“M’Dear? D’you see her right away? D’you see her in the tub, I mean?”
“No. I went after Pastor and them. They were the ones that brought her to the church. I went up, though, and the Barghest hadn’t even drained the tub.”
“What’d it look like?”
“Red. Just…red.”
Perhaps her own eyes in the mirror, perhaps the pitch darkness of night, perhaps the cool hand of a john, perhaps the soft whirring of the pendulum clock, perhaps the last dregs of coffee in a tin mug, perhaps the flood of Ida’s blood filling the bath red, perhaps the ink on the corpse’s fingertips, perhaps the frost-rimed grass some morning last March, perhaps the crystal of her Habanera dress, perhaps the curse woven into the corset, or perhaps the stench of the piano man’s remains in the icebox—perhaps all of those pieced together in a row—pushed Jessup’s heart to sickness over thinking about the Barghest.
Down below, in Mercy City, the men were leaving for home, as dawn peeked up over the hill. Kicking Jess’s love down the road, they were laughing and tumbling in the way only intoxicated men could. In the way that spilled forth into disaster when they would truly awaken. Danuel, especially, clapping his son’s back. Danuel’s sloppy souvenirs from the night—the trace of lipstick, the stiffness in his groin, the laughter in his eyes—would disappear into the light. And Jess would be watching from her tiny window in the whorehouse.
Her ma’am spat the word with venom. Whore! Whore! Whore! She sang that refrain, over and over, clapping to the beat. Jess liked to giggle a little at the word, pretending it was nonsense noise.
“Jessup!” he barked from his office.
She muttered a simple curse to herself in the back of her throat.
“What you say?” he yelled as if he could hear the thoughts pounding in her head. It was just the headache behind her eyes; without the cool damp cloth to rest into, she just pushed her head against the window.
It began in this way, pressing her forehead against the cold window, watching Danuel laugh. And hating the Barghest. The Barghest and his smile like fire in the reflection of the piano man’s pupils. Hate twisted her stomach. Hate churned her innards. Dashed upon the quiet hill of torment in her own way, she was brimming with that bile. Then the bile leapt from her throat and onto the window.
It wasn’t the first time. The first time this happened, her mother had called her a whore for the first time. Jess had prayed it would be the last.
“Jessup, get up here!”
The blessed child, she decided, would be named Wanhope.
Esther Lyons was keeping track of her charges’ misdeeds.
The glass of buttermilk was filled with carpenter ants, scrambling over each other in a panicked daze, screaming the noiseless shrieks of drowning, while JJ Kincaid, the second son of Reverend and Mrs. Kincaid, watched with a silent smile and licked his lips.
Croswell Kincaid—aged four—kicked a sleeping hound. The hound stirred only an inch or so before sinking back into slumber. Croswell Kincaid—aged four—kicked the dog again. The hound sighed heavily and dreamt of rabbits on the mountain. Croswell Kincaid—aged four—kicked the dog a third time. The hound sank his teeth into the fat of Croswell’s face, leaving him droopy. The hound was shot over by the gardener’s shed the next morning.
Penelope sang and skipped rope. Penelope played Beethoven for her mother’s bridge club, hymns for her pastor’s sermons, carols for her teacher’s Christmas concert. Penelope embroidered roses and truisms onto pillows. Penelope wrote in her diary about going to the state normal school to teach little darkies to read and write as a missionary’s wife in the jungles of Africa, next to the dirty pictures she kept of Sandow the famous strongman. Penelope flashed a glimpse of her burgeoning breasts to the neighborhood boys for a nickel.
Samuel, the oldest at thirteen, always smelled funny. He smelled like sulfur and Jessup’s perfume.
Daily, as Esther watched the children, the two naked tar women stood by the windows and sang their song. Esther sang the song to the children when she put them to bed.
“I know it! ’Deed I know it, Sister. I know it! Dese bones g’wine rise again.”
