In This Light (4 page)

I pleaded for mercy. Martha was always calling Abe, telling him to fetch her some water, fetch her some eggs. One day she’d say, “Help me move this rockin’ chair, Abe.” And the next day, she’d make him move it back to where it had always been. She ran her fingers through her dry, colorless hair; she batted her stubby eyelashes and never thanked him.

I knew she led him into the grove, looking for mushrooms, she said; but as soon as the trees hid them, she grabbed his wrist and pushed her face against his, mouth wet and open for the kiss he would not give. Scorned gentleman, proper husband of another woman, he knocked the girl to the ground and fled.

Spitting blood from her bitten lip, Martha came complaining to Mama. False and fearful, she whispered she was lucky to have her virtue intact. “Just think what he might’a done if I hadn’t kicked him and run.”

No one truly believed her, not even Mama, and least of all my father. Still, the orders were given. Three other slaves held Abe down in the barn, and old Walkerman, Father’s overseer, took a knife to Abe’s head. His howls filled the yard. The green twilight pulsed with the throb of his veins. I sat on the porch, racked by dry sobs. Mama said, “Quit that fussing. It’s for your own good. If he thinks he can get away with slapping Martha, maybe he’ll go after me next—or you. Slaves must be obedient to their masters on earth, with fear and trembling, just as we are obedient to the Lord,” she said. “I want you to find that passage and memorize it for tomorrow’s lesson.”

Father gave me a swat to the back of the head. He said, “What would people think if they heard you crying over some nigger boy, Selina?”

In the barn, a man lay facedown in his own sticky pool of blood. On the veranda, Father kissed Mother’s radiant hair, sat down beside her and laid his hand on her belly. “My son,” he said.

“I can’t make that promise,” Mama told him.

That night I stood at my window and saw my father run toward the grove, a bundle in his arms. His high black boots caught the moonlight, flashed in the dark. I followed him deep in the trees. Limbs snagged my hair; shrubs tore at my dress. I saw the girl-child, naked on the ground, saw him raise the shovel, heard the dull crack, metal on bone, a pumpkin cleaved open to spill the seed. My father dug a shallow grave for my sister. She was small enough to hold in his two broad hands, but he let her drop, unwanted runt, the shoat that will starve because it’s weaker than the rest, so you kill it and call yourself merciful.

When I woke, the image hovered between dream and memory. I too prayed my mother’s child would be a son.

I saw Abe chopping cotton in the fields, skin so black it blazed blue at noonday. For weeks he wore a bandage around his head, and I pretended his ears were growing back, that when he unwrapped himself in the evening, he could feel the first nubs, and soon, very soon, the whorls would bloom to full size, firm in the curves and fleshy at the lobes, perfect ears. I touched them in my sleep, peeled away the crust of dried blood, pressed my lips to the fine lines of his scars until they disappeared. I clambered to the edge of sleep to wake hot and tangled in my sheets, my hair damp with sweat, my chest pounding.
Yes, I was the one he hit; yes, I was the one who told.

After Lize came, my brother ate day and night. He shrieked if she set him down. She couldn’t go to the toilet alone or wash her face without bouncing him on one hip. If she tried to talk to Beulah while she nursed, he’d start to whine and then to wail. He needed every inch of her and every breath. Mama hadn’t had enough milk for him. After months of hunger, he was determined never to want for anything again. He seemed to know his power already, four-month-old master, king, little man. Green-eyed Lize, flesh full from cheek to thigh, gave him her body and did not complain.

Lize, I do not believe you loathed my brother. You showed a certain kindness toward him, and fed him well. Soon he grew fat. His fine white hair fell out in patches and the hair that grew in its place was coarse and dark, glossy as my father’s hair.

Sounds new to me rose out of the night air. Whip-poor-wills repeated their own names, a sleepless dirge; the wings of insects clicked and buzzed, a swarm in the yard, hissing in the dirt. Even the earth carried a sound, a distant stamping, a thunderous herd of wild horses.

Abe call at my window. I say, go away. I say, havin’ no ears ain’t bad enough? You want to die too? But he keep callin’ so I go down. He tell me, the boy don’ eat. He say, won’ take no milk-wet finger. Your own baby gon’ die, Lize, and you lettin’ some white man’s child suck you dry. He cryin’ there in the bushes like some fool. I say, what you want me to do? I say, that white boy shake the house with his screamin’ if I go. Your baby get one good meal ’fore we all dead.

