Sapphire's Grave

by Hilda Gurley Highgate

  The woman seemed unaware of Sister’s presence, unable to hear Sister’s silent appeals.

  “Can you see me, over here?” Sister sometimes asked aloud, squatting in the room with the cornhusk mattress, staring intently through the small square window, frightening her children, who watched her wide-eyed from the front room.

  “Mama,” Lilly would venture, with tears in her eyes, clutching tightly her little brother’s hand. But Sister did not hear her, or see her children huddled together on the dirt floor.

  “Can you hear me?” Sister would ask the space outside the window.

  The woman would not respond, would only sit immobile and silent as stone, her head in her hands.

  It was during one of these attempts to speak with the woman that Sister fell backward from a stool, striking her head hard on the floor. She had been doing the laundry that she took in to eke out a subsistence for herself and her children. The vacant expression on her face had been making the children uneasy, but her hands moved methodically, squeezing warm soapy water in a large iron tub through the delicate powder-blue fabric of a baby’s blanket. The woman was in another of her somber moods, sitting with her back against a wall, her head bowed, and silent. Sister became aware that the woman was confused, that parts of her mind struggled to recall things ugly and grim, while other parts fought back with a fury, pushing and driving the thoughts from her mind as they fought with equal fury for entry. Sister was torn between her horror of the ugly memory and her need to know the particulars, the source of this woman’s torment. She needed to ask.

  She became dizzy, leaned forward and dangerously backward on her stool. The children gasped. The baby’s blanket slipped from her fingers. Sister’s head hit the ground with a pound and she was there, in the woman’s body, the woman’s dress being torn at her breast, her throat constricted as Sister tasted the woman’s tears and pleaded, “Naw. Suh. Naw, it too soon.” She was sitting on the floor of the barn, leaning backward on the woman’s elbows, her legs aching and spread wide. Two women huddled horrified in a corner, one as thin and dark as Sister, perhaps slightly older, the other matronly, the color of peanuts, with a naked yellow infant cradled by her elbow, whimpering pathetically.

  Sister felt a blow to her stomach that winded her. She looked down to discover a bloody mess between her knees, then raised her head in bewilderment to face the thick neck and reddened jowls of a white man, his face contorted and ugly. Sister blinked the woman’s eyes. The white man’s narrowed. “I’ll set you uppity wenches. I’ll teach ya yet. You will learn to obey. Do you hear? Every one of you will obey me, or I will make every black whore on this place live in hell. Now GIT nekkid, whore. ”

  The room fell silent. The infant began again to whine. The two women did not move, only stared helpless, their eyes filled with pain for the woman. Sister could not move, could not think of moving any part of the woman’s body, or of anything else but this strange, barbarous man and the hate she read in his cold blue eyes.

  He was upon her, striking like a lion upon a lamb. He tore at the hem of her dress and was in her, pounding flesh against raw and torn flesh, bleeding flesh. Sister gasped, the woman’s mouth frozen wide, unable to breathe; the pain, pounding and pounding, unbearable. Reason left her. She knew it the moment it departed. And the pounding and pounding went on, for a day and a night, she was later to swear, her life becoming an endless cadence of pain that she could not survive whole. She was keenly aware of his stench—the acrid stench of him, insulting her further as the pain became blurred and indistinct.

  He was looming over her, withdrawing himself with ridiculous care. He studied her, his face thoughtful and almost kind. What was left of Sister regarded him through the narrow slits the woman’s eyes had become.

  “I will have you. You and any other wench. I will have you all at my will.” He stood and raised his breeches. “And when she is a gal—” He jerked his head toward the women who stood motionless in their corner of the barn, hunched over the now-silent child. “I will have her too.”

  Something stirred within Sister, recalling the former days. It stood on legs that threatened to buckle. It moved toward the two women, and fell to the woman’s knees. Sister heard him laughing. It spurred her on. She crawled, barely able to see through the woman’s outraged tears, reaching at last the astonished women. With a burst of vigor, Sister leaped to the woman’s feet, wrenching the infant from the matronly woman.

