Dessa Rose (5 page)

Dessa had come to look forward to the talks with the white man; they made a break in the monotony of her days. She had slept a great deal when she first came to the farm, surrendering in the deep quiet of the cellar to the exhaustion she had held so long at bay. But, once she was rested, misery had come upon her in shuddering waves she hoped would kill her; and the dreams. She had paced restlessly, the chain that held her to the stake in the middle of the dirt floor clanking behind her. Sometimes she lay listlessly on the pallet or sat against the wall behind the dull sunlight that entered through the tiny window. Always, whether her eyes were open or closed, Kaine walked with her, or mammy. Jeeter tugged at her head-rag or Carrie Mae frowned her down about some lit
tle foolishness. Aunt Lefonia, Martha—They sat with her in the cellar. She grieved in this presence as she had not done since their loss.

Often she saw Leo, his bald head shining in the moonlight, his face a bloody mess, and felt his body heavy and supine where it had rolled against her knee. Her hands moved ineffectually above the gapping hole in his chest. Big Nathan whispered eerily, urgently, above her, “Help me get his jacket off. Help me!” Leo's skin was still warm, the flesh flaccid—She cringed away from that memory, that ghostly vision. They hadn't killed Leo; one of the white men had done that. And Leo—The white men would think Leo was Nathan, if they couldn't see his face. Nathan had been ferocious in battle but he could not look into Leo's dead face. He had raised the rock above his head and closed his eyes as it descended. She couldn't forget this. They had paid so much, so much for it all to end in this hole. Talking with the white man kept her, for those brief periods, from counting and recounting the cost.

Jemina said he was making some writing, a book, about the fight on the coffle. The big, light-skinned woman came to see her almost every night, often bringing some special fixings from the white folks' supper table that she passed to Dessa through the bars of the cellar window. At first, in her misery, Dessa hadn't understood why the house servant would take such risks for her, or even wondered why. She had merely accepted dumbly whatever the woman offered. Jemina's kindness had eventually penetrated her despair and, finally, Dessa had asked why.

“Why?” Jemina chuckled softly. “Why, honey, you's the ‘debil woman.'” Hurriedly, she told how the people in the neighborhood had coined the name from the slave trader Wilson's description of the uprising. It expressed their derision of slave dealers, whose only god was money, and their delight that a “devil” had been the agency of one's undoing. Dessa had not liked the idea of such notoriety, but she was pleased to know that others knew of that daring, that brief moment of exultation in the clearing, when all had stood free, by their own doing, of beads and chains.

She was grateful for the brief companionship of the other woman
for no one else came near her. Now and then she did hear a scrap of song or caught a word from a raised voice that might have been meant for her to hear. Often when she sat with the white man she saw one of the men or women going about some errand in the yard. Once, two wide-eyed, bare-bellied children had appeared suddenly behind the white man's shoulder. One had smiled quickly, tentatively, at her, then they had scampered away as silently as they had come. The white man never knew they were there. Twice a day, Jemina brought her meals. If her master had unlocked the door, Jemina set down the tray without a word. More and more often now, Beaumont, Jemina's husband, unlocked the door.

“Masa say he got better things to do than wait on some darky,” Jemina had chuckled the first time Beaumont guarded the door. “Go on, look.” She gestured toward the stairway. Dessa, her chain clanking, walked to the bottom step and looked up through the doorway. Beaumont, his foreshortened figure framed by the light, his face shadowed by a hat, cradled a rifle in his arms. He wiggled the fingers of one hand at her; his teeth flashed whitely and were gone. Jemina took up Dessa's slop jar and turned with a nod and brief smile and she, too, was gone. Dessa understood; even with Beaumont above, it would not do to tarry.

At night, Jemina hunkered down beside the window for a few moments' whispered conversation, meaningless words of encouragement that Dessa appreciated nonetheless. Sometimes Jemina brought news that she had overheard in the conversation of her white folks. That was how Dessa knew the white man had studied what the court said about the fight. She had no idea what a “court” was; she had never been more than five miles from where she was born before being sold, nor seen more than three or four white people together, except at a distance. She had no words to describe much of what she had experienced, or what those experiences had forced her to see. She understood “court” as white folks for trying to figure out if everyone on the coffle had been caught. She wanted to know this herself, so she watched and listened.

The white man was little, hardly taller than herself, she thought,
but he kept a careful distance between them, even outside under the tree, sitting above and behind her, his chair tilted back on its hind legs, its back against the tree. He would lean forward long enough to wave her to a spot several feet from him, using the vinegar-soaked handkerchief she knew was meant to protect him from her scent. She no longer smelled—Jemina now brought her water to wash in—and it shamed and angered her that he still thought she did. Always above her, behind her if she turned her head, she heard tapping, in the silence between his questions, his finger flicking proudly against the gold chain he wore at his waistcoat.

