And Clovey’s value would increase in her own eyes, a valid basis for perceiving her own specialness discovered at last, lending credence to her mother’s urgent insistence, recompense for her father’s confidence in her, and refutation of Eugene’s lovelessness, her aunt’s muted disdain toward her.
Jessie began again to appear to Clovey, at first vague and nameless. Then with sound and fury, as if relieved from compression, she began to leap from Clovey’s charcoal and paint and lead. These appearances were not intentional on the part of Jessie, or of Clovey, who had simply sought to reproduce her mother in a form more accessible to that part of Clovey that needed play without discipline, friendship without obedience. She felt that Jessie was her mother, her sister, her friend—her imaginary play-mate, sprung from her pencil. She did not know that there had been another Jessie; that that Jessie was dead. The adults were hesitant to tell her. Her siblings assumed that she knew. And so Jessie grew alongside Clovey to adolescence, her legs stalwart, sturdy; her back straight and strong; infused with the strength of spirit that lived only barely within Clovey, weakened there by the presence of progenitors unacquainted with the affliction and anguish that demand audacity. Clovey was irresolute, of delicate constitution. Jessie was her bulwark of strength and self-possession, native to another land, and generations old.
chapter 11
LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA
OCTOBER, 1946
Thus saith the Lord, Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.
—II Kings 20:1
Sister perceived a beckoning from that part of her that was divine; a calling to where her forebears had earlier come, to where her own spirit had yearned for years of Sister’s desperate life. Vyda Rose, still stunned by her sudden redemption, was there, as were others like her, atoned for and at peace. Courage and Truth ministered to Sister. She relaxed her grip on something she had not known that she held, easing a tension to which she had grown accustomed. Hers had been a life of seeking, groping. Sister was surprised at how little it all mattered now. She chuckled as she thought of the unhappiness that had darkened much of her youth—and it was all youth, right up until this moment.
The beckoning became an urgency. Sister looked back—at her family, her life—then inward, to where faith and stillness resided. Her family would be fine, and her life, over. She would cross over with certainty and peace.
Meticulous preparation had preceded Sister’s passing. She had emptied the great black trunks that held the most significant of her belongings, distributing their contents as she had felt led. She had insisted upon setting her own house in order, scrubbing, sweeping, and dusting, her hands stiff, her joints distressed. She had begun to babble, debating with herself issues resolved years before, recounting stories to herself—Lilly had arrived at the old log house more than once to find Sister cackling happily, her gray head thrown back, her mouth, still full of teeth, open wide.
She had talked of dying for weeks.
“Shush, Mama. You’ll live forever. You know that,” Lilly had chided, closing her hands around her mother’s brittle fingers, covering the old woman’s knees with a quilt as they sat in silence before a fire, or rubbing fatback gently on the parched lips. But Lilly had been concerned.
An eventual peace had settled upon her mother, a contentment, even satisfaction, beyond any that Lilly had seen in her before. Sister had dealt long ago with her demons, and reacquainted herself with her own spirit; but she had intimated that these last were the best few weeks of her life. And Lilly had braced herself against the inevitability of her mother’s departure.
After all, Sister was a very old woman, Lilly thought as she stroked the slumbering hoary head. She had been blessed to have her mother’s presence for so long. The time was nearing. She would have to let go.
The doctor pronounced Sister in good health. But Lilly still worried. Sister insisted that she was dying, willfully, happily. Prince Junior came by most evenings, and sat with Lilly and Sister outside the cabin. He talked desperately and incessantly, about everything and nothing at all, ignoring his sister’s withering looks, afraid of the silence so like the grave.
“Let her sleep,” Lilly would whisper. “Don’t you see she sleepy?” But Prince Junior could see his mother’s eyes folded only in eternal sleep, and he was not prepared to face this.
Once, during a short lull in Prince Junior’s monologue, Sister began to speak. She cleared her throat, and began again.