  “You—” Sister began, spinning around to face the laughing man. There was a strange gurgling in her throat. The words came out in spurts, with breaths taken in between. “You. Will. Not.”

  His laughter mocked her. The thing that had stirred within Sister found its voice, shocking the women and silencing his laughter. “You! Will! Not!” It raised the child above the woman’s head. “You will not have my daughters! You will not!”

  The next time Sister awoke, she was in a strange room; strange at first, then recognizable as a room in her parents’ hut, where she had slept as a child with her seven sisters. People came, occasionally, speaking to her or feeding her gruel, or washing her hair. Loving hands braided and brushed, rubbing cottonseed oil on her legs and arms and face. Voices comforted. Faces young and old, wise and filled with understanding, hovered above hers, then disappeared, replaced by others.

  Sister slept peacefully.

  There was a bandage around her head. She raised both hands to touch a place near the nape of her neck where her hair, she determined, had been shaved. In fact, Sister realized as her fingers traced the back of her head, from the nape of her neck to a place half the distance from her crown, a wide aisle had been shaved up the center of the back of her head. Puzzled, she sat up in bed, and saw that she was wearing a faded pink-flowered nightgown with a ruffle across the boat neckline. Her mother’s “good” nightgown, given to her by a benevolent slave mistress during the latter days of chattel servitude.

  Sister remembered then, falling and striking the ground with her head, perhaps several weeks ago, and the long-running episode from which her own mind recoiled in horror.

  Had that been she, Sister, transfigured and transported to an earlier time, and another place? Or had she been dreaming, a long and awful dream? Sister began to cry, soundlessly and helplessly, her hands in her lap. For seven days, Sister had learned, she had been confined with the woman’s slaughtered child. She had despaired of ever returning to her own home, and her own time. Then, she had been released from her prison, only to find herself a stranger in a world where everyone knew her, but as someone else, at an unknown time in the rice paddies of South Carolina. Mosquitoes and gnats had tormented her as she stood in the marshy soil, her back aching, the menace of an overseer’s whip spurring her onward as she struggled to keep up with the others.

  In the mornings, and again sometimes in the evenings, she was often summoned to the edge of the woods or behind the slave houses and ordered to disrobe. The other women, probably fifteen or twenty others, Sister guessed, had avoided contact with her. They spoke frequently of her, she suspected, and rarely to her. But the woman had been a favorite of the Master and his sons; the overseers, drivers; tradesmen, neighbors; house guests, and passersthrough. The woman, it seemed, had earned a reputation as both compliant and rebellious. She likes a good beating, the men had said of her. She’ll give you a fight. The woman cursed them all, eloquently, first in her own mind, then under her breath, and finally out loud; long, loud monologues of venom and outrage earning her even more notoriety, and making the men laugh, infuriating her all the more.

  But now that she had murdered her infant, she had been reputed deranged, and violently so. Now, they were careful, approaching her two, sometimes three at a time; tying her to trees, or shackling her ankles to poles. Sister performed the woman’s motions—mental, emotional, and physical motions through which she moved mechanically. She knew, on some level, that she had lost some vital and human part of herself, but it had been by no choice of her own. She could not afford re
grets or self-pity.

  The woman had other children, Sister had discovered. This knowledge renewed the tenacity of which she had been robbed during her morbid incarceration. Sister had resolved that no one would touch the woman’s daughters—three small girls, all under ten. No one would bring her daughters to the circumstance to which she had been brought. She had acted swiftly and with finality before. She would do it again if necessary. She would see the children dead, their small skulls crushed or their bodies floating in a pond, before she allowed them to suffer as she had.

  And so weeks passed, weeks of humiliation, misery, and arduous toil. The smirks and openly disapproving stares of her peers were acceptable to Sister so long as they were not directed toward her children. The continual and offending parade of assailants, white, black, angry, impassioned, or indifferent, rolled on.

  Strange discharges, malodorous and purulent, began to stain her ragged dresses and the blanket on which she slept. At times she was feverish and suffered from headaches, fatigue, and aching joints. Round, red patches appeared on her hands and feet.

