Dessa Rose Read online

  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 t
heir 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:

  Tell me, sister; tell me, brother,

  How long will it be?

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

  Tell me, brother; tell me, sister,

  How long will it be

  That a poor sinner got to suffer, suffer here?

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

  Tell me, sister; tell me, brother,

  When my soul be free?

  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:

  Tell me, oh, please tell me,

  When I be free?

  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.

  Oh, it won’t be long.

  Say it won’t be long, sister,

  Poor sinner got to suffer, suffer here.

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

  Tell me, brother, tell me,

  How long will it be?

  Again the voice soared above the chorused refrain:

  Soul’s going to heaven,

  Soul’s going ride that heavenly train

  Cause the Lawd have called you home.

  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?”

  She could hear him suck in his breath before he answered sharply, “I teach your master and his kind how to speak.”

  “Oh, you a teacher man,” she exclaimed childishly. He was angry and she continued hurriedly, “Was a teacher man on the coffle.” She was grinning in his face now, feeling him hang on her every word. “He teached hisself to read from the Bible, then he preach. But course, that only be to niggas, and he be all right till he want teach other niggas to read the Good Word. That be what he call it, the Good Word; and when his masa find out what he be doing, he be sold south same’s if he teaching a bad word or be a bad nigga or a prime field hand.”

  “Is he the one who obtained the file?” the white man asked quickly.

  Dessa laughed tiredly, wanting now only to hurry the white man on his way. “Onliest freedom he be knowing is what he call the righteous freedom. That what the Lawd be giving him or what the masa be giving him and he was the first one the patterrollers killed.” She moved back into the darkness of the cellar, still laughing softly.

  “Odessa!” he called again.

  “Whatcho want?” she asked moving toward him. “Whatcho want?” stopping just outside the pool of gray light.

  There was a shout from the yard and the white man’s face disappeared from the window. She could see his legs clearly now as his hands brushed at the legs of his trousers. “You will learn what I require when I return,” he flung at her.

  The sound of his departing footsteps was lost in the new song the people had begun during their conversation. Dessa joined in, suddenly jubilant, her voice floating out across the yard.

  Good news, Lawd, Lawd, good news.

  My sister got a seat and I so glad;

  I heard from heaven today.

  Good news, Lawdy, Lawd, Lawd, good news.

  I don’t mind what Satan say

  Cause I heard, yes I heard, well I heard,

  I heard from heaven today.

  On the Trail

  South and West of Linden

  June 30, 1847

  We set out early this morning, picking up the trail of the renegades at the farm where they were last seen. It led us in a southerly direction for most of the day and then, just before we stopped for the night, it turned to the west. The trackers expect to raise some fresher sign of them tomorrow for, by their tracks, they appear laden with supplies and we are not (a fact to which my stomach can well attest. Dried beef and half-cooked, half-warmed beans are not my idea of appetizing fare). And, I am told, if the weather holds humid as it has been and does not rain, their scent will hold fresh for quite a while and the dogs will be able to follow wherever it leads.

  I did see Odessa this morning before we departed. I heard singing and, at first, taking this to be the usual morning serenade of Hughes’ darkies, I took no notice of it. My attention was caught, however, by the plaintive note of this song (a peculiar circumstance, for Hughes, despite his disclaimer to the contrary, does frown on the darkies’ singing any but the liveliest airs). I listened and finally managed to catch the words—something about the suffering of a poor sinner. I had no sooner figured them out—and recognized Odessa’s voice—when another voice, this one lower and harsher, took up the melody, singing at a somewhat faster tempo while Odessa maintained her original pace. It gave the effect of close harmonic part singing and was rather interesting and pleasing to the ear, especially when other voices joined in, as they presently did.

  This is the liveliest tune I have heard Odessa sing and I went round to the cellar window. There proved to be no time, however, for the kind of session such as now has become our custom—quite vexing. Odessa was a bit fractious, probably no more than a sign of her returning spirits. And no more than a careful master would soon put to rights. A pity she came under the influence of that fool buck so young. Even now, with prudent schooling—That Vaugham was a fool; of course one puts aside such things when one marries—as Mims did when he wed Miss Janet. Had I but had Odessa’s breaking, that intemperate nature should have been curbed. What a waste that she should have fallen into such hands as those.**

  Somewhere South and West of Linden

  July 3, 1847

  A wild goose chase and a sorry time we have had of it. I much doubt that there is an encampment, such as I first conceived of, at least in this vicinity. We have searched a large area and come up with nothing conclusive. Several times, we sighted what might have been members of
such a band, but the dogs could not tree them and it was more than we ourselves could do to catch more than what we hoped were fleeting glimpses of black bodies. Whether they took, indeed, to the trees, or vanished into the air, as some of the more credulous in the posse maintain, I have no way of knowing. If they exist, they are as elusive as Indians, nay, as elusive as smoke, and I feel it beyond the ability of so large a group as this posse to move warily enough to take them unawares. To compound matters, the storm that has been threatening for days finally broke this morning, putting an end to our search and drenching us in the process. We have stopped to rest the horses, for Hughes estimates that if we push hard, we should reach Linden by nightfall. A bed will be most welcome—and, perhaps, I shall see also about something to warm it when we get back. Hughes has given the call to mount and so we are off.**

  July 4, 1847

  Early Morning

  I put the date in wearied surprise. We have been out most of the night scouring the countryside for signs of Odessa, but there were none that we found and the rain has by now washed away what we must have missed. It as though the niggers who crept in and stole away with her were not human blood, human flesh, but sorcerers who whisked her away by magic to the accursed den they inhabit. Hughes maintained that the devil merely claimed his own, and gave up the search around midnight. But reason tells me that the niggers were not supernatural, not spirits or “haints.” They are flesh and bone and so must leave some trace of their coming and going. The smallest clue would have sufficed me for I should have followed it to its ultimate end. Now the rain has come up and even that small chance is gone, vanished like Odessa.