Dessa Rose (10 page)

Harker and Ada swore the darky wasn't from around here. In
fact, Harker said the girl was from Charleston. Not that Rufel believed that for a minute; Ada had probably put him up to that, hoping to touch Rufel's heart. But, if the girl were from Charleston. Here Rufel would stop short, hearing once again Mammy's anxious voice, urging her to write the family, for surely they would send for Rufel to visit, seeing again the glittering ballrooms of her first Charleston season. Usually—for if it wasn't this longing or memory, it would be some other—she would put aside whatever task she worked on, gather up the babies if she had been nursing, and find something in the sitting room that needed doing.

No one asked and she rarely thought to question herself after the first day or so. She knew there was more to the girl's story than the darkies were telling, and now and then she did wonder briefly what could have forced the girl out into the woods with her time so near. Even in the comfort and splendor of Dry Fork, having Timmy had been an ordeal, and Rufel refused to dwell on the agony of Clara's birth. Well, darkies did have their own way of doing things and whatever the real story was, it couldn't, she thought, amount to much. Rufel sometimes suspected that the girl was the sweetheart of one of the new darkies, and was made uneasy by the idea. They couldn't start using the Glen like a regular hideaway, she would think fearfully, and push the speculation aside. The colored girl would wake and tell her story—Whether or not she believed it, Rufel, recalling the long hours she had spent with Mammy, talking idly or in companionable silence, thought it would be something to pass the time.

Rufel leaned now against the bedroom door and watched the colored girl, who lay curled on her side in the big feather bed, facing the door. The colored girl had not stirred at the sound of the closing door and after a moment Rufel continued across the room to the curtained doorway in the adjacent wall. This girl couldn't go on acting crazy forever, she thought impatiently, talking all out of her head, laying up like she was still half dead. Rufel pushed aside the curtain with a swish and entered the narrow antechamber where her seven-year-old son, Timmy, slept. It had been her dressing room in the original plan of the house. The boy had
slept in the room since early spring and its plain neatness was a sign of his growing independence. He acted more like nine or ten than the eight he would be in November, spending long hours with Uncle Joel and Dante as they tended the stock and garden, with Ada in the cook-shed, or with Annabelle, when she could catch him and there was nothing better to do.

She should keep him closer, Rufel thought as she put away his clothing in neat piles on the open shelves above his makeshift bed, keep him away from the darkies. Send him to the field school at the crossroads—But Bertie would return and be mortified to find his son sharing a desk with common red-necks. And where would she get the two dollars a month to keep him there? I can't just keep him cooped up in here with me all day, she thought wearily. And the darkies talked before him as they would not with her; it was through him that Rufel kept some kind of track of the comings and goings in the Quarters. She was not entirely convinced that some of those darkies were not Bertie's nigras taking his continued absence as an opportunity to slip back and live free. Neither she nor Timmy would ever recognize them. Mammy had been the one who knew them all.

Finished, Rufel turned and stood in the doorway, peeking between the curtains; she could just see the top of the girl's head in the pillows. Rufel shrugged between the curtains and started toward the bedroom door but stopped as she neared the bed. The girl had turned over; her profile was a sooty blur against the whiteness of the pillow. Her eyes were closed, the lashes lost in the darkness of her face. When open, they looked like Mammy's, a soft brown-black set under sleepy, long-lashed lids. And big. Once, when Rufel had had to restrain her, the girl had seemed to look at her, to recognize her. Even as Rufel watched, the girl's expression had changed to fear and loathing. It was over in a moment. The girl had renewed her efforts to get out of the bed and Rufel had called to Ada for help. Sometimes, when the girl's eyes fluttered open, their gaze sweeping past her without recognition, Rufel thought she had imagined that momentary expression. And it was silly to suppose the girl had really recognized her, even if she were from
Charleston. And never, never had Rufel done anything to anyone to deserve such a look. But to see eyes so like Mammy's, staring such hatred at her. It had given Rufel quite a turn. She wanted the girl to wake up, wanted to see that look banished from her face.

The girl lay unmoving and Rufel continued to the door. It was time for this darky to wake up. Rufel turned as a thought hit her, and, back to the corridor door, eyed the colored girl. Perhaps she had changed her position slightly, but she lay still now under Rufel's gaze. “You not doing a thing but playing possum,” Rufel said loudly. The girl did not respond and, turning with a flounce, Rufel stepped into the wide central hall, closing the door behind her.

