Dessa Rose Read online

  The wench watched her narrowly for a moment; slowly her tensely held shoulders relaxed. “I know that, Mis’ess,” she sighed. “I know that,” she said without anger or regret.

  Rufel, suddenly conscious again of the wench’s half-nakedness, started. “I’ll pull this door to so you can have some privacy while you dress.”

  Rufel and Nathan made love for the first time later that week. Nathan came to the House in afternoon. Rufel was in the bedroom and heard him ordering Annabelle out. He walked into the bedroom without knocking, closed the door behind him, told her to take off her clothes. He spoke with such authority that almost without thought her hand moved to the drawstring at her bosom. She caught herself and laughed nervously as she dropped her hand. He took her in his arms. It was no laughing matter after that and she clung to him as he undid her bodice with practiced ease. He picked her up, his mouth already nuzzling at her breast. His tongue left trails of liquid fire along her flesh. He eased between her thighs, entering that nameless deep, filling that lonely cavern. Will-less, she gathered around him; the day exploded into a thousand nights and endless stars.

  Nathan had told Rufel the truth, though he later assured her that his first mistress had been no where near as pretty as she and, by the time he knew her, she had not been so young either. Headstrong and smart, Miz Lorraine—he never identified her beyond this—had inherited a large fortune at an early age. There had been none to curb her wild nature and not until she was almost forty—near as he could figure it; she held her age well—had she allowed herself to be “stifled,” as she called it, by “the chains of matrimony.” Prior to that she had taken slave lovers, bought from friends or sent up from her own plantation off the Georgia seacoast. She took them young—Nathan was barely fifteen when he was sent up to town, but already the size of his shoulders, his hands, and feet gave promise of the man he would grow into. He was apprehensive at being summoned to the House, and totally unnerved when the back stairway Miz Lorraine’s maid led him up opened into the mistress’s bedroom. He looked around wildly for the maid when Miz Lorraine told him to strip, sure that he couldn’t have heard right. The maid had already disappeared. Frightened half out of his mind—Miz Lorraine had on something he knew he could see through if he looked—he did what she told him; and was totally unable to achieve an erection.

  Miz Lorraine laughed, gently, mockingly, and made him sit on the edge of the bed. She knelt before him and took his penis in her mouth. Terrified, he at first tried fumblingly to pry her head away, but already her mouth and tongue were sending such intense waves of pleasure through him that all he could do was hold her head and moan—and try to control the muscle that threatened to leap from his control. “Mistress,” he whispered frantically, “Mistress,” trying to pull her head away now, “Mistress, I’m, I’m—” not knowing how to say it so she would understand him but terrified of coming in her mouth. “Mist—” He could hold it no longer. The power of his climax rocked him back on the bed and he lay there, waiting for her to denounce him, to call the laws, but uncaring. She squirmed onto his still erect penis. Her lips still wet with his come, she sought his mouth. Faintly repelled but already excited by the pull of her vaginal muscles on his penis, he turned his lips toward hers. “If you ever breathe a word of this to anybody, I’ll chop it off,” she breathed then. He believed her, but the threat didn’t deflate him; rather the knowledge that he lay in danger, not only of his member but of his life, sent him plunging up a peak of unspeakable desire.

  Miz Lorraine took her bedmates young, saw that they learned some more conventional trade, and, about the time their fear of discovery and their awe of her abated, about the time they found their tongues with her and might have boasted to others, about that time she got rid of them, sold them off. Nathan was young enough when he came to her that it took a long time for him to reach that stage, at least in front of her. He believed Miz Lorraine implicitly when she told him, with a finger over his lips, that talking to niggers was like trying to get monkeys to talk (it was even longer before he thought to ask himself what fucking niggers was like), and she, for one, did not want to do it. By the time Nathan found his voice, he also understood (or thought he did) something of why his mistress chose her belly-warmers from among the lowest of the low. Nature was strong in her; she did not call on him that often, no more than once or twice every month or so, but when she did, she kept him awake most of the night and sometimes kept him for a day or even two. If she had tried to satisfy her sexual needs with white men, even ones outside her own class, she would have had no way of ensuring their silence. If a black man boasted, she could have his life. He never learned who else, if anyone, besides her maid knew of the mistress’s habits. He talked to no one about what he did and no one talked to him. This was what Miz Lorraine wanted: to be in control.