From A Historical Survey of Napoleonville by Eugenia Kincaid (1912)
Chapter 11: The Negro Population
According to township records and census maps, Napoleonville’s Negro district down the hill, known colloquially as the Bramble Patch, was built on the trampled remains of land belonging to R. Miller Croswell. You will recall that the Croswell family were among the first of our Scotch-Irish pioneers to settle this land and that R. Miller, in particular, was integral in founding the Napoleonville school and library after his gristmill business flourished.1 While the Croswells were initially successful in their business, the devastating flood of 1830 left much of their land infertile. This, coupled with the tragic death of his sons Micah and Evan and of his first wife, née Sarah Winston,2 led to R. Miller’s eventual abandonment of the land.
The Bramble Patch comprises a few streets cross-cutting the swath of land formerly belonging to the Croswell family. The major thoroughfare is Freedom Avenue, which is a tributary of sorts from Napoleonville’s Main Street, meeting the main artery of Napoleonville. Running parallel to this are Asher and Lincoln streets, where several prominent families of the Negro race inhabit modest houses. Most of the surrounding area is a shantytown.3 The few cross streets are Mercer, Perry, and Harris. Rural routes extend from these.
FIGURE 11.1
No one is sure when the Negroes first began to settle in what would one day be known as the Bramble Patch. However, the neighborhood’s first major building, the African Methodist Episcopal church, was erected in 1841. The original edifice burnt down in a fire the following year; the brick church which stands in its place to this day went up four years later. This was made possible thanks to the contributions of several fervent missionary spirits in Napoleonville, including my late father-in-law, Samuel Wilkerson Kincaid, pastor of the Napoleonville Second Baptist. It should be noted at this point that several Negroes had been a part of the initial settlement that became Napoleonville, but they did not live in the town proper. During and after the War, the town’s Negro population grew. The accompanying tintype (Figure 11.1, above) depicts some servants of the Duncan household, including the Negress Livia Marvell (center).
* * *
1 Note from the 1976 edition: Eugenia Marietta Croswell Kincaid was a cousin to the R. Miller Croswell family and may have exaggerated his contributions. Contemporary reports indicate that R. Miller Croswell was no more integral to the establishment of Napoleonville than other well-to-do men living in the area between 1810 and 1845.
2 Note from the 1976 edition: Referenced in Chapters 3, 4, and 14 as death by typhoid, but after her death and even until Eugenia Kincaid’s time, rumors persisted that Sarah Winston was murdered.
3 Note from the 1976 edition: Most of this land is now overgrown, and nothing of the historic “Bramble Patch” remains.
Lauds; or, A Morning Meditation
Friday, June 13, 1913
Penelope lifted her knees to her head. Esther held her breath. Penelope pearled her body up into the parlor rug and, catlike, eyed the blond woman and boy coming up the path to the house. Her eyebrows, lips, and back arched a little. Esther felt insatiable hunger burn her lips. It was not her own but Penelope’s. The sun hung a little too close to the grass, and Esther placed her hand upon her stomach, hoping to rip out her guts. It was morning.
And with the blonds, there was a brown-haired man, trailing a few steps behind. He half smiled like he had just remembered a private joke. There was a flurry of linen and dotted cotton as Penelope brought herself to attention and ran to the door.
“It’s not proper to accept guests this early, Miss Penelope. With your mam and father gone, too.”
“Lower your eyes, darkie!” Penelope said. Esther
turned to liquid and sank into the wall. Penelope leapt at the door. Energy quivered inside the foyer. “Peter!”
The man Peter smiled with an ever-increasing air of obligation and greeted Penelope as “Sistie.” Esther had seen him a few times before, at the home and at the church. He was a friend of Samuel’s from college. Peter was older than the Kincaid boy, twenty-one to Samuel’s seventeen. He had a straight back and a tongue that lay crookedly between his teeth. The blonde woman next to him smelled like raspberries and too many other people’s fingers. He and she, they were spitefully good-looking. Esther knew that the man’s surname was Ailey, and that his mother called him Dob as his first name was really Peter-Robert. The woman was his fiancée; her first name was the same as some virtue that white folks pretended to care about. The boy between them was pale. He didn’t speak; he was the Virtue woman’s brother, but she resented his youth.
