Nowhere Is a Place (7 page)

* * *

April’s room is white-walled. Delicate pink curtains hang from the three small windows, a pink-and-green quilt covers the bed, and a rocking chair graces one corner with a pink sitting cushion and a pink-cheeked ceramic doll on top of that. It is a welcoming space with a fireplace and woven throw rug.

Lou sleeps on a pallet at the foot of April’s bed. The dogs, on the other hand, have small wooden houses behind the main house. She eats with them on the back porch though, seated on a small stool: a bowl of buttermilk and bread in the morning, a plate of corn bread, beans, and salt pork in the afternoon, corn porridge in the evening.

She is a gift, but also a playmate and servant, forced to stand alongside her mistress swaying a fan made of peacock feathers to keep April cool and to shoo the bothersome flies away.

It is a pitiful existence that is made worse by the tears that spring from her eyes when she has a moment alone to long and grieve for her family.

The dark people try to talk to her, try to comfort her when they see her tear-stained cheeks and swollen red eyes. They speak slowly and use hand gestures to try and make her understand, but for the first few weeks she just drops her eyes away from their thick lips and they chuck her chin and blanket her with reassuring smiles.

Their eyes are sad for her, and she sees the weight of their existence in the slump of their shoulders and the bend of their necks.

* * *

Lou sits picking over her plate of food, eyes moving over the land, always searching for her mother’s spirit even as her mind tackles the new words that are quickly replacing the old ones she grew up with.

“Looooooooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuu!” Her new name cuts through her daydreams, and quick fast she is on her feet, the plate and the remnants of her meal clattering to the ground. Like lightning the dogs are on it, hungrily devouring every last morsel.

“C’mon, now. Let’s go play.”

April romps through the tall stalks of corn, laughing and giggling. She slaps at Lou’s arm and runs off. Lou remembers this game with her brothers, but her feet do not skip along; there is no smile resting on her lips as she moves slowly toward the quivering stalk to her left.

* * *

By the time April is fourteen and Lou is ten, she has outgrown her place at the foot of the bed and is given a cot in the kitchen. She is no longer needed for April’s amusement. There is water to haul, furniture to dust, corn to shuck, and beans to snap.

The cook—a large burly woman called Naples—sings her instructions and always smells, it seems to Lou, of clabber and peaches. She talks all the time, even when there is no one there to listen or respond.

Four years now, and Lou’s Yamasee language is practically gone. She remembers the words for
nose, eyes, sky, mother, father, family,
and
love
, but little else.

* * *

It is on a
Sunday that Lou is sent out of the house altogether.

Sunday is the day that Verna spots a red stain on the back of Lou’s skirt. To Verna, it is a blinding red smudge against her character, a reminder that yet another piece of property could and probably would produce a bastard child. There were already three running about. Three yellow-skinned, hazel-eyed reminders that her husband was as unfaithful as he was foolish.

“Come here,” Verna orders.

“Yes, ma’am.” Instantly Lou halts her stride, turns on her heel, and comes to where Verna is standing.

“Turn around.”

Lou does as she is told.

“You dirty heathen,” Verna whispers between clenched teeth, then her palm falls like fire across Lou’s cheek and she is sent flailing to the floor.

This is not the first assault. This is one of many. The last one came when Verna stumbled across her husband watching from the upstairs veranda as Lou was bathing in the stream.

For that, she was slapped and her hair cut down to the scalp.

“Don’t you have any decency, any respect?” Verna cried, and leapt on Lou, levying blow after blow across her face.

“Out, out of my house, you!” Verna screeched, rising to her feet and kicking Lou in the ribs.

* * *

“Why?” Henry asked later that night.

“Because she stinks.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Well, she’s a bkye.”

“Lou?”

“I found April’s locket on her cot.”

“You did?”

“And a shilling. Where would she get it from if she didn’t take it?”

Henry eyes his wife and pulls at his beard. “What Naples say?”

“You gonna take a slave’s word over mine, Henry?”

* * *

Lou is banished to the slave quarters and to the field where she is outfitted with a gunnysack and beaten straw hat. She is given a pallet on the already overcrowded floor, a plate and cup, and instructions on how to handle the blood that is flowing from between her legs.

