Dessa Rose Read online

  “She willing,” Harker say, dry as dust. That’s the way he try to be, so calm don’t nothing faze him.

  Well, that give them all a big laugh, till Ada say, “That fool negro going to get us all killed.”

  “Ain’t no such a thing,” Harker say real sharp, “less one of us going tell it.”

  This made us all shut up. Wasn’t none of us going tell and I reckon he knowed that well as I did, but I think his putting it so harsh made us see that we was all liable. Knowing about it, and telling, was about as bad as doing it—at least to the white folks. Then, just like he couldn’t help hisself, Harker burst out, “West, here we come.” And the men commence to dance around and laugh.

  Harker come took Mony, gived him to Ada, and pulled me to my feet. Trying to waltz me around, you know, but I didn’t feel like no dancing and I shook his hands off. “This how we going work our way West,” I ask him, “on our backs?” I got Mony and went on in the cabin and laid down.

  I could hear them going on about Nathan and the white woman. Harker allowed as how he wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall do the white man ever come back and catch them. Not that he was wishing for them to be caught, understand; he couldn’t wish that on no brother. But just so’s he could see the white man’s face. “Reckon his eyes would bug out?” he asked real serious. “You know that mouth would gape something scandalous, and he would get red. Got to get red. But he just might be carried off in apoplexy before he could do anything to him or her.”

  By this time, they was all laughing fit to be tied; I wanted to laugh myself cause it was true. A slave loving with the mistress, the master’s wife, might be enough to give a white man the stroke. I could see my old master’s face turning red—might even go purple—as the sight of that fly in his milk and death hit him all at once. Course his eyes would pop. Mine had. But I wasn’t in no mood to laugh; Master might get red, but if Master lived, the slave was dead. Nathan could die tomorrow cause of this mess. I was mad at him for letting that white woman put him in such risk and I was mad at her for doing it.

  Nathan and Cully, and Harker, too, sat with me the whole time I was out my head; Ada said that was the only thing kept me quiet—they hands, they eyes, they voice. These had stood between me and death or me and craziness. We’d opened to each others. Oh, I had a admiration for them—same as they did for me. We had scaped, honey! And they’d come back for me and we’d scaped again. You didn’t do this in slavery. We laughed about it—they teased me about the white man what “kept company” with me while I was in that cellar; I said they’d been sparking the girls in the Quarters, that’s what took them so long to see about me—but it was this that brought us close.

  We talked about some of everything while I was laid up in that bed, and they was some talkers. Cully could have you dying about his old master trying to raise him as a slave and like a son—teaching him to read but not to write, to speak but daring him to think. Nathan would fascinate you with stories about outlandish goingons. And Harker got us all fired up about West. He could put some words together, make you see broad, grassy valleys, clear, sparkling streams, a river that divided slave land from free. And wasn’t no pretense between us.

  Mammy wasn’t no more to Cully than breast in the night and he never knew enough to wonder about her till after he was sold. Somebody had carried him like I carried Mony; he’d kicked in a stomach same way Mony did in mine. But he might as well been carried in a bottle for all he knowed. Mammy wasn’t even a face to him. Cully cried when he told us this and I was the one held him, right there on that feather bed. But we all heard; and Nathan, neither Harker was shamed of they tears. I never thought one of them could be so ignorant to something that hurt me so bad. White woman was everything I feared and hated, and it hurt me that one of them would want to love with her.

  I thought “the deal” was a joke when Nathan and Harker first started talking about selling theyself back into slavery so as to get a stake big enough to where we could all leave from round there. This was a story they was telling to help while away the hours Ada made me stay in bed. Harker had the idea of someone posing as the master and of the peoples running away after they’d been sold and the “master” selling them again in another town. This was what his old master used to do with him when they was down on the luck. Harker’s master was a regular scamp, gambling, mostly—he’d won Harker in a card game in Kentucky when Harker was about leven or twelve—and high living, but he wasn’t above a swindle or a cheat now and then.

