American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  They say Lil Miss made funny down there.

  Say no babies

  Say husband say he gon send her back to her daddy’s house

  Say Ole Miss say you got her, keep her

  Say the husband beat her like a dog, hurt her bad like he beat his people

  Say his people say he turrible mean

  Say listen at you, fool, they all mean

  Say Lil Miss not mean

  Say uh-huh and Lil Miss dead

  * * *

  When you fall asleep in another person’s dream, what happens if you awaken. Where are you. Who will you be. Have you become the dream’s dreamer. The Dream. Perhaps you awaken and see yourself sprawled like one of her rag dolls Lil Miss props up to imitate the way she sits when she pretends to read, or perhaps she copies a doll sprawling in a corner, crumpled, soft, head drooping, wide-apart legs and butt resting flat on the floor, or knees steepled, seamed white cotton crotch exposed, back leaned against the wall, sitting so she appears alive reading or dead or asleep, you watching, waiting for her to scold and chase you away or coodle-coo and say come play.

  * * *

  We were children. Two of us growing up alone, many, many hours, most of most days and some nights spent together. Curious children. We looked at, touched, tasted each other. Playmates. Curious children. Play-named each other. My mother’s duty to care for both of us daily. Blackee. Missee. My mother occupied by other duties, left us to fend for ourselves at an early age. No, no, no, Mrs. Travis hollered at my mother, her peer in age and both about to give birth. No daughter of mine raised in the nigger pen full of little dirty niggers. No. You bring yours here to keep her company.

  * * *

  Many hours. Many days alone. Children together. Curious. Learning. Uncovering secrets. Inventing games, names. One mother busy, busy. One mother absent. One burdened with way too many duties. One burdened with no duties. We were children left alone. Explored secret patches of yard outdoors, secret patches of rooms indoors. We learned every inch, inside and out. Every hidden hiding place. Laughed, tickled, scratched, whispered. Shared secrets. And when tired or bored or outraged we fought like beasts. Screamed. Sulked. Sullen. Made up riddles so the other one couldn’t know the answer. Teased. Hurt each other. Licked. Pinched. Sniffed each other. Children growing inside each other. Away from each other. Girl. Boy. One of us could be both, or be the other one or chase away the other until the other missed too much by both, until the other returned and we could be one again.

  * * *

  As a convenience—like the convenience of naming slaves—in order to shape the telling of my story and to deliver my confession in the most convincing fashion, I could name that period of my life before the great and total separation demanded then and now, the separation of children into different kinds and different worlds, I could call my first four or five years on earth “Eden,” except to borrow that name for any time or place in Virginia would mock both Bible story and mine.

  * * *

  Blackee. Missee. Children. I watched her squat and pee. Nap. Weep. Ash on your black legs, she said. Nasty, ashy white. Go away. Or said, “Sulphur.” Never heard that word, I bet, dummy boy. Devil smell. Preacher Wilson said it’s Devil smell. Sulphur. You stink like the Devil, natty. Go way, you dum-dum dummy, boy. Stinkee, Sulphur boy. No. Come over here, nattykins. Let me lick your round black pot of belly. Tummy boy. Boy tummy with a little sprouty root down there. Weedy sprout. Not like nigger sprouts, nigger bare bottoms in the fields. Bare black asses under long shirts. Bend over show their bottoms. Bend over chopping weeds, grass. Show their business. Show long, rooty nigger legs. Long knives chop, swing back and forth, back and forth. Chop grass, weeds, cotton. Blades swing, swinging like Nanny used to tie us a swing on a low branch and swing us back and forth. Low branch above low roots running along the ground, roots popping out the ground like old, twisted gray old Devil fingers. No hair, no weeds around your tiny rooty little hair down there. Not like grown hairy niggers. Not like my mama. My father I seen him, too. See. Come here, scaredy-cat. Mama dead drunk look like she sleeping she dead as a dead frog. Look, Blackee. Don’t be scaredy-cat. See me touch her, see, Mama’s black black bush. See I touch it. Dare you. I see your big white eyes looking. Go on and touch it. Look at all that black nigger hair dead as a dead frog, natty, touch it, dare you touch it. Someday mine growing black like her. Promise I let you touch mine. Let you sleep in it, let you live in my dark patch, natty-boy.

