He knew it the moment he first smelled it. And as she burned outside, somewhere unseen but certainly burning, the smell that he’d known since he was five years old, that had caused the first of these pains in his head and the first of his many visions, now became the smell of his own freedom. His best hope was that she would burn so hot, that her immolation would be so intense, the very heat of her black annihilation would burn the rope that held his life. At that moment he loved the smell. At that moment, as the rope choked him tighter, he inhaled its sensuality; he was filled with desire for the burning slavewoman. He could see his slaves below him. He could see them shrink back from the sight of his erection. It would become so big that the weight of it would snap the rope above him and send him groundward, and then send him through the window to the pyre, where he would thrust himself into the ashes of her thighs.
He woke in this pandemonium. No spell was broken. He didn’t shake himself loose of his dream: his dream went on and on, across the bedroom and into the hall. He knew he was awake, he knew he was in the Hotel Langeac and not his house in Virginia; but the smoke was still there. It was as unmistakable as his desire. His head didn’t hurt now. He was filled with exultation at his new conviction, born in his dream, that no ashes of a burning woman would ever rain down from the sky, as he’d believed when he was a child, but that such ashes were only the soft sensual harbor of his desire, waiting between her legs. He followed the smoke to her quarters. What if James, he wondered, should try to stop me? I should have to flog him then, or sell him. He had never flogged or sold a human being. It thrilled him. He felt like a master, a king.
In her bed, Sally lay with her face in her pillow, her eyes open.
There was a melee outside her door, coming down the hall, though she couldn’t be sure what was happening. Then she knew.
The revolution, she said to herself, has come.
A R C D’X • 24
The revolution, she said to herself, has come.
But when she looked up at the crescent-moon window above her bed, there was no light from torches, there were no voices from the streets. She heard her door open; she didn’t move. She lay still with her face in the pillow, but she didn’t turn to look. An uncomprehending terror gripped her: a secret had come stalking her to Paris. Something she’d never known, something she’d never wanted to know, was in her doorway. Like the child she still was, she thought if she lay still he would leave. He’d think she was asleep and therefore inviolate. But he didn’t care whether she was asleep.
He closed the door and with no hesitation came to the bed. He didn’t touch her to see that she was awake; he didn’t grab her roughly, but without thought at all to either roughness or kindness.
She looked up into his face in the dark; his eyes were wild. He took the sheets and blankets that covered her and threw them on the floor.
“Sir?” she said. He took hold of her sleeping gown by the neck and pulled it, and she heard it tear. “Sir,” she could barely choke it out again; he tore the rest of the gown off her. Naked, she now pulled away toward the other side of the bed, but he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. He took from the bedpost the long blue strip that she’d surreptitiously shredded from the curtains that had hung in his bedchamber in Virginia. It’s my fault, she thought, for taking a piece of the curtain to tie back my hair: “I didn’t know,” she said; “I thought it was all right.” He tied her wrists with the cloth. “Please,” she said, but he held her tight, and then, when he loosened his robe, she saw him. In a panic she tried to bolt, but her wrists were bound and he held her by her legs. She fell back onto her bed. Behind her he pulled her hips toward him so she was on her knees, and took her long black hair in a knot in his fist. Before he buried her face in the pillow she had one last chance to gaze up at the crescent-moon window, to look for the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 25
light of torches, to listen for the sounds of voices. The window was black and silent.
He separated and entered her. Both of them could hear the rip of her, the wet broken plunder, a spray of blood across the tiny room. She screamed. She screamed so her brother James would hear, so the whole hotel would hear. She didn’t care if he killed her for it, if he pulled the hair out of her head for it, she screamed so they’d all know that their secret had found her. It was their secret, she’d seen it in all their faces, in London and Paris. But he didn’t strike or kill her, and then she knew it had been a secret to him too, and he couldn’t bear to live with it anymore. She screamed as the tip of him emptied his secret far inside her.