  She was not as freakish as some of the white men people whispered about; she would copulate orally with him, but only once did she allow Nathan to serve her so. He did so, not because he wanted to—he never did get used to coming in her mouth—but because he thought it was expected. He had been with enough women to know that, usually, they did to you what they wanted you to do to them. While this was a wholly new thing to him and still slightly distasteful, it gave him such joy that he was not averse to returning the pleasure. He nerved himself up and took her, and himself, by surprise, his tongue flicking across that little slippery piece he knew got delight from his fingers almost before he was aware of what he was doing. She had writhed and kicked but he held on till he felt the thick come against his tongue. She threatened to yell rape that night; to sell him, to have him flayed within an inch of his life. He never took the lead in sex with her again.

  At what point Miz Lorraine began to take his silence for sense, Nathan never knew, but she kept him longer, she said, than she had any other slave lover and promised to put him out to stud rather than sell him. He hadn’t looked forward to that. He was thoroughly enraptured by her and he liked Savannah. He loved his work as coachman, the driving, his smart livery, the horses. He felt also, but so dimly he could not have articulated it, that there was something demeaning in what she proposed. Then, she had decided, as far as Nathan could see on a whim, to marry and, contrary to her word, had sold him to Wilson. He understood the reasons for her betrayal—he had never dared boast of his relationship with her, but on that plantation, away from the twin goads of fear and desire, he wasn’t sure he could have held his tongue, as he had not been able to once settled at the Glen. He had tried to be philosophical about the change in his fortune. Driver was a brutal job, but Wilson had not been an especially brutal master. He had rather favored Nathan; the latter did his job and knew how to return an amusing quip without seeming uppity. Had Nathan been more inclined toward harshness, he might have stood higher in Wilson’s esteem. As it was, knowing something of the hardships to which most slaves were subjected, he would not complain. Miz Lorraine had given him what few niggers even dreamed about.

  There was, he told the men in the Quarters late at night, nothing in the world sweet as that white woman’s pussy and he knew because he had had his share of black women both before and after Miz Lorraine. It was not, as he liked to claim, that they had snapping pussy that held on to your dick until the last little seed was drained, then opened to let you fill again. It was the terror, he knew, that made it so sweet. If climax, as some men said, was like death, then a nigger died a double death in a white woman’s arms. And he had survived it. He walked a little taller, aware of the power hanging secret and heavy between his legs.

  Nathan was the color of eggplant, a rich, velvety blue-black; beside him, Rufel’s skin took on a pearly glow. They sweated and rested, his face buried in her bosom, one leg caught between hers. She stroked his back; his fingers played purposefully in matted pubic hair, teasing the slick lips of her vagina. Supine, she waited for him to enter her again.

  They never heard the door open, only the startled gasp: “Mis—Nathan!”

  Sur
prised, Rufel saw the wench’s face, wide-eyed with shock, over Nathan’s shoulder and glimpsed Ada’s bandanna.

  “Nathan,” the wench breathed again, striding into the room, “and Miz Ruint—Well, I knew you was a fool—”

  “Dessa!” Nathan shouted, rising.

  “What you call me?” Rufel cried.

  “Miz Ruint!” Odessa repeated harshly, deliberately, struggling now in Ada’s grasp.

  Nathan was out of the bed then; together he and Ada got Odessa, breathing hard but no longer struggling, out of the room. Nathan closed the door and turned to Rufel. “What’s that she called me, Nathan?” Rufel asked.

  “Rufel,” Nathan said, grinning slowly, widely. “Miz Rufel; that’s what she meant.” He held out his hand to her. “That’s all she meant.”

  Rufel shrank from him. Ruined, that was what the wench had said. Ruined. That was what she meant.

