Dessa Rose Read online

  “You don’t ‘smell’ it; you say it.”

  Startled, Nehemiah looked at the darky narrowly. Her eyes regarded him solemnly above the crook of her elbow and even as he stared, she quickly lowered them. She’d misheard him of course, but she had made, he realized, a slight jest. “That’s quite a good joke—in what you said and,” he added genially, “in my own rather slow reaction.”

  The darky ducked her head but not before Nehemiah saw the flash of even white teeth between the thick, long lips; seeing this, he relaxed himself. “Kaine did speak then, a great deal about freedom?”

  She looked at him, alert. “Don’t no niggas be talking too much bout freedom,” she said flatly.

  Nehemiah did not believe her, but decided, for the time being at least, to allow her to think he did. She was actually responding to his questions and he did not want to distract her. “Then what was your idea in trying to escape from the coffle?”

  She picked up a twig and began to mark in the dirt and to hum—not the same tune as the previous day, but one equally monotonous. She looked up at him, finally, with widened eyes. “Was you slave, you want be sold deep south? I never been deep south, but Boss Smith, he always threats lazy niggas with that and they don’t be too lazy no mo.”

  “And the others,” he asked, “was this what was in their mind?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Onliest mind I be knowing is mines. Why for you don’t ask them first?”

  This seemed more simple curiosity than insolence and Nehemiah allowed it to pass. “I didn’t hear of this…incident until it was too late to speak with the others who were charged as leaders,” he explained.

  “Thank”—she spoke so quietly he almost missed her words—“thank it be a place without no whites?”

  “What?” he asked sharply.

  But she continued to herself, in a deeper dialect than she had heretofore used, really almost a mumble, something about Emmalina’s Joe Big telling Kaine something and going, but where he could not make out. “They caught—”

  “What?” he asked again.

  The blank sullen look returned to her face; the humming started again. She moved as though uncomfortable and touched, almost as if frightened, the big mound rising beneath her dress. “This all I got of Kaine. Right here, in my belly. Mist’s slap my face when I tell her that, say, don’t lie; say, it must be Terrell, that how she call Masa, Terrell, say it must be his’n. Why else Masa want kill Kaine, best gardener they ever has, what cost a pretty penny? She say, well, Terrell live, he live knowing his slut and his bastid south in worser slavery than they ever thought of and Aunt Lefonia stop me before I kills her, too.”

  He was startled by the confession. There had been no hint of anything like this in the court records. And she did look fierce, poised on her haunches, staring into the sunlight. It was almost like listening to the first day’s recital and he knew when she turned her head from him that, for the moment at least, he had gotten all that he could from her. This, together with the gathering heat, had made him close his notebook for the day.

  June 27, 1847

  I asked about the name of the young buck with whom this darky lived, little suspecting what revelations this might lead to….

  Nehemiah quickly wrote a summary of the exchange with the darky, more satisfied than not with his progress. Miss Janet he knew, would be interested in the gal’s tale. She was eloquent on the subject of slave concubinage, charging that the practice was an affront to white womanhood. Nehemiah was not quite so vehement—a man must, after all, have some outlet for the baser passions—but he was sincere in his belief that a race could not long prosper that sowed its seed so profligately. He found it strangely stirring to think how even the appearance of immorality had led to a barely averted tragedy. He continued in his journal:

  It’s obvious the buck shared the mistress’s suspicion about the master and this wench. Why else would the darky attack a white man, his master? And she, that gal, now—

  Nehemiah paused again. Lurking behind the darky’s all too often blank gaze was something more than the cunning stubbornness which, alone, he had first perceived. That was a bad business with the mistress, of course, though remembering the darky’s playfulness that afternoon, he found himself rather unwilling to credit her confession. He had not supposed that the thick-lipped mouth, so sullen in its silent repose, could smile so…so freely, even utter small jests. His own lips curved upward. She must be exaggerating, he thought, egged on, perhaps, by the young buck’s example and her own nerve in attacking the master. He continued the entry:

