As today is Sunday I held no formal sessions with Odessa. But, in order to further cultivate the rapport thus far achieved, I read and interpreted for her selected Bible verses. We were in our habitual place under the elm tree and I must admit that the laziness of the hot Sunday afternoon threatened, at times, to overcome me (as Hughes had warned it would. As a consequence he was loath to give me the key to the cellar. He felt my vigilance would be impaired by the heat. I replied that, in as much as the darky would remain chained as usual, there was no danger involved in such a venture—unless, of course, there was some question about the actions of his own darkies. He was stung by the retort as I meant him to be, but he did surrender the keys. It has really become quite tedious to plow the same ground with Hughes each time I want to do something with Odessa that he considers out of the ordinary. I shall make it my business to obtain another key to the cellar and to the chain with which she is bound to the tree—at my suggestion, this is the only one that in her quieted state she now wears. It is not to my liking to be required to request permission each time I wish to talk with the gal).
My drowsiness was compounded, I finally realized, by the monotonous melody she hummed. I have grown, it appears, so accustomed to these tunes that they seem like a natural part of the setting, like the clucking of the hens or the lowing of the cattle. Thinking to trap her into an admission of inattention, I asked her to repeat the lessons I had just imparted. She did so and I was pleased to find her so responsive. However, the humming became so annoying that I was forced to ask her to cease. She looked up at me briefly and though I had not threatened her, I believe she was mindful of previous punishments and of the fact that it is only through my influence that she is able to escape from her dark hole for these brief periods. She assured me it wasn’t “no good-timing song” it was about “the righteousness and heaven.”
I asked her to sing it and I set it down here as I remember and understand it:
Gonna march away in the gold band
In the army by ’n by,
Gonna march away in the gold band
In the army by ’n by.
Sinner, what you going do that day?
Sinner, what you going do that day?
When the fire arolling behind you
In the army by ’n by?
It is, of course, only a quaint piece of doggerel which the darkies cunningly adapt from the scraps of Scripture they are taught. Nevertheless, the tune was quite charming when sung; the words seemed to put new life into an otherwise annoying melody and I was quite pleased that she had shared it with me. We were both quiet for several moments after she had done. The heat was, by this time, an enervating influence upon me. She, too, seemed to be spent by that brief animation. After a few moments, I closed the Bible, prayed briefly for the deliverance of her soul, and would have returned her to the cellar. But, she spoke.
“They caught ev—” she said suddenly, turning to me.
Instantly I recognized in those few syllables the beginning of the question she had started to ask me the other day. “Some nigras did get away,” I charged. “And you know where they are!” This was a bit impetuous of me, but to have confirmed what I have suspected all along made me incautious. The blank sullen look immediately returned to her face, but I count that as nothing. She will be brought to give up this information!**
Later:
Hughes says there is talk of a “maroon” settlement, an encampment of runaway slaves, somewhere in the vicinity. There have been signs of marauding about some of the farms and plantations farther out from town. In the latest incident, several blacks (the wife of the farmer could not give an accurate count) stole into a small farm about fifteen miles southeast of here, took provisions and the farm animals, and seriously wounded the farmer when he tried to protect his property. Fortunately, the wife was hidden during the raid and thus escaped injury. Hughes was inclined to treat this as an isolated incident—claiming that the other cases had happened so long ago that they had become greatly exaggerated in the telling—and thus dismiss the maroon theory as merely a fearful figment in the imagination of the larger slave holders. He put down the missing provisions and the occasional loss of livestock to the thieving of the planters’ own darkies. I am aware, as I told him, that an unsupervised darky will steal anything which is not nailed down, yet, in light of Odessa’s talk of a place without whites and her concern about “catching”—talk which I repeated—I cannot dismiss the theory of an encampment of some sort so easily. It is, of course, pure conjecture, but not, I believe, groundless to say, as I did to Hughes, that perhaps the unaccounted-for darkies had joined the maroons—which would certainly be one place without whites. And it’s obvious the darkies from the coffle were making for somewhere when they were apprehended. Hughes was much impressed with my reasoning and invited me to join the posse which leaves at dawn tomorrow in search of the renegades. I readily accepted, for, even knowing the imaginative flights to which the darky’s mind is prone, I put much faith in this information precisely because it was given inadvertently. What information Hughes and the prosecutor were able to obtain from the others—and from the darky herself regarding the uprising—is as nothing compared to this plum.**
Dessa had come to look forward to the talks with the white man; they made a break in the monotony of her days. She had slept a great deal when she first came to the farm, surrendering in the deep quiet of the cellar to the exhaustion she had held so long at bay. But, once she was rested, misery had come upon her in shuddering waves she hoped would kill her; and the dreams. She had paced restlessly, the chain that held her to the stake in the middle of the dirt floor clanking behind her. Sometimes she lay listlessly on the pallet or sat against the wall behind the dull sunlight that entered through the tiny window. Always, whether her eyes were open or closed, Kaine walked with her, or mammy. Jeeter tugged at her head-rag or Carrie Mae frowned her down about some little foolishness. Aunt Lefonia, Martha—They sat with her in the cellar. She grieved in this presence as she had not done since their loss.
