An Acquaintance with Darkness

by Ann Rinaldi

  There was a sudden clattering as they dropped their tools, a screaming and a scrambling as they ran through the cemetery toward the gate, leaping over headstones, running around them, tripping and recovering themselves, the ghost in pursuit.

  Annie laughed. Then I did. My laughter was more with relief than anything, I don't mind saying.

  "That'll teach the little varlets," she said. "Oh, how I wish I'd thought of it."

  At the cemetery gate the "ghost" had taken off its sheet and was waving long arms at the intruders. Its whole angular body agitated as it waved the sheet that had covered it.

  "You, Spoon, you, Mole, go elsewhere for your subjects! I'll have you hauled off to county jail if you put in an appearance here again. Go to Potter's Field! Go to Harmony Cemetery. Let decent people rest in peace!"

  The voice had familiar clear rich tones.

  Uncle Valentine!

  "Annie, it's my uncle," I said.

  "I know." She sounded less than enamored.

  "What do you suppose he's doing here? How did he know those two would be robbing Mama's grave? And who are they?"

  "The Spoon and the Mole, didn't you hear him? Grave robbers."

  "Children?"

  "No," Annie said, "dwarves."

  I said my proper good-bye to Mama.

  Without a word to either of us, Uncle Valentine took up the long-handled shovel the grave robbers had left and replaced the earth neatly. Then he rearranged the flowers, which, as Maude had promised, were full blooming now in the dark, their lovely white petals giving off pleasant fragrances. I stared at them. I had never seen flowers blooming at night before.

  He said a brief silent prayer and gestured to me that I should do what I had come to do. He and Annie walked away.

  I knelt. But I could not form my thoughts. They raced through my mind, tumbled together, pulled apart, and ran away, only to scamper back into my mind, a mixture of fear, joy, and confusion, like the light and shadows around me caught up in the night breeze.

  I couldn't concentrate. I thought of Merry Andrews asking me to guess his name, of Maude giving me that cup of tea, of Annie telling me her mother was in love with John Wilkes Booth, of the man in the cart hauling his grisly cargo of bodies to Robert E. Lee's front lawn for burial, of stitching Mrs. Lincoln's gown, of the dwarves digging around Mama's grave.

  I thought of the way Mama had begged me not to let Uncle Valentine touch her once she died. And how vigilant he had been about chasing away the grave robbers, how respectful and tender. He had replaced the earth around her like one tucking in the blankets of a child, rearranging the flowers like you would for someone in a sickroom.

  Had Mama been wrong about him? Why had her mind and her heart been so turned against him?

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Annie and Uncle Valentine waiting for me at the cemetery gate. So I gathered my thoughts in like errant children and spoke to Mama.

  "You should have seen him chase them, Mama," I told her. "Oh, it would have done your heart good. I don't know who they are, but I'm going to tell the reverend all about them. Oh, Mama, I'm so sorry I didn't cry today at your funeral. But I'm going to grieve, properlike, I promise you. Just like Mrs. Lincoln said we have to do. And, oh yes, I finished her dress tonight. Annie helped me. I'm sending it over to Mrs. Keckley's place first thing in the morning. And tomorrow I'm going to pack my things and move in with the Surratts. And everything will be fine with me, Mama, you'll see."

  I stayed a few minutes longer. I said some prayers. But it was no good. I still didn't feel as if I were grieving properly. I still couldn't cry. So I promised Mama I'd be back soon. I couldn't keep Annie and Uncle Valentine waiting any longer.

  The driver of the hack Maude had paid ten dollars for had left. We got into Uncle Valentine's chaise.

  "What would you have done if I hadn't come along?" Uncle Valentine scolded gently.

  "Walked home and been accosted by every vagrant on the streets," I said.

  "We most appreciate your coming," Annie told him. "But how ever did you know those two would be here doing their vile work?"

  "I'm going to hire guards to watch over your mother," was all he said.

  "I'm beholden to you, Uncle Valentine," I told him as his chaise drew up in front of our house.

  "Are you?"

  "Yes. And I missed you at the funeral."