It thrilled him, the possession of her. He only wished she were so black as not to have a face at all. He only wished she was so black that his ejaculation might be the only white squiggle across the void of his heart. When he opened her, the smoke rushed out of her in a cloud and filled the room. It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn’t he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other. This possession made him happy, until he came. Then he sank out of his own sight, refusing to look at himself or what he’d done. He fell asleep, half on the bed and half on the floor.
For a long time she lay naked beside him, shuddering. Her face was turned away from him, but she could feel him there; if she could have moved she would have, but she could not. Nothing was more terrible to her than the silence, because she’d screamed so loud there was no way they couldn’t have heard her; she knew they were all awake in their beds in the hotel, James and Patsy and Polly, all lying staring in the dark still hearing the screams to which they didn’t respond. In these first moments she hated them and then she hated herself, for the way they would despise her now. So she lay shuddering, silently awake, and they all lay awake, except him.
Finally Sally slept. When she woke, before dawn, it was he who awakened her.
A R C D’X • 26
It was, actually, the soothing coolness between her legs that awakened her. When she opened her eyes and saw him, she lurched. Then she didn’t move.
Her hands were untied, the blue ribbon back on the post where it had hung. Blood still streaked the bed. Beside the bed, he knelt on the floor. He held in his hands the cold rags she’d brought for his head the previous afternoon. Sitting on the bed beside her naked body was the peach-colored porcelain bowl. He touched the rags to Sally’s thighs and wiped the blood from her, rinsing and squeezing the rags and putting them to the new wound between her legs, holding them there for a long time. He went on applying the damp rags until finally she stopped shuddering.
When she heard him bury his face into the rags between her legs and sob, she went back to sleep.
When the blood stopped, after he’d taken her many times over the weeks that followed, he didn’t wash her with the rags anymore. It was the hemorrhaging of his conscience to which Thomas tended. If he couldn’t quite forgive the way he fucked her, he accepted it as the dark thing that allowed him otherwise to be good.
Toward the end of the year, when he thought Sally was strong enough, Thomas brought a doctor to the Hotel Langeac to inoculate her for the pox. For several days and nights Sally lay in bed with terror and pox coursing through her; it was left to Patsy and James to care for her. They silently brought her food and, in the same silence, mopped her brow. Their eyes burned with hate. When the fourteen-year-old girl felt how she was banished from the heart of her own brother, her loneliness was without horizon.
Thomas, of course, didn’t come to her during this time. So at STEVE E R I C K S O IS • 27
first Sally was grateful for the fever. But finally she would have gone through anything to be free of it, and in her spells and exile from everyone around her, she imagined that the white spillage of her dark god might cure her like a potion. Feeling his rejection, she even heard herself call for him. When the fever of the inoculation finally passed and she’d spent another couple of days in bed recovering, she crept to th
e hotel kitchen one night and smuggled out a carving knife. She told herself she would lop off her tongue before she ever allowed it to call his name like that again.
Thomas and Sally didn’t speak of what was happening. He wouldn’t have chosen to speak of it, and there was no one for her to speak about it to. She was shunned by everyone as the living black secret that spread through the hotel and down its stairs, out its door and into the street. There this secret took the form of the heads of dead deer and the carcasses of dead rabbits stuck on gate tops and pinned to doorways, draping the pillars of the Pont Neuf and lining the walls along the rue St-Lazare. By the end of the first day the stench of dead animals was as political as the cognac and sex that Thomas had smelled on his arrival in the city two years before. The people in the streets said the dead carcasses were a protest against the law that made it a crime to kill the game of the aristocracy. But Sally knew the carnage had emerged from her uterus in the gush of his afterflow, beasts with their fur slicked by semen dashing crazed into impalement on the spires of Paris. The heads of people would be next.
The heads of people will be next, she whispered to him on the first night he came to her after her fever had gone. He’d taken her and then fallen asleep by her. Now at night there was always torch-light through the crescent-moon window above. I called you from the fever, she said to his sleeping face, drawing the carving knife out from beneath her pillow, because I’m so alone, and for that moment I would have rather had you up inside me than been that alone: that’s what you’ve done to me, she said. That’s the worst thing, that you’ve made me actually long for your defilement. Next time I’ll cut off my tongue first. He was sleeping in the light of torches. She looked down to between his legs and an idea gripped the knife in her hands; instead she pressed the blade to his throat.