  At first, Cully was “master”—except for that nappy hair, he could’ve been white, and he could read some and write a little. But anyone with half a eye could see he was too young to be out trying to sell a gang of negroes, and we joked about having Harker paint a mustache on him to make him look older. Harker had learned this from his master, too.

  It was Nathan put that white woman in it. Oh, not by name; but once they got the idea wasn’t but a step to seeing if it would work. And for that, like Nathan said, we needed a real white person, someone in want, to play the master. I didn’t think about the idea of us selling ourselfs or each others back into slavery long as I took it for fun, you know. But I was uneasy, once they put the white folk in it. Wasn’t no white folk I’d ever heard of would bit more go along with this cutup than a man in the moon—and if they did, it would just be to cheat us out the money in the end. These was the stories we’d all heard, that we’d told right there by that bed—bad jobs made good and the darkies not even getting thanks, promises of freedom or favor the white folks never kept. So it was hard for me to see this as anything but a joke. Even when Harker said he thought Miz Lady could use some money and Cully said he’d oversee the place—since he was so white—while they was gone, I didn’t believe they would trust her. So I—just to keep the story going—I said I better go along to keep a eye on her. I didn’t think they had the nerve to ask such a thing, but I begun to back off.

  Who going nurse the babies? I asked them. It hurt me to my deepest heart not to nurse my baby. Made me shamed, like I was less than a woman. And to have him nursing on her…Oh, I accepted it. Wasn’t no choice; but I never did like to see it. And she act like this wasn’t no more to her than nursing her own child. Miz Ruint was so forgetful, I told them, till she just might forget herself if Mony cried and plump out that titty in public—trying to make a joke of it, but yet and still, trying to get them to see the point of how dangerous it was trusting in somebody could be that careless. Well, they laughed; thought I’d hit Miz Lady off real good. She did know the difference between black and white; I give her that. She wasn’t that foolish. But where white peoples look at black and see something ugly, something hateful, she saw color. I knowed this, but I couldn’t understand it and it scared me. But this was why Harker and them thought she might would go along with the plan.

  Harker, neither Red encouraged too much conversation about Nathan and the white woman—Red say it was too much like talking in the man’s bed. So, by and by, they started talking about West. They didn’t none of them know that much about it, but Harker talked about it like he’d seen the forests and the streams, the river where slavery couldn’t cross over cause everybody on that side was free.

  I don’t know if I really believe all that, land and rivers, and crossing over. It sound pretty spooky to me; yet and still, it appealed to me. Slavery not being allowed; everybody free. I’d traveled so far from my old home and still hadn’t come to the end of slavery; Harker say we could travel that far and farther and still not come to a place where our peoples could live free. It scared me to think how much of the world was slaved.

  I’d taken a dream out of slavery—the one Kaine gived me about freedom. Many the day I cursed freedom; it took everyone I loved in girlhood from me. It taken Kaine. I’d come out of slavery with nothing but that dream and I guess you could say, even laying there in them strange Quarters, that the dream had come true. I wasn’t slaved no more; I’d slept in the white folks’ bed and used the white folk
s’ things, been used by them. Yes, freedom had come true, but in ways I’d never thought of and with hurts I didn’t know I could bear. That dream had to be something worth living for, if not for me, then for Mony; West had to be better than here.

  This what I thought when I listened to Harker talking about West while I was laying up there in the white woman’s bed, joking with them about that plan. But out there in the Quarters that night, with Mony nested in the curve of my side, all I seed as I listened was Nathan sprawled in whiteness, white sheets, white pillows, white bosom. All he did was make them look whiter. He wasn’t nothing but a mark on them. That’s what we was in white folks’ eyes, nothing but marks to be used, wiped out. Hadn’t I seed it in Mistress, in that white man’s eyes under the tree? We wasn’t nothing to them. I couldn’t trust all we had to something could swallow us like so many drops; I made up my mind not to put my freedom in no white woman’s hand.