  "I wanted to come, but I didn't want to upset you."

  "Oh, Uncle Valentine, I'm so sorry I hurt you."

  "Then perhaps we can have a new start," he said. "Perhaps you will do me the honor of coming to my house for a luncheon tomorrow."

  I looked up into his warm brown eyes. They were so earnest. They even twinkled. "Yes," I said. It felt good saying it. I was my own person now, making my own decisions. Mama was gone. I had to think for myself. I felt a certain freedom, doing so.

  "I'll be there," I said.

  7. The House on J Street

  UNCLE VALENTINE sent a hack for me the next day. I knew what Mama would have said. "It's a grandiose gesture. It has no substance." But I was grateful for it.

  I took Mrs. Lincoln's gown with me and asked the driver to stop at Mrs. Keckley's, where I dropped it off. She was out. I was disappointed. I knew she'd just returned from a trip on the James River with the Lincolns. The president had met with his generals to discuss the war's end. The gown was needed, her assistant said. The Lincolns were going to Ford's Theater tonight.

  I went on to Uncle Valentine's house. When I stepped out of the hack at 128 J Street, my spirits lifted. It was Good Friday, a marvelous spring day. I stood looking up at the three-story stone structure. Each floor had its own tower jutting out from the right-hand side. The windows in those towers seemed to sparkle like jewels in the sun. Why, I thought, that top tower could be where the miller's daughter is sitting, crying because she cannot spin her flax into gold.

  It reminded me of the Brothers Grimm. Some kind of vine crawled up the wall of the house on the side of the garden. In the middle of the garden I could see a small pond, and behind it a stone shed, which in itself looked like a fairy-tale cottage. The whole place was enclosed by a tall black wrought-iron fence. Brass lanterns on either side of the double-glass front doors gleamed. There was something solid and permanent, yet something forbidding, about it, too.

  Mama had always hated the house. "It's the putting on of gold and costly apparel," she'd said. She always went after Uncle Valentine with quotes from the Bible. But I didn't think that described the house. Or Uncle Valentine.

  The door opened. A young girl stood there holding a cut-glass bowl of candy, and I thought her the most beautiful and delicate thing I had ever seen. She was wearing gray bombazine with a white apron and a lace collar. Her hair was tucked under a white kerchief, but wisps of it peeked out. It was a burnished brown.

  "Come in, do. We're so glad to have you. Let me take your wrap."

  I handed over my light shawl. From the back reaches of the house came the sound of children shrieking and laughing. "Is this the right house?"

  She laughed. "They're from the Ebenezer Free School. I'm their teacher. We're pulling taffy today." She held out the bowl of candy. "Have one?"

  I took one. They were nougats. Then she thrust out a slender hand. "I'm Marietta."

  Her grip was cool, firm. "Your uncle isn't here yet. He's been detained. Come, let me show you the house."

  "Are you kin to Uncle Valentine?"

  She laughed again, a light, musical sound. "Kin? Hardly. Until last week I lived here. On the third floor. In the tower room."

  The miller's daughter, I thought.

  "No, my father wasn't a miller. He owned a plantation below Richmond."

  I hadn't said it aloud, I was sure of it. Oh, I must watch myself.

  She raised delicate eyebrows, indicating the floors above. "Someone else lives in that room now."

  "How did you come to know my uncle?"

  "He saved my life."

  I stared at her. Nor anot
her one, I thought. But how? She was no more than twenty and in charge of herself. "How does someone like you need your life saved?" I asked.

  "Come, I'll show you the house." She smiled at me. "I tried to drown myself," she said as she led me through the wide hall. The floors were highly polished, the place smelled of beeswax. There was a grouping of more strange-looking flowers in a bowl on a gateleg table. "Yuccas," she said. "All day the flowers hang down like bells at rest. At dusk they turn up to the evening sky to bloom all night."

  "Nightflowers," I said.

  "I have a whole garden in back. I'll show you later."

  "Why did you try to drown yourself?" I asked.

