Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (29 page)

All that hate! Denmark thought that rage was the ruling principle of his own life, but it was nothing compared to what slaves felt. That was when Denmark realized the difference between free and slave—freedom stole hate away from you, and made you weaker. Denmark hated his father, sure, but it was nothing compared to his woman’s hate for him.

Of course he had to kill her. She’d laid it out so plain, and it was clear he wasn’t going to change her mind. It was just a matter of time before she killed him, so he had to defend himself, right? And he owned her, didn’t he? She wouldn’t be the first Black woman killed by her master.

He hit her in the head with a board and knocked her cold. Then he bundled her into a sack and carried her down to the dock. He figured to hold her under the water till she drowned, then pull her out of the sack and let her float so it didn’t look like murder. Well, he had her under the water all right, and she wasn’t even struggling inside the sack, but it was like a voice talking in his
mind telling him, You killing the wrong one. It ain’t the Black woman killing you, it’s the White folks. If it wasn’t for the White folks, you could marry this girl and she be free beside you. They the ones she wants to kill, they the ones you ought to kill.

He dragged her out of the water and revived her. But she wasn’t right after that. It might have been the blow to the head or it might have been the water she took on and the time she spent not breathing, but she walked funny and didn’t talk good and she didn’t hate him anymore, but everything he loved about her was dead. It was like he was a murderer after all, but the victim lived in his house and bore him a baby.

Oh, Denmark, he was a sad man all the time after that. The joy of fooling White folks was gone. He got sloppy with his work, doing it late, and his customers stopped hiring him—though of course they thought it was his White master they were firing. The Black people around him hated him too, for what he done to his woman, and he had to watch all the time to keep them from getting any of his hair or fingernails or toenails, or even his spit or his urine. Cause they would have killed him with that, if they could.

His son Egypt got to be four years old and Denmark prenticed him to a Black harness maker. Had to do all kinds of pretending, of course, that it was a White man who owned the boy and wanted him trained to be useful on his plantation, and it cost nine pounds a year, which was most of what Denmark was earning these days, but the paperwork went well enough, and even though Egypt was treated like a slave, he was learning a trade and there’d come a day when Denmark would tell him the truth. You free, boy, he’d say that day. Egypt Vesey, no man owns you. Not me, not nobody.

When Egypt was gone, the last light went out of the boy’s mama. The day Denmark saw his woman drinking varnish, he knew he had to do something. Stupid as she had become, she hated her life and hated him. He agreed
with her. Maybe he hated himself even more than she did. Hated everything and everybody else, too. It was chewing him up inside.

That was when he met Gullah Joe. Joe came to him. Little Black man, he suddenly appeared right in front of Denmark when he was in the dirt garden peeing. He wasn’t there, and then he was, holding a crazy-looking umbrella all a-dangle with strange knots and bits of cloth and tin and iron and one dead mouse. “Stop peeing on my foot,” said Gullah Joe.

Denmark didn’t have much to say. Piss just dried right up when Gullah Joe said so. Denmark knew he must be the witchy man they were always threatening him with. “You come to kill me, witchy man?” Denmark said.

“Might,” said Gullah Joe. “Might not.”

“Maybe you best just do it,” said Denmark. “Cause if you don’t, what if I kill
you
?”

Gullah Joe just grinned. “What, you hit me with a board, put me in a sack, drown me till I can’t walk or talk right?”

Denmark just started to cry, fell to his knees and begged Gullah Joe to kill him. “You know what I am! You know I’m a wicked man!”

“I’m not God,” said Gullah Joe. “You gots to go see him preacher, you want somebody send you to hell.”

“How come you talk so funny?”

“Cause I not no slave,” said Gullah Joe. “I from Africa, I don’t like White man language, I learn it bad and I don’t care. I say
people
talk real good.” Then he let loose a string of some strange language. It went on and on, and turned into a song, and he danced around, splashing up the mud from Denmark’s pissing all over his bare feet while he sang. Denmark felt every splash as if he’d been kicked in the kidneys. By the time Gullah Joe stopped singing and dancing, Denmark was lying on the ground whimpering, and there was blood leaking out of him instead of piss.