The big front door stood open and the wide hall was cool. Rufel could see Annabelle, Ada's daughter, through the open parlor door opposite the bedroom. Annabelle sat on the backless lounge near the front window, head bent over the magazine she held in her lap. The girl couldn't read a lick, but she would, if Rufel let her, spend hours staring at the illustrations in old
Godey's Lady's Books
, turning again and again to favorite pictures and staring off into space.

“You supposed,” Rufel said loudly as she entered the parlor, “to be folding nappies.” Clean laundry lay piled about on the settee and chairs ready to be sorted, folded, or ironed, and put away.

Annabelle looked up at Rufel's words and, putting the journal aside, stood. “This'n just start crying,” she said, pointing at the newborn baby, who began the first tentative notes of what Rufel knew to be his hungry cry. Then, pointing to Clara who crawled toward Rufel across the bare wooden floor, face screwed up to cry, “That'n—”

“And see at these children,” Rufel shouted as she reached for Clara.

“—been fretting off and on. Spect she hungry,” the girl continued as though Rufel had not spoken. “Nappies in the chair.” She pointed.

“Well, put them away,” Rufel snapped. The girl had to be told everything and she would do just what she was told and no more.
Rufel wiped at her daughter's motley face. She would have to speak to Ada, she thought with a tightening of her stomach; the girl was just too, too—slow. That was what Mammy had maintained. Slow and big for her age. Rufel certainly agreed with that last. Ada seemed to tower over both Rufel and Mammy who were themselves somewhat above average height. Annabelle, whom Ada claimed was no more than thirteen, was already eye level with Rufel. And Rufel could not rid herself of the idea that Annabelle's slowness was assumed, that the girl somehow used this means to mock her. There had been incidents. Once, Rufel had stood posing in front of the mirror, lifting her hair from her neck, tugging at the waist and bodice of her dress. It was the first time she had taken an interest in her appearance since Mammy's death and she prattled to the girl, as she used to with Mammy, about fashions and hair-styles, which had lifted both their spirits, and happened to look up in midsentence to see the girl's retreating image merging into the shadows of the great hall. Reflected in the mirror, the dusky doorway seemed to yawn at Rufel's back and she turned, suddenly furious. “Why—I'm telling you more joy and, and happiness, yes! and excitement, too, than you can ever imagine in that paltry black hide. Nigger,” she started forward, “you come back here.” The girl stopped in the hall so suddenly that Rufel almost ran into her. She retreated a step before the other's silence. “You.” And then again, this time stronger. “You know you don't just walk away from a white person without a by-your-leave.”

Hands on hips, Annabelle leaned toward Rufel, grinning in her face; the dark shoots of her tangled hair seemed to writhe in the yellow light from the fan-glass over the door. A thousand imps seemed to dance in her eyes as she said on a rising note of incredulity, “Mistress ‘
Fel?
Miz
Rufel?
”

Rufel flushed, hearing the name on the darky's lips over a sudden pounding in her head. “Miz Rufel” was a slave-given name, discarded by white people when they reached adulthood. Annabelle had put Rufel almost on the same level as herself by its use now, making Rufel appear a child, Young Missy in tantrum, rather than Mistress of the House. Shaking, Rufel screamed, “My name
is ‘Mistress' to you!” and fled before the silent laughter in the girl's eyes.

Shaken and angered by the incident, Rufel had complained to Ada. And Ada, while allowing that the girl was slow and oftentimes silly, had defended her, reminding Rufel in that abrupt way she had that neither of them belonged to her, that in fact they did her a favor by working for her at all! Outraged, Rufel had wrung from Ada a promise that Annabelle would do better. Annabelle was more civil now—almost foolishly so. At times, Rufel itched to strike the girl and hid her own anger behind an elaborate show of patience. And, despite her anger at the way the girl had turned the name against her, she could not break herself of the habit of thinking of herself as “Rufel,” “Miz 'Fel,” the pet name Mammy had given her so long ago.

