by Bill Harris
The word was “Him!”
&
Cretia’s Gal still only hearing the echoing sounds in her head was the only one in earshot of the piano not to realize it was she who was actually playing it. Playing for the first time in her life.
Polishing the pianoforte was her favorite household chore. Smoothing the oiled cloth back and forth about the dark wood: the part with its gold scrawled letters spelling Boardman & Gray, that her Mama Cretia had taught her to read. The top that lifted to show the wires and little cotton covered heads of the hammers inside, the curved sides, the heavy carved legs, until it reflected her own darkness back at her. But never touching the ivory and ebony keys except to feather dust them with maternally possessive strokes. Warned about it by her mother. Threatened about it by M’s Esme. To never fool with the piano keys. Never. Playing now, note for note, the music the French man had played the night before. With the same enthusiasm and volume. The same pounding rhythmic drive.
M’s Esme, her bonnet clutched in her fist, her forehead wet from rain and sweat, entered looking about, stern and confused by what she saw and did not see. Jube was on the porch, at the open window, looking in at Cretia’s Gal.
“Where is—? Who?”
Cretia’s Gal stood, wide eyed as if shaken suddenly from a sound sleep. She stood looking at her hands trembling in spite of her tightly intertwined fingers.
There was a moment of almost hesitant embarrassment, as if each of them had caught the other engaged in a shameful activity, but neither of them, for the moment, knew what it was or what they should do.
“Where is he?” M’s Esme demanded, unsure this time. She looked at Cretia’s Gal.
Sophy’s baby cooed and crawling on his hands and one knee, moving toward the woman, then stopped and plopped on his behind and sat looking from one of them to another, as he began sucking his right index and middle fingers.
“Who was playing that piano?” Esme asked.
Sophy’s baby made a gurgling sound as he pulled his index and middle fingers from his mouth and pointed them toward Cretia’s Gal as if he were answering the woman’s question.
“You,” she said to Cretia’s Gal, whether or not she was convinced on the strength of the baby’s identification. “Did you play that piano?”
The girl stood, looking down at her hands.
“Answer me.”
The girl looked up at her mistress.
“Do not stand there looking at me. Did you play that piano?”
The girl didn’t move.
“I want to hear you play something.”
Still did not move.
“Do as I told say.”
Cretia’s Gal was confused, not sure that she had played, and if she had that she could do it again, and if she did, what she could or should play, nor what would happen then.
Sophy’s baby rolled back to his hands and knees and scooted back under the piano as Cretia’s Gal did as she was told and sat at the instrument. She closed her eyes and began playing not what the French man had played, but the tune that the woman staring at her from the doorway had been practicing for the last few days.
“No,” M’s Esme said almost calm, as if Cretia’s Gal had misunderstood her request. “Not that. The other. Play like him again.”
Cretia’s Gal did.
Cretia, who had not been there, was in the parlor doorway.
“Who taught you that? Who? Her?”
“No-body, ma’am,” Cretia’s Gal said, her voice steady.
“No-body . . . ? Some-body.” To Cretia. “Was it you?”
“Did some-body teach you?” Cretia asked her child, reassurance in her voice.
“You do not answer me by asking her a question,” M’s Esme snapped at Cretia.
“If you’ll let me I’ll find out,” Cretia said.
“I’ll find out,” she answered. “From her.”
“No-body, ma’am.”
“Get me Mister McCready. McCready,” she said to Jube. “Get Mister McCready!”
Jube looked to Cretia. Cretia nodded slowly, indicating for Jube to go, but to take his time.
Jube ran out into the rain.
M’s Esme moved to the piano and grabbed the child awkwardly by the wrists. Cretia’s Gal did not actively struggle nor did she passively resist. Her body, for the instant immobilized by fear, confusion, and dawning astonishment, was simply dark flesh, blood and bones, an object, with weight and form occupying space.
