Dessa Rose

Author's Note

Prologue

The Darky

The Wench

The Negress

Epilogue

Reader's Guide

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dessa Rose
is based on two historical incidents. A pregnant black woman helped to lead an uprising on a coffle (a group of slaves chained together and herded, usually to market) in 1829 in Kentucky. Caught and convicted, she was sentenced to death; her hanging, however, was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. I read of the first incident in Angela Davis' seminal essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves” (
The Black Scholar
, December 1971). In tracking Davis to her source in Herbert Aptheker's
American Negro Slave Revolts
(New York, 1947), I discovered the second incident. How sad, I thought then, that these two women never met.

I admit also to being outraged by a certain, critically acclaimed novel of the early seventies that travestied the as-told-to memoir of slave revolt leader Nat Turner. Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth—and made of that process a high art—remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often, these have betrayed us. I loved history as a child, until some clear-eyed young Negro pointed out, quite rightly, that there was no place in the
American past I could go and be free. I now know that slavery eliminated neither heroism nor love; it provided occasions for their expressions. The Davis article marked a turning point in my efforts to apprehend that other history.

This novel, then, is fiction; all the characters, even the country they travel through, while based on fact, are inventions. And what is here is as true as if I myself had lived it. Maybe it is only a metaphor, but I now own a summer in the 19th century. And this is for the children—Malcolm Stewart, Patricia Grundy, Steven Allen, Evangeline Birdson—who will share in the 21st.

S
HERLEY
A
NNE
W
ILLIAMS

San Diego, California

September 14, 1985

Someone…

 

“Hey, hey…”

 

coming down the Quarters
.

 

“…sweet mamma.”

 

Kaine, his voice high and clear as running water over a settled stream bed, swooping to her, through her…He walked the lane between the indifferently rowed cabins like he owned them, striding from shade into half-light as if he could halt the setting sun
.

 

“Say hey now, hey now—”

 

Even without the banjo banging against his back—she would have known him

 

“Dessa da'ling…”

 

arms outstretched, fingers soundlessly snapping, their rhythm the same one that powered her heart…Mouth stretched wide in a grin, shadow running to meet him

Hoe thrown aside, running, running…

 

“Kaine calling, calling his woman's name—”

 

caught, lifted from the ground, pressed hard against his chest, hands locked behind his neck, the banjo banging against them. “What you doing down here so early?” On the ground now and scared. Lawd, if Boss Smith saw him—And that no-good Tarver was still behind them—

“They think I'm still up there at that old piece-a greenhouse trying to make strawberries grow all year round.” His warm breath tickling the side of her neck—almost, she lost herself in the sensation; dread held her quiet. Laughing, ignoring her silence, he stooped and picked up her hoe…

The Quarters stirred. Smoke curled lazily from several stovepipes; children ran here and there. Already a few people waited a turn at the grinding stone near the center of the row, others at the well next to it
.

“You just asking for trouble, coming down here like this,” she told him (she had told him…told him time and time again

“Baby, I'm already in trouble.”

He grinned but still the breath caught in her throat. “What you mean?”

“Mean a nigga ain't born to nothing but trouble,” David seemed to materialize out of the twilight as he spoke, “and if a nigga don't court pleasure, he ain't likely to get none!”

“Naw,” Carrie Mae, fat brown baby slung on her hip, chimed in, “Masa done sent his butt down here to get it out of trouble: taking care that breeding business” baby…baby—“he been let slide.”

“Now yo'all know I be trying.” Kaine was laughing, too. “But I got something here guaranteed to ease a troubling mind.” He patted Dessa's shoulder
.

Laughing, David and Carrie Mae passed on
.

“Kaine—”

“Lefonia gived me—”

“After how much talk?”

“Didn't take much”

The laugh was choked out of her; she had looked into his eyes. They were alive, gleaming with dancing lights (no matter what mammy-nem said; his eyes did so sparkle) that turned their brown to gold. Love suffused her; she had to touch him or smile. She smiled and he grinned. “Don't take much, Dess—if you got the right word. And you know when it come to eating beef, I steal the right word if it ain't hiding somewhere round my own self's tongue.” He tugged her up the steps to their cabin. She laughed despite herself; he could talk and wheedle just about anything he wanted. “And I pulled some new greens from out the patch and seasoned em with just a touch of fatback.”

“A touch was all we had. Kaine, what—”

“Hmmmm mmmmmm. But that ain't all I wants a touch of,” he said holding her closer, pulling the dirty, sweaty rag from her head. “Touch ain't never just satisfied me.”

She laughed and relaxed against him. They were inside, the rickety door shut against the gathering night. “Our greens going get cold.”

“But we ain't.” He stood with one leg pressed lightly between her thighs, his lips nibbling the curve of her neck
.