“It’ll come every month from now on,” one of the women tells her.

“Every month till Massa get to you,” another one says.

___________________

The first time Buena Vista came, Lou was fourteen years old and she had calluses on the palms of her hands, had tried and failed at picking cotton, and had been assigned to assisting Naples in the kitchen and washing clothes in the spring.

* * *

“Buena Vista?”

They roll the name across their tongues. Saying it aloud quick and then slow. Running it together in their mouths and then picking it apart with their teeth.

He arrives with Oswald and Cora Joseph, the speckled white man and his ailing-looking wife. Oswald is Henry Vicey’s distant cousin from Kentucky, recently relocated to Macon.

Buena Vista drives their carriage and helps the missus down with his strong hands. Oswald don’t seem to mind, and the missus, well, it seems to the onlooking faces that being helped down from the carriage is the best part of the trip.

“Buena Vista?”

His name is repeated and the black faces fold in on themselves. “What kind of name is that?

“Don’t know,” he says as he fumbles with the reins.

“You drive the carriage and what else?”

“Pick cotton, same as you.”

They eye him. His hands look too clean to be cotton-picking hands. Too smooth. Can’t be doing much else than holding reins.

“Sure
’
nuff?”

“Ay-yuh,” he says, and pulls an apple from his pants pocket. He looks over the crowd again, and his eyes fasten on Lou. He is smitten right then and there.

The women watch as he slides the apple up and down the front of his shirt, considers the shine, and then bites in.

* * *

Second time he comes, his eyes are swimming with the memory of bronze skin and slick dark hair. Eyes black, but sparkling.

A voice comes from the rear. “Y’all back here so soon?”

Buena Vista strains his neck, his eyes eager, hand fingering the apple in his pocket. “Can’t see ya. Y’all come a little closer.”

The crowd rolls and then parts.

Nellie appears. Stout, but tight. Dark. Strong. Good teeth, he thinks, but she not the one.

“They just visitin’, I guess,” Buena Vista says, and his hand rolls across the apple in his pocket while his eyes ride her hips. She smiles, pulls her stomach in, and her breasts swell up and touch her chin.

“Y’all don’t get no passes?”

“Nah.” It is a collective response.

“Oh,” he moans. “Too bad, lotta country to see beyond here.”

“You all get a pass?”

Buena drops his eyes and studies the dirt. “Nah.”

“No matter; you here now. Seem like you be coming regular,” Nellie spouts, taking another step closer.

“Ay-yuh, seem so.” His eyes pick over the faces that gather around him, but there is no bronze among them; plenty of black, though, and a sprinkle of yellow. “Missus say we be making the trip every other Sunday,” Buena adds, and then, “Look here, where are all y’all menfolk at?”

The three that are there, right up in his face in fact, grunt.

“No disrespect,” Buena Vista spews out with a little laugh. “But y’all kinda long in the tooth for all these young womens.”

The men exchange glances and try to stretch themselves into the youth they remember.

“I means to say, I just wonder who with who,” Buena Vista says, and rocks on his heels.

“Why you wanna know?” Nellie blows at him, lips pursed, tongue flicking. “You looking for something other than conversation?” Nellie come to stand alongside Buena and rests her hip against the fence. “A woman, maybe?” she purrs.

“Maybe,” Buena gushes, and his hand squeezes the apple.

A cry goes up from behind them. “She the massa’s whore; got three sons from
him already.”

Every head turns, and Mary is standing there, broad and stern, hands on her wide hips.

“True,” someone whispers, and they all turn back to Buena.

“And?” Nellie throws back at them. “I ain’t had a whip on my back since.” Turning to Buena again, Nellie stretches a finger out and runs it along his bicep. “So what y’all looking for?”

“Where’s the slight one with the pretty skin?”

Nellie pulls her hand back. “What y’all want wit her? She ain’t nothing but a chile.” And then her mouth opens and her tongue runs the length of her bottom lip. “I got pretty skin.”

“Sure do,” Buena says, but his eyes don’t alight on her.

Nellie’s back stiffens. “She ain’t our kind.”

“What kind is that?” someone laughs.