“Let me go,” she had murmured, startling both Lilly and Prince Junior with the urgency and difficulty of her utterance. It took a moment for the meaning of her words to settle upon them, and Sister reached out to take Prince Junior’s hand, her eyes kind, her smile thin and labored. “Let me go. I’m ready. I been ready. I know you’s been keepin’ me here. But jes let me go.”
Prince Junior’s face seemed to pucker. There was a moment of silence. And then Prince Junior began to sob—great, heart-rending sobs that shook his body. Lilly rose to take his free hand. Sister placed his head upon her bony lap. And the three cried until the fire died in the hearth, and night overtook the small house, blanketing them all with a deep and merciful sleep.
The dying of Sister was the death of something else. People gazed at each other questioningly, and finding no answers in each others’ faces, they shrugged their shoulders and walked away. Sister’s death was the death of something, and the birth of something. They did not know what.
People came from near and far, to the homegoing of the ancient woman who had been a slave. Few of them knew her. Many knew of her. Others had not known of her until her death. But they came, bringing their children and their grandchildren, because they understood that her death was the death of something else, great in consequence and gravity.
The procession extended out the back door of the Bull Swamp Methodist Church. The newspapers arrived to snap her picture as she lay supine and somewhat haughty in a fine mahogany casket—Prince Junior’s handiwork, carved from Sister’s favorite wood, and polished by her grandsons. She would have balked at all the fuss, insisting that others not trouble themselves. After all, she was an ordinary woman who had lived a less than auspicious life, in a log cabin on someone else’s property. She had tried to live quietly and had loved completely, for a time. Her children, as far as she could tell, had been her only offering to the world.
But others knew better. The girls from Shaw and Saint Aug’s, their arms filled with flowers for the grave side, tears of awe and loss interrupting the powder on their faces as they leaned over the lustrous casket, knew better. They had not known her. They understood more of her than Sister might have imagined. She was their mother, and the daughter of their mothers. The death of Sister was the death of all that they had been, the death of all that was honest and despised within them, neither the first nor the last of these deaths. They hoped she had lived well. They hoped that she had triumphed.
chapter 12
HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA
JANUARY, 1947
Clovey struck a match in the near-darkness of the up-stairs room, and touched it to the wick of a beeswax candle. The flame flickered, then settled, as she extinguished the burning match with a flick of her wrist. And Jessie appeared, kneeling before the bed, as was her habit, her chin resting in the hammock created by the dark-skinned sides of her intertwined fingers. Clovey sat heavily on the overstuffed armchair, and the two girls sat in silence, each intent upon her own thoughts.
Clovey had often considered asking Jessie if she was real. They were fourteen now, past the acceptable age of childhood playmates, far ahead of senility. When she was not feeling foolish, Clovey felt blessed to have Jessie, whose silent presence provided Clovey the necessary backdrop for reflection, for facing her fears—fear of reproach, fear of insanity, fear of otherness; and for resolving the discord that still raged within Clovey at times—resolving it, at least, for a time.
She had begun to see herself as gifted and vital and approaching
wholeness. Jessie smiled proudly at Clovey, as their mother often did, the energy of Jessie’s smile filling and infusing Clovey. She had also begun to suspect that she had inherited a peculiar genius—from Great-Grandma Sister, whose knowing looks had frightened and fascinated her for as far back as she could recall, and whose death had left Clovey with a sense of loneliness for a woman whom Clovey had barely known. The torch had been passed. She had felt this at sunset on the day that Sister had died, also at sunset, sitting on a knoll near the wooded area outside the house in Henderson. Clovey and Jessie had been there since early afternoon, engaged in silent conversation, sharing with each other their feelings rather than their thoughts—Jessie calm and reasonable, Clovey confused and lonely, but less so as Jessie’s presence began to soothe her.
Jessie had suddenly sat up and looked at Clovey from her position on the grass. “You feel that?” she had asked, her eyes wide and round.