  The Negress

  “Ma négresse,

  voulez-vous danser,

  voulez-vous danser avec moi, ici?”

  —TAJ MAHAL,

  “The Cajun Waltz”

  Five

  I never seed such a thing! Nathan—laying cross that white woman—Black as night and so—so satisfied. It was like seeing her nurse Mony for the first time all over again. I was that surprised to walk in on them. I seed the name upset her, so I said it again out of plain meanness; I wanted to call her something worse. All the while I was yelling at her, Nathan and Ada was hustling me out that room. And something inside me was screaming, Can’t I have nothing? Can’t I have nothing?

  Well, I went, just about stumbling down them back steps with Ada fussing in behind me. I’d “gone too far,” she say, calling that white woman out her name. Miz Rufel been “good to us.” Oh, yes, the white woman was “Miz Rufe!” to her then—when she’d been the main one started me calling the woman Miz Ruint in the first place. Anyway, far as I was concerned, that white woman was the one’d “gone too far,” laying up with a black man. And Nathan. I was so mad at him, I could’ve spit.

  Ada huffed at me all the way cross the yard: We was all going get put off the place; if I wanted that “fool negro,” I could have him when Miz Lady was through with him. I turned round on that one. I could feel trouble all round me and in me, and pain; she was talking like all I needed was a little belly-rub. “You put Annabelle name in this mess,” she say. And forgot Mony; remembrance of him didn’t come to me till then. I’d forgot him just that quick, when it was him we’d gone in that room to peek at in the first place.

  You know, any other time, Miz Lady—which is what we mostly called her amongst ourselfs; to her face, it was always Mis’ess or Miz Rufel. But everyone, Nathan included, called her Miz Ruint, too—amongst ourselfs; this was the name Annabelle give her. Both names meant about the same to me, though Ruint did fit her. Way she was living up there in them two rooms like they was a mansion, making out like we was all her slaves. For all the world like we didn’t know who we was or how poor she was. Them rooms was big all right, but it was only two of them, same as any poor buckra; and that stairway didn’t lead to no other story. It ended right smack dab against the roof before it had gone ten good steps. We all knew something wasn’t right up there. And any other time, she’d’ve been out to the woods someplace, way she did most afternoons when I put Mony down for nap. That’s where me and Ada both thought she was when we seed she wasn’t in the parlor. Setting out there in the kitchen the way we was, we never even seen the white woman, neither Nathan, go in the House. Wasn’t no way in the world we’d’ve just walked in that room if we’d knowed she was in there—I’m saying “me and Ada,” but I knowed Ada wasn’t that much in it. I was the one had mocked the white woman in public.

  For the first time I wanted to cry. I couldn’t go back in that House, not to get Mony, not and see Nathan, see him and that white woman again. The remembrance of them in that bed kept stabbing at my eyes, my heart—black white red. I knowed that red was her hair, but it looked like blood to me.

  I moved down to the Quarters that evening. Tell the truth, I didn’t have that much to move, just Mony (and Ada’d had to go back to the House and get him) and the clothes I stood up in. Even these was gived to me by Miz Ruint, just like most everything else I had. It chafed me to be so beholden to her. For the life of me, I couldn’t see no reason for a white woman to let us stay there—less it was for devilment. I’d only heard of “good masters”—I didn’t know nothing about no good white folks—and none of them claimed Miz Ruint was a “good master.” No “good master” would’ve let us stay anyway. So why she would do this was a puzzlement to me.

  Letting us stay on the place wasn’t zactly slave stealing, true enough, but I knowed she was posed to tell somebody we was there. Wouldn’t the white folks get her for keeping runaways? She couldn’t be letting all these peoples stay just so she could lay with a black man, I told myself. Could she? And I was scared. Ada was right, Miz Ruint could make us all leave. I didn’t really think she would do it—who was going pick that crop, feed that boy, mend them draws? But she could, you know; she was white and it was her place. I couldn’t just go round popping off at the mouth any old kind of how—least ways not at her. I had plenty I wanted to say to Nathan but I hadn’t seed him since he put us out that door.

