White Doves at Morning

THE black woman's name was
Sarie, and when she crashed out the door of the cabin at the end of the
slave quarters into the fading winter light, her lower belly bursting
with the child that had already broken her water, the aftermath of the
ice storm and the sheer desolate sweep of leaf-bare timber and frozen
cotton acreage and frost-limned cane stalks seemed to combine and
strike her face like a braided whip.

She trudged into the grayness
of the woods, the male shoes on her feet pocking the snow, her breath
streaming out of the blanket she wore on her head like a monk's cowl.
Ten minutes later, deep inside the gum and persimmon and oak trees, her
clothes strung with air vines that were silver with frost, the frozen
leaves cracking under her feet, she heard the barking of the dogs and
the yelps of their handlers who had just released them.

She splashed into a slough,
one that bled out of the woods into the dark swirl of the river where
it made a bend through the plantation. The ice sawed at her ankles; the
cold was like a hammer on her shins. But nonetheless she worked her way
upstream, between cypress roots that made her think of a man's knuckles
protruding from the shallows. Across the river the sun was a vaporous
smudge above the bluffs, and she realized night would soon come upon
her and that a level of coldness she had never thought possible would
invade her bones and womb and teats and perhaps turn them to stone.

She clutched the bottom of her
stomach with both hands, as though holding a watermelon under her
dress, and slogged up the embankment and collapsed under a lean-to
where, in the summer months, an overseer napped in the afternoon while
his charges bladed down the cypress trees for the soft wood Marse
Jamison used to make cabinets in the big house on a bluff overlooking
the river.

Even if she had known the
river was called the Mississippi, the name would have held no
significance for her. But the water boundary called the Ohio was
another matter. It was somewhere to the north, somehow associated in
her mind with the Jordan, and a black person only needed to wade across
it to be as free as the children of Israel.

Except no black person on the
plantation could tell her exactly how far to the north this river was,
and she had learned long ago never to ask a white person where the
river called Ohio was located.

The light in the west died and
through the breaks in the lean-to she saw the moon rising and the
ground fog disappearing in the cold, exposing the hardness of the
earth, the glazed and speckled symmetry of the tree trunks. Then a pain
like an ax blade seemed to split her in half and she put a stick in her
mouth to keep from crying out. As the time between the contractions
shrank and she felt blood issue from her womb between her fingers, she
was convinced the juju woman had been right, that this baby, her first,
was a man-child, a warrior and a king.

She stared upward at the
constellations bursting in the sky, and when she shut her eyes she saw
her child inside the redness behind her eyelids, a powerful little
brown boy with liquid eyes and a mouth that would seek both milk and
power from his mother's breast.

She caught the baby in her
palms and sawed the cord in half with a stone and tied it in a knot,
then pressed the closed eyes and hungry mouth to her teat, just before
passing out.

THE dawn broke hard and cold,
a yellow light that burst inside the woods and exposed her hiding place
and brought no warmth or
release
from the misery in her bones. There was a dirty stench in the air, like
smoke from a drowned campfire. She heard the dogs again, and when she
rose to her feet the pain inside her told her she would never outrun
them.

Learn from critters, her
mother had always said. They know God's way. Don't never ax Master or
his family or the mens he hire to tell you the troot. Whatever they
teach us is wrong, girl. Never forget that lesson, her mother had said.

The doe always leads the
hunter away from the fawn, Sarie thought. That's what God taught the
doe, her mother had said.

She wrapped the baby in the
blanket that had been her only protection from the cold, then rose to
her feet and covered the opening to the lean-to with a broken pine
bough and walked slowly through the woods to the slough. She stepped
into the water, felt it rush inside her shoes and over her ankles, then
worked her way downstream toward the river. In the distance she heard
axes knocking into wood and smelled smoke from a stump fire, and the
fact that the work of the plantation went on rhythmically, not missing
a beat, in spite of her child's birth and possible death reminded her
once again of her own insignificance and the words Master had used to
her yesterday afternoon.

"You should have taken care of
yourself, Sarie," he had said, his pantaloons tucked inside his riding
boots, his youthful face undisturbed and serene and without blemish
except for the tiny lump of tobacco in his jaw. "I'll see to it the
baby doesn't lack for raiment or provender, but I'll have to send you
to the auction house. You're not an ordinary nigger, Sarie. You won't
be anything but trouble. I'm sorry it worked out this way."

When she came out of the water
and labored toward the edge of the woods, she glanced behind her and in
the thin patina of snow frozen on the ground she saw her own blood
spore and knew it was almost her time, the last day in a lifetime of
days that had been marked by neither hope nor despair but only
unanswered questions: Where was the green place they had all come from?
What group of men had made them chattel to be treated as though they
had no souls, whipped, worked from cain't-see to cain't-see, sometimes
branded and hamstrung?

The barking of the dogs was
louder now but she no longer cared about either the dogs or the men who
rode behind them. Her spore ended at the slough; her story would end
here, too. The child was another matter. She touched the juju bag tied
around her neck and prayed she and the child would be together by
nightfall, in the warm, green place where lions lay on the beaches by a
great sea.

