by Lucy Corin
Black Caesar appreciated the desire to make people feel dumb, but ostentatious pride naturally struck him as infantile and rang of unexamined hypocrisy. His own headquarters consisted of a pack of palm-thatched huts and a pack of roaming dogs to guard them. Grubby, ragged, mangy, ugly, low and brutal, rotten, and, Henri thought, comfortable, appropriate, and kind of true. Although his enterprise was vastly lucrative, Caesar stashed his loot on scattered coastal islands and maintained a haggard appearance. It was Gasparilla’s pretenses and snottiness that ticked him off. Fancy-pants Officer José, who’d felt snubbed by the royal court back in his Navy days and turned against everything Spanish. Kinda slimy. Reminded Caesar of a quick lizard with a gaudy multicolored tail. Dressed up, sure, but a lizard’s a snake with legs or it’s a mini crocodile, and there it is and that’s that. It was the perfume, how José liked to pretend he was an aristocratic man, like he thought it was something to be an aristocratic man.
After a while the part about the captive Spanish ladies really started to piss Caesar off. He’d been to dinner at José’s and seen the servants fanning and primping the ladies in preparation for Gasparilla’s bedtime sessions, and he really thought this would be more in line with his own life, that of all pirates he should be stringing up royal ladies, that Gaspar had unwittingly stumbled into a practice that actually belonged to him, if only for the sake of something like metaphoric justice. So one night he got pretty drunk and his crew got pretty drunk too, and you know how it goes. Caesar started bitching about Gasparilla and what a dandy he was, and how he had these ladies chained up in back and they all went over to Gasparilla’s mansion and snuffed out some guards, quiet as Bruce Lee, and stole away, giggling, dragging behind them the youngest most tender of the ladies in Captiva. Slinking dogs that they were. Sly foxes in a henhouse. Kidnapping the kidnapped ladies.
Of course when you’re a pirate you can’t expect to just get away with something like that, and the very next day Black Caesar and his crew abandoned their dumpy camp and moved south. Some say Gasparilla was there, sword in hand, actually driving them out, chasing away the little scavenger ship with his big billowing one, if you can imagine them, zipping through the coastal waters in their respective ships like that.
Some nights while his crew snoozed, dead to the world in the ship’s rocking belly, Henri stood on his deck, rising and falling with the choppy swells. He listened through the layers of sounds that carried no human voices in them: waves, wind, great heaving sails, rope tails coiling and uncoiling from masts and booms, the hollow aching noises of a wooden ship in night waters. You have to remember the atrocities perpetrated against the slaves. Colonists trained their imaginations to run in a single inventive direction, they competed with one another, they proved their ingenuity by the tortures and complex deaths they could produce. Slaves were whipped more regularly than they were fed, and of course there were the irons on the hands and feet, the iron collars, the blocks of wood to drag wherever they went, the tin-plate masks strapped over faces to prevent the eating of sugarcane. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and sex organs. Whipping was interrupted in order to dress wounds with salt, pepper, citron, hot ashes. Colonists were known to leap upon slaves and sink their teeth into their flesh. Which is different than simply biting.
They poured boiling wax on arms and hands and shoulders, emptied boiling cane sugar over heads, roasted slaves alive on slow fires, buried them up to the neck and smeared their faces with sugar and fastened them near the nests of ants or wasps, made them eat excrement and drink urine, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match.
I don’t know what Henri did about his memory. What do you do with a history like that? I don’t know what he thought about in the night, rising and falling on the deck of his ship. Stars like electrified insects. Waves beating the hull, wind whipping sails.
The revolution that rumbled and then raged in Haiti was real, no kidding, with real lives and real humans. It happened and happens. But actually picturing it, actually trying to take it into your mind—because of the atrocity—I mean there’s no way. You can’t take it in. It’s uncontainable. It’s too much.
