Dessa Rose (26 page)

Not talking “place,” talking “mistress” talking “friend.” This what was going through my mind as I walked out the hotel. And, Swole all up, told me I didn't know a “dinner dress” from a “morning gown”—Like I don't know friend from slave just cause I spoke up about Nathan. I had swole up when Martha spoke about that Robert boy, how he bragged on the girls before the mens. I membered that and it was like a pain in my heart. That was what the white woman was talking about, being Martha, being like Carrie to me; and I was shaken. I'd slowed down, now I started walking fast again. This was the damnedest white woman. White as a sheet and about that much sense—sleeping with negroes, hiding runaways, wanting to be my friend. I slowed down again. Wanting to be my friend. Who wanted to be her friend anyway? I speeded up. It was like her to take for granted I'd want to be her friend, that
we
-all would want her to come West with us, that she could have what she want for the asking. Would “friends” put us in danger the way she had? And she want to be my friend. I stopped. This was something I hadn't thought of in her. And I wanted to believe it. I don't think I wronged her at first, but the white woman I'd opened my eyes to at the start of the summer wasn't the one I partnered with on that journey; I admitted this to myself that afternoon. Harker might would joke me; Ada probably call me a fool, after all the sand I raised, but I wanted to believe I'd heard the white woman ask me to friend with her. I wouldn't put no dependence on her holding to it, I told myself, not tarrying now, wanting to see how this would end. “Friend” to her might be like “promise” to white folks. Something to break if it would do them some good. But I wouldn't draw back from her neither.

I was almost to the bakeshop, when I thought I heard someone call, “Odessa.” Miz Lady was about the only one call me that and this was a man's voice, so I kept going. And it come again, “Odessa.” I kept walking, knowing they must be calling someone
else, but walking faster and looking round trying to see where it come from just the same. All a sudden, a hand clap me on my arm and jerked me around. First thing I thought about was someone trying to steal that money. We didn't generally wear them money belts less neither one of us was going to be in the room. We didn't wear all them petticoats, neither; these was packed away in the bags. But—what with all that friend and place talk—I had come out that day and forgot to take the belt off. When I felt that hand on my arm, the money was the first thing I thought about, and I started fumbling for that pepper.

“I knew it was you,” and I was looking in the face of a white man, wasn't too much bigger than me.

I knew he'd mistook me for someone else name Dessa so I tried to pull away from him, but without touching him, you know. I didn't want to be cused of disrespecting no white person. “Master, Master, I don't know you,” I told him, but I was scared.

“Don't know me, eh?” he said grinning in my face. He had big teeth and no lips and his smile made him look like he was in pain. His nose look like a beak, it was that bony and sharp. His eyes was deep-set close beside it; they was empty as a unclouded sky. It was the white man, the last one, talked to me in that cellar. His eyes made me know him; when I looked into them I didn't see no reflection of myself. Oh, I knowed him. He knowed I knowed him; and he grinned.

I started jerking away from him in earnest then. White peoples had stopped, a course, was looking at us, and I tried to talk to them. “I don't know this master,” I called out. “I belongs to Mistress Sutton staying down to the Hotel Gilmore.” I was so upset I forgot all about Miz Carlisle and them hands. People was saying something, some of them was laughing but wasn't nobody helping me. The white man started pulling me along, back the way I'd come from. I jerked away and commence to run. “Stop her, someone,” I could hear him yelling, “dangerous criminal, reward.” Then something knocked me off my feet and something smashed into my temple.

When I come to myself, I was standing with my arms held tight
behind me, heavy breathing rasping in my ear. I looked into the face of another white man and the floor about reach up and grab me; hadn't've been for my arms being held, I would've fell. I thought it was Boss Smith, had them same light eyes and sandy hair. But this white man was standing behind a desk. There was bars at the window behind him and I could hear other white mens behind me. At first I couldn't member what happened and when I did, everything inside me felt like it was coming unglued and I fought to hold myself together, just to draw breath. This was a jail; the white man was a jailer, a sheriff. I wanted to scream but all I could do was shake and lick my lips. A voice behind me was saying something and I could see the sheriff's mouth moving. Sheriff say, “Now just a minute, Nemi—”

Nemi. Never forget that name now, it's wrote in my mind. Oh, yes, I knowed the white man, now. “I belongs to Miz Carlisle,” I said, “staying down to the hotel. I takes care of her baby, Clara—”

Sheriff say real rough to someone over my shoulder, “You can't keep kidnapping niggers off the street looking for that gal of yours—”

“That's all a lie, sheriff.” This was said right in my ear; I jumped cause I didn't know it was Nemi holding me, and he yanked my arms backwards. “When I caught up with her she swore she belonged to some Suttons. This a dangerous criminal and I want her held.”