And indeed, Clovey had felt it, a curious feeling of light and warmth and woe spreading from her stomach in radial waves throughout her body. She had flushed, and Jessie had regarded her knowingly without speaking.
Later, the news of Sister’s death had not surprised Clovey. In her mind, she saw the old woman lying on her much-cherished cornhusk mattress, her frail shoulders, stiff, extending from beneath a white sheet that covered most of her body, her mouth open, as if death had sneaked upon her from behind, expected but not this instant, and startled her into surrender, the bright eyes closed in surrender.
The vision made Clovey shudder. A feeling of dread and responsibility made her want to run; but from what? Jessie offered no answers. Clovey began to feel occluded. She carved colored girls in invisible boxes, crouched in corners, standing with their backs against their confines, their hands pressed helpless on invisible ceilings and walls, their faces distorted with pain or fear. She began to run, short distances down the length of the gardens outside Aunt Suzanne’s house, then longer stretches across the fields. She felt invigorated. Her legs grew muscular, strong. Jessie nodded approval. Clovey painted winds, ethereal, moving about and into each other confused, but free.
Her tutor began to notice the changes in Clovey’s disposition. Less wistful than before, Clovey had become decidedly restless. Her compositions trailed off as their author gazed distracted out the window near the cherry buffet in her father’s house. Beyond it, a calm sky stared back at Clovey. Neither spoke. Nothing stirred.
Are you challenged, Clovey? her father was later to ask her. She would be surprised by the question, thinking at first that he referred to the isolation that challenged Clovey daily, and in her father’s austere study, Clovey would cry and bewail the confinement that was her “specialness.” He would listen patiently and helplessly, as always, his hands hanging limp at his sides, his head bowed in that posture of surrender that seemed to Clovey to humanize him from omnipotent to man: white man, touched by the pain of his dark daughter, pain he could observe but could never understand or erase. Feeling wretched for him, Clovey would dry her eyes and lift her chin. This would comfort him—Clovey’s pretense at composure always comforted him; and he would become again Clovey’s almighty—advisor, problem solver—her benevolent father, letting there be light.
HIGH POINT SCHOOL FOR GIRLS HIGH POINT, NORTH CAROLINA
NOVEMBER, 1947
Always a light sleeper, it was Clovey who rose, in the early morning darkness, when he rapped, softly, on the first-floor window, confident that she would hear, even through the din of high winds or clamorous rain, and rise to let him in. Always patient and long-suffering, Clovey lay breathless and still, pretending not to mind the sucking, kissing sounds from the narrow bed across the small room, the sounds of skin against skin, sometimes of giggles and later, moans; his occasional, low, and rumbling; hers more frequent, sultry, and gently coaxing. Clovey stared into the darkness, training her mind upon the downpour outside the window, or on the stillness of the autumn air.
But Shame crept over her, that vague discomfort that had found its name. Her cheeks burned. Her extremities tingled. She longed for her own room at the house on Chestnut Street, where she and Jessie had spent late afternoons, after the tutor had gone, imagining their freedom: from that house, and the other house; from that town, and the other town; from the Shame of otherness that had plagued Clovey from her earliest recollection. She had wanted to get away. She had gone away, to this.
Sometimes, when they had finished, he would crouch over her on all fours, like an enormous, carnivorous cat, as he withdrew himself. And from her own narrow bed in the thin gray predawn light that had begun to filter through the curtains, Clovey would see his penis, shriveled and unimpressive. He would swing one leg, then the other, over the side of the bed as he stood to put on his trousers. A shock of hair would fall into his eyes as he buttoned his pants, and he would glance at Clovey briefly as he lifted a hand to push it behind his ear.
He would let himself out. Clovey would get up to lock the window.
