Dessa Rose (6 page)

She didn't know where “this” had begun. There was no set moment when she knew that the negro driver the white men called Nate was paying attention to her or that the young mulatto boy who often walked the chain in front of her was being kind. Gradually she had realized that she never stumbled when the mulatto walked in front of her, that there was always something extra on her plate—a bit of home-fry when everyone else had only grits, a little molasses for her bread. She expected that one or both of them would come fumbling at her in the dark. The men and women were bound together at night; and, while it was more common for the white guards to take one of the women, the chains were no real barrier to a determined couple. They were encouraged to it. Pregnancy was proof of a woman's breeding capacity; and the boy was often chained with her at night. But neither man touched her.

Cully, the mulatto, talked to her about the stars when they happened to lie next to each other at night. She knew the drinking gourd, the North Star in its handle. He showed her a cluster he called Jack the Rabbit, put there, so he said, because of a low trick Rabbit had played on Brother Bear. Often he touched her stomach and marveled that the baby moved. This was all that she remembered of those nights. For at first she had paid him no attention. He talked just like a white man; except for his nappy yellow hair, he looked just like a white man. Later, he reminded her of Jeeter, her only living brother, who had been sold away. The big, bald-head driver, Nathan, had been with the trader the day she was bought. It shamed her somehow to know he had seen her so low and she was glad they could none of them hold a real conversation. The coffle walked twenty miles a day, and even around the campfire, talk among them was discouraged. But Dessa knew herself to be enveloped in caring. The pain and tiredness of her body numbed her mind; she was content to leave it that way. Even when the others spoke around the campfire, during the days
of their freedom, about their trials under slavery, Dessa was silent. Their telling awoke no echoes in her mind. That part of the past lay sealed in the scars between her thighs.

Dessa couldn't understand why this white man would want to take her out under the tree and talk about Kaine, and behind her inquiring expression she resented his careless references. Wasn't no darky to it, she would think indignantly. Kaine was the color of the cane syrup taffy they pulled and stretched to a glistening golden brown in winter. Or, Childer had said the words over them, looking at each of them in turn, disapproving, Dessa knew, of Kaine's choice (but he had chosen, Lawd! he had chosen her, brown as she was, with no behind to speak of, and he had wanted her—not for no broom-jumping mess, but the marriage-words and Childer just had to accept that). Talking with the white man was a game; it marked time and she dared a little with him, playing on words, lightly capping, as though he were no more than some darky bent on bandying words with a likely-looking gal.

Maybe she had been careless with the white man, she worried now. She had lain awake in the early morning hours watching the window as it slowly grayed with dawn light. The baby kicked vigorously in her side; she put her hand to her stomach, feeling it ripple with the baby's movement, and crooned wordlessly to it. She had slipped in asking anything of the white man that did not turn his own questions back upon themselves; maybe she had caught herself in time. He hadn't pressed her and she couldn't bring herself to regret that betraying impulse. To know that someone, Nathan, anyone had gotten away…She had forced Nathan and Cully to abandon her, clambering noisely back toward the sound of sporadic pistol fire, where she knew she would find the patterrollers. Her flight had been an act of total despair. Someone had to escape. After what they had done, someone had to be free. She was barefoot, pregnant—She had already held Nathan and Cully back insisting that any who wanted to be free must be given a chance. Nathan had grudgingly agreed. In the melee of a general escape, the three of them would be harder to track. He had planned at first to free only Dessa and Cully on some moonless night when
the two were chained together. He had a key, as did all the guards, to the shorter chains by which groups of five or six were chained together at night. Only Wilson had a key to the manacles and Cully argued against taking it. Best to let sleeping dogs lie; the three of them could be away while the camp slept and once free could worry about the manacles. But with more than half the coffle expected to run, they had to have the slave trader's keys.

Their numbers grew, David, Matilda, Elijah, Leo, two or three others Nathan felt could be trusted. They talked only of stunning the white men, tying them, taking their guns, of stranding them. The actual deed there in the clearing was more frightening and more exhilarating than any of them had imagined. Nothing went as planned. They had wanted a dark night, but there had been moonlight; Cully and Dessa weren't chained in the same group. The white men had delivered a big lot of people to an outlying plantation and were in a relaxed mood. They had sat long and drunk deep by the campfire, two of them falling asleep there; the rest managed to make their way to their bedrolls. Not long after the camp settled into sleep, one of the white men sought out Linda, a mulatto girl purchased in Montgomery, and led her into the bushes.

The other white men didn't even rouse up as the guard thrashed off into the underbrush with Linda, but everyone on the coffle was awake. Every night since Montgomery, one of the white men had taken Linda into the bushes and they had been made wretched by her pleas and pitiful whimperings. The noise from the underbrush stopped abruptly. Then came the rattle of chains and above it a dull thud, startingly loud in the stillness, and the rattling of the chains again. In his lust and alcoholic daze, the guard had failed to secure the chain after he removed Linda from it. Someone in Linda's chain group moved and all their chains fell away. Seeing this as a sign, Elijah whispered urgently for Nathan, who was already moving stealthily toward Dessa's group. Linda appeared in the clearing, her dress torn and gaping, the bloody rock still clutched in her manacled hands. All hell broke loose.

The white men asked her later about attacking the trader, but
whatever answer she had given (and she thought she had given several different ones), she could not remember the trader as distinct from the other white men. She'd tried to kill as many of them as she could. The one thing that stuck in her memory from that night was Nathan in the moonlight, crushing the face of his friend.

