Dessa Rose Read online

Often, misery washed over her. She would struggle against the familiar tide, feeding her indignation at Ada’s story. At least Uncle Joel and Dante, the darkies Bertie had brought back from that last trip, had stayed, she would remind herself then. And, forgetting her angry, and silent, exasperation at Bertie’s conviction that he had somehow gotten the best of a deal that netted him an old darky and a crippled one, took some satisfaction in their loyalty to the place. Mammy said they had been some help at harvest, but the real work was done by the darkies Ada knew. Still, Rufel hadn’t been able to resist pointing out Ada’s lie to Mammy.

  “No white man would do that,” she’d insisted; unless he tied a sack over her head first, she had continued maliciously to herself. Mammy, folding linen—black hands in the white folds, Mammy’s hand against her face, and even then, maybe, that scaly, silvery sheen creeping over the rich, coffee-colored skin—had paused. “Why, Mammy, that’s—” Rufel wasn’t sure what it was and stuttered. “That’s—”

  “Miz Rufel!” Mammy had said sharply. “You keep a lady tongue in your mouth. Men,” Mammy had continued with a quailing glance as Rufel opened her mouth, voice overriding Rufel’s attempt to speak, “men can do things a lady can’t even guess at.”

  Rufel knew that was true but could not bring herself to concede this openly. “Well—” She had tossed her head, flicking back locks of hair that tumbled in perpetual disarray from the artless knot atop her head. “Everyone know men like em half white and whiter,” she had finished saucily.

  “Miz Rufel,” Mammy had snapped. “Lawd know it must be some way for high yeller to git like that!” Shaking out a diaper with a low pop and folding it with careful precision across her lap. “Ada have a good heart and at least she know how to work that danged old stove.”

  Mammy’s retort about the stove had silenced Rufel. She shared Mammy’s antipathy for the beastly and expensive contraption Bertie had so proudly installed in the kitchen lean-to during the first months of their marriage. Its management had baffled every cook they ever owned; meals were most often late or the food burned, when the darky could manage to get the fire going at all. None of them had ever understood how to regulate cooking temperatures by sticking a hand into the oven and counting until it had to be withdrawn, the method prescribed by the manufacturer. And it took Mammy’s constant supervision to see that the stove was kept clean and blackening applied to prevent the rust of its many surfaces and joints. To his credit, Bertie had seldom complained about the tardy and overdone meals (often he was not there to share them), and usually laughed when Rufel apologized for the quality of the meals set before him. How, he would ask, could she be expected to teach darkies to regulate the temperature of the stove when most of them couldn’t count beyond one or two? Still, Rufel felt she had failed in a crucial duty and she was both relieved and piqued that Ada seemed to have an instinct where the operation of the stove was concerned.

  Despite Ada’s considerable skill in the kitchen, Rufel still itched sometimes to throw the lie back in Ada’s face (White man, indeed! Both of them probably run off by the mistress for making up to the master), but she was glad she hadn’t provoked Mammy that day. Mammy had probably not believed Ada’s story herself, Rufel thought now, but had not wanted to antagonize Ada. Mammy, perhaps even then foreseeing her own death, trying to secure the help Rufel would need until Bertie came back, knew Rufel would need that scheming Ada. No, Rufel had concluded, hurrying now lest she be trapped in grief and fear, the “cruel master” was just to play on her sympathy.

  But—maybe—there were no people for this wench to return to. Timmy had said the other darkies called her the “debil woman.” His blue eyes had rolled back into his head and he had bared his baby teeth in a grotesque grin as he said it. Repulsed by his mimicry, she had scolded him for the mockery. “But that’s the way they do it, mamma; and laugh and slap their thighs.” He had imitated that also and she had relaxed, a little surprised at how seriously she had taken the joke. And it was a joke, she told herself, a foolish nickname, “debil woman” (He talk plain when he with me, she thought defensively). What could there be to fear in this one little sickly, colored gal? Oh, she was wild enough to have some kind of devil in her, Rufel would think, smiling, remembering the way the girl’s eyes had bucked the first time she awakened in the bedroom, just the way Mammy’s used to when something frightened her. Mammy, Mammy’s hands in her hair—Sudden longing pierced Rufel. Mammy’s voice: “Aw, Miz ’Fel” that was special, extra loving, extra.

