Sapphire's Grave

by Hilda Gurley Highgate

  Realization arrived disheveled, hurried, and unfashionably late: Prince did not intend to claim this child. Her jaw lowered itself slowly, her mouth opened in a horrified O.

  Prince did not believe that he had spawned this child.

  Prince believed her a liar and a cheat.

  She watched his departing back, dumbfounded. Suddenly, she dropped her candy and ran after him, intending to take an authoritarian tone—this worked sometimes with Prince—and scold him into repentance.

  “How you know it ain’ yours!” she cried, all attempts at dignity and indignation lost as she began to wring her hands, something she had never done, in horror and frustration. “How you know? How you know you ain’—how you know we ain’—” she sputtered.

  “Queen Marie,” he said, his voice patiently condescending, as if talking to a stupid child. “I keeps up wit’ yo’ mont’ly. I knows yo’ cycle. I ain’ never touch you when you was . . . dat way.”

  Queen Marie stared at Prince. Cycle? She had no idea what this meant. She stood silent, puzzled and ashamed of not knowing this thing that she should have known. And as Prince ambled down the path that led from the store to the road, hot tears began to burn a path down Queen Marie’s face.

  For weeks thereafter, she sat alone in her room above the barroom. Sometimes she plotted ways to win back her Prince. She even toured the barrooms in three counties searching for him, prepared with well-rehearsed words of wit or charm or sore contrition. At times she was filled with dread of her life without Prince, now looming ahead of her, a drawn-out and unpleasant nightmare with no hope of awakening, a dark drama without the light of resolution at its end; for Prince had been both her reason for living and her life’s only goal. Without him, her life was aimless and morose.

  She also thought of life, for the first time since she had shared her callow philosophical musings with Dottie—those innocent, life-ago ruminations with Dottie.

  She reconciled with her mother, finally, tearfully; and in her own bedroom, kept exactly as she had left it, Queen Marie found her writings from that time, untrained but promising, the germinating talent of a child soon to be thrust into a kind of infantile adulthood. And for the first time, she grieved for lost possibilities, lost newness and freedom and power—the power of Queen Marie’s own mind, which had been known to take her to heights of adventure and enlightenment, weaving stories of complexity and fascination that had made Dottie shiver, her teachers gush, and her mother hug her with satisfaction and pride.

  She could have been somebody.

  Yet, she still loved Prince, loved him fiercely and unconditionally, and it was hard to regret the years she had spent with him, the sweetest days of her existence. She knew in her heart that given the same options, even knowing the outcome, she would spend those days with him again—every one of them. Some part of her would always live in those days, with her Prince.

  Queen Marie kept working at the Feels Good Inn, harder now that she had a purpose. Her insecure future, her brazen past, the need for rectifying things—these matters concerned her now. In September she had a girl—a girl with skin the color of caramel and Prince’s soulful eyes, or perhaps Prince Junior’s, or perhaps it did not matter. There was business to take care of—Queen Marie’s business and that of her baby, Vyda Rose, named after Queen Marie’s great-great-grandma who had once held off a handful of British soldiers with a musket. What difference did it make who the father was? Vyda Rose had a pedigree to rival even that of the finest white gentry in the state of North Carolina. Why, her grandma was a successful businesswoman. She had come from a bloodline of heroines.

  Lots of people came around the Feels Good Inn these days, to see this girl child of uncertain parentage. Prince, it was reported, was not claiming the child. Of course, no one spoke of this around Queen Marie, as in years to come, no one was to speak of it within earshot of Vyda Rose. This inviolable silence was forged to a wrought-iron rule, not entirely out of kindness and tact, but out of fear as well: Queen Marie had become fiercely maternal—it was her job to protect her child and, for her child’s sake, her own reputation as well. And although it was rumored that she had messed around with Prince Junior, it was speculated as well that Sister had brought an abrupt end to this, and advised that the townsfolk avoid the subject. And so folks regarded the child with the sorrowful eyes, and looked away without comment.

