Dessa Rose Page 8

  Dessa watched the white woman, who stood now with her back to the door. She lowered her lids even more, looking at the white woman through the spikes of her own lashes; finally she could no longer see her. A white woman. The image filled her mind, the hair pinned carelessly on top of her head, orange tendrils hanging about the pale blur of the face. She opened her eyes slowly. The face seemed to float toward her. She clenched her hands convulsively and was still.

  “I know you-all ain’t doing a thing but playing possum.” The face grinned.

  Dessa’s mind raced; she could not put two thoughts together. Oh, why this dream so hard? Mammy would have a time trying to explain this dream. A white woman—Is that your enemies?…could be…could be

  “‘To dream of death is a sign of marriage.’”

  The teeth of the comb bit into her scalp as Carrie Mae parted off another thin line of hair. Dessa flinched from the comb and frowned at mammy. Dessa and Carrie sat on the steps that led up to mammy’s cabin door, Carrie Mae on the top step, she on the next step between Carrie’s legs. Carrie’s fingers tugged sharply on each strand of hair as she began the intricate corn row. Sometimes it was so hard to get mammy to talk some sense. That was grief had her bowed down, so Aunt Lefonia said—pappy, whom Dessa remembered a little (didn’t she? somewhere; when she was little: a prickly cheek against her own small hand, a wide chest against her knees, hard arms supporting her bottom…?); Jeeter, whom she knew she loved; that boy and girl mammy seldom spoke of, children sold away—Lawd, there was that word again. Mammy had to talk. Dessa turned her head under Carrie’s hands and looked at her mother. She waited. The old woman sat on a three-legged stool in the doorway, her heavy hips and thighs overflowing its seat, arms folded tight against her chest, eyes closed. Maybe she should go see Aunt Lefonia. But Lefonia would only send her back to mammy; mammy was the one who read dreams. “This a white woman I’m dreaming of, mammy, not no burying shroud.”

  Mammy sat on a three-legged stool by the bottom step, head bowed, sucking on the little corncob pipe Jeeter had made for her. Dessa wanted very much to see mammy’s face, the full lips that were the color of ripening blackberries, the broad, pockmarked cheeks and furrowed brow, the large flaring nostrils. The whites of mammy’s eyes were yellowed, the red-brown pupils covered by a milky film. This she knew from memory. Mammy would not turn her head.

  “‘A dream of marriage is a sign of death.’”

  “I know that, mammy,” she said patiently. “This a white woman I’m dreaming of, not no wedding gown.”

  “Maybe,” Carrie said; the comb’s teeth bit into Dessa’s scalp again. “Maybe, it’s like silver money; you think, mammy? (Hold your head this way, Dessa.)” She tapped Dessa on the shoulder with the comb. “You know, ‘Silver money a sure sign of trouble.’”

  What a nigga doing dreaming of money, anyway? Dessa thought impatiently. Course something like that bound to mean trouble. She had never seen a white woman so close—the fine red-gold fuzz on the top lip, the lines radiating from the corners of the eyes, the bluish shadow at the temples, the skin as pale as hoecake dough—so much detail she could almost think it real. “Mammy—!” Lawd, she wished she could give herself up to Carrie’s strong fingers massaging her scalp, to her nonsense about the baby’s talking at six months. “Mammy—”

  “‘A bright Christmas mean some white folks going die.’ That the only one I knows.” Martha grinned. (This was too much, Dessa thought frantically; Martha would tell her something she didn’t want to know. Something mammy would say she didn’t need to know.) “‘A dark un mean some nigga going go.’” Martha was laughing now. “But I guess we don’t need no dream to tell that. Girl”—Martha sobered—“don’t be running round here trying to figure out no dream when you got life right here to get through.” Her skin was the golden brown of an autumn sycamore leaf, with just that much red, stretched smooth and taut over the thin-bridged nose, the delicate nostrils. “Don’t be studying about no dream.” And Martha walked away.