Peter wanted to know if the folks were home. Penelope dripped onto the doorposts and shook her head. Esther stood looking at the Virtue woman. Down in the yard, the tar women were bathing naked, singing their song over the lot of them. The Virtue woman had plaited hair and a little Brownie camera.
Peter eyed Penelope. Virtue and her brother stood silent. “That’s a shame, Sistie! We needed to talk to your father.”
Penelope shook her head again.
Peter would come around Sunday, then, after church. Virtue and the boy had to go home tonight. Just like the song Mrs. Kincaid played on the piano, “Catch the Ten Fifty-Five to My Henrietta Love.”
Esther heard the hammers inside strike the piano strings and saw the tar women reach out.
It was a shame, Penelope noted. She dug her nails into her palms. Crescent moons of terrible scarlet bloomed in the soft flesh. Only the blond boy noticed and he balked like a mule. Esther saw the tar women begin to split their mouths open in laughter. Penelope stalked her eyes over the Virtue woman’s entire body as a breeze cut through her white linens and raised her skin. Then she declared the coming picnic and dismissed the group on the porch.
Peter Ailey and the others—Verity, the fiancée’s name was, and her brother Jerry—left. The church bells began to ring. Verity and Peter stopped to take a couple of photographs of a little home down the street. They planned the names of their future children and what sort of furniture that little white house would hold. Jerry asked for a picture of the draft horse in the adjacent field; Verity obliged. The three went back to a small hotel room.
It was too bad, thought Esther. Too ugly. The tar women had touched his blond hair, and it was now marked with their sticky splotch. They were still laughing when she went to the back kitchen for bread. The sun was too low in the sky. The tar women sang their hymn. There was fire in the river already.
A newspaper clipping found in Rev. Jonah Kincaid’s office
Letter to the Editor, New York Herald, 1913
Can it be said that America is falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro through the influence of what is popularly known ‘rag time’ music? If there is any tendency toward such a national disaster, it should definitely be pointed out and extreme measures taken to inhibit the influence. This music is symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible limitations of the Negro type.
From the diary of Samuel Kincaid
Wednesday, April 23, 1913
She’s a nice shade of periwinkle when she smiles. She smiles pretty and I like the bloods in her neck. She shudders breath and rains silver from her flat bare feet. Sings from her hips “honey,” which drips on my lips. I could plunge my hand into her cavities and pull out her gallbladder and hold it at night.
I want to. I want to.
Is this what a man feels upon falling in love?
The harrowing tremble of her frantic heartbeat while you walk behind her.
I think she’s seen me walking behind. I want to sink my teeth into her hand while I kiss it. She’s chocolate candy and hysteria. This is my madness and my slavery.
How do you get to the Bramble Patch? When your daddy’s the preacher and your nurse was a Negro, too? Maybe you wish you had a black bastard over in the Bramble Patch.
I don’t miss standing in the back of their peep show, watching them devour her. With her baby, they don’t want her, and I can eat alone. How do you end up seeing her and wanting to set your own body on fire to prove that she’s your own shade of periwinkle? I want to crumple into the flames and jungle music. She’s threadbare and whelped—yet I adore her.
I dream she’s at the edge of the river, rocking my aching head back and forth; I dream her breasts and the trees are whispering in the wind and they tell me to gobble her tongue and I do and I swallow her blood and tears after and she thanks me with her eyes and baptizes me in the cool of her body. I wake up in Onan’s shame.
I watch her walk overcanted, smiling and turning periwinkle. Honey waits at her hips.