  "I jumped off the Navy Yard Bridge." We were paused in front of the parlor door. "I'm one-eighth Negro. I come from below Richmond. I was a slave. My master was my father. But he had three other white daughters, my half-sisters. When their beaux came around they'd always ask, 'Who is that pretty girl?' My half-sisters weren't so pretty. It was a curse that I was. So I had to be sold off. The girls demanded it. I was sold on the block in Richmond. My own half-brother bought me. He was running off to join the Union army. He was so against slavery. He'd fought with Father about it and purchased me as an act of rebellion. He brought me north with him, to Washington, and said, 'Now you're free. And now, so am I. You don't have to go home again and neither do I.' He left me some money, and I lived for a while in a small roominghouse. He went off with the army. He was killed in the Shenandoah Valley last August."

  Her calm recitation gave me the chills.

  "I ran out of money and had no place to go. I had no way to make a living. I had a choice: Become a fancy woman or drown myself. So I jumped off the bridge. The water was so cold. It was first light. All grayness and mist. No one about, or so I thought. Next thing I knew these two little dwarves were swimming beside me, pulling me out."

  I blinked. "Dwarves?"

  "I thought I was dreaming. They worked on me. Got the water out of my lungs, then one of them ran off and came back in a little while with your uncle Valentine. He brought me here and Maude took care of me. He gave me a home, got me a tutor, and now I'm instructing the little freedman children at the Ebenezer Free School."

  She smiled. "School is out because of the end of the war, and their parents are working. So I brought some here today. He lets me do that, your uncle Valentine. This is the parlor."

  All I could see was this girl standing on the block, being auctioned off. One-eighth Negro. She did not look Negro. How had she looked up there on the block? I'd heard about slave auctions. Annie had told me of them. They pick up a girl's dress and show buyers what they're getting. That's what Annie had told me. And sold by her own father!

  I made myself look at the parlor. It was elegant. In the circular area that formed the bottom tower was a piano. The windows overlooked a side garden and were graced with yellow satin curtains that dripped like tears. The floors were highly polished and there were one or two Persian rugs. There was a cherry highboy, a desk, a gathering of chairs around a round table.

  "You like it. You are drawn to it," Marietta said, again reading my thoughts.

  I stared at her. One-eighth Negro. Some of them have powers. Did she? I must be careful.

  "It's peaceful," I allowed.

  "Dr. Bransby likes it that way. Come on upstairs, I want to show you something."

  I followed her up the wide, uncarpeted stairs and gasped when she opened the door to a room that was the second-story tower. There was a cushioned window seat in the tower. In the middle of the room was a Sheraton four-poster draped in blue. Again, there was an elegant plainness about it. There was a small ladies' desk, a dressing table with a gilt-framed mirror, a chiffonier, a shelf filled with books. Lying across the blue-and-white bedspread was a blue velvet dressing gown.

  "This is your room," she said.

  I drew back, angry. "I'm not moving in."

  "You don't have to. It's your room when you want to visit. He had it redecorated in blue and white because he knows blue is your color. Go and look at the books in the case. Go on."

  Gingerly I stepped into the room and went to the bookcase.

  Sir Walter Scott; The Adventures of Roderick Random by Smollett; the plays of Shakespeare; John Ruffini's Lavinia—all three volumes; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; and so many others! I ran my fingers over the books, then backed away.

  "Come downstairs now. Meet my charges."

  Downstairs in the large kitchen in back of the house, Maude was at the stove, and six brown children, all under the age of ten, were pulling sticky candy. The girls wore pinafores, the boys large aprons. They were paired off into three sets, and they stood across the table from each other, the gooey caramel-colored candy stretched out between them. Their faces were splotched with flour. They were having a grand time of it, and when Marietta and I came into the room, they didn't stop. She had to clap her hands and silence them to introduce me.

  "All right, all right, now you all will have to finish soon. Dr. Bransby will be back for lunch, and I told him we'd be finished."

  "Help us, help us, Marietta," they begged. They gathered around her, sticky hands and all.

  She handed me an apron. "We'll both help and get the job done."