Her own face was inches from his. She had the feeling he wasn’t asleep at all. Something about his breathing was different; she put A R C D’X • 28
her eyes right up to his as though to look in. “Master,” she said,
“we’ll carve your head and put it on a pike outside, with a rabbit.
Your head on a rabbit’s body, and a rabbit’s head on yours. That’s how Patsy and James will find you tomorrow.” She wanted to goad him now out of his pretense of sleep. It would be just like him, she thought, to die without anyone’s ever knowing whether he’d been awake for his own death. How godlike. She put the knife away and lay back on the pillow, waiting for a lion to emerge from her and crash through the hall, down the stairs and into the foyer, spearing itself on the iron poker with which the ashes of the fire below were stirred.
The next time he came to her she was awake. She heard the door open and let herself go limp in his hands. He took the blue ribbon from the post and tied her wrists. But instead of taking her from behind, he knelt on the floor by the bed as he’d done when he washed her with the cold rags. On the ceiling above her was the riot of light through the window, a blazing crescent-moon in the black. When she had almost lost herself in it, she was shocked by the feeling of something she’d never imagined. It was several seconds before she realized it was his mouth she felt on the small red hinge of her thighs. It didn’t hurt at all. It didn’t hurt in the least. She lay transfixed by it, not daring to look down at his hair the color of fire brushing against her in the dark. She felt his tongue slip inside her. Her inner mutilation hummed to it; the shudder she felt from it was unlike the one in which his first de-pravity left her. The crescent-moon grew on the ceiling above her.
As he continued with her the furor of the streets outside retreated to the low hum of her inner passage. The next shudder took her by surprise as did the one after, and when she felt herself plummeting into the blaze of the crescent-moon, when she felt herself grab the fire of his hair and pull him to her, she knew, with rage, that her violation was total: when she came she knew, with fury, that this was the ultimate rape, the way he’d made her give herself not just STEVE E R I C K S O N • 29
to his pleasure but to her own. Then he turned her over and plunged himself into her. But it was too late. If he’d intended to make his own possession of her complete, she had also, if for only a moment, felt what it was like not to be a slave.
“Great man’s whore,” James said to her when they were alone. Her eyes filled with tears but he wasn’t moved. “Just don’t think,” he went on, “just don’t think for a second you’re not as black as black.”
“I don’t think that,” she insisted, “I’ve never thought it. I would be even blacker, if I could.”
“Liar!” James said. They were upstairs standing in the hall of the hotel. Patsy had gone out and Thomas, who was now American ambassador, was at Versailles. Polly was in another part of the hotel with the concierge. “You’re a liar or a fool,” James said, “to wish to be even blacker in this world.” He leaned in so close it frightened her. “Remember this, little sister. He’s not your father or your husband, and never will be. So don’t get into your head any such foolishness. No silly-young-girl ideas. He’s your master, and all his white jism will not make you white enough to be the wife or daughter of a great man.”
Sally turned and ran, crying. She hurried to her own room but, looking at her bed, she could barely stand to be there. So then she ran to James’ room. When he came into the doorway she searched for anything she could throw at him; grabbing his chamber pot, she hurled it. The morning’s piss slopped all over James and the door. “Damn!” James cried, and lunged at her. He flailed at her as she covered her face with her hands. He would have kept flailing but stopped when he realized he’d have to account for the marks on her beautiful face. “Christ, I can’t even hit you,” he said disgustedly, “it would only bruise his property.”
She sat on the edge of his bed glaring up at him. “Oh, don’t let that stop you, James,” she said, “don’t you worry about that. He can’t tell anyway. He comes to me at night and I’m still black A R C D’X • 30
enough he can’t see me. So you just go ahead and beat me, because I’m still black enough that he’ll never know.”