  Rufel squeezed her eyes tight. She—the colored girl—had probably been scared out of her wits at finding herself in a bed. Even in her fevered state, she would know that no darky could own a room like this. It was a spacious and light-filled chamber, handsomely proportioned and stylishly finished from the highly polished golden-oak flooring to the long, French-style windows that faced the morning sun. Even the open-beam ceiling, so long an ugly reminder of that good-for-nothing darky’s unfinished work, seemed, since Mammy had hit upon the idea of painting the rough wood white, almost elegant. The highboy and matching cupboard, the cedar clothespress and thin-legged dressing table with its three-quarter mirror had come with her from Charleston; the crib and the half-sized chest had been made by the estate carpenter at Dry Fork as the Prestons’ christening gift for Timmy. She had only to look at these to see Dry Fork again—not as she had come to know it during her lying-in with Timmy and the weeks she had spent there regaining her strength, as a bustling, virtually self-sufficient, miniature village, but as she had seen it on her first visit, the year she and Bertie went to Montgomery to buy a cook: the stately mansion built in the English style with an open court in front, the circular carriage drives and broad walks, the gardens opening before it: large flower beds and mounds, empty at that season but since pictured in her mind in a riot of blooming colors, rose, snowball, hyacinth, jonquil, violet. A mockingbird sang perpetually from bowers of honeysuckle and purple wisteria, perfumed and heavy with spring blossoms.

  There was no comparison, of course, between the Glen and such magnificence; you couldn’t build an establishment like Dry Fork in five or even ten years. Not without slaves, not without “capital.” Unconsciously, Rufel quoted Bertie, and shrugged, impatient with herself. What could a darky have to compare the Glen with? Certainly it offered a better home than any runaway could hope to have. Even that scheming Ada didn’t want to go back out in the wild.

  And, if the darky wasn’t from around here—No angry owners or slave catchers had descended on the house as Rufel had half expected would happen. She had been in the yard drawing water from the well, because that idiot girl of Ada’s had forgotten to do it, the morning Harker rode in with the girl. She had been startled by the sight of darkies on horses and frightened when she recognized Harker. What would these darkies steal next? And: She would have to say something; people might not come way out here looking for a chicken or a pig, but somebody would want to know about these horses. The darkies had been as startled as Rufel, but, after the briefest hesitation, had continued walking their horses toward the kitchen lean-to. “Harker.” She had stepped into their path—and seen the girl strapped in the litter Harker pulled behind his horse. There was something in the ashen skin, like used charcoal, the aimless turning of the head that had kept Rufel silent. The baby had started to cry, a thin wail muffled by layers of covering. The girl’s eyes had fluttered open and seemed to look imploringly at Rufel before rolling senselessly back into her head. “Go get Ada,” Rufel had ordered without hesitation. “Take her on into the house; bring the bucket,” she said as she bent to look for the baby.

  She shouldn’t have done it; Rufel had been over that countless times, also. If anybody ever found out. If they had been followed. But nothing of that had entered her head as she picked her way carefully up the steep back steps, the baby hugged close to her body. The girl’s desolate face, the baby’s thin crying—as though it had given up all hope—had grated at her; she was a little crazy, she supposed. But she c
ould do something about this, about the baby who continued to cry while she waited in the dim area back of the stairs for the darkies to bring the girl in. Something about the girl, her face—And: She—Rufel—could do something. That was as close as she came to explaining anything to herself. The baby was hungry and she fed him. Or she would imagine herself saying to Mammy, “Well, I couldn’t have them bringing a bleeding colored gal in where Timmy and Clara were having breakfast,” wheedling a little, making light. As long as the girl wasn’t from around here—Though it would serve the neighbors right, she thought, resentful now, if the darky did belong to someone around here. Many times as Bertie had gone looking for a darky and been met with grins and lies. Truly, it would not surprise her to learn that some jealous neighbor had been tampering with their slaves, just as Bertie had always said, urging them to run away.