They had argued about which direction to take, some wanting to go north, following the drinking gourd to freedom. There was a mighty river to cross, David admitted, but once across it, they would all be free. Most wanted to go with Nathan, who planned to take Dessa and Cully south to the coast. They could find a ship there to take them to islands he had heard of where slavery had been abolished and black men were all free. Again, Nathan consented, not so grudgingly that time, she thought now, for he had fallen in with their plans. Matilda wrote a pass for them, stating that all of them were in the charge of Toby, a big mulatto, and Graves, a lean brown man approaching middle age, taking them to their master on a plantation farther south. The moon had set by the time this was decided.

They took wagons, weapons, and horses. The wagons proved too cumbersome for the quick cross-country trip Nathan said was imperative. They plundered, then abandoned them, piling the horses high with supplies, traveling, after the first day, by night and sleeping by day. The patterrollers came up on them one morning just as they were retiring, having, as they thought, eluded the white man for yet another day. Nathan and Cully, never far from her, took her hands and ran.

Afterward, when she burst into the clearing where the captured people were held, she had fought fiercely hoping by the strength of her resistance to provoke them into killing her. They hadn't; a blow to her head quickly ended her struggles. She kept count, on the trail and in the warehouse where they were held, scanning the faces of those who were recaptured, culling through the whispered names and descriptions of those who had been killed. Nathan—Nate, as the white men called him—was reported dead and no one of Leo's description was ever mentioned in her hearing.
Only Toby of the several mulattoes on the coffle had been taken alive and she mourned Cully, giving him up as lost.

Those who had not fought the posse too hard were early taken from the warehouse where Dessa and the rest were held. Those who remained learned their fates when some were taken out and didn't return, or returned whipscarred and branded. Yet, as the population in the warehouse dwindled, a pinprick of hope was born in Dessa. Perhaps their ruse had worked and Nathan had survived. Had it not been for that hope, her own sentence would have driven her mad. To be spared until she birthed the baby…the baby…Could she but do it again, she sometimes thought, she would go to Aunt Lefonia if that would bring her even a minute, real and true, with Kaine. But to let their baby go now, now…She would swallow her tongue; that's what Mamma Hattie said the first women had done, strangling on their own flesh rather than be wrenched from their homes…. She would ask Jemina for a knife…. She would take the cord and loop it around the baby's neck…. She…

A rooster crowed; the conch sounded. Dimly, so softly at first it might have been the echo of her own crooning, she could hear the people assembling for work, a mumbled word here, the chink of a hoe, the clunk of one implement hitting against another. A warbled call soared briefly above the dawn noise; sometimes this signaled the beginning of a song, one voice calling, another answering it, some other voice restating the original idea, others taking up one or another line as refrain. She never heard more than fragments of these songs; whatever commentary they contained did not carry beyond the Quarters, but she recognized many of the tunes. Now and then she mouthed the words or soundlessly improvised a response of her own. She came to recognize some of the voices, a nasal soprano she learned was Jemina's, a full-throated voice that skipped from baritone to soprano in a single slurring note, the clear tenor that ascended to falsetto and yodeled across the dawn much as Kaine's had done. He could have made another one, she thought as the tenor rose briefly and was silent. Kaine
could have made another banjo; he had made the first one. Why, when they had life, had made life with their bodies—? The question gnawed at her like lye. She shut her mind to it; it would eat away her brain, did she let it, leave her with nothing but a head full of maggots.

On impulse, she moved to the window, her chain rattling behind her, and standing on tiptoe looked out. She could see nothing except the dusty yard that sloped away from the cellar, but she sang anyway, her raspy contralto gathering strength as her call unfolded:

She had never sung a call of her own aloud and she repeated it, wondering if any of them would hear her:

There was a momentary silence, then the tenor answered, gliding into a dark falsetto:

Other voices joined in, some taking up the refrain, “How long will it be?,” others continuing the call; her voice blended with theirs in momentary communion:

They had begun the chorus a second time when another voice, a rough baritone that Dessa did not recognize, joined in, singing at a faster tempo against the original pace.

The words vibrated along her nerves; was this really an answer? She sang again:

Again the voice soared above the chorused refrain:

Startled, Dessa drew away from the window.

“Odessa.”

The voice cut across the singing and she was still a moment, heart thudding. “Who that?” she called. No one called her Odessa but the white folk; only Jemina came to the window.

“Odessa.”

It came again and she bundled the chain in her arms and moved soundlessly back to the window. “Who that?” She saw the pale blur of a face at the window even as she recognized the voice of the white man.

“I'm leaving in a few minutes.”

“You don't be coming back?” Jemina had not told her about this. She moved closer to the window, letting her chain drop noisily to the ground.

“Oh, I shall indeed return in a few days and we will resume our conversations then.” He paused a moment as though waiting for some response from her; when she made none, he continued. “We are going in search of a maroon settlement.”

“Maroon?” She caught at the unfamiliar word for he seemed to put special emphasis on it.

“An encampment of runaway slaves that's rumored to be somewhere in this vicinity.”

She clutched the bars of the window and peered at him through them. She had not understood the half of what he said, catching only the meaning of “camp” and “runaway.” He stooped awkwardly at the window, his face almost touching his knees. It was a ridiculous posture and she turned her face to hide her grin. “You a
real
white man?” she asked, turning back, as the thought struck her. “For true? You don't talk like one. Sometime, I don't even be knowing what you be saying. You don't talk like Masa and he a real uppity-up white man, but not like no po buckra, neither. Kaine say it be's white men what don't talk white man talk. You one like that, huh?”