In the middle of his room, looking at his sister, James put his face in his hands and let loose a convulsive sob. After a moment she got up from the bed and put her hand on his hair. He pulled her to him and they stood together, the reek of urine rising around them. They spent the afternoon washing down his room and their clothes; they didn’t talk anymore except at one point when James, on his knees scrubbing the floor, suddenly said, “We’re not slaves here.” He said it to the floor that he was scrubbing. She had wet clothes in her arms. When he looked up at her from the floor, she rushed with the clothes down the hallway.
Thomas returned from Versailles the following day. He called Sally and James into his chamber, which was still dark from the period of his headaches; he was sitting not in his reclining chair but in an upright one, behind a desk. His hands were on his head, and all Sally could see of him was the same red-gold hair she’d clutched so fervently in the night. Thomas told Sally and James he had decided to pay each of them thirty-six francs a month in wages.
He said he regretted not being able to pay them more, his debts being what they were. He rose from the desk and walked around the room, his head barely missing the low ceiling; he went on to explain that he’d arranged a tutor for Sally, who would learn French, and for one of the city’s finest chefs to teach James how to cook, so that on returning to America they wouldn’t have to leave behind them the pleasures of Parisian cuisine. Sally could see how her brother wanted to leap over the desk and kill Thomas. She saw it on James’ lips: we’re not slaves here. I could kill you, she knew he was thinking, and in Paris it wouldn’t be a slave killing his master. They might hang me for it, but in Paris it would be hanging one free black man for killing one free white one.
That afternoon Thomas and Sally rode through the city in his carriage, from one clothes shop to the next. Never concerned about his own attire, always wearing old pants and threadbare shirts and c
oats, Thomas was particular about choosing for Sally dresses that were elegant and simple. He bought shoes for her and an expensive pair of wine-red gloves. Sally wore the gloves in the coach on the way back to the Hotel Langeac. “Do you like them?”
he said, the first words that had been spoken intimately between STEVE E R I C K S O N • 31
them, and she answered, “Yes, I like them,” and she was astounded at how his face lit up. “They’re beautiful on you,” he blurted, “all of these clothes are lovely on you,” and then, embar-rassed by himself, he withdrew into silence.
She didn’t thank him for them. In the time she’d been in Paris she had come to construct the first foundation of who she was.
Used as she was by him and abandoned as she was by the rest of them, the only one she could turn to was herself, and when she’d first turned there and found no one, she had no choice but to make a person where nothing but beauty had been. The person she’d made wasn’t going to thank him for a pair of gloves and a couple of dresses. They weren’t compensation for anything; they were the gestures of a man taking care of his possession. That night she wore only the wine-red gloves as she lay naked on her bed. She believed that when he came to her, when he took her wrists to bind them with the blue ribbon that hung on the bed post, the generosity of his having given her the gloves would be desecrated by their sex. Lying for hours on the bed she began to touch herself.
It was in the early morning that her door opened. “Sally,” he said to her in the doorway. He’d never spoken on these occasions.
“Yes, Thomas,” she answered. The familiarity of his name shocked both of them.
“I want you to come with me,” he said, and she raised her hand to him from the bed. He took it, and as he pulled her from the bed he could feel the wetness of the glove’s fingertips. She brushed up against him as she stood and looked into his eyes to taunt him.
“Are we going somewhere?” she said.
“Get dressed,” he answered in the dark. Twenty minutes later they were in his carriage again, riding through the city with dawn still an hour away. When Sally shivered in the cold Thomas moved from the opposite seat to sit beside her, a thick blanket pulled up around them. They rode in silence beyond the city walls and then on the road east out of Paris, passing along the way the farms and villages that lay beneath the winter snow. Finally the sun came up over the trees. Sally could see an abbey on the other side of the valley. Sometimes, when she arranged the blanket around her, Thomas looked at the gloves on her hands. As they approached the abbey he broke the silence. “I received word last night,” he said,
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