Someone say, “He right, sheriff, I heard her say she belongs to the Suttons.”

“Who are you, gal?” sheriff say to me. “And turn her loose, Nemi. Ain't likely she could get too far with all of us in here.” He pulled out a chair, told me to sit down; he sat down on the edge of the desk facing us. The white man let go my arms and I sat down, thankful to have something under me, my legs felt that weak. I started to say again I belongs to Miz Carlisle, but the white man don't let me finish.

“Sheriff,” he say, “she match the description in the poster.” He took a paper out his coat and start unfolding it.

Sheriff say, “Speak up, gal.”

“Master, I never seen this master before in my life,” I said and it wasn't no act when I started to cry. “This master scare me so. I been stayed with Mistress Sutton—Oh please, Master, just go to the hotel and ask Miz Carlisle.”

“The one I wants got scars all over her butt,” Nemi say real nasty. “Let's have that dress off; let her prove she ain't the one.”

It was several other white mens in the room and all them seemed to like that notion. “Ware the goods,” I cried, scared to death at the way they was looking at me. “Ware the goods!” I didn't even not know what this meant then, but this what they said on the coffle when they got a pretty high yellow on the rope, “Ware the goods, Master saving that for the fancy trade.” Only the trader would touch her then. And this what stopped the white mens: that I might belong to someone be upset about damaged goods.

“Damn it, Nemi, you had your last peep show in here,” sheriff say. “All right, you mens, clear the office. This a jail, not no carnival.” He sent one the mens down to the hotel to see could they find Miz Carlisle and everybody left but him and the little white man. White man say I had to be locked up and started reading from that paper. “Hundred-dollar reward. Scaped. Dark complexed. Spare built. Shows the whites of her eyes—”

Sheriff say, “Nemi, that sound like about twenty negroes I knows of personally.”

“Branded,” white man say real quick, shaking that paper, “branded, eh, sheriff,
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on the thigh, whipscarred about the hips. What about that, eh, sheriff?”

Sheriff just look at him. “You ought to go on home, man; let the law take care of this.”

“Like they took care of it already?” the white man yelled. “The law the ones let her scape in the first place!”

Sheriff sucked his teeth at that. “Come on, girl,” he say to me, and I followed him through a wide doorway into the next room where the cells was. There was three of them, all empty. He locked me in one, then went back and sat at the desk.

I stood at the cell door holding on to the bars and waited. I was
in puredee misery. West, the Glen, all our ventures, the whole last few months wasn't nothing to me then. I felt almost like I hadn't never left that first jail or this last white man. To come so close to what I had suffered for, to see, to have freedom in me—. I had to be real careful with myself.

I doubted everything. Harker and them would never scape bondage. And we had sold Nathan; I had let her sell Nathan. I had to sit down on that. Last time Harker and Nathan and Cully had come as answer to a prayer I was too numb, too blind to pray. But I wasn't blind then and I could feel every one of them scars, the one roped partway to my navel that the waist of my draws itched, the corduroyed welts cross my hips. And
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on my thighs. This was the place Harker had kissed, had made beautiful with his lips. I would never have thought anyone would want to love this, that my blood would be stirred when they did. This was what would betray me. Nemi wouldn't even have to say nothing. Sheriff would see that for hisself. And these white mens would kill me.

I grieved for Mony, for Harker, for myself. I tried to tell myself I had Miz Lady—standing now, walking; afraid to keep still. White lady good as two or three negroes any day, trying to make a joke to myself, you know, keep my spirits up. But I wished she'd said “friend” while I was still in that room. No, I couldn't make myself laugh. Laughing was too close to crying and crying to begging, to screaming. If I let myself, I would moan; I would foul myself. I was being real careful with myself.

The white man stood in front of me, and I jumped. He was fingering that watch chain; that's what caught my tention, that clicking where he knocked his fingernail against the watch. That's what I heard above me the whole time I sat under that tree, him clicking that watch and breathing.

