Sapphire's Grave

by Hilda Gurley Highgate

  “... the budding young expressionist ...”

  “... the mulatto sculptor ...”

  “. . . beautiful newcomer to the arts community, Amber Hedgebeth, who prefers to be called Clovey . . .”

  She had never thought of herself as mulatto, or as beautiful. These designations fit her uncomfortably. She shrank even further into herself, dressing in baggy trousers and men’s coats, a style intended as self-deprecating but interpreted by others as eccentric and chic. She avoided interviews and social affairs, working feverishly. Bridges began to appear in the homes of the local nobility, on bookshelves and mantels and walls. Her name sprang from the most revered tongues in the local art world.

  The bridges stopped. The shame remained. And Clovey began again her search for escape.

  NORTH CAROLINA COLLEGE AT DURHAM DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA

  SEPTEMBER, 1952

  You have the visage of a goddess, he had written, the face of a cherub come to grace humanity with your presence. And I would be proud to be your escort, my Venus, my Minerva, my Juno . . .

  She had thought no one would know her here—it had seemed the perfect hideout—no one except the professors of art, who had literally embraced her upon her arrival. And she had begged them for anonymity, no references, oblique or direct, to her work, please, during classes. She had needed a reprieve from stardom, asylum from the adulation of others that had dogged her ever since the bridges. Despite her parents’ urging, college had not been in Clovey’s plans. She had hoped to study, quietly, at the home of a noted multimedia artist, there to perfect and understand her crafts. But the cameras had followed her there, distracting and distressing her. Perhaps here, in this vast, yet undiscovered place, she would find the space she needed to invent and define herself, as woman and as artist.

  She studied both art and science, writing and mathematics and dance. She attended football games and parties. She made new friends here, even joining a sorority. When the demands of a new environment, disappointing in its superficiality, began to tax her; when her peers bored or confounded her with their pretentiousness; when she could not concentrate or comprehend her courses, she doodled in ink.

  And Shame sprung from her pen. It began to cover the walls of her room in the residence hall. She sold some of it—to classmates and neighbors who admired her work. Some of it remained in her windows, on her closet door, and on shelves and walls, dominating her small dormitory room, giving it an air of drama:

  A small brown girl cried in a crowded train station, surrounded by white travelers rushing and indifferent, gripping with all her meager power a small, stuffed bear, its innards spilling from a vicious tear at its shoulder. A woman leaned toward her, smearing lotion from a bottle on the child’s face . . .

  A pregnant woman, naked, her face exhaustion, regret, and cowardice, arched her back, her palms spread out on her hips, her elbows bent outward and away from her back . . .

  “Your subjects are always women,” Aldridge pointed out to her one day as she sat doodling between classes beneath a stairwell, her knees drawn upward toward her chest. She had found she worked best in shadow. He had learned where she could be found, especially on gray and melancholy days full of a peculiar splendor, but without warmth.

  She nodded. “Colored women,” she added.

  “Women with eyes that are luminous . . . knowing, and sad,” he observed.

  She looked up at him. “Colored women,” she repeated. “With the eyes of my mother and my friends.” His face registered no comprehension. She lowered her head and resumed her work. Aldridge sat beside her then, and watched her. He watched his mothers take shape with graceful black strokes of Clovey’s pen. He did not recognize them.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Isis,” she replied. “The original Venus.”

  He laughed, a scornful snort. “A colored Venus?” he teased.

  “Yes,” she replied quickly. “Venus in black. Venus in shadow. Venus eclipsed.” Venus hidden and denied, Clovey thought, unrecognized by her own sons. He stared at her without understanding. She looked away from him.

  You have the visage of a goddess . . .

  She had asked him to the dance at the urging of her roommate, and because he was dark, and quiet. They had often sat for hours, quietly, in the evening gloom of the library, sneaking peeks at each other from opposite ends of a long, polished table, while pretending to study. For two semesters, he had been unable to speak to the girl with the auburn hair and amber skin, dressed so oddly in oversized pants, a girl of the sort who did not speak, only cogitated and observed. He had stared, in awe of her, and she had doodled, for two semesters pretending not to notice him.