  When she saved enough money, Queen Marie bought an inexpensive headstone and secured a plot at the cemetery adjacent to Bull Swamp. She fabricated a somewhat vague but intriguing story of an itinerant father for Vyda Rose. And every year on the anniversary of his purported death, she took Vyda Rose to visit her father’s grave. The trustees at Bull Swamp each raised an eyebrow at the solemnly marked but apparently empty grave. But they said nothing. Queen Marie had paid for her plot. She could sleep in it or fill it with pig slop, for all they cared.

  During these annual treks to the graveyard, Vyda Rose drew from Queen Marie whatever details of her father’s life and death she could. The remaining details she filled in herself. Aside from this, he remained, for the most part, unmentioned, shrouded in a mystery that Queen Marie and Vyda Rose were happy to maintain, each comforted by her own privately invented image of a man whom neither had known.

  Queen Marie had intended to devote herself to the raising of her child. But after a fretful, strong-willed infancy, Vyda Rose became a sweet-natured toddler, and then an obedient child. She sat quietly in the kitchen at the Feels Good Inn, or just outside the back door, while Queen Marie washed dishes and entertained suitors. She avoided danger, and was respectful to her elders. By the time she was five, Vyda Rose seemed to possess the wisdom and carriage of a woman several times her age, and none of the stupidity and lack of restraint that had guided Queen Marie’s actions as a child. Queen Marie sighed with relief. Child rearing would be easier than she had thought.

  With Vyda Rose safe in her own care, Queen Marie began searching for a replacement for her Prince. She did not need to look far for candidates, for there were many men in Queen Marie’s life now, suitors who wished to be lovers, even husbands: She was still young and attractive, with a few babies left in her.

  But Queen Marie had trouble bonding with these men. Their love-making disappointed her—it lacked the emotional intensity of her experience with Prince—and she could not settle for less than the all-consuming love she had first had. Some part of her could not let Prince go.

  Yet the steady stream of admirers continued, in and out of the kitchen at the Feels Good Inn, each disappointing her, each informed, eventually, of his deficiencies and tactfully dismissed, usually without having gained so much as a kiss for his trouble. Occasionally, she grew discouraged, wrote poetry, and cried on the large and sturdy shoulder of Fields, her employer and friend, painfully sorry to have lost Prince, even though he had never truly been hers to lose, and even though years had passed. She despaired of ever finding another to fill his space in her heart, and badly wanted him back.

  Were it not for Fields, and the fact that she seldom knew where to find Prince, she would have pursued him to the end. But Fields reminded her, in his quiet, rational tone, that she did not need Prince, that her love was wasted if it was not returned.

  Once, upon hearing of Prince’s liaison with a dancer in a musical revue company, Fields had thwarted Queen Marie’s intention to sneak backstage after the show and fling herself at his feet, confessing her sin and begging, as she had on earlier occasions, for forgiveness. Fields had held her, fighting and screaming, her fists falling upon his solid chest with a hollow thudding that he did not seem to feel. When she had exhausted herself, he had led her meekly home, where she had dissolved in tears, her head in his lap.

  The following morning, she had made careful incisions in her wrists, avoiding the green veins that lay visible just below the surface of her skin. Fields had discovered her in the kitchen at the Feels Good Inn, as she had expected him to, and she had lain comfortably in bed for several days, co
mposing rhymes, reading novellas, waiting for the news to reach Prince; hoping that he would rush to her side.

  But it soon became apparent that Prince had not heard or did not care, her artifice transparent to him now, or her life a matter of indifference. Queen Marie rose from her bed and began to wash dishes.

  Vyda Rose played quietly alone outside the back door.

  Lonely, she made of her surroundings imaginary scenarios and friends, birds and squirrels who stopped to chat with her before flying or scurrying away through the woods that surrounded the Feels Good Inn. Soon, her precocity and hunger for attention began to attract certain patrons to the back of the roadhouse, where Vyda Rose was a pleasant distraction from the goings on inside.