In the mornings, Clovey would rise first to claim the porcelain bathtub. Otherwise, she had discovered, she would find long, pale hairs clogging the drain; thin hairs that clung to her skin when she tried to remove them; hair tenacious like cobwebs. And when she returned to their room, her skin damp in a long white bathrobe, she would not look at her roommate, whom she knew would be naked and shameless, her dough white back and buttocks facing Clovey as she rifled through her closet, pausing to consider one, then another nearly identical white blouse before selecting one to wear with the required blue skirt, often without bathing. Clovey could not imagine not bathing, especially on those mornings when he had come, with his strange fluids and peculiar smell, making Clovey feel dirty, debased, and ashamed.
She would dress, quickly and abashedly, and hurry to class, where she would sit distressed and unable to focus, fifteen, never kissed, and dreaming, as usual, of escape. She would marvel at the white girl’s immodesty, reflecting on the absence of Shame at her nakedness, her trysts, and on Clovey’s own complicity in an exploit she found discomfiting and embarrassing. As the day progressed and classes dragged on, she would wonder at the relationship between bridges and Shame, the latter of which she would render, perhaps, in oil or in relief; its absence in watercolors or airy mache, the freedom of it suspended from a limitless sky.
Clovey felt used up. She wanted to go home.
HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA
MAY, 1948
She had become aware, all at once, of the shame, or aware, at last, that it was Shame. Clovey had been stricken by her mother’s, her sisters’ persistent oiling and scrubbing and straightening; the cleansing and tucking and hiding; the opaque slips and confining brassieres; the silence and euphemisms and apologies for being—too this or that, not enough; the circumstances of her own origin, her mother’s act of liberation and Shame; the obscurity of her ancestors, the absence of history, the seldom mentioned forebears of Shame: her mother’s mother, and hers, posterity of whoring and filthiness, of meanness and madness, stretching so far backward into their descent that no one knew where the Shame had begun. No one recalled or understood how, much less why. Heiresses of contempt, they hid, powdered, covered the Shame, arranged themselves along church pews with lowered eyes, hems tugged self-consciously below the knees at intervals; covered heads—turbans, scarves, also tugged upon, concealing unkempt edges at the nape of the neck; thick stockings concealing hairy legs, large, shapely calves, sensuous, lewd, covered.
Chastity had been taught by solemn adults to nervously giggling schoolgirls in class rooms—purity classes. The biting of tongues and ingestion of bitterness had been taught as virtues, bitterness held carefully in check, unrationalized, unexplained. Clovey felt the burden, and the silence, of her co-conspirators against themselves, the great, gasping weight of Shame, borne on the backs of women already bowed down, their backs ostensibly strong, but breaking, slowly, the breaking to culminate finally, and with relief, but not for many generations; bridges breaking, crossed o
ver with ingratitude by many and sundry others—husbands, brothers, sons, even daughters, mothers; bridges creaking, sagging; bridges spat upon, saddened, angry, hurt; groaning, but not speaking, silent; bridges of iron; bridges of clay; wood bridges with reinforcements of stone; straw bridges fortified only with mud; crumbling bridges; broken, the rifts filled in with mortar or sand; painted bridges peeling; covered bridges.
These adorned the walls, graced pedestals, and stretched across the floor of the Davis Gallery in Raleigh—Clovey’s bridges. These had languished unborn within Clovey since her flight in horror from the nakedness of her roommate, the presumptuousness that had gone unpunished, the girl privileged, unmolested. Clovey had purchased oil and canvas. She had waited. Shame had not come. But the bridges had come, the first bridge insubstantial—as Clovey felt herself insubstantial—of plaster and paint; but vast, filling the backyard of the house on Chestnut Street, startling her parents, the neighbors, and the local reporters, on its surface bearing the imperceptible burden of Shame for which she had felt herself accountable, and by which she had felt herself indelibly marked.
The other bridges, mostly commissioned, had been inspired nonetheless. Bridges, her show was simply called, bearing many burdens, many secrets, many others. And the artist, modest and retiring, had been incessantly photographed, her image appearing above captions that read:
Sapphire's Grave Page 18