  Finally, early last semester, she had ventured an open stare at him. And he had realized, when she looked at him—toward him, not directly into his face—that here was a girl of tender heart, fiercely guarded, and of seemingly aimless imaginings, unaware of her own beauty, or, he thought, of the discernment that flickered in her bottomless eyes. Her lip had trembled. She had not smiled or flirted. She had not known how. Clovey’s mouth had parted slightly, her knuckles white as she gripped her pen.

  Aldridge had smiled at her.

  And she had resolved to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.

  Aldridge had looked up when he heard the torn-off piece of heavy canvas slide across the table. Her writing had been small and earnest, the letters slanted anxiously, awaiting his response:

  My friends are all going to the dance. Will you go with me?

  He had glanced toward her, to find Clovey slouching in her chair, her face red, unnerved.

  You have the visage of a goddess . . .

  Clovey had learned not to expect much of others. She understood what they could not. A dark and buxom Venus was beyond Aldridge’s mental and visceral grasp. Clovey pitied him, and she forgave him.

  He stood over her now, his thighs muscular, filling his pants. She ignored him, as she often did when engrossed in her drawing. He had dated a white girl—she forgave him for this—a white girl free of shame, free to soil herself and yet retain the esteem of her paramour. Clovey did not have the luxury of this liberty. The thighs seemed to bulge. She squeezed her knees together and drew them more closely toward her chest.

  “Why do you wear trousers?” he asked her.

  She did not glance at him. “Because I can.”

  Because it is one of the few things that I can, is what she had intended to say. Because they are warmer than dresses in winter, more comfortable in summerthan stockings. Because they do not reveal my anatomy or draw attention to those aspects of me that cause others discomfort.

  “Because they are the one small liberty to which my artistry entitles me,” she told him airily, and smiled at him.

  He responded with the smile she had hoped to provoke. Next to his darkness, and his comfort with silence, she loved his smile most about him. It was neither a knowing, superior smile, nor an overly indulgent smile, neither patronizing nor ingratiating. It was the smile of an equal, of one who did not condescend or otherwise profess to know her, an honest smile, sincerely but not strongly felt; a smile she had not longed for or earned. His was a simple smile, uncalculated, uncontrived. She liked the stark white of his teeth against an outline of brown lips that stretched outward to each side and backward into his yet browner face; and the way his eyes sometimes danced with mischief and a secret that he would share with her, if she would allow him to.

  He had not attempted to kiss her, and for this she was grateful to him. It was not that she found him unattractive. It was fear of the unknown that made Clovey’s palms clammy. Clovey had never been kissed. She recognized the value of innocence, as did her sorors at this mecca of talented young colored men, eligible young men from decent families and with radiant futures.

  And Clovey had something to live down. The Betas had known this.

  “Clovey Hedgebeth . . . that name is so familiar. Are you a relative of . . . ?”

  And they
had smiled smugly as she acknowledged her mother, and implicitly her father, her origin, her Self. The Betas were local girls, daughters of the colored elite. They knew of her art. They knew of her family. They knew of her mother. And Clovey had refused to apologize or deny. Even when they wandered away from her, still smiling, to whisper among themselves.

  “White man . . .”

  “Whorehouse in Warrenton . . .”

  “Vyda Rose . . .”

  Vyda Rose. She had lived wantonly. She had died tragically, as some had thought appropriate. Clovey—and the Betas—knew little else of her. The details of her life had been shrouded in mystery, in rumor and innuendo. Vyda Rose was seldom mentioned—Clovey’s mother had not known her, though her name appeared in the family bible, just below Queen Marie’s and Prince Senior’s; and because Vyda Rose had lived, joyously and irresponsibly; because Clovey’s father was a white man and her mother had created a scandal, Clovey could never aspire to be a Beta.

  But she could aspire to innocence.