  Meanwhile, Queen Marie’s relationship with Fields began to metamorphose. She began to rely upon him to comfort her, and to steer her through periods of erratic behavior and irrational decision-making. He was like a father to her, caring and accepting and wise; and although he did not evoke in her the passion she had felt for Prince, her gratitude and respect for Fields turned to something comfortable and mature and akin to love. She declined to marry. She was not certain of her love for him. It was not what she had expected.

  But Fields moved Queen Marie with her daughter to a small house that he had built next to his own, across the road from the Feels Good Inn. There, Vyda Rose could have her own room, and he could spend nights with Queen Marie. He was certain of his devotion, and he was a patient man.

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA

  APRIL, 1888

  And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.

  —Ecclesiastes 2:16

  Surprisingly, word traveled slowly, and it was not until the morning of his burial that Queen Marie heard of Prince’s passing. “. . . Quietly in his home,” the obituary read. But everyone knew that Prince Yarborough had died violently in someone else’s home, shot in the back as he fled an adulterous scene, by a cuckolded husband unexpectedly come home.

  The homegoing service was well attended. Prince had had many wellwishers. Sister appeared in black, apparently in shock. Out of respect, Queen Marie took a seat near the rear of Bull Swamp, next to Fields, hoping that Sister would not see her. And she wore a veil over her face, not wishing Prince Junior to recognize her as she followed the procession past the wood coffin. She need not have worried. Mother and son sat huddled in the front pew, oblivious to all others, his arm resting protectively around her shoulders. Lilly alone cried profusely, her shoulders convulsing as she took in great breaths and wailed aloud. She did not notice Queen Marie, who tiptoed past her relieved to have looked, for the last time, upon the face of the man that she would forever love, and to have done so without upsetting the family that Prince had loved. Years under Fields’ charge had sobered her. She did not wish to cause the Yarboroughs further pain.

  Queen Marie secluded herself for a week after Prince’s funeral, strangely hollow and quiet inside, almost as if she had died. She waited for tears that would not come. It was not until her seventh day of unexplained absence from work that Fields finally rapped on the door of her house. He understood her need to mourn in private, but he was becoming concerned. When she did not answer the door, he opened it with his key.

  He found her kneading dough, tears rolling, finally, down her cheeks. He tried to hold her, but she stiffened at his touch. He left her alone, taking Vyda Rose with him.

  Queen Marie emerged the next day—Sunday. “I think,” she told Fields, “that I would like to be somebody’s.” They were married three weeks later, with little Vyda Rose as maid of honor.

  The fact of Prince’s death had an unexpected impact upon Sister. She had thought herself through with him for over a decade, and had barely seen him for years, aside from those uncomfortable visits with Lilly, during which Prince had watched Sister with the sad eyes of a chastised puppy, and the uncertain longing of a soldier boy wrenched from his beloved and not confident of her loyalty. Sister had found him resistible. He had had no mercy on her when she had loved him. She would show him no mercy now.

  Suddenly, he was dead. Finished. Over. Done.

  The spirits that had lived in Sister had not allowed her to show compassion. She had needed them to ensure that she would not forgive. Now she wished them to leave.

  They scoffed at this.

  It was funny, Sister thought, how precious moments and people could become once they were lost. She realized now how joyous those early years with Prince had been, especially when compared with this vacuum of time and feeling in which she now lived. She realized, too, with no more Prince to hate, that hating him had given her life meaning, and she resented him for taking this from her. Now, her life was without purpose. She was persistently unhappy for the first time in more than ten years.

  To her surprise, men began to court her. Had they been waiting, Sister wondered, for her husband to die? Sister laughed. For her to regain her sanity? For her children to become grown? She could only guess what had made her so suddenly alluring. But she hoped that their intentions were not honorable. An occasional lover, she might take. But Sister did not want another husband. She wanted contentment, solitude, and peace.