  Nathan stopped me that next morning as I was coming through the woodlot carrying Mony. It wasn’t no more than just light, he was in the shadows leaning against a tree trunk. My heart did kind of leap up when I seed him; I was glad he’d come to me. Course, by the time I got to him, I membered I had some things to be mad with him about. I was finding out just how convenient it had been to live at the Big House. Oh, the mattress was the same—I’d taken that corn-husk pallet down with me—and I like to suffocate in that little hidey-hole Dorcas slept in. But I had to get up to the House early and I came back late on account of her nursing Mony. I started giving him a little grits in milk before I left the House in the evening and, after a while, he slept through the night. But he didn’t the first night in the Quarters. I managed to get him back to sleep—Janet made him a sugar-tit from a corner of molasses she’d saved—but not before everybody in the Quarters was wake. They was too polite to say anything, but I could hear them tossing and turning well as they could hear me. So I wasn’t in no mood to let Nathan know how glad I was to see him.

  “Dessa,” he say when I got up to him, “what is wrong with you?” Not “Morning,” not “How do?” It was “What is wrong with you?” Like I was the one crazy.

  I was so surprised and hurt—cause it was real evident to me who and what was wrong—that I walked on past him. “I’m a person,” I said over my shoulder, “and you got to treat me like I got some sense.”

  “Why don’t you act like you got some, then?” he said real snappy, but after a minute, he come to walk beside me and asked, like he want an answer, “Why is you mad, Dess?”

  I thought he should already know that. I had told him what Master had done to Kaine and I knew he had seen how Young Mistress had used me. White folks had taken everything in the world from me except my baby and my life and they had tried to take them. And to see him, who had helped to save me, had friended with me through so much of it, laying up, wallowing in what had hurt me so—I didn’t feel that nothing I could say would tell him what that pain was like. And I didn’t feel like it was on me to splain why he shouldn’t be messing with no white woman; I thought it was on him to say why he was doing it.

  “Why not?” he ask when I ask him.

  Well, that stop me right in my tracks. “Why not?” I ask. “What you going to do if her husband come back?”

  “What we going to do if he come back?” he shot back real quick. “From what she say, he just as likely to lay claim to us and sell us all right back into slavery.”

  “And he sho will be disposed to do just that, he come back and find you sleeping in that bed.”

  He grinned. “So you think Master Sutton going give us a square deal, do I stop diddling his wife, eh?”

  That lie-gap between his front teeth was gleaming and I couldn’t help but laugh—which was what he wanted me to do. You know most mens feel if they can get you laughing and funning, talking a little saucy, you know, that they can do just anything they want with you. And I guess it is true that you catch more flies with sugar. But I was right; and I wasn’t going be laughed out of it.

  “You just liking her cause she white,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he say, “I likes her cause she white; I likes you cause you got that old pretty red color under your skin. Now what of that?”

  I could’ve hit him, he was making me so mad. “You know what I mean!”

  “If you mean that I’m getting something that the white man always kept for hisself, well, yes. I likes that, too.”

  “If the ‘white man ain’t no good,’ how his ‘likes’ or his woman going be any different?” This was another thing he’d said there by that bed and I wanted him to member that.

  “You know, Dess, Ruth ain’t the one sold you; her husband ain’t killed Kaine—”

  “But he’d kill you or Harker, or anybody here, for less than what you doing. Maybe for less than what Kaine did,” I added. I didn’t like him putting Kaine in it; and I knowed he called that white woman name just to be cute. “Ruth,” like she wasn’t no more than his friend-girl. He could show off all he wanted to, try to make it seem like it was all in my mind. I knowed what had killed Kaine, the master’s power; and poor or not, every white man had that when it come to a nigger. “Why you doing something you know can’t mean you no good?”

  “Felt plenty good to me.”

  “That ain’t no answer.”

  “Why I got to have a better one?”

  I just looked at him. To hear him tell it, he hadn’t suffered as much as some people—he said he had belonged to a high-society white woman didn’t mistreat her slaves, before he was sold—but he knew, had seen what others had been through. The reason he runned away in the first place was cause he couldn’t stand having his own luck depend on having to hurt others. He didn’t think I knowed this, wouldn’t want me to know it, but I did.

  Maybe there was some little black drivers in slavery. But every one I ever seen was big and black and they whole idea of theyselfs was in they strength; that was the white man’s “arm” and that was the only way they knew to be. Well, Nathan was big and black but I don’t think he knew nothing about no white man’s arm until he was sold to that slave trader. Maybe he was too old to like it by then, maybe it just wasn’t in him to like all that bullying and beating. But he had to act like he did or at least act like it didn’t make him no difference. I think even after we got away from the coffle, he still didn’t like to show too much of hisself that wasn’t like what people generally thought a big, black nigger should be. But Nathan was different; and I knowed he was different.

  I couldn’t put into words all this that was going through my head. I didn’t have the words, the experience to say these things. All I could do was feel and it was like my own flesh had betrayed me. Nathan and Cully, and Harker, too, had risked something for me and I felt bound to them—and them to me—as tight as bloodkin. Miz Ruint wasn’t no part of that knot; the only way she could get in was to loosen it. Maybe I would have felt this way about anyone but this was a white woman—and a crazy white woman at that.

  Well, with the answers Nathan was giving the questions I was asking, didn’t neither one of us get no satisfaction. So I resented the white woman even more.

  I took Mony and all my mending out to the kitchen yard. I wasn’t going let my tongue run away like that again, but I didn’t want to be round the white woman. I hadn’t never had that much to say to her, no way. She was always strange to me, way she was always looking at me when she thought I didn’t know it, other times acting like she was scared I would touch her. I didn’t like her eyes—though they wasn’t as bad as that writer man’s had been. His was about as empty as a snow sky, just that pale and heavy; hers was gray as wet mortar. But, most times, it was like she didn’t see you, no way—and be talking right at you. She left her dirty draws in the middle of the floor when that’s the first thing you teach a child: Pick up behind yourself. She called Ada “Auntie” like they was some kin.

  Ada said this was the way white peoples was. And what did I know—I hadn’t been more than a
mile or so from my home Quarters till I was sold. Most of what I knowed about white folk, I’d learned on that coffle. Ada had worked in Houses from the time she was old enough to know anything and I don’t reckon it was much white folks could get past her. She had come out from a pretty strict-run House, the kind where the mistress weigh out the provision in the morning and lock them up at night; you know, order everything about the House just so. Her old mistress was one of these see-nothing, say-nothing white womens when it come to the master. And he slept with all the womens in his Quarters; said it kept them fertile. Ada was her master’s daughter—though it didn’t get her no special favor; she just happen to be one the childrens he kept. He didn’t have nothing to do with Annabelle—only white on her had come from Ada—and Ada might would’ve been there still, hadn’t’ve been the master started looking at Annabelle. That was his granddaughter, mind, and she not even thirteen. Ada tried to get the mistress to stop him, but mistress say, don’t bring that kind of talk in her House. This was one of the first things Ada told me about herself: “He didn’t have to be so low.” Lips trembling, eyes like a bruise in her face, swimming in water, and I was back in my home Quarters hearing my friend-girl Martha’s voice: “All he had to do was ask,” after Master’s brother forced her in the fields one day. Oh, I was spared much that others suffered.

  And Ada tell you in a minute, white woman ain’t got no excuse to be so trifling when all it take is they word. Aunt Lefonia and Emmalina had said about the same thing. They didn’t have too much patience with white womens amongst theyselfs—though they never let on about this before any mistress; before mistress they was good slaves. Not that they talked that much about white womens in particular; they talked about everyone come near that House. But this was Ada’s favorite conversation; Miz Ruint didn’t know how to keep no House; wasn’t for Dorcas, Miz Ruint’d be dead. Tell you the truth, I wasn’t much interested in that white woman; used to be, quite a bit of the time, Ada would talk, and I wouldn’t listen. But now, with Harker and them acting so closed to me, I began to pay attention.