Mile Zero (13 page)

Brenda Bee stood perched on a pickle barrel with skinny hands crossed over the center of her sex, cast off and alone, separated forever from her former self. Brenda looked not nineteen, but sixteen, naked and vulnerable atop an up-ended wooden barrel, shivering in the glare of male eyes crowded around her on the dock. Brenda was not sound of body. She had narrowly escaped becoming one of the two hundred who died on board the Slaver as days without food slipped by on a sea growing wide as a continent. On this new continent Brenda would have little value in the cotton rows up south. The well-dressed gentlemen in the crowd from Charleston and Mobile didn’t see anything of value in Brenda worth bidding the hard metal of dollars for, they weren’t even interested in purchasing Brenda for their breeding sheds.

“Come now, gentlemen!” The auctioneer waved his cane toward Brenda, as if it were a magic wand which could disperse the white crawl of lice in the matted braids of her hair. “What is offered the Company for this good wench?”

“My dog!” A laughing answer came from the crowd.

“My dog’s fleas!”

“The blood of my dog’s fleas!”

John Coe knew Brenda could not understand any of this, but it seemed her exposed skin shaded a deeper color of black from a spreading blush of shame, a black almost obliterating jagged red cuts and purple bruises spotted over her body. John Coe’s hand flew up of its own will. John was a tall man made taller by pulling the weight of sharks and turtles from the sea, he was two heads above every man in the crowd. When John’s hand went up a silence fell as if something evil had tumbled from great height into the midst of civilized society. The silence was broken by John’s voice, thundering deep as a stormy sound slamming down from a brood of inky clouds roiling in a summer sky. “Suh, be mah offah! Two hunnah dollah!”

So it was John Coe bought himself a wife in a town where a man of dark skin was not allowed to walk the streets after the nine-thirty
ringing of the night bell, unless he bore a pass from his owner or employer, or was accompanied by a white person. Nor could a dark-skinned man play the fiddle or beat a drum, unless he desired thirty-nine whiplashes for violating the public peace. John Coe took this woman, called by her captors Brenda Bee, to his one-room shack on Crawfish Alley in the section of town called La Africana. That shack was John Coe’s palace, owned and built with hands calloused from pulling turtles and sharks from the sea. Now all the plenty given John by the sea he was about to return. What John and Brenda Bee had in common was an ocean of hardships. As John bathed Brenda’s bony body with the humped softness of his favorite sheepswool sponge he vowed to treat this woman with kindness, drive the unspeakable terror from her eyes. John spoke to Brenda in a tongue she could understand, touched her only in a healing way. John brought Brenda red cotton dresses, strolled with her hand in hand on Saturday eves down the rutted dirt length of Crawfish Alley, stopping to tip his cap to folks cooling themselves on the front wooden steps of their shacks. John planted a papaya tree behind his shack and a mango in front, for on Sundays the preacher man swayed in the stone church before the congregation tall as an eleuthera palm in a high wind, shouting his clear message that the Bible teaches to plant the fruiting tree. A man must sow seeds to harvest. John watched Brenda grow out of her bag of bones into a prideful woman with a strong gaze and firm lips. John measured his prosperity by the image of Brenda’s flesh. Tracing the girth of Brenda’s strong buttocks and thighs with his fingertips late at night in the shack filled him with contentment. John Coe was man enough to keep his woman solid. When the children came Brenda’s hips and breasts swelled and John overflowed with a newfound joy. The ever-increasing size of Brenda’s body became a living monument to a niggardly past so narrowly escaped.

Brenda Bee Coe had no envy for the Ship Captain’s wife she scrubbed and cooked for in the sooted kitchen shed behind the three-storied house with a widow’s walk perched atop its steep tin roof from which tall-masted ships could be spied tacking inside the reef toward the island. Brenda felt gratitude she was living life after death, swept up from the ocean of hardship in the net of John Coe’s kindness. Envy did not gnaw at Brenda’s soul, only a bitter sense buried deep and hidden from the world that one day the Evil Eye would be upon her, carry her away from the strong arms of John back onto the Slaver into a whale belly of white misery. For this reason Brenda
always wore a clove of garlic around her neck on a thinly braided rope, to hold off the Eye of the Evil One lest he come upon her unawares to carry her away from her sea of plenty. Brenda insisted her nine sons each wear a garlic necklace, even though she knew they discarded them when they left the crowded little shack on Crawfish Alley. But Brenda’s only daughter, the jewel in her sea of plenty, Pearl, never discarded her garlic necklace. Pearl obeyed her mama. Pearl knew the Evil Eye could snatch her away quick as a pox can worm the life out of a child’s heart.