  * * *

  Somewhere before the age of five or six, as they used to do things and will continue doing forever would be my guess, the great separation prevented me from accompanying my mother to the big house and I was assigned endless, mindless chores each day, chores to keep me busy, keep me with all the other little niggers in the little nigger yard or pigpen or garden, barn, outhouse, chicken coop, manure pile, garbage pit, etc. Anywhere except the big house. No errand, no question or urgent need for my mother served as an excuse to go anywhere near the Travis dwelling. A few scoldings and beatings clarified the dangers, the price of breaking the rule. Soon I was a boy large enough to go chop down forests, drain swamps, dig out stumps and boulders to clear fields that became new land where we would sow, cultivate, reap, and harvest white people’s crops, a perpetual round of labors which profited others and kept niggers possessionless, hungry, poor, dependent, evil, exhausted. One day someone told Mr. Travis, Nat Turner can read, and I confessed to him and he tested me, discovered not only was I literate but could write and cipher. You are a peculiar one, Nat Turner, he said, finally, and a peculiarly smart one and steady, too, a hard worker, the overseers tell me, and I’d be a foolish businessman not to take advantage of your skills, to waste you on nigger work, wouldn’t I, Nat Turner.

  Little by little, step by closely watched step, I found myself assigned new tasks that required me to be decently dressed and reasonably clean of field muck and stench, tasks performed in the big house under the scrutiny of Travis, who gradually put more and more trust in me until I was more or less his jack-of-all-trades assistant (not immune, however, from occasional episodes of nigger work) summoned daily to receive a long list of chores, though very different chores than those my mother had complained almost killed her, but chores that kept me constantly occupied, like her, sunup to sundown and many hours more. By then, during my apprenticeship as clerk, overseer, buyer, seller, manager, etc., learning to fulfill impeccably the expectations of Travis and on my good days even anticipate them, Lil Miss was long gone, naturally, from the big house I frequented.

  * * *

  With a burnt black end of stick I had practiced writing letters of the alphabet on my palm. If caught, one hard swipe, rub against my shirttail or trouser leg and no evidence. Just a dirty nigger hand like nigger hand supposed to be dirty. Dark ash shows well on pink palm of hand. Easy to trace letters there. My hand not a large hand, not small, a middling size for a middling-sized fellow like me. Middling size hands, feet, and the rest. Good enough, I think. No hand big enough to fit the whole alphabet. Even drawing letters with a point not clumsy as the nub of stick. How many letters fit if I practice smaller and smaller, I wondered. If letters small enough, how many words might fit on my palm. If hand bigger, letters smaller could my palm hold a book. How many words in a book. Did I know enough words to fill a book. How many words could I spell. A book is many words spelled correctly with letters of the alphabet to make sentences, make sense, make a book. If I could spell many words correctly and write them with smaller and smaller letters, how many books might fit on my palm. Books so small, how would anybody read them. But if I wrote the letters, words, books, tracing them on my skin, wouldn’t they be there whether anybody else able to see them or not.

  * * *

  Look, Nat, Mr. Joseph Travis said. My eyes obey and fasten on a brightly painted wooden ball, recently purchased, hollow inside as a dried gourd. I can detect the seam gluing together two halves of this globe, as Travis calls it, gripped by an
iron claw that allows it to rotate atop a black iron pedestal in this room he calls a study. This ball a map of the entire world, he confides. This globe you’re looking at, Nat, holds every place on earth—England, Italy, China, France, Rome, America. Brings every place on earth here for us to see in this room in Southampton, Virginia, where we stand. A round map of the known world. North Pole. Africa. No place missing. Almost magical, isn’t it, Nat.