You have to abstract it. You have to see its ridiculousness. Like you go into shock after too much pain, you’re over a cliff, you’re dead to it, you’re just behaving, your jaws are still snapping, but the rest of you is gone—
They say that after the duel with Gasparilla, Black Caesar settled around where I lived, maybe fifteen minutes away, if you take 1-95. Fancy-pants show-off and the grungy monster. In Tampa, they have a whole festival about José Gasparilla to this very day. Perhaps it’s because Caesar was a transient, as we were transient, my whole town except for the Seminoles, or perhaps it’s because they say he looked like a monster, but, as I mentioned, I lived right near where Caesar retired and I never heard of him the whole time I lived there. He’d disappeared into the fog of history, which exists, I suspect, somewhere under the grid of pavement that seems to float like an enormous raft over the muck and ruin of the Everglades.
There’s an Art Nouveau sculpture called La Nature that I think about when I think of buried treasure. It’s sort of the bust of a woman, but it actually includes her bust and continues to her waist. One of those smoothed over, nymphy waifs all those art nouveau guys liked to make. Shiny-shiny silver. She’s life-sized; it’s easy to imagine putting an arm around her shoulder, and when I look at her I can tell that if I could get up close and look her right in her face, right at her closed eyes, which are silver and so shiny, I would see my face reflected on her lids, convex and buglike, my whole head in her oval eyes.
She’s behind glass, though, and set eye-level to a man. It’s as if she’s asleep standing up, or maybe peacefully dead, molded of this solid-looking, liquid-looking silver, or encased in it, seamlessly. Think of dipping baby shoes in bronze—she’s been dipped in silver. Like Venus, she has no arms, but by this time, in 1900, it’s quite on purpose; she never had any arms. Her hair is long, gilt, swirling around her shoulders down to her waist. It encircles her waist and morphs into a corkscrew shape at her trunk. She’s an elaborate stopper for an enormous bottle.
She wears a golden crown, and, like a budding horn in the center of her forehead, a contraption emerges from it. It’s a bracketlike structure, with four knobs that could, it seems, screw in to hold a miniature head, as if gravity alone would not hold one there, as if holding one would require a vice. The punchline is it’s an eggcup, rising from the center of her forehead, and there’s a smooth wooden egg in the eggcup. But you can imagine, if you screwed the screws in, they’d inch right into the wood.
In this depiction, Nature is ostentatious and the egg she holds is wooden.
I am astounded, for one thing, by how identically all the materials are treated. How the wood and the metals end up with the same textural quality—all smoother than life, all idealized, and idealized identically. Nature is made generic, poreless. It’s been civilized. How the egg she holds is both natural and lifeless. How immaculate and cleaned it is, how sterilized. As if the eggs in her womb are wooden, as if they’re beads. Of course, this woman is truncated. She has no womb.
Woman as eggcup. She’s so big she could be a one-man table for him. Can’t you see the guy sitting at her, with his spoon, eating the soft egg from her head? How close he comes to spooning out her brain?
Our minds are buried treasure.
I think about how Black Caesar breaks out of his box, his life in bondage, goes off hacking through bodies, seeking his fortune, gathering treasure from those who enslaved him. Then he buries the treasure and moves along his tangled trail. Egyptians order the treasure from a menu, have it custom-made by slaves, and then they bury themselves along with it. What can I make of this? Treasure is always stolen, for one thing. And it’s buried, for another.
Poor La Nature. She’s a couple of utensils. Top and bottom, an unwieldy eggcup and a too-big bottle stopper. She’s awkward and useless. She’s a composite woman from a
n imagination that is not mine. I think of Henri with his giant flashing saw, the unwieldy form of the swords and cudgels to come. Mirrors can be tools and they can be weapons. Look at yourself. I imagine him looking at his garish face in the heaving saw. I think of the anonymous men across the saw from him, first one and then another, then many at once.
Christine Falling
This girl, Christine Falling, with a name like that, like snowflakes, a sparkling, dangling name like the sound of a ping on a shiny triangle in music class for children—the name struck me because of my friend Chris and how her awful mother called her Christine, so I’d never thought of the name as anything except awful, but what a lovely name when you put it like that: Christine Falling, sounding like small bells, sweet and surprising, like dew on grass, like ribbons clipped from a kite.