“Smart gal like you don't have to end on the gallows,” he say, and it was like “Nice day,” or “Morning.” That's the way he say it, “Morning; know you been laid with some buck,” licking his lips, “—won't hold that against you. Woman like you need,” he say. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This white man—and I'm backing away, you know, and thinking, stuttering; I couldn't
be subject to this, not now, not no more. And he commence to curse at me. “Sly bitch,” he call me; he wasn't no more than two, three feet in front of me, and quiet. “Caught you,” almost whispering, but I heard him right enough. “Got you now.” He tapped his chest. “Right in here. Roots, you lying sow,” and all such nonsense as that. He looked plumb wild, way he was throwing his head back like a horse and brushing at that hank of hair. Closer he got to me, the more I backed up till I bumped against the edge of the bunk. He was right at the bars by then and he reached for me. I couldn't help myself. I screamed.

Well, the sheriff called him up sharp then, and Nemi went on back in the other room. He kept on walking in and out my view, brushing at the hank of hair; it kept falling. I stayed on the bunk. I didn't put no dependence on that sheriff but the fact that Nemi did mind him calmed me some. White man come on me so sudden he hadn't peared subject to no rules; least not the same ones I was. But he didn't seem to back-talk that sheriff too much. This gived me some comfort; I didn't think the sheriff would let him do me nothing till Miz Lady come.

I couldn't think of nothing good that would happen when she did. Nemi knowed me without looking at scars. I couldn't hide them no way and they told plain as day who I was. I didn't see how Miz Lady could dimple her way round that. The sheriff looked to be a steely-eyed white man; you know, the kind we always joke about know what's in a darky's mind before the darky even think it hisself; maybe he wouldn't care for big eyes and quick smiles, neither. He was kicked back in one chair with his feet propped on another one, whittling. He didn't put me so much in mind of Boss Smith no more, but I couldn't tell much else about him from just looking—though it was something that he didn't seem to care that much for Nemi.

The white man had taken a seat where I could see him and he could see me. He sat with his legs crossed. Now and then he would brush at his hair or flick something on his lap, but he didn't seem too concerned. This the way he'd always been with me at that farm, like he had all the time in the world and might lend me a little if
I would talk. And I had talked. I'd had to say something to get out that cellar; now, I didn't know what all I had said. Just about Kaine, I told myself, just about Master busting in his head with that shovel. But I was scared I'd talked more than that, had to be more than that. Else why this white man track me down like he owned me, like a bloodhound on my trail?

White man hitched his pants at the knee and switched up legs, crossing the bottom over the top one. I looked at his ankles showing gray and bony above his low-top shoes. I membered how he sat on them cellar steps with his hanky stuffed round his nose. I really hadn't smelled myself till then. Lawd, it'd shamed me to have to sit up there in them chains and know I was the one he was smelling. Sometimes I just wanted to go over and wave my arms all over him or break wind in his face; you know, breathe on him so he would know that he could be made dirty just like me. Now, I thought, now his shirt don't even have no collar; his ankles dirty. My eyes filled with tears then. To be brought so low by such a trifling little white man. This what chance will do, children, trample over all your dreams, swing a bony ankle in front of you.

And I got warm. I mean, crazy white man, tracking me all cross the country like he owned me. Why, he didn't even not know how to call my name—talking about Odessa. And here he'd just taken it on hisself, personal, to see I didn't get free. And he was crazy; had to be crazy, walking round with no hose, no collar, his cuffs frayed. This the first thing that gived me hope. They couldn't take the word of no white man like that, not against the word of a respectable white lady. I stood up on that. See, this had been a precise white man; even when he took his coat off, his sleeves was rolled just so. He'd sweated; you couldn't help but sweat, not in that heat. But, I mean: The sweat did not bead; it wouldn't roll down his face. And here he was sitting up here with no hose on his feet. Course it was something strange in that. And sheriff said he'd dragged other girls in there. The white man was crazy; I'd make them see that. My fingers touched them money belts hidden about my waist, there where I hugged myself. Miz Lady couldn't let them see under my clothes. We wasn't posed to let no one know
we had this money; she would member that. Cept for them scars, it was the word of a crazy white man against a respectable white lady. This was how I calmed myself till Miz Lady come.