  Both my hands, as if tied together at the wrists, are behind me, invisible to Travis. The globe too large. Too much of it for a runaway’s feet to flee. Too much world to fly across to freedom. Fingers of one hand tighten, crush all the countries. All the white people inhabiting them, all the people wearing black, yellow, red skins, gaudy colors like the painted globe wears. Squeeze, crush until the map, the miles, people, the globe shrink small as a kernel of corn in my fist. I can throw it away or put it in my mouth and chew it, swallow or spit it out. This small, round world large enough to hold a master’s study, this room in which Travis speaks and I listen, both taller than the globe Travis spins now atop its black iron pedestal. Travis taller than me as he rotates the globe and talks, talking as if he owns it, understands every place on it, this room with two men in it, his dwelling with its cellars, porches, shutters, columns, portico, stairways, attics, kitchens on a slave plantation, the map large enough to hold me, hold every alphabet letter, every word, and small enough to fit on one of my palms.

  I refuse to believe the globe. No magic. No map. The North Star—God’s cold, bright eye—only map a runaway should trust. Distant as it seems, that faraway light also inside, leading, guiding, all the map required to escape earthly bondage.

  Show me my footprints on this globe you purchased. Where do the quarters fit. The chains. How could every shifting grain of grit or sand or puddle of pig shit under my bare toes be repeated here, preserved, doubled exactly, once and for all, but then again and again as it spins, here like mountains, rivers, clouds, animals, leaves, leaf by leaf and all leaves growing, dying over and over on a globe holding this room, this land holding us and being embraced in turn, Virginia a convenient name for a place holding this house, the silence, order, and tranquillity of this moment I can hear Travis yearning to hold, embrace, celebrate, to sing a little praise song inside himself about this place, about this precise present moment, as if he could, as if he were a singing type of man, though he isn’t, though in the silence I can imagine hearing him sing, as if he could, and I imagine Lil Miss propped up in a corner of wall, legs spraddled, mouth moving, pretending to read a book before she could read, before we helped each other learn. Travis praising the globe he rotates, his fingertips giving more a glancing caress than hitting the empty shell’s wooden skin to keep it turning, Travis silent now so he can listen as if there’s a song in this room coming from his lips.

  * * *

  I lean a ladder against a chimney behind the house and will climb it, step through a window into the bedroom where Travis sleeps. The day is August 21, 1831. I’ve known how to read since I was a boy. Taught myself at an early age clock time, calendars, how to write the name Nat Turner, the name Joseph Travis of the man who claims to own me, whom I intended to kill the past spring but I took ill, so will kill him today, August 21, 1831. Him first, then every other plantation owner, their women and children, relatives, white minions from here to Jerusalem. Perhaps when our work completed, I will write their names in a ledger. A thick black ledger to save names of whites murdered tonight, and runaways, and those who die trembling with fear of us and disappear into thin air. We must cleanse the countryside of them because we no longer require white people to tell us what to do, tell us our names, the hour, day of the week, month, year, color of our flesh.

  Until we rid ourselves of them, until they are gone, we will not truly cleanse ourselves of the belief that we are nothing without them.

  With each step up a ladder leaned against the back chimney’s stones, rung by rung, I feel my feet rising higher, closer to freedom. Still, surrounded by night’s darkness and silence, afloat, suspended as always between one instant and the next, when I enter the window open against August’s sweltering heat, when my feet are planted on a solid wooden floor, will the first blow of my hatchet prove fatal. Or will I hesitate, temper the blow because I’m still afraid I might need white people. Nowhere, no one without them.

  * * *

  What’s Egyptland, natty-boy. Niggers sing Egyptland when they sad, sometimes sing it happy. My blanket my Egyptland, little nat. Wraps it round me at night. Rub my nose with a corner when I suck my thumb. Smell my sweet blankey, nat-nat. Egyptland in it. Me, you in it.

  No, you say. No-no. Stinky, you say. How dare you. Get your black ass over here this instant. Get over here and bend over. Take your beating, bad, bad boy. Say yes. Say sweet. Say Egyptland.

  * * *

  Ole Miss sent for me and here I am standing at the foot of her bed. Does she remember me. Does she know she will die asleep in this same room adjacent to her husband’s while we dispatch him. Who is this large boy, I hear her eyes asking herself. No. I’m grown now. Man-size. No. Not man. Boy. Because if boy her girl still lives. This black something, standing here eyes lowered, mute as a mule, thick as a mule. Stink of him filling the room or is it already full she’s asking, her dank flesh, hot breath reeking, room crowded with stench of death, sick vapors rising off wet, rumpled bedclothes. She is not afraid of dying, except if she dies, how will her poor baby find her, her poor lost girl wandering, haunting dark corners of the room: I’m back. I’m here, Mama. Where are you.