  The Quarters wasn’t no better than what Ada had said—one room with a dirt floor; wasn’t even no chinking in between the logs. Harker and them’d added a lean-to where the mens slept and I moved into the cabin with the womens. I had walked down to the Quarters a time or two when Ada took dinner down, helping her lug that big kettle once I got my strength back. I knew most of the peoples by sight, and all of them knew Mony. He never wanted for lap nor arm long as a person was in the Quarters.

  There was three other womens: Flora, a big hefty seal-brown woman; Janet, a little string-bean woman (both of them worked the fields); and Milly, a old woman with a ulcerated foot who helped Ada with the laundry and tried to work that loom Dorcas had used. I kept the House, helped Ada in the kitchen, and did the sewing, mending really. I could do decent plain stitch and darn; this what our mammy taught all of us, so we knowed how to be neat. But I couldn’t bit more cut a dress or do nothing fancy than a man in the moon. Even this was better than what Miz Ruint could do and I set some store by it.

  There was eight mens, counting Nathannem. Uncle Joel and his grand-boy, Dante, belonged to the place. Uncle Joel had been sold more times than he could count; white folks just call him to the House and point to his new master. That last time, he figured his old master was using him to settle some small debt. He begged for Dante and the master throwed him in as a present to the new master’s son. Being as his arm and leg was crippled on one side, no one valued Dante but Uncle Joel (though Dante could do just about anything peoples with two good arms and legs could do). Master Man, that’s what Uncle Joel called Miz Ruint’s husband; made it sound like something nasty, too. Master Man hadn’t wanted either one of them and plained all the way home about getting the worst of the deal. Ned was a young fellow round about the same age as me; Castor and Red was both about the age of Harker. We didn’t none of us know how old we was, but near as I could figure out, I think Harker must’ve been close to thirty. I wasn’t no more than seventeen or eighteen myself. All the mens worked the fields except for Uncle Joel; he tended the garden which House and Quarters both ate from, and the few head of stock. Nathan mostly hunted and fished.

  Evenings they sat in front the cabin; not everybody, every evening, but usually peoples sat out there a minute or so before turning in; sometimes Ada would sit a spell when she brought supper or walk down again after we’d cleaned up. Mostly I guess they was quiet—peoples don’t talk too much in the heat, not after they been in the fields all day. Oh, sometimes they did talk, now and then trade stories, or Uncle Joel would play his mouth organ. I had heard it once or twice wailing faint through the night when I was laying up at the House. Sadder than a whippoorwill, more lonesone than a owl, it w
rung my heart; it reminded me so much of home. But these wasn’t like my home Quarters, and I sat there that first night holding Mony, feeling like a stranger amongst them.

  The weather, the crop, this is what they talked about; Milly’s foot, Mony—but Mony was sleep—the weather again. It was hot. Harker, Cully, and Red was off somewheres; I spected Nathan was up to that House. Even Ada and Annabelle was there, but Ada hadn’t more than said good evening to me. The rest of them spoke and I could feel the ones had seed me bring my pallet down wanting to ask why I’d moved. No one did but they couldn’t seem to keep a conversation going.

  Long about the time Harker and Cully walked up, someone inquired after Nathan; after everybody say good evening, Janet inquired again. I didn’t say nothing. Ada waited a minute, then she say, “Up to the House.” No one said nothing to that; then she say, “Laying up with Miz Lady.”

  Don’t nobody say nothing then; finally Harker slap his thigh and laugh. “Doggone it, Cully,” he say, “I didn’t believe old Nathan’d do it!”

  Cully let out a big whoop. “Miz Lady bound to come in on the deal now!”

  I couldn’t believe my ears; had they planned this? “Nathan doing that with that white woman wasn’t part of no deal I knowed about, Harker,” I told him.

  Everybody was talking at once, but he turned around when I said that. “What got you so mad, Dessa?” he ask.

  “That’s a white woman, Harker.” They all quieted down when I said that.