Often she saw Leo, his bald head shining in the moonlight, his face a bloody mess, and felt his body heavy and supine where it had rolled against her knee. Her hands moved ineffectually above the gapping hole in his chest. Big Nathan whispered eerily, urgently, above her, “Help me get his jacket off. Help me!” Leo’s skin was still warm, the flesh flaccid—She cringed away from that memory, that ghostly vision. They hadn’t killed Leo; one of the white men had done that. And Leo—The white men would think Leo was Nathan, if they couldn’t see his face. Nathan had been ferocious in battle but he could not look into Leo’s dead face. He had raised the rock above his head and closed his eyes as it descended. She couldn’t forget this. They had paid so much, so much for it all to end in this hole. Talking with the white man kept her, for those brief periods, from counting and recounting the cost.
Jemina said he was making some writing, a book, about the fight on the coffle. The big, light-skinned woman came to see her almost every night, often bringing some special fixings from the white folks’ supper table that she passed to Dessa through the bars of the cellar window. At first, in her misery, Dessa hadn’t understood why the house servant would take such risks for her, or even wondered why. She had merely accepted dumbly whatever the woman offered. Jemina’s kindness had eventually penetrated her despair and, finally, Dessa had asked why.
“Why?” Jemina chuckled softly. “Why, honey, you’s the ‘debil woman.’” Hurriedly, she told how the people in the neighborhood had coined the name from the slave trader Wilson’s description of the uprising. It expressed their derision of slave dealers, whose only god was money, and their delight that a “devil” had been the agency of one’s undoing. Dessa had not liked the idea of such notoriety, but she was pleased to know that others knew of that daring, that brief moment of exultation in the clearing, when all had stood free, by their own doing, of beads and chains.
She was grateful for the brief companionship of the other woman for no one e
lse came near her. Now and then she did hear a scrap of song or caught a word from a raised voice that might have been meant for her to hear. Often when she sat with the white man she saw one of the men or women going about some errand in the yard. Once, two wide-eyed, bare-bellied children had appeared suddenly behind the white man’s shoulder. One had smiled quickly, tentatively, at her, then they had scampered away as silently as they had come. The white man never knew they were there. Twice a day, Jemina brought her meals. If her master had unlocked the door, Jemina set down the tray without a word. More and more often now, Beaumont, Jemina’s husband, unlocked the door.
“Masa say he got better things to do than wait on some darky,” Jemina had chuckled the first time Beaumont guarded the door. “Go on, look.” She gestured toward the stairway. Dessa, her chain clanking, walked to the bottom step and looked up through the doorway. Beaumont, his foreshortened figure framed by the light, his face shadowed by a hat, cradled a rifle in his arms. He wiggled the fingers of one hand at her; his teeth flashed whitely and were gone. Jemina took up Dessa’s slop jar and turned with a nod and brief smile and she, too, was gone. Dessa understood; even with Beaumont above, it would not do to tarry.