“I got to clean up a little.” Teasing now, yet conscious, too, of the moist grittiness of her skin against the coarse cleanness of his shirt. Never end! Suddenly, fiercely, the wish was upon her. To be always in this moment, her body pressed to his, his warm in the bend of her arm
.

“You ain't dirty,” he growled, hands grasping her shoulders, shaking her from the shadow of that wish. She leaned against him feeling the steady beat of his heart against her own; he ran the tip of his tongue down the side of her neck. “Ain't no wine they got up to the House good as this—” fingers caught in her kinky hair, palms resting gently on her cheeks. “Ain't no way I'm ever going
let you get away from me, girl. Where else I going to find eyes like this?” He kissed her closed lids. “Or a nose?” He pecked playfully at the bridge, the tip. “Mouth.”

His lips were firm and velvety as the tip of a cat-tail willow; her skin yearned under their touch. She trembled. “Mmmmmmmmmm. I sho like this be-hime.” Hands cupping her buttocks, he dared her, “Tell me all this goodness ain't mine. And when it get to moving—Lawd! I knowed it was going be sweet but not this doggone good!”

Talk as beautiful as his touch. Shivering, she pulled at his shirt. This was love, her hand at his back, his mouth. “Sho you want,” she asked him, “sho you want this old—?” His lips were on hers, nibbling, nipping, “Dessa,” a groan in his throat. Her sentence ended in a moan. Thighs spreading for him, hips moving for him. Lawd, this man sho know how to love…

Desire flowered briefly, fled in dry spasm, gone as suddenly as the dream had come, so lifelike she had felt herself with him, knew herself among Carrie and them, been swept up in the warmth of their presence. And woke. She closed her eyes. Chains rasped, rubbed hatefully at her ankles and wrists. Coarse ticking scratched at her skin; corn husks whispered dryly beneath her at each move. Kaine's eyes had been the color of lemon tea and honey. Even now against closed eyelids, she could see them—Kaine's eyes, Carrie's smile…

 

I sent my Dessa a message

 

Dessa mouthed the words

 

 

and heard his voice in her ear

 

The darky had sat on the floor of the root cellar, barely visible in its shadow. Occasionally her head moved toward the block of
light from the open door or her chains rattled in the darkness. There had been nothing in the darky's halting speech and hesitant manner to suggest the slave revolt leader she was convicted of being. Held spellbound by that very discrepancy, Adam Nehemiah had leaned forward from his perch on the cellar steps the better to hear the quiet rasp of her voice. He hadn't caught every word; often he had puzzled overlong at some unfamiliar idiom or phrase, now and then losing the tale in the welter of names the darky called. Or he had sat, fascinated, forgetting to write. Yet the scene was vivid in his mind as he deciphered the darky's account from his hastily scratched notes and he reconstructed it in his journal as though he remembered it word for word.

Nehemiah paused, the pen poised above his journal. He couldn't bring himself to believe that negroes actually had some means of preventing conception, yet he could not keep himself from speculating. The recipe for such a potion would be worth a small fortune—provided, of course, that one could hit upon some discreet means of selling it. A contraception root would be very like slave trading, he thought with a low chuckle, something from which every gentleman would profit but which no gentleman would admit knowledge of. Probably he gave the negroes too much credit, but it would do no harm to question the darky further about this, he thought; he continued writing.

His tone had been a bit sharp, Nehemiah thought reading the question now, but he had been startled by that casual revelation of violence against a master. Perhaps he had made some overt sign of his excitement—after all, he was actually tracing the darky's career back, perhaps to her first mutinous act—for she had opened her eyes and looked at him. Nehemiah still marveled at how wide and black her eyes had appeared in the half-light of the cellar, the whites unmarred by that rheumy color characteristic of so many darkies. He had understood then something of what the slave dealer, Wilson, might have meant when he talked of the darky's “devil eyes” her “devil's stare.”

It had been an entrancing recital, better in its way than a paid theatrical, the attack on the master, the darky's attachment to the young buck, that contraception root—all narrated with about as
much expression as one gave to a “Howdy” with any passing stranger. And then that bald statement that seemed to echo in the silence.
This
was the “fiend,” the “devil woman” who had attacked white men and roused other niggers to rebellion.

Nehemiah replaced the pen in the standish, seeing again the ghostly gleam of the darky's eyes in the dimness, the bulky outline of her body. Who would think a female that far along in breeding capable of such savagery? He shook his head, chiding himself; he shouldn't be surprised. Though the darky had no scars or marks of punishment except on her rump and the inside of her flanks—places only the most careful buyer was likely to inspect—these bespoke a history of misconduct. But the darky, according to the trial record, had been offered for sale at a bargain price (which Wilson jumped at)
because
she'd attacked her master. And neither the attack nor scars were mentioned in her description in the coffle manifest. How many others on Wilson's ill-fated slave coffle had carried a similar history writ about their privates? Nehemiah wondered; how widespread was such collusion?