  The woman thin and dark as Sister returned to nurse her, her eyes kind and worried, hugging her comfortingly, not speaking. Sarah was her name. She held the woman through sweats and chills, dabbing at her forehead with strips of cotton, or wrapping her in blankets before a fire, while the children watched terrified, a trio of varying hues and hair textures and eye colors. Sarah smiled at them, a forced grimace of a smile, and reassured them as best she could.

  “She be awright. Yo’ mama ain’ so well right now. But she be awright. You gals go’on-a sleep, now. I be here wit’ yo’ mama. Go’on now.” And she smiled falsely at them again.

  Once, during a calm between episodes of fever, Sister had tried to ask Sarah of the woman’s identity. Sarah’s expression had become troubled, then patient as she kissed the woman’s forehead. “Git you some rest. I be here all night. Git some rest now.” And she had blown out the lamp in the musty cabin. Later, Sister had asked Sarah where they were. Sarah had looked at her strangely and patted her hand. “You’s in South Ca’lin’y, Sapphi’. Saint John’s Parish. Now git you some rest.”

  As harvest time drew near, she was sent back to the rice paddies, her odor and pallor too horrid now to escape notice. The succession of ravagers had come to a halt. The smirks and stares of the other women became more overt. The men, both Negro and white, looked away when she passed. But Sister persevered—there was nothing else she could do. There never had been.

  Soon, she was again too weak, too sick to work. Her children were taken. “Don’t let nobody hurt ’em,” Sister begged, delirious and befuddled with laudanum or whiskey. “Don’ let ’em hurt my—” her throat was hot and parched—“hurt my babies. Please don’ let ’em . . .” She knew that she was dying. But she knew also that she was dead already inside, and had been dead for what felt like years. She had lived, had heard and seen and felt and acted only to the extent that was necessary for survival and the care of her children. She had been, for most moments of her recent life, otherwise dead.

  Sarah, her eyes solemn and calm, squeezed Sapphire’s hand reassuringly. “Ain’ nobody go’ hurt yo’ babies. I swear ’fo’ God. I’ll guard ’em wit’ my very life.”

  Slowly, Sister relinquished Sapphire’s feeble grasp on life. She experienced a curious mixture of regret and relief—regret that life had dealt with Sapphire this way, and that she was of no use now to her children; relief that Sapphire would finally be free of this, her brief and miserable life, to face whatever circumstance, pleasant or ill, awaited her hereafter. For Sister had become convinced, during her internment in the barn if not before, that there was no hope in Sapphire’s life for a meaningful existence, only misery and loss; and if no hope, then certainly no kind, benevolent God in the heavens to meet her at the celebrated pearly gates. She knew that Sapphire had no fear of death—no hell, Sister thought, could torture and consume her as the hell from which she was at this moment departed. Sister supposed that she should close Sapphire’s eyes. But then she thought perhaps she should not, for this would impart to her passing an inappropriate finality. She did not know if this was the end, or the beginning of another life, perhaps more merciful than the one before. Surely, it could not be less so.

  But whatever this mystery, this death, she would face it open-eyed, her chin raised and defiant, as if issuing a challenge to death itself:

  O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

  ST. JOHN’S PARISH, SOUTH CAROLINA

  FEBRUARY, 1772

  Sapphire was buried in a hole at the edge of the woods. Few people mourned. Her children, timorous but instructed to be brave, moved like wooden soldiers toward their mother’s inglorious grave, and the thin dark woman who had been Sapphire’s only friend stared angry and appalled over their small heads as Sapphire’s body was dumped unceremoniously into the hole and covered with dirt.

  Some folks said that Sapphire’s spirit would never rest. She had challenged God and death, making of each a formidable opponent and dooming herself for an eternity. Had she gone meekly, death might have taken her to a place of quiet and calm, her ravaged soul to comfort, her spirit laid at last to tranquil rest.

  Instead, the soul met its eternal fate; but the spirit of Sapphire lived on in her daughters; three, hundreds, then thousands dispersed, bound by a collective memory of suffering and shame. Persisting against monumental antipathy, they would pass bits and pieces of their inheritance from daughter to daughter, the things that Sapphire did not carry to her vile grave: tools of endurance, a hunger for love, and a haughty, surly spirit to defend and protect them from further pain, but with dire consequences and at great expense. Sapphire would leave her daughters, also, her hugeness of heart, and a willingness to sacrifice, labor, or even kill, for that which she loved.