“Human?”

“We ain’t even that, ’cording to the white folk.”

“Mind your damn business!” Nellie barks at the crowd.

“Hush up, Nellie, with that type a talk; it’s Sunday.”

“Where she at?” Buena Vista asks again.

“Down in the field, I s’pose.”

“On a Sunday?”

“Not a-pickin’, just a-sittin’.”

___________________

They come every other Sunday for three months.

Buena riding high, grinning, two apples stuffed into the pockets of his overalls, his heart thumping in his chest.

Those eyes, that skin.

It’s all he can think about. And every other Saturday night he can barely sleep—up before dawn, horses hitched, and waiting while his owners sit at the dining room table and tap delicate spoons against the shells of soft-boiled eggs.

He drives the horses, double time, while the missus hangs on tight to her hat and the master calls out over the thunder of the galloping horses, “Goddammit, Buena, slow down!”

Once there, he paces. Paces so hard, his feet pound out a trench in the dirt before he finally catches sight of Lou and Nellie moving across the lawn and toward the back of the house.

“Hello, ma’am.” Buena Vista moves beside them in a flash, quickly removing his hat.

Lou looks at Nellie, who is smiling smugly back at her. “Go on and speak to him. You the one he want.”

Want?

Lou does not understand what is happening here. Henry Vicey wanted her, and so he purchased her. This man standing beside her—all teeth and rolling the brim of his hat between his fingers—didn’t look like he had the means to buy her, and even if he did, he couldn’t; he was a slave too.

Lou’s head swiveled between Buena Vista and Nellie.

“Don’t she speak?” Buena’s voice betrayed his sudden disappointment.

Nellie dug her finger into Lou’s shoulder blade.

“Oooooouch!” Lou cried, and swatted Nellie on her shoulder. “Quit!”

Nellie rubbed the place where Lou had landed the blow and laughed. “She sure do,” she said, and sauntered off.

The worry lifted from Buena Vista’s face. “My name is Buena Vista,” he said, and presented her one large, dark hand.

Lou looked down at it and then back at him, but said nothing.

Buena Vista’s smile wavered, and he threw a desperate look at Nellie’s retreating back. “I—I,” he started as he dug desperately into his pocket. “I brought
you a gift,” he said cheerfully, and presented Lou with a shiny red apple.

Lou eyed it, and then with a sigh removed it from the palm of his hand

“Thank you,” she whispered, and dropped the apple into the pocket of her dress.

Buena Vista grimaced. Didn’t seem that there was any way to get through to this woman. Buena Vista looked down at his shoes, thinking hard about something else to say. He thought about the long ride home, about the excitement that had fueled him in getting here. What if she offered him nothing else, turned
her back on him and walked away, or just came right out
and said, “You black and ugly.” What then could he count on getting
him back home?

Buena
Vista was deflated. He had stupidly assumed that this woman would find him irresistible, but it seemed as though she didn’t even find him interesting.

“Uhm . . . so they call you Lou, huh?”

“Uh-huh,” Lou said, and rubbed at a crick in her neck.

“Pretty name.”

“I’m glad you think so.” Her words dripped with sarcasm.

“Oh, you don’t think it’s pretty? What would you rather
be called, then?”

Lou bit down on her lip. She hadn’t said her given name in so many years. She didn’t even think about it, because what came along with the thought was far too painful to bear.

“Never mind. It’s all right, I guess.”

Buena Vista considered her. The sadness that now shadowed her face was not lost on him. He’d seen it on his own face when he stooped to stare at himself in a puddle of water. “Well, I think it’s a right fine name for a right fine lady,” Buena said, and puffed out his chest.

A small smile crept across Lou’s lips. She didn’t thank him, but she did give him the benefit of a head-to-toe examination. Her eyes moved shyly over his body. He was a good-looking man. The way he carried himself reminded her of her father.

Buena looked up at the sky; the sun was moving west. “I’m sure the massa gonna wanna get going soon, so’s we can make it back
’
fore dark.”

Lou nodded.

“I just wanna know if’n I can visit with you again?”

“Gal, them sheets gonna have to come off the line
’
fore the sun sets!” Mary yelled from the porch.