  “You scrape—oh, about the same amount you use if this was a regular cup of tea—scrape that much from the horn of a cow; this is if they real sick with the fever, now. I wouldn’t use this for just every little common heat. But I take the scrapings from the horn, you see, and make that into tea, just pour some hot water on it, honey. Let it steep till it cool, then reheat it and this will cure any fever—long as it ain’t determined to kill. Now if the fever determined…”

  “Mammy, I came about my dream.” Dessa was exasperated. She stood in front of mammy’s cabin. Like all the others in the Quarters, it stood on stilts above the ground. Three rickety steps led up to its lone door. Mammy sat in the doorway on a three-legged stool. Dessa started up the steps. Mammy was going to tell her something about this dream today.

  “‘Never tell a dream until you broke your fast.’”

  “Fast? Mammy, you say yourself I’m fifteen, going on sixteen. Me and Kaine be just down the Quarters, there.” They were inside mammy’s cabin, the dark smoky room where she and Jeeter and Carrie Mae had been raised. A crude fireplace had been arranged in one corner, bricks and a stovepipe that vented the smoke from the fire through a hole in the wall. A rude table and four three-legged stools stood before it. Pappy had finished the last stool just before he’d hired out that last time. That was before Dessa was old enough to work the fields. She had slipped away from Mamma Hattie as she often did and run off to the spring house. Mammy gave her a piece of cheese and continued churning the butter: swish, creak, squeak, and beneath that a top-pa-ta, top-pa-ta, as the stick thumped against the bottom of the churn. The sound of the churn filled the room and mammy’s voice rose above it: “This little light of mine…” Dessa rocked herself to the beat of the churn and chewed to the rhythm of mammy’s singing. “This little light of mine…” Dessa chewed and rocked and hardly noticed the creaking of wheels as a wagon lumbered into the yard. Someone had come running, shouting. Mammy had jumped up screaming, knocked over the churn, and slipped and slid in the soft butter and yellowed cream, and screaming had run behind the wagon and the pine box that knocked against the wagon sides. Mammy sat now on one stool, Carrie Mae, a big chicory-brown baby (…baby? asleep on her shoulder, on another. Dessa sat down on a third. One place was empty.

  “We be just like Carrie-nem.” Someone was missing “Kaine through with all that foolishness he done when he first come here—acting out and talking back.” Someone “Mammy, you going talk to Boss Smith for us?”

  “‘Dreaming about dollars is a sure sign of a whipping.’” Mammy nodded her head wisely and turned as though to talk to Carrie. In that moment Dessa saw her face clearly though she could not say by what light. Deep lines ran from nose to mouth and something gleamed on one cheek. “‘Never spit in the fire; it will draw your lungs up.’”

  The banjo again. He could make it tinkle like the first drops of spring rain spattering on the roof or sheet like creek water running over a rocky course. Someone was sweeping her house after sundown, someone was sweeping her out of the family house “Mammy. Mammy. I dreamed—”

  “‘Put graveyard dirt in your shoes and can’t no dog track you.’”

  She snuggled

  The white light the raftered ceiling Dessa had seen this all before. She watched the white woman sitting in the light from the long window. Her hair was the color of fire; it fell about her shoulders in lank whisps. Her face was very white and seemed to radiate a milky glow; her mouth was like a bloody gash across it. Dessa closed her eyes. Only the Quarters had been a dream. Mammy, Martha. Kaine’s face danced before her eyes. She was the one who was missing; she had been sold away. This was a bed and these were sheets. She clutched them in her hands.

  The white woman sat in a rocker across from the bed. Next to her was a large cradle; next to it another piece of furniture Dessa couldn’t identify. A large cupboard stood in a corner on the other side of the rocker; near that corner was a door. Dessa stared at it but could not move.

  They ha
d come for her at night. Nathan, Cully, and Harker, whom she hadn’t known. Jemina, praising the Lawd in scared whispers, had opened the cellar door and unlocked her chains. Free, and scrambling up the steep steps, Dess had focused all of her attention on the stranger’s whispered instructions, refusing to think beyond the next step. She was free and she walked on, mindful of his hand on her arm, uncaring of anything else save his cautions and the putting of one foot in front of the other. Silently, she had thanked the Lawd, Legba, all the gods she knew, for Harker and Cully and Nathan, for Jemina herself. She would not be a slave anymore in this world.