Marginalia
Following the river behind the little white boy named Croswell—he held his sister’s doll by fistfuls of hair, the smell of mischief dripping from him in pools of sweat, as if summer weren’t ever a good idea—Esther’s brain pulsed with the river’s current. Esther liked to drink switchel, which was molasses and vinegar mostly, on hot days like today so she could feel as sticky as the mule who pulled the ice wagon. Instead Mrs. Kincaid had packed up canteens of water for Croswell, JJ, and Penelope. A smallish tin cup for Esther, who carried the basket through the woods. With Samuel away at seminary, there were fewer eyes on her these days.
Penelope didn’t mind her brother clinging to the doll’s hair, desperately dragging her through the forest, but Croswell’s teeth clacking from his over-pronounced overbite drove her to sprint away. There hummed with the bees a sort of drowsy springness, drowning out for Esther the humiliating vision of Penelope’s future peep shows in a year or two as she would grow from girl to woman with sinister smiles. Penelope for her part slowed to a lope not too far ahead and sank into her own gray eyes. The Reverend and Missus were taking Samuel to a tent meeting in a place far enough to be called “away” but not enough to be called “far.” Penelope had the Reverend’s eyes, which was why Esther feared her the most, or maybe it was her rolling tongue, begging for the satisfaction of kissing older boys and men. Or maybe it was the cloudiness in Penelope’s future beyond a year or
two.
When Croswell asked Esther why she looked so sad, she lied and said she missed ’Livia Marvell. No one really knew how to miss ’Livia, not properly in the way she deserved, least of all Esther. The Marvells for their part hissed nasty rumors between the pews at church—that Ma Lyons was a whore and Esther was the devil’s punishment. In the trains heading back down South, there were whispers about a little Black witch living and working in Napoleonville, trembling in the clickty-clack-clitckty-clack on the bridge that crossed the river a little to the west.
Esther almost told Croswell about the train cars tumbling down into the river, the fire, fire, fire, burning the water. She repeated the phrase she’d heard gray-haired aunties tell each other: “It sours a soul.” Croswell wasn’t cruel like the others, she reasoned, just naïve. And naivety could be just as damaging. If not more.
The electricity in the June heat shocked Esther’s tongue, zagged into her soul. She was left suddenly naked; each layer of her body peeled away from the rest. Frayed, she felt the tug of the tapestry around her, a single thread pulled out to the rotting guts of tomorrow—maggoty with the stench of blood and silt. Her eyes hit heaven before plummeting back down to the margins of the wooded path and a spot up the creek.
Further up the creek, a blue-black dot skipped against the horizon. Even from this distance, Esther could make out the braids splayed out in every direction, like epidermis sliced away from fatty tissue. She cringed and cringed again, looking at the baby, Wanhope. There, trailing at Jessup’s skirts, toddling behind her mother’s hem, leaning against her leg, clutching s
hards and wrinkles of the gingham dress, which Esther could see was made roughly by hands with too many blisters. So clumsy and swollen, the hypocritical fingers of a new laundress and an old whore.
Esther hadn’t seen it happen, but the ritual of lactation had made Jessup’s body impossible. Her breasts had sat atop the boning of her corset like overripe peaches whose skin split with boozy nectar, sweet and hot to sting the throat of the suckling masses. But something about the burst was ugly, patrons complained to the Barghest. Matronly. So Jessup had left the corset on the bed she once worked in and taken the toddler to Honey’s house. She left the corset because she was neither whore nor lady anymore but something other entirely.
Sometimes, at night, Jessup’s heart fluttered between her ribs as she remembered how she was once adored. It scared her, how neatly the jagged little line split her world into a double realm. Until that day she left, the difference between adoration and indifference had seemed like the difference between night and day, but in reality it was the difference between flotsam and jetsam, the difference between New Amsterdam and New York.
Timetables
THROUGH TIMETABLE EFFECTIVE JAN. 1911
Passenger Train No. 17
Northbound-Daily
Station
Southbound-Daily
Noon
Marion
These Bones Page 3