In M’s Esme’s attempt to pull the child away from the instrument the force of the girl’s non-resistant but non-compliant mass caused M’s Esme to stumble a step forward and hit her hip, first against the squat black instrument, and in a lurching half roll, attempting to regain her balance and avoid stepping on Sophy’s baby crawling from beneath the piano, she caught her foot on one of its bulbous legs, and with a grunt, pitch headfirst, like a feed sack shouldered from a wagon bed, her left hand, nearest the piano, grasping at but hitting and dislodging the slanting vertical rod bracing open the angled piano top, opened last evening by Monsieur Gottschalk, striking it with the full weight of her forward fall and thus with sufficient force to dislodge it, causing the blunt force of the shined solid mahogany top to slam down with a gunshot-like report, as she, to break her awkward fall across the baby, jammed her wrist against the floor.
The wire strings in the instrument’s shuddered innards raised a whining quiver, like the after-shiver of an axe stroke in the trunk of an oak tree. It droned in an eerie harmony to M’s Esme catlike howl.
Cretia knelt beside her, gripping her non-injured forearm.
. . . and Esme looked into the great twin pits and was consumed and sank deeper than the lowest hell into their burning blackness and the sorrows closed upon her, she was naked and empty, and in her distress she heard them say, there will be slaughter and overthrow, and all that is solid will perish, and the foundations will be compressed into dust.
M’s Esme swooned, her face as white as late May cotton.
In the few minutes later, M’s Esme regained consciousness to the sight of Cretia’s Gal staring at her. Her eyes. Mal Occhio, she almost screamed. She covered her eyes with her uninjured right hand and screamed, “Face her to the wall. Turn her away from me. Face her to the wall.” Convinced of what she had suspected all along—the girl had Mal Occhio. The Evil Eye.
Cretia’s Gal’s just displayed sorcery of perfectly played passages from Monsieur Gottschalk proved that she was somehow connected with evil. It was the only explanation of the piano playing. M’s Esme said she did not want to set her eyes on Cretia’s Gal again until she had been punished, hoping that being whipped would drive the evil out of her. The gal had never, as far as she could remember, had a beating. That was what had let the dark spirit get in her. That and her sullen mammy of course . . .
&
The word went down: Bring them up. Bring them all up to Highland House after supper.
Just for the beating of a child?
Must be more to it to be called out in the rain.
When there was bailing out and patching up to be done.
Some: Let’s just get it o’er with. So we can come back and get on with our doings.
Some: Just a child. E’en if Cretia’s Gal.
Some: She needed to be taught a lesson. Same as ev’rybody.
They went: motley, sodden. Grudging.
The paths muddy, the grass slick.
Trudged up from the Bottom in twos and threes and random clots and clusters, nigh, they hoped, the chafing end of a galling day.
&
Esme wore the sling Cretia had fashioned from a piece of an old petticoat. The swelling was gone and there was no pain even when she flexed her wrist, but she had retied the sling as a reminder to herself and to them.
A lighted lantern on the table behind her, she sat in her second-story window seat and looked down on them as they slowly assembled in the yard.
Their coming together looked to be as resented and labor
ed as her journey to understanding the thing that had, until the last few hours, preoccupied her life.
&
Cretia would forget, as they all did, Esme reassured herself. She’d mope and drag around a day or two—or hiss and strut, her tail up like a cat’s. She’d have to be watched, closely, but she’d soon forget and get over it. They always did, no matter how they hooped and hollered, they always forgot. In the end they had little more feelings than the animals. It was their way.
So, that was that. But she still was not satisfied.
“Did you deliberately let her play that piano? To spite me.”
“No ma’am.”
“No, ma’am? Do not contradict me, you ungrateful devil. Aye ma’am, you mean. Well let me make it plain as pudding. See if this moves you, you sulky bitch. You have said your last goodbye to her while she served in this house.
“Maybe my uncle has coddled you so, letting you keep her too long. He cuts my dreams asunder. Would not let me perform, as I want to.”