At night, Jemina hunkered down beside the window for a few moments’ whispered conversation, meaningless words of encouragement that Dessa appreciated nonetheless. Sometimes Jemina brought news that she had overheard in the conversation of her white folks. That was how Dessa knew the white man had studied what the court said about the fight. She had no idea what a “court” was; she had never been more than five miles from where she was born before being sold, nor seen more than three or four white people together, except at a distance. She had no words to describe much of what she had experienced, or what those experiences had forced her to see. She understood “court” as white folks for trying to figure out if everyone on the coffle had been caught. She wanted to know this herself, so she watched and listened.
The white man was little, hardly taller than herself, she thought, but he kept a careful distance between them, even outside under the tree, sitting above and behind her, his chair tilted back on its hind legs, its back against the tree. He would lean forward long enough to wave her to a spot several feet from him, using the vinegar-soaked handkerchief she knew was meant to protect him from her scent. She no longer smelled—Jemina now brought her water to wash in—and it shamed and angered her that he still thought she did. Always above her, behind her if she turned her head, she heard tapping, in the silence between his questions, his finger flicking proudly against the gold chain he wore at his waistcoat.
She couldn’t always follow the white man’s questions; often he seemed to put a lot of unnecessary words between his “why” and what he wanted to know. And just as she had puzzled out what that was, he would go on to the next question. “Who had the file?” he would ask, and how could she answer that? There had been no file. Nathan had knocked out the trader where he slept and taken the keys to the chains from the saddlebags the trader used as a pillow. So, having no answers, she gave none, though she had listened carefully at first: Maybe this white man would tell her something she didn’t know. But it was soon apparent to her that the white man did not expect her to answer. She had kept a careful expression on her face, now and then cutting her eyes at him to see if he required some response; but, despite her best efforts, her attention wandered. Once she had looked up and seen his face contorted with the violence of some unexpressed feeling. She had shrunk from him, her chains clanking about her, and he had hit her in the face. She had not taken the full force of the blow; she had been warned by that one startling glance. Her nose had bled some and she now kept her face vacant (better to appear stupid than sassy); but her mind continued to roam.
Had Master looked at Kaine like this white man looked at her? Why? White folks didn’t need a why; they was: his voice, quiet and mocking, pulsing like a light through the darkness inside her. “Kaine—” She didn’t know she had spoken aloud until she became aware of a voice in the stillness and knew it in the next instance as her own. How hoarse and raspy it sounded. She had not spoken above a whisper, except in muttered response to some white man’s questions, in weeks. Caught in her own flow, she listened and continued, seeing as she spoke the power of Master as absolute and evil.
Terrell Vaugham, by virtue of his marriage to Mary Lenore Reeves, owned three farms, the large Home Farm and two smaller outlying properties, and a house in Charleston. Dessa didn’t know how many people he owned. Somebody was always being born. Two or three times, a relative or family friend had died and left someone to one of the Reeveses, as Martha had been inherited by Young Mistress when an elderly cousin died. Master Vaugham had brought no slaves to the marriage (not even a manservant, Childer, scandalized, had reported), as Old Mistress had brought mammy, the dairy maid, and Lefonia, the personal one. All the children were separated early from their mothers and raised on the Home Farm under the care of Mamma Hattie and a couple of older or younger women—depending on who was just up from childbed or otherwise ailing. When the children were old enough to work, usually around six or seven, they were parceled out among the farms and the town house to fetch and carry, as Dessa had been put with her mother in the dairy. Often they were hired out to local farms or businesses or apprenticed to a craftsman on the Home Farm—as mammy had feared that Dessa would be apprenticed in the dairy. Carrie Mae, Dessa’s older sister, already worked there; the only reason they would need three women in the dairy was that one was going to be sold. But Dessa, like many others, found a permanent place on one of the farms.
If they lived, they lived long. But the toll of those who did not, who died or were permanently debilitated by the annual fevers, by one or another of the ailments that walked through the Quarters with agonizing regularity, from punishments or their aftereffects, left a gaping need for more and more hands to plant, to reap, to make, to clean, to feed. Or, you were sold away. Increasingly, they were sold away. Even in dreams that threat had haunted her.