  They had walked for a long time, Harker going before her, holding back low branches and vines, his voice whispering the presence of obstacles on the path so she could avoid them. It had taken a while for her feet to remember the gliding shuffle that, slow as it appeared, ate up ground. The coffle had taught her that, just as it had Cully and everyone else who had ever spent more than a day on one. She had learned quickly after the first few hours of hobbling along with the manacle rubbing her ankle raw. She had known without being told that if she fell, one of the drivers would be along with the whip. Her feet were remembering: The muscles of her calves and thighs protested some and it took all of her concentration to keep their protests from drowning out the remembrance of her feet. She didn’t speak. She didn’t think either. She was free; maybe not as free as she would ever be but she knew, without needing to think about it, that she’d never be less free than she was now, striding, sometimes stumbling toward a place she’d never seen and didn’t know word one about.

  She remembered laughing weakly, leaning against the thin mulatto boy, an arm around her, an awkward pat on her shoulder. “…the midwife back at the farm say less your time real near…” (Farm? Had he—A white woman—) Her own foot in the stirrup, Cully pushing from behind, she mounted the horse before Harker. And leaning back against his chest, tears sliding silently down her cheek. She had not known how bad she felt, how scared, how—She had lost track of place, of time, dozing only to be jostled awake by the dull throbbing in her back, some pounding in her head, starting up out of some unremembered dreams to feel the sinewy arms around her, the beard-stubbled cheek against her face, “Got you” on a smoky breath. At some point they rested, probably more than once; she remembered the sky through a canopy of trees, the smell of roasting meat, “Rest,” her face against some coarse material, the warmth of someone’s flesh and the dull throbbing in her back. She was bumped up and down and something, in her womb, she guessed, somewhere deep inside her, the baby pinched its lining in its fist. It had rained, hard and soaking, and Harker laughed, “There go the trail and the scent,” as he pulled out an oilcloth and draped her in it. But the wetness of the rain was mixed with that other, sudden, drenching liquid that made the horse rear, nearly killing them both, embarrassing her half to death. What would Harker think, her having no more bladder control than this? And little else: the anxious broad-nosed face, a fiercely muttered “Shush!” and “Bear down, bear down! You got to help.” The core of her body uprooted, Lawd, the pain, the blood…

  The white woman’s mouth was like an open wound across the milky paleness of her face. She sat, one shoulder bare, a child held against her breast. “Got enough?” She tickled the baby under the chin and raised it to her shoulder, patting its back and murmuring. The baby was big, a year old, maybe, or more, with plump white arms and legs, wisps of light-colored hair on its smooth white head. The child burped loudly and grinned; the white woman laughed. “Well, I guess you did get your fill.”

  Dessa closed her eyes; her lashes clotted wetly against her cheeks. Her stomach was flat, the muscles flaccid; her breasts, swollen and tender, felt on fire. Lawd, where my baby at; where is my child? She could feel the sodden rag between her thighs, sticky with blood. “Where my child?” She didn’t know she had spoken aloud until she heard the gasp,

  “Right here.”

  And opened her eyes.

  The white woman, the shoulder still bare, the curly black head and brown face of a new baby nestled at her breast, faced her now. “See?”

  “Naaaaaawwwww!” The scream rushed out of her on an explosion of breath. She saw the glass-colored eyes buck before her own squeezed tight. The covers weighed her arms and legs; some voice screamed, “Annabelle. Annabelle, get Ada! She starting up again!” Hands, herself crying weakly, a cool cloth on her forehead and something at her breasts.

  “See? See? He know his mama. See, he just want to eat.”

  Dessa looked down. The brown baby was in her arms, his dark eyes staring up at her unwinkingly. She touched a tiny fist; it opened to grasp her finger. She looked up. She had never seen the tall brown-skinned woman before.

  “Let me fix them pillows so you can nurse more better.” The woman bent over Dessa, her hands moving deftly. Dessa lay quietly but warily. “There, now; you turn just a little on your side and you both be more comfortable. Well, go on; put the nipple in his mouth.”