  This lapse does not unduly disturb me. I think the darky begins to have less distrust of me. She was not overly free in her speech but it is obvious that she inclines towards me more than in the past. I fancy that I am not overly optimistic in predicting that one, perhaps two more sessions and I will have learned all I need from her. I shall have to think of a provocative title for the section in which I deal with the general principles apparent in her participation in this bloody business. Truly, the female of this species is as deadly as the male.**

  Two

  “June 28, 1847.” Nehemiah wrote the date at the top of the new page. It was hot and clear, even as Hughes brought her up from the cellar, that the darky felt the heat, too. Her movements, always slow, were even slower, her walk not stumbling but heavy as though her feet were weighted. She eased her bulk onto the ground beneath the tree and leaned back against its trunk. Her dark hair seemed to merge into the deeper shadows cast by the low-hanging branches of the tree. Nehemiah sat in his habitual place facing her, stripped to his shirt sleeves, and felt stifled by even this light covering. The sharp bright sunlight was too painful to gaze at from the depth of the tree’s shadow and his eyes wandered between the pages of his notebook, blank save for the day’s date, and the darkness of her face. They were silent for some moments after she was seated.

  “That writing what you put on that paper, huh?” He was startled by the question and did not immediately answer. “You be writing down what I say?” She was on her knees, turned to him now to see what was in the notebook.

  Instinctively he held it away from her eyes. “Well.” He cleared his throat. “Although I have written nothing today—we have said nothing so far…” He laughed a little, but this small pleasantry escaped her. “I do indeed write down much of what you say.” On a happy impulse, he flipped back through the pages and showed her the notes he had made on some of their previous sessions.

  “What that there…and there…and that, too?” He told her and even read a little to her, an innocuous line or two. She was entranced. “I really say that?” When he nodded, she sat back on her haunches. “What you going do with it?”

  “I will use what you have said in a book I am writing.” He was totally unsure of whether she would comprehend the meaning of that.

  “Cause why?” She was thoroughly aroused by this time and seemed, despite the chain that bound her, ready to flee.

  “Girl,” he said, for at that moment he could not for the life of him remember her name, “girl, what I put in this book cannot hurt you now. You’ve already been tried and judged.” She seemed somewhat calmed by the utterance, perhaps as much by the tone of his voice, which he purposely made gentle, as by the statement itself.

  “Then for what you want do it?”

  “I write—” He cleared his throat again, casting around in his mind for some appropriate words. “I write what I do in the hope of helping others to be happy in the life that has been sent them to live.” He was rather pleased with that response. Certainly, it seemed to succeed in setting her mind at ease about the possible repercussions in talking freely with him; she appeared much struck by the statement, looking intently into his face for a long moment before she again settled into her customary pose. He allowed her to reflect upon this for a moment. She was silent for so long that he began to suspect her of dozing and leaned forward the better to see her. Her eyes were open (she seemed not to have the
same problem as he with the harsh light), her hands cupped beneath the roundness of her stomach. “Your baby seems to have dropped; according to the old wives’ tale, you’ll be brought to bed soon.” It was merely an attempt at conversation; he, of course, knew no more about that sort of business than he knew about animal husbandry or the cultivation of cotton. She jumped as though stung and he cursed his stupidity, knowing that his unthinking comment must have brought her own sentence to mind. After the initial start, she straightened her back and scooted nearer the tree, but said nothing. He waited, somewhat anxiously, for the blank sullen look to return. It did not, however, and emboldened, he ventured quietly, “Girl, where did the others get the file?” even as she spoke.

  “Kaine not want this baby. He want and don’t want it. Babies ain’t easy for niggas, but still, I knows this Kaine and I wants it cause that. And…and, when he ask me to go to Aunt Lefonia…I—I near about died. I know what Aunt Lefonia be doing, though she don’t be doing it too much cause Masa know it got to be some nigga children coming in this world.”