  And long after Sapphire was buried, and few remembered her name, she would live on, her acrid presence surviving several centuries, so pitiable yet so unpitied, a vilified image never lain to rest.

  The daughters had not cried. This was what was recalled of them, ages later, when they were dead and deeply buried, the memory of them hazy, their names unrecorded, their faces indistinct in the collective and deliberate amnesia of a people too ashamed to recall. Their words did not become wisdom. Their deeds were neither folklored nor memorialized in song. No glasses were raised in oblation, no altars erected in tribute. The three girls had not cried, and this the people could not forgive.

  Finished. Done, or so they thought. Forgotten, except to say that they had not cried.

  Their names were Ndevu. Eshe. Zoe. Collectively, their name was Life. This was what their mother had intended for them, in the days before her broken baby, in the days before she understood. They would go by other names, as would their progeny: Hagar. Sister. Sojourner. Diaspora, as they took their leave of one another. Other places, other circumstance would claim them. But they would remain just one. Many lives. Just one.

  The first one—Ndevu—the brown one, gave up. She would not live in this place. Not here. Not like this. Her sisters stared at her, but understood. The people stared, too, reproach on their faces, and in the set of their mouths as she passed. Sapphire’s daughter, as surely as she was born. The smell of whiskey and honey on her voice, she laughed as wanton women laugh when carried to the gallows of popular disapproval. I will not live as you say. I will not do as you say. She lay supine in the fields, her arms spread, awaiting their wrath. Praying for it. Surrender was her name. Triumph was her name. The tether came down on her chest, her belly. I will not do as you say. She smiled drunkenly, or perhaps insanely, doing instead what they had come to expect, and bearing the scourge they had come to enjoy. Her mouth worked silently in a tongue no one understood.

  Only her sisters heard.

  I am my mother’s daughter, and the daughter of her mother.

  With the power of her mind, she had discovered, she could cross the waters, become royalty, warrior. Zhenga.
Amira. Nzingha. But she would never become theirs. She would not live in this place. Not on their terms.

  Neither would she flee this place, as cowards flee their captors. They branded her nevertheless. The green eyes laughed, defiant. Bloodhounds sank their teeth into her flesh, and when this did not move her, they used lye to turn her back to Hades, home of the dead. Her flesh swelled, exuded pus and contagion, her back a welcome sign for Death.

  The daughter of her mother.

  No one knew what else to do with her.

  They hanged her by her apron strings. Brown, melting flesh dripped like whiskey and honey when they set it aflame. The hair long and straight as sugarcane curled as it burned. The people sniffed the air. Her spirit far away, she never flinched.

  The daughter of her mother’s mother.

  Zoe: the secret revealed. Sarah had seen it in the yellow eyes. This child would not soon die. Patient, Zoe bided her time, did as she was told. Yassuh. Yes, Ma’am. The yellow eyes were lowered so they could not read them. But Sarah saw the Evil. Zoe glanced up at her, knowing, wondering if Sarah knew, shadow of a smile dancing at the corners of her mouth, the eyes grim. They were not the eyes of a child, a girl. They were the eyes of death, the grave, and infernal places, of memory aged as soil and vengeful as the sea. They were eyes that held the knowledge of death, and therefore of life.

  When they came to her at night, she turned the burning yellow gaze of death upon them.

  They never came to her at night again.

  Zoe had no children.

  They would kill her if they could not subdue her, make hell of her flesh if she laughed. She had seen this, the dark one, Eshe, daughter of her mother, sister of Ndevu. Disconnected from Godness, she lacked her grandmother’s power. She lacked Zoe’s knowing superiority, Ndevu’s resolve. She learned to adapt. The daughter of her mother. She lay down, but only when directed to—no antics in the field; and she did not smile. She flinched when they raised their fists. She cried only when she was alone, when she was sure that no one heard.