Rufel curbed her temper now and turned to look at the baby. He lay on his back in the bedding-stuffed basket that served him as a daybed. She patted his chest and made soothing sounds at him before turning back to Annabelle, who had not moved during the pause. “After you put away the nappies,” she said carefully, “change the baby and bring him into the bedroom. Don't forget to wrap him up.” He would be all right until Annabelle came back for him.

Clara quieted under the expectation of eating and Rufel retraced her steps to the bedroom. She sat Clara in the crib while she unfastened the bodice of her dress, loosening her milk-plumpened breasts. Annabelle came in with the nappies but Rufel ignored her as she picked up Clara and sat in the rocker. She leaned back in the chair, allowing Clara to accept her nipple, and, feeling the muscles in her back and pelvis loosen, relaxed under the baby's deep pulls at her breast. Clara liked to explore, her fingers wondering at Rufel's dress, her underthings, tracing imaginary patterns across Rufel's skin. Often when she finished, Clara would lie with her head resting under Rufel's bosom as she explored herself, her fingers, her nose. The baby let the milk gurgle in her throat and smiled around the nipple when she saw Rufel watching her, in perfect charity with the world. Rufel smiled, too, holding her
quietly, barely rocking, now and then smoothing wisps of hair from the baby's face as she continued to nurse.

Clara finished and Rufel burped her, talking gently to the child, who was now so sleepy she could barely keep her eyes open. Rufel laid her in the crib and settled herself once more in the rocker. Annabelle had come back so quietly that Rufel had scarcely noticed her. Now she handed the infant to Rufel and waited, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, for Rufel's dismissal. The girl would now stay—except for sneaking off to look at those danged magazines, which not even Ada seemed able to do anything about—until Rufel told her to move. “Bring his basket in here,” she told the girl, turning away from her. “You can go sit in the parlor when you finish that.” It would be a relief to have someone around with a little conversation and initiative. She glanced at the colored girl, still asleep, on her back now, and quiet, as she gave the baby her other breast.

The new baby suckled with insistent shallow pulls. “Your mammy will have a time when she start nursing you,” she chided him, speaking aloud as she often did when she nursed the babies alone. Sometimes this one stared at her with eyes as bright as new brown shoe buttons and almost lost in the brown folds of his face. Rufel had taken the baby to her bosom almost without thought, to quiet his wailing while Ada and the other darkies settled the girl in the bedroom. More of that craziness, she knew; but then it had seemed to her as natural as tuneless crooning or baby talk. The sight of him so tiny and bloodied had pained her with an almost physical hurt and she had set about cleaning and clothing him with a single-minded intensity. And only when his cries were stilled and she looked down upon the sleek black head, the nut-brown face flattened against the pearly paleness of her breast, had she become conscious of what she was doing. A wave of embarrassment had swept over her and she had looked guiltily around the parlor. Annabelle was settled in a corner, oblivious to everything but the page of the journal in her lap; Timmy, she realized with relief, had slipped out soon after breakfast. No one would ever know, she had assured herself, and, feeling the feeble tug at
her nipple, he's hungry and only a baby. Lulled as she always was by the gentle rhythm and spent by the drama of the morning's events, she had dozed—and awakened to the startled faces of Ada and Harker. Their consternation had been almost comic. Ada had stuttered and Harker had gaped. In the pause Rufel had recovered her own composure, feeling somehow vindicated in her actions by their very confusion. She had confounded them—rendered Ada speechless. Still, she had felt some mortification at becoming wet nurse for a darky. She was the only nursing woman on the place, however, and so continued of necessity to suckle the baby. Whatever care she might have had about the wisdom of her action was soon forgotten in the wonder she felt at the baby.

The baby had lost what Timmy called his bird look, the grayish sheen over his skin that Ada said was common to newborn darkies. His color had been blotchy, pale patches of nut-shell brown, darker patches of chocolate, red, even green. “That why they called them colored, mamma?” Timmy had laughed. He was as fascinated with the baby as Rufel, taking an interest in him that he had never shown in Clara, wanting to measure him, to watch when he was bathed or changed, to wake him if he were asleep, to hold him if he were awake. She herself liked to watch the baby as he nursed, the way he screwed up his face and clenched his fist with the effort, the contrast between his mulberry-colored mouth and the pink areola surrounding her nipple, between his caramel-colored fist and the rosy cream of her breast.