Later, there were other sounds. One night, before I learned to hide, before I learned to pull the blankets over my head and press my palms against my ears, I heard a muffled cry in the kitchen and crept down the back stairs, shadow of myself.

The man pushed me up on the table. He slap me when I yell. One smack break my nose. Nobody notice bruises on a black-skinned woman, that’s what he think. He say, why fight? I never knew no nigger woman who didn’t like a white man better’n her own kind. I close my eyes. He don’t take too long.

I stood mute, though I saw her skirt bunched up around her waist, and my father’s pants dropped to his knees. His black boots were dull and brutal in the dim light, but the pale globes of his buttocks made him ridiculous, a child caught pissing in the woods, his tender flesh exposed.

I remembered my mother’s caution, her voice in my skull:
A nigger woman’s appetites are dangerous to men.
And I believed, because she spoke to me so rarely.
God is light. In Him there is no darkness.
Still I was afraid, hearing Martha Parnell whisper:
Nothin’ but a motherless child with no one but the devil to keep her safe from her daddy.
The son of Noah saw his father drunk and naked and did not turn away. So Ham was cursed, forced to be a slave of slaves to his brothers—because his brothers were good, because his brothers walked backward to their father and covered his nakedness without looking.
Read it again
, Mama said.
Slowly, Selina, open your vowels.

The morning I woke with blood on my sheets, I wept half the day, until Beulah came to me, held my hand between her two soft hands, and explained the life of a woman to me. Later she laughed with Lize in the kitchen, shaking over the joke of me, mouth wide, pink tongue clicking:
Silly white girl, cryin’ over a bit of blood
, and then, the terrible words again:
Motherless child don’ know nothin’.

Fool or not, I stole a knife from the kitchen, hid it under my pillow, slept with one eye open.

I heard the table scrape across the floor, heard my father cuss. No one was laughing now. I scuttled down to the bottom of my bed and buried myself beneath the heavy blankets. I almost wished to smother, to have him find me there in the morning and repent.

Abe came to me that hot night. I was blue-veined and pale. In the grove, I knelt beside him and touched his dark back, making his muscles mine. I laid my hands on his chest, drained him until my skin was black and he turned white and woman in my hands.

They bury my boy ’fore I know. I go down to the shack. Don’ wake nobody. Don’ want to see the husband all weepy eye, ear place bloody I know ’cause he pick the scabs when he not thinking. I find the heap of ground. I dig in the loose dirt. Don’ take me long, he not bury deep. I hold my baby next to my naked breast. Eat, I say. I wipe the dirt from his eyes, dig it out of his nose and ears, pull a clot from his mouth. He smell bad and I cry and cry but I don’ make no sound. I say, God, You ain’t nothin’ but a dark horse stamping on my soul.

My brother’s tiny coffin had flowers enough to drown him: gardenias and orchids, lilies so white I was afraid to stare, afraid my gaze would stain them. The gravestone was twice the size of Seth, its four carved names too great a burden for a six-month-old boy to bear.

When they come lookin’ for me, I don’ tell no lies. I say, I smothered him between my own breasts. He beat and beat at me with those tiny fists, but I hold him tight till he go limp in my arms. I hold him tight, then I put him in his basket, rock him all night.

Lize, I condemned you for the murder of my brother, execrated you for your bold confession when lies might have kept you alive. You were dangerous to men in ways my mother never dreamed.
What fellowship has light with
darkness?
Devil in a woman’s shape, you kept me pure, but I thought you deserved to hang, unnatural woman, I’ll say it plain: death for death, justice simple and swift.

I never risked my father’s curse, never spoke of the ring of bruises on your wrists the day you died or the scratches on my father’s face, though I knew well what these signs meant.

At dusk, Abe cut her down, lifted her in his powerful arms as if she weighed no more than a child. Beulah followed, her face a map of sorrow, rivers of blood in the lines of her cheeks, broad forehead a desert to march, bodies laid out in the sun, mountains to rot behind her eyes.