Except this girl, Christine Falling, in real life, what a hunk of wax. In her picture in the paper she looked like a child and then look again and she looked forty. Plus, she was retarded, or close to it.
She could have been one of those mainstreamed kids in the seventies. I remember those kids from all through elementary school. This brother and sister, I remember. John and Mary Crumb, no lie. They might have been twins, or they might have been a couple years apart and the school decided what the hell, keep them together, what’s the difference. That kid John a lot of the time had his socks on upside down so the heel stuck out by the laces and I’d keep checking, under the desks. It made my stomach quake that he could have his socks on upside down all day and not even feel it.
I mean they didn’t tell you what to do with these kids, so it just seemed ridiculous, these funny-looking kids who refused to blow their noses or comb their hair and didn’t come in from the playground when they were called, so everyone had to wait around in lines while the teacher went off to find them, drag them back from the tunnels or out where the baseball field turned into dandelions. If you noticed the kid was weird it was like you were crazy. Teachers got angry at you for being annoyed, when anyone could see it was John and Mary Crumb who were fucking up all the time.
Mary Crumb was epileptic. When she seized, she lay on her side on the carpet and her hands stretched out like umbrellas. I remember her glasses sliding, so the lenses didn’t circle her eyeballs, they circled her nose and part of her cheek. Christine Falling was epileptic, too. Pale and fat, and you could tell she had acne even though newspaper pictures are so imprecise.
In middle school, there was a retarded girl called Angela who was on my bus route. Her stop was right at the end of her driveway and every day we could see her mother shoving her out the bright green door, pushing her backpack at her and Angela screaming and flinging her arms around. For a while I’d see just the mother’s hands slipping in and out from behind the door, like an octopus from behind a rock, trying to push the last bits of Angela outside the door so she could get it closed. Then, when she did finally, she gave the door an extra pull from the inside so I could almost hear, from way away in my seat on the bus as I leaned over my French horn to see out the window in the noise and ruckus of the children, how the door huffed and then clicked into place. Angela put her face up against it and moaned, and I could see she was moaning because of the way she put herself against the door, with that bright green color standing out sharp against her, making Angela look no more formed than a mound of dry leaves. There was a window next to the door and Angela’s mother cranked it open and leaned out and yelled at her in Spanish.
By this time, the bus was done screeching and fully stopped at the stop, and our bus driver shoved the door-lever so the door folded open, and leaned there, sighing dramatically at the wait. Our bus driver bet a lot of money on the Dolphins and the Dolphins lost big at crucial times that year. Everything was a big deal for her. She had the weight of the world, or acted like it. Her arm trembled a little, holding the door crank, and things got slower for those moments, riveting me. I could see something going on in the mound of dry leaves. A door was closed to her face, but another was open behind her back, a door she could climb into that would take her rumbling away from the den with the octopus. But she wouldn’t even look at the folded door. Still, I could see it in her mind, gaping, a bright hole in her mind, a double of the one behind her head. It could take her to something, or away, if she could only turn from that one door to the other.
Boys emptied their notebook paper cones of spit out the windows. Wads of paper bounced off the backs of the green vinyl seats. A small girl with her hair in a double-beaded rubber band pulled bits of mustard-colored foam from a split seam in her seat and sprinkled it in the aisle like breadcrumbs.
At some point, something broke in Angela. Her back couldn’t hold her face against the door in just that posture, or her mother said one particular Spanish thing that got to her; something broke in her and Angela wrenched herself from the door and ran with heavy feet and her backpack lifting and slamming on her back. She ran stamping down the walkway from her rectangular house and down the center of the driveway. She ran past their patch of front yard. In its center was a giant hand-shaped cactus that had tipped over. It’d been tipped over for a long time, you could tell, because someone’d mowed around it and grass reached through its fingers. Angela put her hands to the sides of her head so her elbows were like blinders as she ran past the fallen cactus. It looked like she was going to run right onto the bus, like the bus driver was going to have to sit back up quick or get run into.
She had everyone almost convinced, her mother at one door, the driver at the other, and me. Leaning from her window, Angela’s mother looked, for that moment, hopeful. The driver braced herself for impact.