  I hadn't made candy like this since I was a child. And soon Marietta and I were both helping. Then the candy "set" and we got the children washed and helped Maude pack lunches for them—apples, cheese, biscuits. Six checkered napkins full. Maude made a pitcher of lemonade. They clutched the napkins close, and Marietta had them file out the back door.

  Never had I seen a garden like this. "Is that a grape arbor?" I asked.

  The children were gathering around the arbor, under the vine, and starting to eat their lunches.

  "Not grape," Marietta said. "It's a chocolate vine. See how the branches are covered with small purple-brown flowers? Likely you thought they were grapes. As the afternoon warms, it will produce a sweet-spicy scent. It gets stronger at night. That other vine, growing on the side of the house, is a serpent gourd. The white flowers open late afternoon and bloom all night."

  I nodded and walked across a stone path to the shed.

  "Don't go there," she said. "Nobody goes there. It's Dr. Bransby's laboratory. With some specimens in it."

  "What kind of specimens?"

  "He does experiments on animals. Don't worry. They're all dead." She met my eyes.

  I shivered in the warm sun. "I just wanted to see the rest of the flowers," I said.

  "All right, then, I'll show you. Here. These by the shed wall are mouse plants. Don't they look like mice?"

  They did, all clustered in a bunch like that. The flowers had dark brown tops and white bottoms, and a long tail wound out of each one. "Why are they blooming now?" I asked.

  "I couldn't resist planting them." She beamed. "They aren't nightflowers, but they just look so dear. Like mice having a meeting."

  "What is that?"

  "Devil's tongue." She sighed. "I had such trouble growing it. I had to start it in a pot in your uncle's laboratory at the college. Under a skylight. And look how the flies are drawn to it. But it has a certain beauty. Sometimes it grows six inches a day. When it gets to eight feet a long liver-colored tongue will grow out of that green spike. And it will smell of decayed fish."

  Was she mad? "Why do you want to grow something like that?"

  "It has its own beauty. Everything does. Don't you think there is a reason for everything that exists in this world? And everything that happens? Even the bad?"

  "No."

  "I do. Or I wouldn't be standing here talking to you like this now. So much bad has happened to me. I look at it like fertilizer in a garden. It has helped my soul to grow."

  "Well, I've had fertilizer in my life, too, then. But my soul could have done without it."

  "You don't know that yet, do you?"

  Now, what did she mean by that?

  "This," she said, leading me over to a flower with willowli
ke leaves, "is an evening primrose. It will be yellow at dusk and gives off a lemony scent. This is a night-blooming cereus. The petals that bloom tonight will be white with dark yellow spikes surrounding them. Sometimes I cut one off and bring it into the house. By midnight it will be perfect."

  "Those are the ones Uncle Valentine sent for my mother's wake."

  "Yes. We often send some when a patient dies. It comforts him to do so."

  "Why do you plant only flowers that bloom at night?"

  "It intrigues me to know that certain things can only happen at night," she said. "It's a little sad, I think. Thoreau said that moonlight is a light we have had all day but have not appreciated, and proves how remarkable a lesser light can be when a greater light has departed."

  We walked back to the pond. She showed me the water flower, spider lily, the turtleheaded flower, the maiden grass at the pond's edge. "The people from the Smithsonian have tried to get in here and see my flowers," she said, "but I won't allow them in."

  "Why?"

  "I want to keep this private. Your uncle enjoys it. I want it to be my gift to him for saving my life. And taking care of it gives me an excuse to keep coming and seeing him."

  "If my uncle treated you so well, why did you move out?"

  "Because it was time to be on my own. And because then he could give the room to someone else who needed it."

  "Who's in there now? Someone else whose life he saved?"

  "Someone whose life he's trying to save," she said soberly. "Her name is Addie Bassett. She's an old Negro woman. Don't go near her, ever."

  "You needn't worry," I said. "I won't be coming back after today."

  She was peeling apples for the children. They had crowded around her. "You'll be back," she said. She had the graciousness to flush and lower her gaze. "Sometimes I just know things," she said. "I can't help it and I don't like it, but sometimes I just do."