  Dessa looked down quickly, then up at the woman’s smiling face. She did as she was told, gingerly touching her breast and awkwardly guiding it toward the baby’s mouth. The nipple touched his cheek and he turned his head toward it, his mouth opening to grasp and clamping tightly around it, all in one sudden movement. A sharp pain shot through her breast at the first tug and she gasped.

  “You got to get used to that,” the woman said conversationally. “Pain going get worse before it get better—that is, if you ain’t dried up. It’s a mercy if you not, way you been carrying on.” She laughed. “Attacking white folks and scaping all crost the country in the dead of night.” Laughing again and shaking her head. “I told her don’t be coming in here less one of us was with her. But you think Miz Ruint going listen at me?”

  At least she could understand these words even if they still made no sense to her. Who was this woman? Where was “Harker?”

  “She sent the boy at him. He be here directly. You go on see at that baby. He getting some, huh?” she asked, peeking over at the nursing baby. “It be all right, now.”

  Every pull of the baby’s lips sent a thrill of pain through Dessa’s breast. She looked up at the woman and smiled before she closed her eyes.

  Rufel watched the colored girl, not as she had at first from the rocker by the window, rocking gently as she nursed the babies or shelled peas. The colored girl was young. Don’t look no more than twelve or thirteen, Rufel had thought. Couldn’t be more than fourteen, she would say to herself, don’t care what Ada said. She disliked disagreeing with Ada. The older darky had an abrupt way of speaking that Rufel found daunting. Rufel herself was not, of course, a child to be corrected by some middle-aged darky—Who knew no more about birthdays, she would continue sullenly to herself, than “planting time” and “picking time.” Why, even Mammy hadn’t known how old she was or even her own birthdate. That was why they—she, Rufel, “Miz ’Fel,” had chosen Valentine’s Day as Mammy’s birthday. Mammy had refused to accept a date—“This way I don’t have to age, see,” she had joked, “I just gets a little older.” Eyes full and shiny, a smile fluttering about her bee-stung lips—Rushing from the wound of that memory, Rufel would silently declare, All darkies know about is old age.

  Rufel would sew or rock for a minute, until another point occurred to her. Thirteen, even fourteen was young to have a baby, even for a darky. Well. Rocking again, maybe sewing, fifteen. But no older and Ada talked about her as if she were a grown woman. Even if the girl were eighteen, as Ada said, she was too young to live as a runaway, hand to mouth, Rufel thought scornfully, like the rest of these darkies. And Ada was no better than the rest of them. Why, any white person that came along could lay claim to them, sell them, auction them off to the highest bidder. They should thank their lucky stars she was a kindhearted person. Bertie—But she resolutely closed her mind against the thought of her husband. She had done what she could do. He would see that when he came. Rufel would resume her task, all the while watching the colored girl. If
she didn’t want to go back to her people—

  The wench was the color of chocolate and Rufel would stare at her face as she tossed or, more frequently now, slept quietly, at the thin body that barely made an impression in the big feather bed. The girl would be all right. Rocking again or returning to the rocker if she had stood as she sometimes did to fetch some article, to stretch, or just to look more closely at the colored girl.

  Ada and Harker said she—they called her Dessa—had been sold south by a cruel master. She certainly acted mean enough to have been ruined by a cruel master—kicking and hitting at whoever got in the way the few times Rufel had seen her roused from stupor. But the girl’s back was scarless and to hear Ada tell it, every runaway in the world was escaping from a “cruel master.” Ada herself claimed to have escaped from a lecherous master who had lusted with her and then planned the seduction of Ada’s daughter, Annabelle. Rufel didn’t believe a word of that. She could see nothing attractive in the rawboned, brown-skinned woman or her lanky, half-witted daughter—and would have said as much but Mammy had cut her off before she could speak, thanking Ada for her help and God that Ada had escaped from her old master.

  Vexed, Rufel had bit her lip, remembering then what the utter nonsense of the darky’s statement had made her forget. They needed Ada. That was the plain fact of it.