Gullah Joe bent over him. “How you feel?”

“Fine,” Denmark whispered. “’Cept I ain’t dead yet.”

“Oh, I don’t want you dead. I make up my mind. You be fine. Drink this.”

Gullah Joe handed him a small bottle. It smelled awful, but there was alcohol in it and that was persuasive enough. Denmark drank the whole bottle, or at least he would have, if Joe hadn’t snatched it out of his hands. “You want to live forever?” Gullah Joe demanded. “You use up all my saving stuff?”

Whatever it was, it worked great. Denmark bounded to his feet. “I want more of that!” he said.

“You never get this again,” said Gullah Joe. “You like it too good.”

“Give it to my woman!” cried Denmark. “Make her well again!”

“She sick in the brain,” said Gullah Joe. “This don’t do no good for brain.”

“Well then you go on and kill me again, you cheating bastard! I’m sick of living like this, everybody hate me, I hate myself!”

“I don’t hate you,” said Gullah Joe. “I got a
use
for you.”

And ever since then, Denmark had been with Gullah Joe. Denmark’s money had gone to supporting both him and Gullah Joe, and to accomplish whatever Joe wanted done. Half Denmark’s day was spent taking care of new-arrived slaves, gathering their names and bringing them home to Joe.

The whole idea of taking names came from Denmark’s woman. Not that she thought of it. But when Denmark rented the warehouse and brought Gullah Joe and the woman both to live there, Gullah Joe asked her what her name was. She just looked at him and said, “I don’ know, master.” It was a far cry from what she used to say to Denmark, back before he made her stupid. In those days she’d say, “Master never know my name. You call me what you want, but I never tell my name.”

Well, when Gullah Joe asked Denmark what the woman’s name was, and Denmark didn’t know, why, you might have thought Joe had eaten a pepper, the way he started jumping around and howling and yipping. “She never told her name!” he cried. “She kept her soul!”

“She kept her
hate
,” said Denmark. “I tried to
love
her and I don’t even know what to call her except Woman.”

But Gullah didn’t care about Denmark’s sad story. He got to work with his witchery. He made Denmark catch him a seagull—not an easy thing to do, but with Joe’s Catching Stick it went well enough. Soon the seagull’s body parts were baked, boiled, mixed, glued, woven, or knotted into a feathered cape that Gullah Joe would throw over his head to turn himself into a seagull. “Not really,” he explained to Denmark. “I still a man, but I fly and White sailor, he see gulls.” Joe would fly out to slaveships coming in to port in Camelot. He’d go down into the hold and tell the people they needed to get their name-string made before they landed, and give it to the half-Black man who gave them water.

“Put hate and fear in name-string,” he said to them. “Peaceful and happy be all that stay behind. I keep you safe till the right day.” Or that was what he told Denmark that he said. Few of the arriving slaves spoke any English, so he had to explain it to them in some African language. Or maybe he was able to convey it all to them in knot language. Denmark wouldn’t know—Gullah Joe wouldn’t teach him what the knotwork meant or how it worked. “You read and write White man talk,” Gullah Joe said. “That be enough secret for one man.” Denmark only knew that somehow these people knew how to tie bits of this and that with scraps of string and cloth and thread and somehow it would contain their name, plus a sign for fear and a sign for hate. Even though he couldn’t understand it, the knotted name-strings made Denmark proud, for it proved that Black people knew
how to read and write back in Africa, only it wasn’t marks on paper, it was knots in string.

Besides gathering the names of the newly arrived slaves, Denmark helped collect the names of the slaves already in Camelot. Word spread among the Blacks—Denmark only had to pass along a garden fence with an open basket, and Black hands would reach out and drop name-strings into the basket. “Thank you,” they said. “Thank you.”

“Not me,” he would answer. “Don’t thank
me
. I ain’t nobody.”

