbit narrowed her eyes, looking down at the white man to whom she’d given herself. She knew that he kept slaves but had put that in the back of her mind. Every lover lies to herself, in small or large ways. Yet she had thrown away every teaching of her childhood, that as a Negro girl she should avoid or hide from white men as best she could. She’d closed her eyes and ignored the truth of Matthew’s heritage. And she was afraid again to tell him that Samuel, the man he thought was a benevolent gentleman, had caused her sister to be marked and shorn. The trust she had with Matthew flapped away, like a bird seeking shelter from the cold. Rabbit lay back on his chest and pulled him to her. She privately reasoned that she had a right to take her pleasure one last time.

  The next day, when Matthew opened the door of the guesthouse, before him stood Pompey with the basket. He offered the obsequious words of a slave, but no excuse for Rabbit’s absence. The next day and the next, Rabbit was absent again. Matthew could not inquire about her, for by then, Samuel had suggested to him that his courtship with Gloria had gone on long enough, and wasn’t it time to start planning a wedding, and Matthew had agreed. He hadn’t known how to extricate himself and keep his friendship with Samuel. And though he continued to visit the plantation every month, he could never catch a glimpse of Rabbit.

  Worse than Matthew’s romantic anguish was his ignorance: he’d thought that his offer of a soft life in a little house on a hidden street in Milledgeville had been a wonderful gif
t, like the brooch he had bought. Any other Negress would have been delighted. Where had he gone wrong?

  The Day of the Daguerreotype

  In 1839, a year before the birth of Rabbit and Eliza Two, a Frenchman with too many first names for us to list here had invented a process that permanently captured the images of humans. M. Daguerre showed the products of his fume-ridden invention, the wages of his camera obscura, in a building before learned men who thought highly of themselves, over the sea in Paris. It had been the sixth day of January. Earlier, M. Daguerre had transfixed a gentleman, M. Gaucheraud, with the capturing of a deceased spider underneath a microscope. So taken was the gentleman that he could not keep his secret and wrote about it in a local newspaper the day before the demonstration, stealing the surprise. His consternation and pleasure over this new toy mingled with his criticism of what the inventor had failed to do: “Nature in motion cannot be represented, or at least not without great difficulty, by the process in question.” The criticism was obligatory. M. Gaucheraud did not want anyone to think him biased.

  The invention crossed the sea shortly thereafter, and within years, a man traveling through Putnam County arrived in a covered wagon through the narrow, dangerously pitted portion of the main road, and used M. Daguerre’s invention to capture the members of Samuel’s family: Lady, Victor, Grace, and Gloria, along with his future son-in-law, Matthew Thatcher. And because Samuel felt so smug about finally securing a mate for his daughter, he even paid the man who took that daguerreotype to take an image of Rabbit, Eliza Two, and Leena. The three girls would pose with their arms around each other’s waists. Samuel had only wanted his Young Friend captured, but she had begged him to let the other girls be included. Usually Samuel was not so giving, but he relented. Daguerreotypes such as this were being taken throughout the south, as plantation owners chronicled their lives, their falsely idyllic arenas, the white infant charges with dark nurses dressed in calico with rings in their ears.

  The Weeping Time

  Samuel splurged in planning for his daughter’s wedding. He had sent away for the ivory silk, and in the months that it took to arrive, there was a tangled network of which he was only vaguely aware that made his request come to fruition: the skeins of thread manufactured by hungry worms in Asia, then sent to France, where the cloth was woven and then shipped to Boston, then Savannah, where Samuel had it transported to his store, and finally, to a particularly gifted slave’s lap, a woman who was owned by a planter the next town over, in Eatonton. She sewed the dress by hand, painstakingly, after Samuel drove Gloria in his carriage for three fittings. The matching lace veil had not taken that long, as it only had been made in some English housewife’s cottage. Samuel decided that his strange daughter would be married the following June.

  When Samuel invited Matthew to travel with him to a slave auction in Savannah, Matthew did not want to leave the area; he hoped that Rabbit would forgive him, and his plan would be fulfilled. However, he wanted to please Samuel, who was his only friend—once again—and Matthew agreed to travel to Savannah. Samuel was merry: he meant to enjoy himself. They took the train to the city and stayed at a fine hotel. The rooms were luxurious, with canopied beds, and the further Samuel traveled away from his plantation, the higher his strength rose. He felt like a very young man again.

  At the Savannah racetrack, the parcel for auction was huge, over four hundred pieces of slave merchandise—too much to hold the auction in the town square. Samuel paid for his four new slaves with a full bank draft. He did not want to accrue interest, and he advised Matthew to do the same. If he could not, Samuel assured his future son-in-law that with his own investments in the rail line, he could afford to loan Matthew the funds needed to purchase one lonely slave. Thinking of Rabbit, Matthew demurred. He was shocked at the roughhousing at the auction. There were much groping and intimate insults directed at the female slaves. Matthew and Samuel put several feet between themselves and the traders, who were partaking in the merry abuse, and hooting at an unusual sight: unlike the rest of the hundreds of slaves who created a high volume with their lamentations, one Negro man had grinned on the block without coaxing, even when the auctioneer had instructed a crying female to unbutton the Negro’s trousers and expose his member for all. After striking the female several times, the auctioneer further forced her to stroke the naked flesh. It came to massive life.