“Aye’m.”
Cretia: These buckras ain’t people.
Not contrite enough, Esme thought. Not nearly. Still under what she thought was the secret covering, that Uncle mistook in Cretia for nigger quality. Esme could see it now for what it was. Vainglory. Audacity. A flaming disdain that had been extinguished to little more than an ember, as she’d hollered She’s mine.
Cretia: These buckras ain’t no god’s people, this one, nor Beasley, nor Goodsire too. None of them, not from here to any ocean.
“I know what’s wrong with you. You do not think I mean it, do you? You think I’m just playing with you. You did not bother to control her because you take me for a fool. Goodsire is all you respect. You do not respect me. And you do not fool me. You may fool Uncle, but you do not fool me. I am not a fool.”
She stopped, unsure about how to prove she was not fooled.
“No ma’am.”
“Aye, ma’am, you mean. Well, the sun will never shine on your evil-eyed heifer in this house again—to look at me with that look of hers. Those eyes.”
Cretia stood. Stock-still. She was stoic as a teaspoon in her saucer of sulkiness. “No ma’am,” she said.
“‘Aye ma’am,’ you mean. But come dawn she will be in the fields just like the rest of them. We’ll see how her well-fed insolence stands up under that sun. See how her eyes burn out there. And how yours look in here.”
“Aye, ma’am,” neither looking at her nor not looking at her.
“Do not you answer me until I ask you something.”
“Aye ma’am.”
As Esme adjusted the sling she had her second revelation.
The fields weren’t far enough. Cretia’s Gal had to be gotten as far from Caledonia as a slaver could send her, and as soon as she could be sent. She had to be sold.
&
“She’s mine,” Cretia repeated.
“We’ll know whose she is when I write my name on her back,” McCready said. Then to Asch and Caesar standing on either side of the girl’s mother, “Now get Cretia out of my sight, and lock her down. Or I swear I will beat the skin off all of you, first to last!”
“Do not let him,” Cretia said, a statement to anyone.
Nowhere nigh a proper plea, M’s Esme thought. Ought to make her stay and watch. But something warned her not to.
“Whup me!” Cretia ordered. “Not her. Me!” As she is hauled away by the two mechanics.
“Hold some light here,” Beasley, McCready’s assistant, said. He had been handed the whip. “I want to see what I’m whupping. Don’t want to waste my time whupping air.”
A couple with lanterns moved closer, the rings of illumination bobbing like fishing lures on a black river.
Cretia howling like Biece’s dogs, Jube, half bare thought, and we standing here. No better than bales of wet cotton.
Cretia’s Gal sank to her knees and Moon and Odum laid her face down on the ground.
Seeing Cretia’s Gal whipped, hearing Cretia’s screams, Jube was, for the first time, and only for an instant, glad he had no parents to witness their child being beat.
During, Cretia’s Gal remembered once, after a scolding by M’s Esme, when Jube, whistling to himself, had seen her crying and had shown her what at first she thought was how to listen to plants grow—laying flat against the earth, each of them with an ear to the ground, until she had shook her head and admitted, No, she couldn’t hear a thing, and he’d laughed and shook his head.
No. That was not it.
What then?
He had pointed at her then and wiped his fingers under his eyes and shook his head to show no tears. She had realized that because of his diversion she not only was no longer crying but had forgotten all about her hurt.
She had smiled at him.
He had nodded and put his hand to her lips to stop her from speaking, and at that instant M’s Esme had shouted for her lazy bones, and she had turned and run for the house, but when she looked back before entering he was gone. Disappeared. As he could do. Leaving not e’en a silence where he had stood.
The drizzle wetting her lash wounds, Cretia’s Gal laid, her face in the mud.
She listened for the sound of grass growing.
But e’en after the whip had ceased its snap and slash and Cretia had stopped screaming to bathe and salve Cretia’s Gal’s wounds, and to go to McCready’s cabin and return to Highland House, they still heard her in their sleep, in the Bottom, in the grieve’s house, and in the main house too. Screaming.