  Who sent you here, you black imp. To mock me with your “condolences,” your white word in nigger lips. You know better than to enter my bedroom. Someone put you up to this. A meddler. A fool.

  You say I sent for you. “Summoned,” you say, minstrel man. You grinning pillar of salt. You Devil mask. Why would I ever “summon” you. Your presence an abomination. Here where I grieve. Reminding me God took her and let you live. Breath in your body belongs to her. Stolen from her. As you stole her time. Why does God let your heart beat while hers has stopped. If I could snatch your bloody beast heart from your chest and plant it in her, I would. I detest you, Nat Turner. Your hateful presence reminding me she’s not here . . .

  Oh, Nat. Pitiful Nat. And pitiful me. If only I could take you like a baby in my arms. Hug you close to me. As if it would bring her back. Please. Please, go away. Let me die. Leave me my empty peace. My oblivion. My mother’s grief. Make my child alive again, Nat Turner. My baby. Oh, let me touch you. Let me hug.

  * * *

  I could have begun this confession by speaking first of my father. With my time for telling stories almost over now, with a bloodthirsty mob milling around me, I regret I have not talked more about him, with him. I must admit—chagrined, ashamed—that I know very little about him aside from my mother’s stories, mentions of him by my brethren in recollections they exchange to entertain one another. I’m able to put a face on gray Thomas Gray, but no face for my father. Except perhaps a shadowed version of my colored face. Yet at a crucial juncture when I needed to gain my brethren’s trust in order to go forward with my plan to liberate us all, I called upon my father, used my father to allay their suspicions and doubts.

  * * *

  I confess today I again need his name. To steal his name. Be him. As if his name bestows his determination, clarity of purpose, ruthlessness, refusal to turn back and accept failure. My story could not exist without his. No promise of freedom, no uprising, no bloodshed, no record of violence released or violence suppressing violence, no numbing sense of futility, no guilt without him. Without the denial, the silencing of him.

  * * *

  A father, of course, part of a story you know already about me. No person on earth begins life without a father’s seed. I could have started my story there—with his undeniable presence, but a presence slavery’s evil constantly denied so that when I attempt memories of my father, I can only recall times he was absent. Father
separated. Father withheld. Father embodied in words, thoughts, not a flesh-and-blood father. Father a runaway, a fugitive before I reached my fourth year. Runagate who escaped and never returned, never seen again.

  My father must have been strong-minded and probably accumulated much wisdom and many practical skills he began perhaps to pass on to me before he ran away. I will never know what kind of man I might have turned out to be with him beside me daily. I am certain I inherited his strong back. They say a brother of my father was whipped to a whimpering pulp by an overseer’s slave lackey and lay bleeding in a cotton field miles from the big house. Overseer said, Leave the nigger, but my father begged please, please, let me carry him, and overseer didn’t stop my father from kneeling and slinging his brother over his shoulder and trudging all those miles back. But like Lil Miss returning to her father’s house after what everybody said was a miscarriage, my daddy’s brother dead when he arrived.

  * * *

  At the point it was necessary to enlist them, I began to share with my brethren my plan to seize freedom for us all. At first Will, Hark, Henry, Nelson did not trust me. Nor my plan, nor the spirit voice I claimed instructed me, nor secret meetings in the forest, nor my sudden enthusiasm for freedom. My initial four recruits—court would call them “co-plotters”—proved loyal, brave to the end. Despite their initial misgivings and mine. They had long been accustomed to regarding Nat Turner as odd—a solitary, private one who maintained a distance from his fellow sufferers, one who unless conveying orders from the big house seldom spoke, waited for others to start conversations. I worshipped differently, was rumored to speak to voices no one else could hear. My privileges and small property were resented. My seeming intimacy with Travis compromised any prospect of intimacy with them. Perhaps most disquieting and inexplicable was the fact I had been a successful runaway, then returned voluntarily to servitude. How could they trust a man who had spurned his own precious freedom.