  And greatness. Not the greatness of title or high birth. But the greatness of wholeness and enlightenment, the greatness of exploring one’s self, and of bringing vision to others. Clovey intended to create.

  And to marry well. That Aldridge could be her salvation was not lost upon Clovey. That he might not be was equally apparent to her. This recognition, along with her absorption in her art and studies, allowed Clovey to pursue him passively and inconsistently, and to project an indifference to him, sometimes real, sometimes rehearsed.

  He was intrigued by her. Clovey only partly understood why.

  He had come from a family of blacksmiths, he had shared with her proudly, men who had worked for themselves for as far back as the family history was recalled. Their acumen as businessmen had led to a plethora of entrepreneurial ventures. His was a proud heritage—strong colored men who had withstood suppression and triumphed over it, achieving wealth and stature. He had grown up predestined, the progeny of men as outstanding in character as in skilled trades and business. He had grown up knowing he was called to great things.

  Before long, he had discovered his mother’s ugliness, the cruel yet pitiable ugliness of this woman who had borne him and nurtured him, and who would support him as he grew to adolescence and then a maturity of sorts, his contempt toward his mother rising with his ambition. He would be a great man. He was not yet certain how, but he would be as successful as his father.

  He had often wondered why his father, Etheridge, had not acquired a more suitable woman—a beautiful woman, obligingly so, with smooth ivory skin and flowing hair; a quiet woman, and submissive. He did not know that his father, a man of independent tastes, self-esteem, and common sense, had loved his mother because she was himself—black, strong, and sweet like ripened plums; bitter as unprocessed cocoa, when this was called for; capable and courageous. Aldridge did not know that his mother was secure in a beauty internal, inherent, and indifferent to external standards. She had made Etheridge more of what he had already been, as Etheridge had known she would—a man of hard work and strong passions, of loud raucous laughter; a man given to excitability and shouting, argumentative, and temperamental.

  Aldridge’s mother could cut you with a stare, her head turned at a suspicious angle, her tone diminishing you, daring you to respond, knowing you could not. She had kept his father humble, human. But Aldridge felt her a hard woman. As he grew older, he did not recall the gentle, maternal care of his mother during his early childhood. He did not know of her softness.

  Not until he was ten, and a look had passed from his father to his mother. She had been dressed for a wedding, ridiculous in a floral print dress that ruffled at the neck, squeezed her bosom into a funnellike bodice, and gathered at her thick waist before tumbling ungracefully downward over colossal hips. She had been standing before a full-length mirror, putting on the diamond and amethyst earrings that his father had bought her for no particular reason and on no particular occasion. A look had passed from his father to his mother, a look filled with an emotion he had not known his father capable of. And she, suddenly shy, had cast her eyes downward in modesty.

  “But Baby, you sho’ looks goooood to me,” his father had bellowed.

  His mother had waved her hand at him. “Pshaw!” she had responded, smiling, her eyes fixed upon her feet. It was then that he had noticed how hideous she was, how desperately, he supposed, she had needed reassurance. A dark, plump woman, she kept her mass of nappy hair braided and coiled around her head except on special occasions, when it was pulled into a severe bun at the top of her head or hidden beneath an ostentatious hat. Her nose was round, not large, but her nostrils sometimes flared, and her stubborn, full lips always seemed poised to say, “No.” She, like Aldridge’s father, had come from a proud family. She was known as a smart, industrious woman.

  But not as a beautiful woman. Aldridge would have a beautiful woman. One, perhaps, with golden auburn hair, he thought as he stood staring down at Clovey’s bowed head, and at her busy hand, scribbling furiously now, creating tightly coiled locks of hair that stuck out from a round, full-featured face.

  “Ain’t you got nothin’ to do?” she teased, using the language he abhorred. “Ain’t you got a class now?” And she glanced up again to smile at him.

  “Ain’t you?” he replied.

  Clovey finished the unruly hair and took his outstretched hand, standing reluctantly with his assistance.