Master Vaugham had improved their working conditions. They were never in the fields before sunup and seldom there much after sundown. They were given an hour-and-a-half break at noon, nursing mothers two. Roofs were repaired, weevily meal replaced. But they all knew, without, it seemed to her, ever having discussed it among themselves, that as soon as they learned some craft or task, they were liable to be sold. They were bred for market, like the cows mammy milked, the chickens that she fed. Dessa had not admitted this to herself, even under Kaine’s prodding. She saw the past as she talked, not as she had lived it but as she had come to understand it. White men existed because they did; Master had smashed the banjo because that was the way he was, able to do what he felt like doing. And a nigger could, too. This was what Kaine’s act said to her. He had done; he was. She had done also, had as good as killed Master, for wasn’t her own punishment worse than death? She had lost Kaine, become a self she scarcely knew, lost to family, to friends. So she talked. She was reconciled to nothing, but the dreams or haunts that had crowded about her in the cellar now walked the sunlit air and allowed her peace at night.
Memory stopped the day Emmalina met her as she had come out of the fields. Dessa came back to that moment again and again, recognizing it as dead, knowing there was no way to change it, arriving at it from various directions, refusing to move beyond it. Out there was nightmare, Kaine’s body, cold and clammy beneath her hands, Master laughing in her face, the horror that scarred her inner thighs, snaking around her lower abdomen and hips in ropy keloids that gleamed with patent-leather smoothness. Once the white man’s questioning had driven her into that desert and Young Mistress had risen from the waste, clothes torn, hair screaming, red-faced, red-mouthed. The four red welts in the suddenly pallid face, the white spot where her thumb had pressed at the base of the red neck filled Dessa with a terror and glee so intense they were almost physical. Frightened at her own response, she was almost ashamed—not of the deed. No. Never that, but sur
ely it was wrong to delight so deeply in anyone else’s pain. She had seen the blood and bits of pink flesh beneath her own fingernails, felt again the loose skin of Young Mistress’s neck. And clamped her mouth shut, clanked her arms across her chest. She should have killed the white woman; they would have killed her then. It would all have been over; none of this would have begun.
She didn’t know where “this” had begun. There was no set moment when she knew that the negro driver the white men called Nate was paying attention to her or that the young mulatto boy who often walked the chain in front of her was being kind. Gradually she had realized that she never stumbled when the mulatto walked in front of her, that there was always something extra on her plate—a bit of home-fry when everyone else had only grits, a little molasses for her bread. She expected that one or both of them would come fumbling at her in the dark. The men and women were bound together at night; and, while it was more common for the white guards to take one of the women, the chains were no real barrier to a determined couple. They were encouraged to it. Pregnancy was proof of a woman’s breeding capacity; and the boy was often chained with her at night. But neither man touched her.
Cully, the mulatto, talked to her about the stars when they happened to lie next to each other at night. She knew the drinking gourd, the North Star in its handle. He showed her a cluster he called Jack the Rabbit, put there, so he said, because of a low trick Rabbit had played on Brother Bear. Often he touched her stomach and marveled that the baby moved. This was all that she remembered of those nights. For at first she had paid him no attention. He talked just like a white man; except for his nappy yellow hair, he looked just like a white man. Later, he reminded her of Jeeter, her only living brother, who had been sold away. The big, bald-head driver, Nathan, had been with the trader the day she was bought. It shamed her somehow to know he had seen her so low and she was glad they could none of them hold a real conversation. The coffle walked twenty miles a day, and even around the campfire, talk among them was discouraged. But Dessa knew herself to be enveloped in caring. The pain and tiredness of her body numbed her mind; she was content to leave it that way. Even when the others spoke around the campfire, during the days of their freedom, about their trials under slavery, Dessa was silent. Their telling awoke no echoes in her mind. That part of the past lay sealed in the scars between her thighs.
Dessa Rose Page 5