When Pearl turned sixteen and went off to work in the cigar factories, she still wore the garlic necklace. That is what first attracted young Abuelo to Pearl, the creamy colored garlic against a black skin shining brilliant with vibrance of life. Years after they were married Abuelo suspected Pearl had not so much worn the garlic necklace to keep off the Evil Eye, but to beguile him with her voluptuous charms and deeply contented nature. Perhaps, Abuelo thought with a laugh which always sent a bright image of Pearl’s lovely face to mind, she tricked him with that jungle religion her mother brought across the seas on the Slaver from Africa.

Pearl became the gem setting which closed the ring of Abuelo’s young life. Pearl was the first of two fortuitous twists to seal Abuelo’s fate forever. Abuelo believed when his father abruptly took him at the age of seventeen from the
Chinchalito
, it had less to do with his father’s desire to have his son become part of the emerging La Liga, more to do with an African plot of love planned by Pearl’s mother to put one more ocean between her only daughter and slavery, marry Pearl off to a Cuban man, into the sea of a different society where the Evil One would never find her. Such is what Abuelo thought, that he was ensnared by jungle conspiracy. Like many men who are convinced they have fallen prey to a charmed woman highly coveted by others, Abuelo accepted a preordained fate guiding larger passions which made him victim of an inescapable coup d’état of the heart. Abuelo’s love for Pearl came up so big and unexpectedly it overpowered his sense of self, left him trembling with the blind faith of newfound religion.
No te agites qué el corazon no se opera
, that is what Abuelo’s father counseled at the turn of the century when his untried son first started with Pearl.
Take it easy, the heart can’t be operated on
.

No. In those days the heart could not be operated on, but if it could it would have been to no avail. Abuelo lost his heart the morning he saw Pearl his first day of work in the large cigar factory. He did
not yet know she had stolen his heart. Abuelo thought he still had a choice in the matter. Pearl was one of the few women who worked in the cigar factory, the only woman on the third floor where Abuelo began his new job of Cigarmaker. Abuelo was not so much struck by Pearl’s beauty, rather by the position she held in the factory. Most women labored in the lowly role of Stripper, who each day untied hundreds of
tercios
, bundled tobacco leaves barged from Havana. The women carefully stripped precious leaves from spiny stems, then pressed them between two boards to be sent on as wrappers to the Selectors. Never had Abuelo seen a female Selector. A Selector was an exalted position held by men with a keen sense of vision to distinguish the air-cured tobacco leaves by true color value. Perhaps Pearl inherited her extraordinary eyesight from her father, who could read the bottom of a storm-tossed sea. To watch Pearl’s hands work quickly through stacks of tobacco leaves, eyes searching between colors ranging from golden papaya to ripe mahogany shading called
maduro
, was like witnessing a cat in a dark granary go about its stealthy nocturnal business of separating mice from mountains of wheat. Pearl did not work like a machine, rather as an adroit athlete laughing at a task made simple by exertion of inbred attributes. The creamy clove of garlic on Pearl’s braided rope necklace rose and fell where her breasts began their full swell beneath a thin cotton dress. Pearl’s skin glistened in the heat, her fingers flew, her eyes did not miss a trick. Blue clouds from the narrow cigars she continuously smoked swirled around her. Pearl appeared to exist in a haloed mist, struck by steady light cascading through lofty north-facing windows blocking fickle sea breezes which could disturb the cigarmakings so carefully laid out on the rowed tables of the great hall. Pearl’s body exuded aromas fueling every man’s desire high up in the third story of the cigar factory. The perfume of Pearl was a heady mixture of succulent reminiscences, of green dreams and urgent yearnings, of growing tobacco leaves hidden in slippery shade of muddied hillsides, of the pungent burnt scent of garlic rooted from firm earth. In a sea of heat the men of the great hall watched Pearl from afar and on the sly as she selected among tobacco leaves for those of the chosen colors. Perspiration of honest work ran coolly along the back of Pearl’s arched neck, then out of sight beneath her white dress, traveling the length of her strong female spine. To the men of the great hall Pearl was a sweeter dish than
boniatello
, the sugary preserve boiled from pulpy flesh of sweet potato. The men of the great hall desired someone they could sniff,
lick and eat up, a great gorgeous feast of female. Pearl became the fantasy entrée on the menu of every self-respecting Latin male in the great hall. The problem was Pearl was born with an appetite greater than that of all the sniffing males combined.