She’s mine!
&
Cretia was weary. Slave weary. Too tired to spit or swat a wasp.
She had done what she could. Tonight, and the thirteen years that had come before, when each of those days and nights her primary purpose and thought was to get Cretia’s Gal away to possible freedom. She did not e’en consider her good fortune in having had her child for that long to teach and give hope to. Many mothers did not have half that. Many had nothing.
But was it enough? Had there been time enough? Nagged like sore joints or dreams of flying. Was there an enough?
She remembered her own mother.
St. Thomas Caribbean woman, carried into southern slavery.
Cretia, born in slavery, but bred on her mother’s stories of revolt in the Caribbean and of freedom in the north, stories passed on to Cretia’s Gal in fact, parables, and sewing riddles as they had been passed on from Cretia’s mother to her.
Would the child call on the lessons? Could she use them? Would they serve her? Be her guardians?
Once Cretia’s Gal was gone, Cretia would never know. Had known that from the beginning.
Would never again see her. Or hear word of or from.
Who would she be? Where?
She would never know.
Never.
Never.
That was the way it of it. To be sold away was, for those left behind, a beginning that had no end.
Cretia was weary tired.
All she wanted now was quiet, and the strength to wait and to gather her strength, for when McCready came back from the slave trader without her child she would kill him, she would be strong enough for that by then.
&
Jube watched Cretia. He did not know what she would do. He did not know what he could do.
He remembered the sound only a few hours ago of the liquid being squeezed in the gourd and her word in the black of the cabin as she soothed the girl. Remember, was the only word she said, and something had passed between them, mother to daughter, something that he had not been able to see.
In the moments before their final separation they, with McCready and Jube in half shadow watching them in the lantern light of the servants’ cabin, mother and daughter, had moved without looking at each other. It was as if they had long ago rehearsed the moment of their parting, and ev’rything necessary had been settled between them.
As McCready led Cretia’s Gal out to take her to his cabin and then away, Jube was gone.
It was raining again.
&
Jube was crouched, hunched on his haunches at the edge of the cornfield. With his naked arms wrapped around his naked knees, he watched Cretia’s Gal in the illumination from the faint lantern light from McCready’s cabin. He marveled at how erect she sat on the surrey seat, waiting as McCready loaded his second satchel into the surrey.
Jube had been planning, as soon as he had time, to make up a secret language just he and Cretia’s Gal could understand. It was to have been a language without words. Thought talk. So they could speak any time, whether they were together or not. She in the house, him in the garden, she on her pallet, he on his.
He closed his eyes and imagined it was in the morning, after the pour. He and Cretia’s Gal are in the stable, watching a mama cat deliver a litter of six, as they had done one time, and in their secret no-word language he would say to her, What can go round the house and look in ev’ry window, but do not make no tracks?
She would smile at him, and without shaking her head would say she did not know.
Guess he would encourage her.
She would think some more, still smiling, would say-think she couldn’t guess. What?
Then she’d hear him think-say: The sun.
Cretia’s Gal would turn her head slightly, but still looking at him, and still smiling, admiration shining in her eyes.
Ask another one.
Then he’d say-think: All right, what goes all around the house and do not make but one track?
They’d go through it all again, Cretia’s Gal looking at him and smiling in wonderment.
Finally he’d tell her: A wheelbarrow.
She’d wonder how he knew so much . . . ?
Jube opened his eyes as he heard McCready close the door to his cabin. The lantern was out. It was dark.
McCready’s hound yipped once as its master hiked the surrey horse.
Man and girl rode off in the rain.
Cretia’s Gal was gone.
Mud covered and naked, a beating in his chest like Ashe’s hammer on the anvil, Jube blinked in the downpour, and licked the tears and raindrops from his lips.
&
A candle was in the center of the dirt floor.