But now she was too tired to
think about any of it. She stood on the edge of the trees, the sunlight
breaking on her face, then sat down heavily in the grass, the tops of
her shoes dark with her blood. Through a red haze she saw a man in a
stovepipe hat and dirty white breeches ride over a hillock behind his
dogs, two other mounted men behind him, their horses steaming in the
sunshine.

The dogs surrounded her,
circling, snuffing in the grass, their bodies bumping against one
another, but they made no move against her person. The man in the
stovepipe hat reined his horse and got down and looked with
exasperation at his two companions. "Get these dogs out of here. If I
hear that barking anymore, I'll need a new pair of ears," he said. Then
he looked down at Sarie, almost respectfully. "You gave us quite a run."

She did not reply. His name
was Rufus Atkins, a slight, hard-bodied man whose skin, even in winter,
had the color and texture of a blacksmith's leather apron. His hair was
a blackish-tan, long, combed straight back, and there were hollows in
his cheeks that gave his face a certain fragility. But the cartilage
around the jawbones was unnaturally dark, as though rubbed with
blackened brick dust, knotted with a tension his manner hid from others.

Rufus Atkins' eyes were flat,
hazel, and rarely did they contain or reveal any definable emotion, as
though he lived behind glass and the external world never registered in
a personal way on his senses.

A second man dismounted, this
one blond, his nose wind-burned, wearing a leather cap and canvas coat
and a red-and-white-checkered scarf tied around his throat. On his hip
he carried a small flintlock pistol that had three hand-smoothed
indentations notched in the wood grips. In his right hand he gripped a
horse quirt that was weighted with a lead ball sewn inside the bottom
of the deerhide handle.

"She done dropped it, huh?" he
said.

"That's keenly observant of
you, Clay, seeing as how the woman's belly is flat as a busted pig's
bladder," Rufus Atkins replied.

"Marse Jamison says find both
of them, he means find both of them, Rufus," the man named Clay said,
looking back into the trees at the blood spots in the snow.

Rufus Atkins squatted down and
ignored his companion's observation, his eyes wandering over Sarie's
face.

"They say you filed your teeth
into points 'cause there's an African king back there in your bloodline
somewhere," he said to her. "Bet you gave birth to a man-child, didn't
you, Sarie?"

"My child and me gonna be
free. Ain't your bidness no more, Marse Rufus," she replied.

"Might as well face it, Sarie.
That baby is not going to grow up around here, not with Marse Jamison's
face on it. He'll ship it off somewhere he doesn't have to study on the
trouble that big dick of his gets him into. Tell us where the baby is
and maybe you and it will get sold off together."

When she didn't reply to his
lie, he lifted her chin with his knuckle. "I've been good to you,
Sarie. Never made you lift your dress, never whipped you, always let
you go to the corn-breaks and the dances. Isn't it time for a little
gratitude?" he said.

She looked into the distance
at the bluffs on the far side of the river, the steam rising off the
water in the shadows below, the live oaks blowing stiffly against the
sky. Rufus Atkins fitted his hand under her arm and began to lift her
to her feet.

She seized his wrist and sunk
her teeth into his hand, biting down with her incisors into sinew and
vein and bone, seeing his head pitch back, hearing the squeal rise from
his throat. Then she flung his hand away from her and spat his blood
out of her mouth.

He staggered to his feet,
gripping the back of his wounded hand.

"You nigger bitch," he said.

He ripped the quirt from his
friend's grasp and struck her across the face with it. Then, as though
his anger were insatiable and fed upon itself, he inverted the quirt in
his hand and whipped the leaded end down on her head and neck and
shoulders, again and again.

He threw the quirt to the
ground, squeezing his wounded hand again, and made a grinding sound
with his teeth.

"Damn, I think she went to the
bone," he said.

"Rufus?" the blond man named
Clay said.

"What?" he answered irritably.

"I think you just beat her
brains out."

"She deserved it."

"No, I mean you beat her
brains out. Look. She's probably spreading her legs for the devil now,"
the blond man said.

Rufus Atkins stared down at
Sarie's slumped posture, the hanging jaw, the sightless eyes.

"You just cost Marse Jamison
six hundred dollars. You flat put us in it, Roof," Clay said.

Rufus cupped his mouth in hand
and thought for a minute. He turned and looked at the third member of
their party, a rodent-faced man in a buttoned green wool coat and
slouch hat strung with a turkey feather. He had sores on his face that
never healed, breath that stunk of decaying teeth, and no work history
other than riding with the paddy rollers, a ubiquitous crew of
drunkards and white trash who worked as police for plantation interests
and terrorized Negroes on the roads at night.

"What you aim to do?" Clay
asked.

"I'm studying on it," Rufus
replied. He then turned toward the third man. "Come on up here,
Jackson, and give us your opinion on something," he said.

The third man approached them,
the wind twirling the turkey feather on his hat brim. He glanced down
at Sarie, then back at Rufus, a growing knowledge in his face.

"You done it. You dig the
hole," he said.

"You got it all wrong," Rufus
said.

He slipped the flintlock
pistol from Clay's side holster, cocked it, and fired a chunk of lead
the size of a walnut into the side of Jackson's head. The report echoed
across the water against the bluffs on the far side.