Pearl’s appetite could be quenched by only one man, the young Abuelo, whose arms had the steel muscles of one born to roll perfect cigars. Pearl’s appetite for Abuelo would never be satisfied in a lifetime. She wasted no precious moments letting her desire be known. The job of Selector was to bundle twenty-five carefully chosen leaf wrappers into an earthenware crock, then call for a boy to run the crock to the Cigarmakers’ benches. Each time Pearl sent a crock she knew was headed for Abuelo’s bench it contained among the perfectly matched leaves a small, star-shaped pink blossom. The flower emitted no scent to distract from the natural aroma of the tobacco, but bore the meaning of not so hidden intentions to be acted upon beneath the eye of future moons. When the future arrived the moon winked time and time again as the hot skin of Pearl and Abuelo’s bodies came together crushing the clove of garlic between them in a fateful sea of plenty.

As La Liga grew among cigar workers so too did the family of Pearl and Abuelo grow. By the end of the century Key West was the cigar-producing capital of the world and Pearl and Abuelo had five children. Abuelo’s voice had also grown, deep and mellow from free smokers, the imperfect cigars inhaled continuously from dawn till dusk by workers in the great hall. The vowels of Abuelo’s voice came strong as notes from a bass cello being played in the depths of a well. It was Abuelo’s voice which gave his life its second fortuitous twist, elevated him to unrivaled status among the workers. Abuelo became a Reader. Through the long, tedious days in the great halls of the cigar factories, amidst the flat fall of light from high windows sealed against winds of the outside world, there was one voice above all in the void of passing time. This voice filled ears and minds, becoming familiar as one’s own conscience, cajoling like a crony, spiteful as a spurned lover, thunderous as a bull in a spring meadow. The owner of this voice earned more than the lordly cigar Pickers and Packers at the pinnacle of their careers. This man was the Reader, elevated on a platform in the center of the great halls, seated purposefully on a stool, straw hat cocked at advantageous angle. When the Reader spoke, no other talking was allowed, in English, Spanish or Bahamian. The Reader’s voice made the day jump with thoughts, translating into
Spanish the island’s English newspapers, reading newspapers fresh off the ferry from Havana bearing news of Cuba, Barcelona, Buenos Aires. The Reader read from the classics, becoming every character in
Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo, A Tale of Two Cities
. As he read he educated himself and the others. He became a one-man school for the cigar workers. They paid him a handsome profit from their own pockets, voted upon favorites from his readings, to hear them time and again. Among the glories of literature Abuelo brought to life his personal favorite was the great Góngora, the Spaniard who emerged cloaked in a glowing mantle of lyricism, magically inventing his poetic self from the crusty seventeenth century with a sudden awesome “melancholy yawn of the earth.” The great Góngora was a favorite of Abuelo’s father. The leather-bound book of Góngora’s poems was the only possession his father brought on the smuggled night voyage of the schooner from Havana so long ago. More and more the workers wanted to hear from the great Góngora. Not because Góngora was the favorite of Abuelo’s father, who had become the iron-fisted
jefe
of La Liga. Not because Abuelo’s father placed his son at center stage of the vast hall to read to the workers. The workers wanted that which could not be faked or bought. The singular fact was, more than at any other time, when Abuelo recited the great Góngora his voice rose from the well of the printed page tinged with mystery of infinity, surged with an inner beat of lyricism on the wing:

Years later, as young Justo stood at Abuelo’s side in the back room of the Cuban
grocería
, there was still respect for the retired Reader. Ears pricked up at the sound of Abuelo’s voice still steady and strong through an ever-present cigar smoke swirling about his craggy face. The cigar factories had long since been boarded up against modern times, when cigars are made by machines in air-conditioned rooms. A generation had passed since La Liga grew so strong among the workers the owners started nonunion factories three hundred miles north of the glitter and culture of Key West. The factories had been transplanted to the swampy palmetto lands around Tampa, where malaria waited, and insects swarmed in rain barrels of precious
drinking water drained from roofs of hastily constructed houses. Such was not a place for Abuelo. No. Abuelo’s family stayed in Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, where Pavlova once danced at old San Carlos. Even though bright important times had faded to Depression-era gray, the star of cultural pride still burned bright in hearts and memories of men who put the coral-capped island on the map, rolling out one hundred million cigars a year.
Bang!
Justo could still hear Abuelo’s tamarind cane striking the floor in the back room of the
grocería. Bang!
The metal tip of the cane struck again, all the men coming to attention as Abuelo elevated the cane haughtily as a teacher with a pointer in a classroom of thick-headed boys destined to grow to men forever ignorant of the ways of women, unless they heeded the words of great Góngora. Abuelo raised the cane higher, until the metal tip nudged the white dancer tights banded around the forceful thrust of Pavlova’s thighs, her body trapped forever in an eternal leap from the poster nailed to the wall. Never taking his eyes from the curved spirit of Pavlova’s leap Abuelo’s voice swelled with wisdom of great Góngora, filling every square inch of the small room as if it were the vast hall of a ghostly cigar factory: