Wash (10 page)

All those spirits hovering round me as real and hollow as shadows, I want em right here by me. I want mine right here in this world where I can get at em. I want to grab em with my own two hands and feel em wriggling and squirming to get away from me. Running to their mammas, asking who is that scary man.

I want these little ones of mine crawling all over everything. Some will make it and some won’t but they will all be mine. They’ll be up under white folks and they’ll get messed with and beat down and broken, but they will be mine whether they ever know it or not. And some will make it and they belong to us and us to them. My mamma and my daddy and theirs, running in the blood of these children I keep dragging into this world.

They will look in some scrap of mirror and they will see us. Showing up in the shape of their eyebrow or the feel of their tongue sitting inside their mouth. They will see us out of the corner of their eye and feel us breathing close, laying our hands on their hands, whether they ever know it for sure or not, we’ll be gathered close. All the time.

So that’s what I do. I get up on em, one after the next, and I keep my heart full with all those spirits of mine. I’m pulling my people back into this world so they can be here with me. Right here in this world, cause I know this world won’t last. These here will die off and mine will breathe in new air and it will be a new day.

So bring em on, those that’s messing with me and laughing. It’s all right. I know who gets the last laugh. Go head, bring em right on.

So I got me a setup and I try to leave most of the rest of it alone. Sit in the sun on cool days and move to the shade of the willow on hot ones. Not like the rest of these folks round here, always trying to get lighter and stay lighter. To hell with that. The darker I am, the less will show.

And I keep most everybody looking out for the back of my hand. Most of these little ones stay on the jump from me. I know what folks think of me and sometimes I let the way they see me rise up in me till I’m cutting the buck real good. Fighting just to feel my hand coming down, till I can read my scars like words on a page.

Life comes over me in waves, with the bad and the good twined tight together, making me take all of it or none. And what I do know is I can’t stay here without nothing at all. That’s like a plant stuck in his little patch of dirt, with rain just too uncertain.

They can take me however they like. I ain’t got a thing I can do for em. Too many of em sitting on ready, wanting to run and trying to plan, but I can’t fall for it anymore. I been through that door enough times to see it don’t lead nowhere. Can’t none of us see far enough, even in our mind’s eye, how far we’d have to make it before we’d be out of these woods. I’d rather be here, with my hearts and my having everything worked into some kind of manageable than having to start over some place else, with this same mess and folks I don’t even know.

And I’m a Washington for Richardson too but he may be getting more than he bargained for. My face and my ways starting to crop up on most places round here. Some favor me more and some favor me less but it’s me everywhere all the same. He laid that big man’s name on me and I’m making my own country, then weaving back and forth across it, going to see Pallas.

It’s hard on her just like it’s hard on me, but life is hard in all kind a ways and this is just one of em. We can’t have each other to ourselves but her knowing and mine go together some kind a way. Day or night, she’s pulling most all mine into this world and naming plenty of em too. Hers is the first face they see, so we got less but at the same time, we got more.

Parts of your heart will jump up trying to catch onto life, and you can’t do nothing but slap em back down, so we stay real careful. We meet out and away and secret. We find our time together and it’s sweet enough to last us these long stretches in between. Drives me clean out sometimes but Pallas sees more to me than anybody and I can’t make do with less.

But it sure did gall me to have this be what Richardson ended up wanting from me. Working you to death is one thing but this here was something else.

I saw from the beginning this work would set me apart from the rest. Sooner or later, they’d put me with somebody’s somebody. And that was just the start. I saw trouble stacking right up.

But I wasn’t in the field and I wasn’t driving and having to give folks the lash. And I was getting enough to eat. More than enough. As for set apart, growing up the way I did, with a mamma like mine, I was already set apart anyhow.

Besides, I was still young and Richardson was careful to sneak it up on me. He started me out slow and kept me to the fine ones I’d already been eyeing. Like Nelle. Right from the first, he made sure he let me think it was me choosing. Like I didn’t do nothing but fall in a tub of butter.

And it didn’t take much. Get my hands on her good, feel her snug round me and let it come over me. Running up my spine and cresting over my shoulders in a wave, keeping me curling into her. Ain’t no way it ever feels bad.

And I looked away from the rest. Looked away from em watching me. Back then, they still bothered to hide it. Wasn’t till later when they stood in the open.

But pretty soon it added up and added up, stories started to go round, and I got riled. Set to work on not letting em take nothing from me. They’d bring her to me in that barn and I’d think about all kind a things, trying to keep myself to myself. They’d nod at her to take her shirt off and she’d stand there unbuttoning, one slow hand after the next, till her cloth fell open and she glowed whether she wanted to or not, so I’d call a picture to my mind.

Bright pink skin of a possum, just been yanked inside out, all crisscrossed with blue veins and deep red ropes of blood ringing the holes where the skin tore from the head, paws and tail. I’d fill my mind’s eye with the inside of that possum skin till no matter what she looked like, I’d just lay there, heavy and soft between my thighs.

It worked but only for a minute. Quinn told me I could find a way to hook up with my business or I could sit and wait for a whipping. Watch everything get taken away from me bit by bit till I was right back in that far field, shackled with the rest of the troublemakers and bringing up the rear.

I saw us all chained together, trying to hoe that last row with some cracker riding close on us all day, dark to dark, straight through all those goddamn songs. I’d already got put in the far field once, back at Thompson’s place, and I’d already decided I wasn’t going back.

This way, I didn’t have to be tied to nobody. Didn’t have to ask nobody for nothing. Besides, it had already made me mad, Richardson messing with the only thing I’d ever known for sure. This one thing was mine from beginning to end, and here he comes, trying to put his foot right in the middle of me.

I wasn’t gonna let it happen like that. One way or other, I wasn’t gonna lose feeling good. Not in this lifetime. It got so I didn’t care how they messed with me. Right or wrong, I went with it more than against it. And that’s how I made it all the way to now.

So I take it all. And the perks and the treats too. Sit in the shade of the willow and pocket that extra bacon. Go see Pallas when I can so long as I keep coming back. Even that damn Quinn, watching me through the stall door with a hand on himself.

At least Richardson keeps him off the girls. Says he doesn’t want no mixing. Not when he has gone to this trouble to start some fine lines with me. Says he’s building something and the last thing he wants is some trashy snaggletooth strain seeping into his plans and draining the African right out. He tells me he has a reputation to look after. That people come to him for his negroes.

He tells me all about it, like I need to hear whatever words he wants to wrap round this work. Then he says I need to keep a very old truth in the front of my mind. There’s always some evil to balance every good.

Richardson

I have learned over time to carry Wash to other places. Let him do most of his work away from home and let mine have their own families. You must give them a reason to do right. Thompson was certainly on the money about that.

It’s best to keep everything as separate as possible. I decided to stick to my own rules after one exception I made nearly bit me right back. I’d received Delph without wanting or needing her. Accepted her in repayment of an old debt and planned to sell her on my next trip downriver since money’s always much more useful to me. She was midway through her twenties so far as she knew and surly but light skinned and lean, with those Chinese eyes so many seem to favor. She wouldn’t be on my place long, and pregnancy would increase her value, so I put her with Wash.

Didn’t take her but a day or two to go after him and she went after him good, never mind the dullness of that oyster knife she’d found. And she near about got him too.

I had him in the barn showing him to Pendleton and Ames to see if they wanted me to write them in his book. They were all standing close. Pendleton had his hand on Wash’s shoulder and Ames was looking hard into his good eye, making sure he believed me about the wandering eye being from an old blow.

I thought I heard something before I nodded to Wash to drop his britches and turn around for them to check him, but I was as surprised as anyone when Delph came hurtling from that pile of hay, heading straight for his crotch and screaming to wake the dead.

Thank God Ames had a quick way about him and grabbed her knife hand. All I could see was over Wash’s shoulder with his wide back to me and his britches down around his ankles. Then the back side of Ames with that crazy gal’s free arm flailing like a pinwheel, her legs kicking at him in a frenzy and that knife glinting in her other hand. I was damn lucky she didn’t nick Ames, not to mention carrying off Wash’s grab bag to the great beyond.

I have learned to be careful about just exactly which ones I put Wash on, and where, because these incidents echo out like rings spreading across a lake from a thrown stone. And it was not enough to get Delph off my place immediately. I sent her to be sold that very afternoon but still the story traveled. There’s a pair of eyes to see every single thing and word gets out regardless.

Even with Delph long gone, the picture she made busting out of my hay pile with that knife in her hand, coming after all of us in a way, although what she was after was Wash’s in particular, that picture lasted much longer. That picture loomed large in every single mind on my place, whether they’d seen it or not.

I heard mine telling that story over and over, the way they do every single thing that happens around here. I can’t always make out that muttering, murmuring way they have of talking amongst themselves, but I knew damn well when they were telling that one. A steady flow of story, torn here and there by rising chuckling.

So you must be careful what you buy, what you keep and, most of all, what you put together. If she is quite fine, then maybe I will run some risks, but you must be careful.

Quinn has changed his mind about my using Wash as our traveling negro. Now that he knows him better, he says I’m a damn fool to breed for sense, and works as hard as he can to keep Wash’s get from around here.

“You are digging your own grave,” he told me. “All our graves for that matter. Thinking is not what we want. Working is what we want. Work and picking and grubbing and yessir and nosir and being damn grateful. We need them so thick they have to work to wipe their own ass.

“I don’t understand how you of all people, with your damn books, can fail to see this. Let your horses be fine, but for God’s sake, keep your niggers muddy. Can’t you see? Each of these smart ones adds another log to the fire they’ve been trying to build all along. We’ve only just now gotten a handle on these murderous savages and here you are refusing to look logic in the face with the negroes.”

Quinn frets constantly about impossible uprisings and fantastical conjurings. Especially since Denmark Vesey staged his doomed rebellion in Charleston last summer. I keep trying to calm him down.

“Vesey only started a rebellion, he didn’t come close to finishing it. They never do. And anyway, he’s dead. That negro is dead, along with plenty of other perfectly good hands that likely had nothing to do with it. Lost to hysteria.”

I tell Quinn it won’t come to that. Not all the way out here. One of them will always turn before it amounts to anything. You can be sure of it. But Quinn just stands there, breathing so hard I can hear him clear across the room.

I think it must stem from the time he spent tending those boatloads of white refugees that landed in Baltimore back in 1794, fleeing the slave revolt down in that island hellhole they now call Haiti.

Quinn loves to tell me about it as if I didn’t know already. How Toussaint and Boukman drove out the last of the whites with fire covering the northern plain. Told them they could come back and then killed them all. I can almost predict the moment when Quinn will tell me again how that island is proof that these negroes will do anything.

Every time, I try to remind him of the facts. It was the only successful negro slave revolt in history. The only one. On a small sugar island already torn to shreds by the English and the French fighting over it. Doesn’t take much initiative to seize the advantage there. That kind of thing could never happen here, no matter how many newspapers keep us up nights worrying.

“Try to have a little more faith. There are ways to manage negroes if you will only learn them. And Wash’s get are not our problem. They are springing up in pastures other than ours. And Quinn, they are children.”