  Harker and Ada swore the darky wasn’t from around here. In fact, Harker said the girl was from Charleston. Not that Rufel believed that for a minute; Ada had probably put him up to that, hoping to touch Rufel’s heart. But, if the girl were from Charleston. Here Rufel would stop short, hearing once again Mammy’s anxious voice, urging her to write the family, for surely they would send for Rufel to visit, seeing again the glittering ballrooms of her first Charleston season. Usually—for if it wasn’t this longing or memory, it would be some other—she would put aside whatever task she worked on, gather up the babies if she had been nursing, and find something in the sitting room that needed doing.

  No one asked and she rarely thought to question herself after the first day or so. She knew there was more to the girl’s story than the darkies were telling, and now and then she did wonder briefly what could have forced the girl out into the woods with her time so near. Even in the comfort and splendor of Dry Fork, having Timmy had been an ordeal, and Rufel refused to dwell on the agony of Clara’s birth. Well, darkies did have their own way of doing things and whatever the real story was, it couldn’t, she thought, amount to much. Rufel sometimes suspected that the girl was the sweetheart of one of the new darkies, and was made uneasy by the idea. They couldn’t start using the Glen like a regular hideaway, she would think fearfully, and push the speculation aside. The colored girl would wake and tell her story—Whether or not she believed it, Rufel, recalling the long hours she had spent with Mammy, talking idly or in companionable silence, thought it would be something to pass the time.

  Rufel leaned now against the bedroom door and watched the colored girl, who lay curled on her side in the big feather bed, facing the door. The colored girl had not stirred at the sound of the closing door and after a moment Rufel continued across the room to the curtained doorway in the adjacent wall. This girl couldn’t go on acting crazy forever, she thought impatiently, talking all out of her head, laying up like she was still half dead. Rufel pushed aside the curtain with a swish and entered the narrow antechamber where her seven-year-old son, Timmy, slept. It had been her dressing room in the original plan of the house. The boy had slept in the room since early spring and its plain neatness was a sign of his growing independence. He acted more like nine or ten than the eight he would be in November, spending long hours with Uncle Joel and Dante as they tended the stock and garden, with Ada in the cook-shed, or with Annabelle, when she could catch him and there was nothing better to do.

  She should keep him closer, Rufel thought as she put away his clothing in neat piles on the open shelves above his makeshift bed, keep him away from the darkies. Send him to the field school at the crossroads—But Bertie would return and be mortified to find his son sharing a desk with common red-necks. And where would she get the two dollars a month to keep him there? I can’t just keep him cooped up in here with me all day, she thought wearily. And the darkies talked before him as they would not with her; it was through him that Rufel kept some kind of track of the comings and goings in the Quarters. She was not entirely convinced that some of those darkies were not Bertie’s nigras taking his continued absence as an opportunity to slip back and live free. Neither she nor Timmy would ever recognize them. Mammy had been the one who knew them all.

  Finished, Rufel turned and stood in the doorway, peeking between the curtains; she could just see the top of the girl’s head in the pillows. Rufel shrugged between the curtains and started toward the bedroom door but stopped as she neared the bed. The girl had turned over; her profile was a sooty blur against the whiteness of the pillow. Her eyes were closed, the lashes lost in the darkness of her face. When open, they looked like Mammy’s, a soft brown-black set under sleepy, long-lashed lids. And big. Once, when Rufel had had to restrain her, the girl had seemed to look at her, to recognize her. Even as Rufel watched, the girl’s expression had changed to fear and loathing. It was over in a moment. The girl had renewed her efforts to get out of the bed and Rufel had called to Ada for help. Sometimes, when the girl’s eyes fluttered open, their gaze sweeping past her without recognition, Rufel thought she had imagined that momentary expression. And it was silly to suppose the girl had really recognized her, even if she were from Charleston. And never, never had Rufel done anything to anyone to deserve such a look. But to see eyes so like Mammy’s, staring such hatred at her. It had given Rufel quite a turn. She wanted the girl to wake up, wanted to see that look banished from her face.

  The girl lay unmoving and Rufel continued to the door. It was time for this darky to wake up. Rufel turned as a thought hit her, and, back to the corridor door, eyed the colored girl. Perhaps she had changed her position slightly, but she lay still now under Rufel’s gaze. “You not doing a thing but playing possum,” Rufel said loudly. The girl did not respond and, turning with a flounce, Rufel stepped into the wide central hall, closing the door behind her.