  Nehemiah started at that: baby murder! He had heard of African women fresh off the boat, as it were, engaging in such practices but this was the first time he had come across any hint of it among native-born blacks. Fancy that, blocking conception and child killing, too. And the owners not even aware! Oh, Roots would explode like an artillery shell among them. He was so startled by the disclosure and its implications that he almost missed her next sentence.

  “…anybody but Kaine, I do it, too. First time anyway. But—” She paused and licked her lips, touching her stomach again. “This Kaine and it be like killing part of him, part of me. So I talk with him; beg him. I say, ‘This our baby; ours, us’s. We make it. How you can say, kill it? It mine and it yours.’ He just look at me. ‘Same way Lefonia sons be hers when Masa decide that bay gelding he want worth more to him than they is to her. Dessa,’ and I know he don’t want hurt me when he call my name, but it so sweet till it do hurt.” His voice seemed to ring inside her head. “‘Dessa,’ just soft like that. ‘Dessa, where your brother, Jeeter, at now?’ I’m crying already, can’t cry no more, not for Jeeter. He be gone, sold south, somewhere; we never do know. And finally I say ‘Run,’ and he laugh.” Her mouth filled with the remembered bitterness.

  “He laugh and say, ‘Run, Dessa.’” (Lawd. No one had never said her name so sweet. Even when he was angry, Dessa. Dessa. She would always know the way he called her name.) “‘Dessa, run where?’

  “‘North,’” she whispered. She’d never heard anyone talk about going north. North had been no more to her than a dim, shadowed land across a river, as mythic and mysterious as heaven: rest, when the body could bear no more. But, and she had understood this even as she breathed the word, if there was rest for the body, there must be peace for the heart. And it was her heart, his heart, that Kaine asked her to kill. “North.”

  “North? And how we going get there?”

  “You know, Kaine.” He knew. She knew he knew. He knew if he wanted to know.

  “And what we going do when we gets there?”

  She looked at him. He had to know.

  “‘Dessa.’” Say my name again. “‘You know what is north? Huh? What is north? More whites. Just like here. You don’t see Aunt Lefonia, I see her for you.’”

  Oh, he had talked to her, the irreverent, half-uppity banter that could convulse her with laughter. “You think white folks piss champagne, huh? They bowels move the same way ours do; they shit stank just as bad.” She remembered her own startled laugh, even though she didn’t know what champagne was, even though she was shocked and a little frightened to hear him talk under white folks’ clothes like that. He wanted, she knew, to shock her, to make her see that white people, except for their skin color, were no different from her, from him—from any of the people. Foolish, futile—But soon she was asking herself, what good was that white skin, anyway? They had been setting out rice in the one field Master now kept for it and that question had come to her as she watched Boss Smith talking with Tarver, one of the negro drivers. Even though the overseer’s face was shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, she could see the winter paleness of his skin. As the spring progressed his nose would blister and peel and blister again until it achieved a semblance of the brown she was born with. But, white people had houses and farms and horses—“And you think Masa’d have one pig or one chicken wasn’t for us working for him, wasn’t for you and the rest of the people out there working from ‘can see to can’t’?”

  “Boss Smith don’t work us—” she had begun.

  “Naw,” Kaine had cut her off, “Masa don’t let him work yo’all from can to can’t—no more; he just work you twice as hard from sunup to sundown.” That was true. Tarver was always there, whether they were working rice, cotton, or corn, with his “Step it up there; speed it up now.”

  They had seldom loved at night; the realization was like a fist in her stomach. Nighttime was for holding, for simple caresses that eased tired limbs, for sleep. Winter Saturdays they had loved in the evenings after dark had shortened the gray afternoons into chilly blackness, lighted by the flame on the fire-half, warmed by the heat their bodies made. They had had only the one winter of love; and the mornings. Memory of that fierce loving, muffled by the dense blackness before dawn, flooded her, bringing quick heat to her face. Sometimes, she had awakened him, suckling at his lightly haired chest, hand searching the wiry thicket that began just below his waist. Or she awakened, nipples tiny and hard, squeezed in his fingers, and he already between her thighs. Molten now, she would rear beneath him, open, drawing him deep; he would plunge. Mostly hurried, always soon done. Sated, they would lie nested together in the silence between cockcrows, dreading the mournful bellow of the conch calling the day, summoning her to ceaseless toil. And at night—The nights of which she dreamed were only that, dreams and ghosts of dreams. I sat between mammy’s knees, she thought wildly, laughed with Carrie, argued with Jeeter, ran with Martha. Loved Kaine—

  She opened her eyes wide against a rush of tears, conscious now of the white man, willing them not to fall, yet unable to halt the memory of Kaine’s voice bitter, beloved, and right: “And Masa’d sell off any youngun on the place as soon as look at em cause he know we can always make another one.”

  Fear had eaten at her insides; even if she saved their baby from Lefonia, she would never be able to save it if Master wanted it. She cut her eyes at the white man. He was bent over the pad on his knee, his hand propelling the pen across its surface in intricate movements. What would this make him know about her, she wondered, about her life with Kaine? The white man looked up at her even as the pen continued across the pad and she recoiled, thinking in that first instance of seeing that his eyes were covered by some film, milky and blank. His eyes were “blue,” she saw in the next moment, like Emmalina said Mistress’s were, like sho enough white folks’ were, like the sky. Hastily, she dropped her own. That’s why we not supposed to look in white folks’ eyes, she thought, with a shiver. There was only emptiness in them; the unwary would fall into the well of their eyes and drown.

  “He, Kaine,” she said, stumbling, taking up her tale again, “he tell me then how he been sold way from some masas, runned away from others. He run, he say, trying to find north and he little then and not even know north a direction and more places than he ever be able to count. He just think he be free of whippings, free to belong to somebody what belongs to him just so long as he be north. Last time he runned way, he most get there and he think now he know what way free land is, what is free town, next time he get there. But never is no next time cause the same time patterrollers takes him back, they takes back a man what been north, lived there and what know what free north is. ‘Now,’ Kaine say, ‘now this man free, born free, but still, any white man what say he a slave be believed cause a nigga can’t talk before the laws, not against no white man, not even for his own self. So this man gots to get another white man for to say he free and he couldn�
��t find one quick enough so then the Georgia mens—that be what the north man call patterrollers—they takes him for to be slave. That’s right. But even before the patterrollers catched him, white man hit him, he not allowed to hit back. He carpenter, but if white mens on the job say they don’t want work with him, he don’t work, and such things as that. He say it hard being a free man of color, he don’t say nigga, say free man of color, but it better’n being a slave and if he get the chance, he going runned way.’”

  Dessa had been almost overwhelmed by the story; wasn’t there no place where a nigga could just be? And, “He—Kaine—say, he ask hisself, ‘That free? How that going be free? It still be two lists, one say, “White Man Can,” other say, “Nigga Can’t,” and white man still be the onliest one can write on em.’ So he don’t run no more. ‘Run for what?’ he say. ‘Get caught just be that much worser off. Maybe is a place without no whites, nigga can be free.’ But he don’t know where that is. He find it, he say we have us babies then.”

  Dessa looked out at the sunshine and her lower lip trembled a little. “I know Kaine be knowing more’n me. I know that. He—he telled me lot a things I ain’t even think about before I’m with him.” Yet, everything that Kaine said that was supposed to make her see the foolishness of having a baby only convinced her that they must run. “No matter though,” she said with her eyes closed. “Masa kill Kaine before it get time for us to go.”

  They were both quiet for some time.

  “You think,” she asked looking up at the white man, “you think what I say now going help peoples be happy in the life they sent? If that be true,” she said as he opened his mouth to speak, “why I not be happy when I live it?”

  June 29, 1847