  The auction upset Matthew, provoking not only blushes when the buyers had shouted at the size of the Negro’s member, but a later sickness in his stomach. Matthew had never been afflicted by slave trading. That some men ruled while others did not was an old story, one he hadn’t written. Yet at the auction he had taken in the saddest scene. At the auction, a slave man, Number 319 in the catalog, had approached the white man who had purchased him and begged the man, begging him to buy Number 278, his ladylove. The slave thought he’d been successful, but the sale was bungled, and Matthew watched the man weep inconsolably as his lady was sold away separately. The rain had been unceasing.

  On their return from Savannah, Samuel expressed his disappointment that there were no little mulatta girls for sale at the auction. He’d been expecting a greater selection, as he was past tired of his current Young Friend, Leena; she was far too old for his tastes. He talked openly and casually about the cost of such little girls, and how he had used them over the years. He remarked he was fortunate to be a well-off man. As Samuel spoke, Matthew stomach was turned, understanding for the first time the purpose of the adorable cottage that sat on the left side of the plantation house. But why hadn’t Rabbit ever mentioned it? Suddenly he understood the insult—the outrage—that his offer to Rabbit had represented. When Matthew had asked Gloria who lived in the cottage, she’d told him, a princess in a tower. He had laughed as he always did at her odd phrasing. He did not love Gloria, but he had promised to marry her, the daughter of this disturbing man. And Matthew realized he was not outside this southern ugliness anymore. His sister Deborah had been right to scold him in her letters. He was firmly nestled inside the rotting carcass of the south.

  When Samuel and Matthew arrived back at Wood Place, Lady delivered tragic news: while they’d been away, Gloria had fallen ill. The doctor had come and gone, but he could not alleviate her illness. She had passed away and already had been buried.

  A Family Gathers

  During the era that Rabbit lived, white women were considered to be frail and inferior to men. However, this perception of frailty never applied to Negro women, who were expected to thrive under any difficult circumstance, including ravishment, childbirth, and backbreaking labor in the fields. Rabbit had been reared on a plantation, and like every other plantation in the south, Wood Place did not treat Negro girls and women as precious. She had borne witness to the incredible requirements for strength that had been forced upon Negresses. As Aggie was fond of saying, “Root hog or die.” And women of her kind had to dig in whatever dirt was beneath them. They had to dig and never cease. This was the reality of a Negress’s life.

  Though Rabbit grieved her separation from Matthew, she had never seen happiness allowed to flourish anyway. Not on Wood Place. The Franklins were an abased, angry group living in their knot of shabby cabins on the south side of the plantation, and though the Pinchards were wealthy, they, too, were demoralized and miserable. The Quarters-folks lived in fear that Samuel would catch a whim and sell one of their children, or that his son Victor would do the same, once his father passed away.

  Rabbit didn’t allow Matthew’s insult to distract her from her purpose: she wanted to leave Wood Place with Eliza Two and Leena, and search for their father. She didn’t know what she expected after she left the plantation, but Nick was the sun and moon and every star in the sky for her. He would show her the way. And she was afraid that if she waited any longer that Samuel would die. True, he was a monster, but his crimes could be depended upon. Once Samuel was gone, however, a new master would have to be adapted to, and her opportunity for freedom could be lost. For now,
Victor was an absence. He rarely spoke during the day, and at night, he roamed the countryside—no one knew in search of what.

  One Sunday night in July, Rabbit gathered her family around her. She was afraid, for Aggie ever had expressed her fierce need to keep her family together. Yet when Rabbit told her family that she planned to leave—and wanted to take Leena and Eliza Two with her—Aggie told her that she already knew. She’d had a nighttime vision of a little girl she’d never seen before. In the dream, the child walked up to Rabbit and Leena, reaching out her hand. Then, from the corner, Tess roused from the chair, where she’d been sitting throughout dinner. Tess declared, sure enough, she’d seen that little girl in her dreams, as well. And Eliza Two shocked everyone by chiming in, the dream had come to her as well—and she didn’t want Rabbit to be sad, but she wasn’t going to leave. She wasn’t afraid: Wood Place was her home, and not only the folks in this cabin, but those who lived in the Quarters.

  Then, Pop George stood and called the name of each woman in the room. His face was at once young and ancient. Timelessness rested there. Love rested there. A knowledge that had been brought from across the water, as he spoke to his family. He told them he would send prayers to guide Rabbit’s way, but before that, there needed to be fire.

  The Night of the Fire

  Samuel recovered quickly from the death of Gloria, if he even had mourned her at all. Yet his brief mourning was replaced by another such as he had never known before: in June, a plague struck his peaches, and dark spots covered the skins, changing the flavor to bitter.