Came a day not long ago when they had all the slaves’ names, and Gullah Joe sang all night. “My people happy now,” he said. “My people got they happy.”

“They’re still slaves,” Denmark pointed out.

“All they hate in there,” said Gullah Joe, pointing at the bulging net.

“All their hope, too,” said Denmark. “They got no hope now either.”

“I no take they hope,” said Gullah Joe. “White man take they hope!”

“They all stupid like my woman,” said Denmark.

“No, no,” said Gullah Joe. “They smart. They wise.”

“Well, nobody knows it but you.”

Gullah Joe only grinned and tapped his head. Apparently it was enough for Joe to know the truth.

There was one person who wasn’t happy, though. Oh, Denmark was glad enough to have a purpose in his life, to have Black people look at him with gratitude instead of loathing. But that wasn’t the same as being happy. His woman was still before him every day, lurching through her housework, mumbling words he could barely understand. Gullah Joe saw that his people weren’t unhappy anymore. But Denmark saw that the happiest people were the Whites. He heard them talking.

“You see how docile they are?”

“Slavery is the natural state of the Black man.”

“They don’t
wish
to rise above their present condition.”

“They are content.”

“The only place where Blacks are angry is where they are permitted to live without a master.”

“The Black man cannot be happy without discipline.”

And so on, throughout the city. White people came to Camelot from all over the world, and what they saw was contented slaves. It persuaded them that slavery must not be such a bad thing after all. Denmark hated this. But Gullah Joe seemed not to care.

“Black man day come,” said Gullah Joe.

“When?”

“Black man day come.”

That was why Denmark Vesey was scowling at Gullah Joe today, as the old witchy man carried the basket of name-strings through the knotwork that guarded the place. All these happy slaves. Was Denmark Vesey the only Black man in Camelot who lived in hell?

Gullah Joe pulled the net open and started to pour in the new name-strings. At that moment, cords along the bottom of the net began to pop open, one by one, as if someone were cutting them. Name-strings dropped out, at first a few, then dozens, and then the whole net opened up and the name-strings lay heaped on the floor.

“What did you
do
?” asked Denmark.

Gullah Joe did not answer.

“Something wrong?” asked Denmark.

Gullah Joe just stood there, his hands upraised. Denmark walked through the hanging junk, circling around until he could see Joe’s face. He was frozen like a statue—a comic one, with eyes wide and teeth exposed in a grimace, like the minstrels in those hideous shows that White actors did with their faces painted Black.

This wasn’t just a net giving way. Someone or something
had
broken open the net and spilled the name-strings onto the floor. If it had the power to do that, it
had the power to hurt Gullah Joe, and that’s what seemed to be happening.

What could Denmark do? He knew nothing about witchery. Yet he couldn’t let anything happen to Joe. Or to the name-strings, for that matter, for the name of every slave in Camelot was spilled here. Yet if Denmark walked within the charmed circle that Joe had shown him, wouldn’t he be in the enemy’s power, too?

Maybe not if he didn’t stay long. Denmark ran and leapt, knocking Joe clear out of the circle. They both sprawled on the floor, leaving a dozen large charms swaying and bumping each other.

Gullah Joe didn’t show any sign of being hurt. He leapt up and looked frantically around him. “Get up by damn! A broom! A broom!”

Denmark scrambled to his feet and ran for the broom.

“Two broom! Quick!”

In moments the two of them were standing just outside the circle, reaching the brooms inside to sweep the name-strings outside in great swaths.

“Fast!” cried Joe. “He take apart you broom you go slow!”

Denmark hadn’t thought he was going any slower than Joe, but then he realized that the end of the broomstick nearest his body was holding almost still as he levered the broom to sweep out name-strings. No sooner had he thought of this than the broomstick rocketed straight at him like a bayonet, ramming him in the stomach just under the breastbone. Denmark dropped like a rock, the breath knocked out of him. And when he did manage to take in a great gasp of air, he immediately vomited.