Nehemiah leaned back carefully in the rickety chair, a sense of well-being spreading through him. This case was likely to yield more toward his book on slave uprisings than he had hoped. The obvious complicity between slave trader and slave owner in the resale of a dangerous slave was a theme worth investigating. It was the nature of the negro trader to buy cheap and sell dear—and warrant any one that could move as “likely” or sound. That was business and the wise buyer was ware. But to omit mention of a darky's mean streak went beyond sharp dealing and bordered on outright fraud.

Wilson, at least, had paid for his cupidity. That darky out in the root cellar and several bucks had somehow freed themselves, overpowered the guards, and freed the rest of the slaves on Wilson's coffle. The uprising had occurred on the trail, a couple of days east of Linden. Though the renegades had fled through the countryside, there had been none of the marauding and pillage rumor still attributed to them; the posse under Sheriff Hughes had caught up with them too quickly. Still, the toll in life and property
had been horrifying. Five white men had been killed. Wilson himself had lost an arm. Thirty-one slaves had been killed or executed; nineteen branded or flogged: some thirty-eight thousand dollars in property destroyed or damaged.

The slave dealer was in comfortable enough circumstances, boarded at the home of a widow until permanent provision could be made for his care. But Wilson, while not violent—at least physically—was quite literally mad, by turns lucid and delusional. He could give a complete catalog of the names, dates, and places of purchase, the price paid for most of the hundred or so slaves in his coffle. A crackle of laughter or perhaps only the blinking of an eye and he would be plunged into tears and raving. Then he would call out to one or another of his companions on that ill-starred journey, or to Nate, the lone negro driver on the coffle who had died protecting him. Or “Step lively, there,” he would cry; then, confidentially, “Lively niggers sing. Help em raise a song, Nate.” Most often Wilson cursed the darky, “treacherous nigger bitch,” and her cohorts, “fiends,” “devils”—“Oh stop the bloody bastards, Nate!” his empty right sleeve waving as the nub within it jerked. It was an affecting spectacle. To see a white man so broken by nigras went quite against the grain. And Wilson, raving or lucid, blamed his condition on that darky out in the cellar, was obsessed with seeing, and selling, the kid she carried. A pickaninny that young would be more trouble than it was worth, but the court, fearing for Wilson's sanity, had delayed the darky's execution until after she whelped.

The unnatural, almost superstitious awe in which Wilson seemed to hold the darky had whetted Nehemiah's curiosity; slave dealers were not usually so womanish in their fears. The darky had been removed from the jail and placed in Sheriff Hughes' custody at his farm a few miles outside Linden—as much to remove her from the public eye as to have her near Hughes' cook who would act as midwife to the wench. Nehemiah had had no trouble persuading Hughes to let him see her, but he had been disappointed in that initial visit. The “virago,” the “she-devil” who still haunted Wilson's nightmares had seemed more like a wild and timorous
animal finally brought to bay, moving quickly and clumsily to the farthest reaches of the cellar allowed by her chains. Hughes had attempted, in a really remarkable approximation of the nigra's own dialect, to persuade her into the light provided by the open cellar door. He had not cared to compel her forcibly; she had been in a dangerously excitable state when first apprehended—biting, scratching, spitting, a wildcat—apparently unconcerned about the harm her actions might cause her unborn child. Her belly was almost as big as she and Nehemiah thought privately that birthing the kid she carried—a strong lusty one judging by the size of that belly—would probably kill her long before the hangman came for her neck. The stench of the root cellar that day, “composed,” he had written, “almost equally of stale negro and whatever else had been stored there through the years,” had almost suffocated him. They had withdrawn without coaxing her into speech.

He sniffed gingerly at his sleeve now, but could detect no telltale odor. Really, he must speak to Hughes about making provision for another meeting place. Being closeted with the darky within the small confines of the cellar was an unsettling experience. He took up his pen and wrote:

He double-starred the last word, denoting the end of the entry, replaced the pen in the standish, and stretched, slowly flexing shoulder muscles cramped too long over the makeshift table. The candles made a shifting pattern of light around him, leaving the rest of the small room in shadow. Leaning back in the chair, Nehemiah locked his hands behind his head. The idea for this book about the origins of uprisings among slaves had come from Nehemiah's publisher, Browning Norton. Anything to do with slavery, as the success of his last book,
The Masters' Complete Guide to Dealing with Slaves and Other Dependents
, seemed to prove, was assured some audience in the south and notice in the north. But Nehemiah had been reluctant to undertake a similar project so close upon the heels of it. He was gratified by the widespread recognition the
Guide
had brought him, but he had no plans to set himself up as an expert on recalcitrant negroes. However much the plantation south might rely on slave labor, the “negro tamer,” like the negro trader, had no place in planter society. And Adam Nehemiah wanted just that.