  The big front door stood open and the wide hall was cool. Rufel could see Annabelle, Ada’s daughter, through the open parlor door opposite the bedroom. Annabelle sat on the backless lounge near the front window, head bent over the magazine she held in her lap. The girl couldn’t read a lick, but she would, if Rufel let her, spend hours staring at the illustrations in old Godey’s Lady’s Books, turning again and again to favorite pictures and staring off into space.

  “You supposed,” Rufel said loudly as she entered the parlor, “to be folding nappies.” Clean laundry lay piled about on the settee and chairs ready to be sorted, folded, or ironed, and put away.

  Annabelle looked up at Rufel’s words and, putting the journal aside, stood. “This’n just start crying,” she said, pointing at the newborn baby, who began the first tentative notes of what Rufel knew to be his hungry cry. Then, pointing to Clara who crawled toward Rufel across the bare wooden floor, face screwed up to cry, “That’n—”

  “And see at these children,” Rufel shouted as she reached for Clara.

  “—been fretting off and on. Spect she hungry,” the girl continued as though Rufel had not spoken. “Nappies in the chair.” She pointed.

  “Well, put them away,” Rufel snapped. The girl had to be told everything and she would do just what she was told and no more. Rufel wiped at her daughter’s motley face. She would have to speak to Ada, she thought with a tightening of her stomach; the girl was just too, too—slow. That was what Mammy had maintained. Slow and big for her age. Rufel certainly agreed with that last. Ada seemed to tower over both Rufel and Mammy who were themselves somewhat above average height. Annabelle, whom Ada claimed was no more than thirteen, was already eye level with Rufel. And Rufel could not rid herself of the idea that Annabelle’s slowness was assumed, that the girl somehow used this means to mock her. There had been incidents. Once, Rufel had stood posing in front of the mirror, lifting her hair from her neck, tugging at the waist and bodice of her dress. It was the first time she had taken an interest in her appearance since Mammy’s death and she prattled to the girl, as she used to with Mammy, about fashions and hair-styles, which had lifted both their spirits, and happened to look up in midsentence to see the girl’s retreating image merging into the shadows of the great hall. Re
flected in the mirror, the dusky doorway seemed to yawn at Rufel’s back and she turned, suddenly furious. “Why—I’m telling you more joy and, and happiness, yes! and excitement, too, than you can ever imagine in that paltry black hide. Nigger,” she started forward, “you come back here.” The girl stopped in the hall so suddenly that Rufel almost ran into her. She retreated a step before the other’s silence. “You.” And then again, this time stronger. “You know you don’t just walk away from a white person without a by-your-leave.”

  Hands on hips, Annabelle leaned toward Rufel, grinning in her face; the dark shoots of her tangled hair seemed to writhe in the yellow light from the fan-glass over the door. A thousand imps seemed to dance in her eyes as she said on a rising note of incredulity, “Mistress ‘Fel? Miz Rufel?”

  Rufel flushed, hearing the name on the darky’s lips over a sudden pounding in her head. “Miz Rufel” was a slave-given name, discarded by white people when they reached adulthood. Annabelle had put Rufel almost on the same level as herself by its use now, making Rufel appear a child, Young Missy in tantrum, rather than Mistress of the House. Shaking, Rufel screamed, “My name is ‘Mistress’ to you!” and fled before the silent laughter in the girl’s eyes.

  Shaken and angered by the incident, Rufel had complained to Ada. And Ada, while allowing that the girl was slow and oftentimes silly, had defended her, reminding Rufel in that abrupt way she had that neither of them belonged to her, that in fact they did her a favor by working for her at all! Outraged, Rufel had wrung from Ada a promise that Annabelle would do better. Annabelle was more civil now—almost foolishly so. At times, Rufel itched to strike the girl and hid her own anger behind an elaborate show of patience. And, despite her anger at the way the girl had turned the name against her, she could not break herself of the habit of thinking of herself as “Rufel,” “Miz ’Fel,” the pet name Mammy had given her so long ago.