In the shack, the women washed the body in silence, no sound but the wringing of rags and drip of water. They rubbed her until her skin shone, until her feet were beautiful and clean, toes dark as polished stones. They dressed her in white, wrapped her hair in gauze, folded her hands across her chest.

At nightfall the keening of women rose from the shack. Their moans raised Lize up to the arms of God and He took her, begged
her
for forgiveness—poor, betrayed murderer.

The cicadas screamed in the heat of day, the buzz of their wings a wild cry. A constant, rising hum and hiss swelled in waves, a torrent surging through the endless days of summer. In the morning, I’d find their shells belly-up on the steps, a horde that had tried to invade the house each night, and each night failed.

The cotton fields steamed. All day the Negroes chopped, backs stooped, knees bent. All day they coughed, choking on cotton dust. When they stood to clear their lungs, Walkerman cracked his whip, crippled them with a shout. Even the women with bellies bulged enough to burst worked until the sun struck them down and they had to be carried to the shade. Walkerman waved salts under their noses. If they woke, he put them back to chopping until they fell again.

My father festered, grew foul with self-pity. The best part of him, his beloved son, was dead. The sound of his boots on the porch scattered us like mice, sent us all skittering to separate corners of the house. At night, he paced the hallway, and I tossed, gripping the knife whenever his shadow darkened the line of light at the bottom of my closed door.

Martha Parnell still owed Father five years for her passage to America, but in August he sold her time to Walkerman for a single dollar. In the first month, she lost three teeth to his fists, paying at last for Abe’s ears. By the fifth month she was swollen up like a spider, her great load teetering on spindly legs. As soon as one child stopped suckling, another began to grow. Her third pushed at her dress when the war started and Walkerman and my father went off to fight.

Walkerman never did come home. Even his body disappeared, was buried with a dozen others in a common grave or left to rot on the road, bloated and black with worms. Martha was free but had no money and nowhere to go. She stayed long enough to see my father’s fields scorched, long enough to see the fine house fill with dust and start to crumble. One day she told me she was going to find Walkerman. I imagined she felt some misguided sense of devotion and wanted the father of her children to have a Christian burial. But I was mistaken. “Have to be sure the bastard’s really dead,” she told me.

My father lost his legs and his mind in that war. I nursed him for ten years, saw his nakedness daily and could not turn away as the good sons of Noah had. His chest shrank, his eyes fell back in his skull, his hair turned white and fine as a child’s. Only his hands were spared. Huge and gnarled, they flailed at the air, cuffed me when I came too near, clutched me in his fits of grief. When he wept, he did not call to Seth or my mother. No, he mourned only for his own legs, kept asking where they were, as if I might know, as if I had hidden them.

Though I knew he could not stand, sometimes I saw him at my bedroom door. His boots gleamed. “Touch me,” he wheezed. “I’m cold.”

To save what little money I could for train fare to Chicago, I buried him in a four-foot box and marked his grave with a wooden cross. The big man fit in a boy’s coffin, and I believed I had nothing left to fear.

I fled the South to take a job as a teacher at a Catholic school. Father would have detested me for that: tasting their bread, drinking their wine, letting it turn to body and blood in my mouth. My constant sins were the lies I told, pretending to be Catholic. Mornings I woke at five to pray. At each station of the cross I murmured:
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women. And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

In the chill of those lightless winter mornings, I almost believed in this God who could change Himself to human flesh and die for me. But alone, in my room, the prayers that rose in my heart called out to another god. There were no crosses, only the leafless trees beyond my window.

All these years I have lived in one room, cramped and dim, a place I chose because it did not burden me with spaces to fill. There were no hallways to swarm with drunken soldiers, no parlors to become hospital rooms for the one-armed men, no banisters to polish, no crystal to explode against the wall when my father raged, no trees near enough to scrape the glass with frenzied hands, no scent of gardenia in the spring to make me sick with memory.

Still, there was room enough for my father, withered in my daydreams, spitting gruel back in my face when I tried to feed him, but tall and thick through the chest at night, stamping with impatience, his boots loud as hooves on bare wood. There was room for my brother, his puling cries when he was hungry, and then, his unbearable silence. And there was always room for you, Lize. For seventy-eight years I have watched you hang.