I looked at Angela’s face, scrunched there between her elbows. I tried to read what she was thinking. Because maybe for a while during the run she was convinced herself. Maybe she was trying to get up enough speed that she’d have to run right up into the bus, that she’d be going so fast there’d be no way to change her mind, no going back. But her face seemed so empty, her expressions like masks with nothing behind them. She could look like she was thinking and not be thinking, or she could look like she wasn’t thinking and actually have something going on. I know not everyone on the bus got as wrapped up in Angela’s daily traumatic approach as I did, but it seemed to me that every day at this point there’d come a collectively held breath, with Angela hunched and her face wobbling with the force of her pounding legs. She’d get close, sometimes. But then, as if an enormous wind changed on her, like she was caught in an invisible current, she’d drop her hands to her sides and just veer. The bus was facing right and she’d turn left and run on down the sidewalk.
In fact, most of the kids didn’t pay attention at all after the first few times, and Angela was no more than a constant pickle for my bus driver, who could not for her life make peace with haying to stop every day and go through this. I watched her, though, as carefully as I could, this slack-faced, frumpy girl. I’d try to do it surreptitiously. I’d try to see around my horn, and between the bodies of kids, and out the back window. Mostly I imagined her running and running until the end of the block, then turning and running more. Sometimes I could see her mother coming out of the house and running after her. She’d yell “Angela, Angela!” but she wasn’t angry anymore.
Angela’s mother didn’t have a car and the next step, every day, was that she dragged Angela home and sent her off to school on a red bicycle.
It’s confusing: why would Angela go to school on a bicycle but not on the bus? Something about bicycles, I imagine. So why not just let her go on the bike? Why try to get her on the bus every day? For one thing, I know it must have been a dangerous bike ride, given the kinds of roads and the traffic. But a lot of it I still think has to do with people being stubborn. Retarded people are notoriously stubborn. But in a lot of ways most people are retarded. It might have just seemed like Angela ought to be able to ride the damn bus, and the dumb but earnest counselor, the bedraggled special ed teacher, and Angela’s worn-out mom just de
cided and put their mule heads together and that was that. Angela ought to ride the goddamned bus.
Once during fifth period I was on my way back from somewhere with a pink slip, and as I walked along the breezeway past the locker rooms, there was Angela. She’d put her back against the wall of the building and was standing as if no one could see her. You know how on TV shows cops sneak around corners and suck in their stomachs and hold their gun up, flat against the wall. I found her standing like that. Without the gun, but with her hand up there, empty and kind of crumpled, and her face turned to the side. The cinderblock wall of the gym was painted pale yellow, and she stood on the blacktop in her red-and-white gym outfit. In the distance, the athletic fields looked like another planet, barren, with white sand and chain-link, the asphalt track swooping like Saturn’s rings, the stark sloping wall-ball walls like the abandoned foundations of enormous buildings, the whole place vacant under tall lights that were as still and shimmering as insects in the bald sun.
I stepped out from the breezeway into the blacktop lot. I said, “Angela, what are you doing?” but she didn’t hear me. She could only hear a little, even with her giant hearing aid. She was a black girl, wearing a hearing aid made to match a white person’s skin. It looked like a cocoon. So I walked right over to her and I could see she’d been crying. She breathed hard from it. When she saw me, she kept standing there, with her head turned and her hand up, and she closed her eyes. I touched her shoulder and said, “Angela, you have to go to class.”
“You’re my best friend,” Angela said. I don’t know if she’d even sneaked a look at me, or thought to. I don’t know if she knew me from any other girl in school.
“You have to go to class,” I said.
“I can’t find my bike,” she said. “I’m running away.” I took a step back, and although she hadn’t moved, no longer did she look like a homicide detective in stealthy pursuit. Now she looked like she was running, but frozen in midstep. You know how cartoon characters crash through brick walls and leave their outlines, or how they fall from the sky through the roof of a building and then through each of the floors below and leave their outline in each floor as they fall, like one crime scene after another. Like that.