She couldn't always follow the white man's questions; often he seemed to put a lot of unnecessary words between his “why” and what he wanted to know. And just as she had puzzled out what that was, he would go on to the next question. “Who had the file?” he would ask, and how could she answer that? There had been no file. Nathan had knocked out the trader where he slept and taken the keys to the chains from the saddlebags the trader used as a pillow. So, having no answers, she gave none, though she had listened carefully at first: Maybe this white man would tell her something she didn't know. But it was soon apparent to her that the white man did not expect her to answer. She had kept a careful expression on her face, now and then cutting her eyes at him to see if he required some response; but, despite her best efforts, her attention wandered. Once she had looked up and seen his face contorted with the violence of some unexpressed feeling. She had shrunk from him, her chains clanking about her, and he had hit her in the face. She had not taken the full force of the blow; she had been warned by that one startling glance. Her nose had bled some and she now kept her face vacant (better to appear stupid than sassy); but her mind continued to roam.

Had Master looked at Kaine like this white man looked at her? Why? White folks didn't need a why; they was:
his
voice, quiet and mocking, pulsing like a light through the darkness inside her. “Kaine—” She didn't know she had spoken aloud until she became aware of a voice in the stillness and knew it in the next instance as her own. How hoarse and raspy it sounded. She had not
spoken above a whisper, except in muttered response to some white man's questions, in weeks. Caught in her own flow, she listened and continued, seeing as she spoke the power of Master as absolute and evil.

Terrell Vaugham, by virtue of his marriage to Mary Lenore Reeves, owned three farms, the large Home Farm and two smaller outlying properties, and a house in Charleston. Dessa didn't know how many people he owned. Somebody was always being born. Two or three times, a relative or family friend had died and left someone to one of the Reeveses, as Martha had been inherited by Young Mistress when an elderly cousin died. Master Vaugham had brought no slaves to the marriage (not even a manservant, Childer, scandalized, had reported), as Old Mistress had brought mammy, the dairy maid, and Lefonia, the personal one. All the children were separated early from their mothers and raised on the Home Farm under the care of Mamma Hattie and a couple of older or younger women—depending on who was just up from childbed or otherwise ailing. When the children were old enough to work, usually around six or seven, they were parceled out among the farms and the town house to fetch and carry, as Dessa had been put with her mother in the dairy. Often they were hired out to local farms or businesses or apprenticed to a craftsman on the Home Farm—as mammy had feared that Dessa would be apprenticed in the dairy. Carrie Mae, Dessa's older sister, already worked there; the only reason they would need three women in the dairy was that one was going to be sold. But Dessa, like many others, found a permanent place on one of the farms.

If they lived, they lived long. But the toll of those who did not, who died or were permanently debilitated by the annual fevers, by one or another of the ailments that walked through the Quarters with agonizing regularity, from punishments or their aftereffects, left a gaping need for more and more hands to plant, to reap, to make, to clean, to feed. Or, you were sold away. Increasingly, they were sold away. Even in dreams that threat had haunted her.

Master Vaugham had improved their working conditions. They
were never in the fields before sunup and seldom there much after sundown. They were given an hour-and-a-half break at noon, nursing mothers two. Roofs were repaired, weevily meal replaced. But they all knew, without, it seemed to her, ever having discussed it among themselves, that as soon as they learned some craft or task, they were liable to be sold. They were bred for market, like the cows mammy milked, the chickens that she fed. Dessa had not admitted this to herself, even under Kaine's prodding. She saw the past as she talked, not as she had lived it but as she had come to understand it. White men existed because they did; Master had smashed the banjo because that was the way he was, able to do what he felt like doing. And a nigger could, too. This was what Kaine's act said to her. He had done; he was. She had done also, had as good as killed Master, for wasn't her own punishment worse than death? She had lost Kaine, become a self she scarcely knew, lost to family, to friends. So she talked. She was reconciled to nothing, but the dreams or haunts that had crowded about her in the cellar now walked the sunlit air and allowed her peace at night.

Memory stopped the day Emmalina met her as she had come out of the fields. Dessa came back to that moment again and again, recognizing it as dead, knowing there was no way to change it, arriving at it from various directions, refusing to move beyond it. Out there was nightmare, Kaine's body, cold and clammy beneath her hands, Master laughing in her face, the horror that scarred her inner thighs, snaking around her lower abdomen and hips in ropy keloids that gleamed with patent-leather smoothness. Once the white man's questioning had driven her into that desert and Young Mistress had risen from the waste, clothes torn, hair screaming, red-faced, red-mouthed. The four red welts in the suddenly pallid face, the white spot where her thumb had pressed at the base of the red neck filled Dessa with a terror and glee so intense they were almost physical. Frightened at her own response, she was almost ashamed—not of the deed. No. Never that, but surely it was wrong to delight so deeply in anyone else's pain. She had seen the blood and bits of pink flesh beneath her own fingernails, felt again the loose skin of Young Mistress's neck. And
clamped her mouth shut, clanked her arms across her chest. She should have killed the white woman; they would have killed her then. It would all have been over; none of this would have begun.