  Time passed—briskly. Lilly got married—to Horace Cheeks, son of a pharmacist, light-skinned and destined for great things. Lilly and Sister knew, though neither of them said it aloud, that Horace had chosen Lilly, at least in part, for her brown skin. Lilly was an act of rebellion on his part. She would spend the rest of her life compensating, proving herself—a brown-skinned girl from the dirt poor shanties of Lickskillet—smart enough, pretty enough, clean enough, chaste enough. It beat taking in laundry, the wife of a brown-skinned laborer. Lilly and Sister wanted what was best.

  Prince Junior married, too—a plump girl, not overly cheerful, from Raleigh, with citified ways. She abhorred country folks and was embarrassed by their backward behavior. But she loved Prince Junior, and he seemed to like her, too. She died six months into their marriage, giving birth to twin sons, Hardy and Grandison. Prince remarried quickly—a widow with a toddler. Her name was Suzanne. She would know what to do with Prince Junior’s twin difficulties. Together they had a son, Sylvester O’Brien, and twin daughters, Linda and Laura Lee.

  In a streak of gambling luck, Prince Junior acquired several acres of tobacco land; but he still found it necessary to sell moonshine occasionally, and to work the land of others. In his heart, Prince Junior knew that the land he and his family worked was rightfully theirs. His father and grandfather, and several generations before them, had worked this land for the benefit of their masters, with nothing to show for it.

  He would not repeat the failure of his fathers. He would not die un-landed or poor.

  He visited his mother often, and she told him stories of another time; stories, perhaps, of an ancestor whose life had been a message that Sister had failed to perceive. Or maybe she had merely seen visions, visions she could taste, touch, and feel. She talked of his father, of spirits that had once possessed her, long ago, and he recalled it had been said that his mother was insane—a long while ago, when he was a child. He remembered that she had fallen and hit her head, but he felt certain that her eccentricity had begun long before then. Yet, he could not quite believe that his mother—calm, competent Mama—was daft.

  So when she said that she could see into the future, he put down the bottle of moonshine he had been drinking and leaned forward in his seat.

  “What you see, Mama? You see my chirren? You see dem tobacca fields? They gon’ be mine?”

  Sister was silent for a long moment, and Prince Junior knew that she had never before shared the revelations she was about to divulge. A chill came over him. He was not sure that he wanted to know.

  “I am cursed with clarity,” Sister began. Prince Junior was startled by his mother’s tone and diction. “I see things, about myself, and about others. Others cannot. They are blessed.” Prince’s skin crawled. He had heard of demon possession, in the long ago past when he and Lilly
had spent Sundays, all day and evening, at Bull Swamp with his aunts. He had heard of strange voices, and tongues not of God, of collapsing and frothing at the mouth. But he was not prepared to see his mother possessed.

  Yet, aside from the strange voice, she did not appear possessed, but calm, filled with an eerie peace. “I see visions of people who’ve been dead for years,” Sister began again. “I feel what they felt. I feel they have a message for me, but I don’t know what it is. I see a young woman, no more than twenty. She has come across the water on a vessel, in the water, in another vessel. She is tormented and oppressed, reproached, and forgotten. I see her children, burdened by the sin and violation of their mother. One of them seems to live forever. She has discovered the force of an evil as ancient and intangible as time. One of them gives up, and is consumed by her enemies. One of them survives, but barely. She lives in perpetual retreat from warfare, only one step ahead of her pursuers. She knows something of her grandmother’s God, but not enough.

  “She has many daughters, each carrying something of her mother, her grandmother, her aunts; each passing to her own daughters blessing and cursing, the consequence of her own choosing.”

  Sister paused and shut her eyes. Prince Junior watched her, fascinated. Sister frowned, as if in concentration, and continued without opening her eyes. “I see a girl with a gift. I cannot tell if she is coming or has passed. She may be two, or many. She dashes the gift against a tree. It fragments into tiny pieces. She pursues the tree, but it flees from her. She prays to it, but it does not respond. She gathers the pieces and hides them for two, perhaps three generations.”