  “I have Plato now,” she said, referring to Greek philosophy, a course Clovey actually enjoyed. She had learned to be selective, avoiding ambiguously named and similarly described courses, accepting more readily the recommendations of upper-class students than the course descriptions in the college catalog. And this semester, a cadre of enthusiastic young associate professors was infusing her courses with a perspective to which she had never been exposed, remarking upon parallels to African folklore and alluding to the African origins of scholarly thought, linking Clovey to a lustrous past that had preceded all pasts and given birth to all cultures.

  She began to talk increasingly, to babble in fact, about a greatness destroyed and buried, the wreckage of a people accomplished through sheer depravity and greed. And she began to reclaim that greatness, to claim the greatness of all cultures as her own, and the universality of that own-ness.

  And so it did not surprise Aldridge when Clovey arrived at his residence hall in a togalike taffeta gown, her hair swept up in a Hellenic wrap, a crown of plastic olive leaves woven into her shining hair. Tonight was the night of the Sadie Hawkins Dance. Highlight of the spring semester, the Sadie Hawkins Dance was the only opportunity for well-raised young women to openly seek the attention of young men. Only once each year, proper young ladies wooed the young men of their own choosing. Young men waited to be chosen. And Clovey, by far the most classically beautiful girl at the dance, had chosen Aldridge to be her Zeus, her Jupiter, god and ruler of Olympus.

  His chest swelled involuntarily when he and Clovey made their entrance, her loveliness and unusual gown attracting the attention of the entire party for a moment—the moment in which Aldridge decided to marry Clovey.

  You have the visage of a goddess, and I would be proud to be your escort, my Venus.

  chapter 13

  PATERSON, NEW JERSEY

  NOVEMBER, 1964

  Clovey had proven an asset of a sort that Aldridge could not have imagined when, at twenty-one, nearly prostrate with devotion and lust, he had proposed to her the life of a minister’s wife. To Clovey, product of a union that had shocked the sensibilities of a community, the proffered position had held a certain redemptive appeal. She had eagerly said yes.

  Her vocation as an artist had accommodated his need to move—first to Philadelphia, where he had attended divinity school; then to Paterson, where Aldridge was to pastor a small and struggling church. Clovey had packed her supplies and portfolio, carrying with her from one city to the next her growing distinction as a perceptive, imaginative artist in
virtually every media.

  Aldridge did not understand his wife’s art. Others did, and to Aldridge, this validated her work, as the appreciative stares of others validated Clovey herself.

  The approval of others was important to Aldridge. He prayed, preached, and lived for the reverence of his parishioners. He built a home of impressive dimensions, situated upon a mountain, in order to impress his peers. The grocery store and old folks’ home, created pursuant to his vision, had garnered the respect of the community—the respect that he required. He needed the adoration of his wife—his wife who perceived things; whose spiritual depth, some were persuaded, rivaled his own.

  They remarked upon this with sincerity. The Reverend’s laugh, nearly a cough, told them that they had made a mistake; not in their belief in Clovey’s perceptive powers, but in the expression of that belief. Hastily, they reminded him, and themselves, that Clovey was a humble woman who knew her place. With this, the Reverend agreed, but halfheartedly, bedeviled by the sense that he had been outdone by his wife.

  But the truth of this was in her painting: the women looking inward at their own souls; inward—their arms were not outstretched, their faces never upturned. Their hands were clasped beneath their chins or upon their laps, and they prayed inwardly, to a power residing not only in the heavens, but within, their supplication not to a shining and external light, but to a light that shined within, unseen, only now discovered.

  And her sculptures. Inaccessible. Sold at posh galleries at a cost prohibitive to most. They came nevertheless, to see daring women; leaping women, their legs long and lithe, clothed in dresses like tulip petals, as vivid as marigolds; flying women resurrected from the grave, their eyes empty, the set of their lips intent, intractable; women dancing wantonly—you knew that they had pasts—wanton women, balanced precariously on one toe, one leg raised, both arms raised; women delicate and severe, both graceful and lewd. Ugly women, mutilated, blind; crazy women, their heads in their hands, their environs garish, swirling.