THE BOOK OF NEGROES (18 page)

I lowered my voice but I wouldn’t let go of Georgia’s hand. “How did he look?”

“Like a layabout. A wastrel. I don’t like the look in his eyes. Too African. That’s what you made me drag up in the fishnet?”

My excitement gave way to an ache. I felt crushed to have missed him.

“He be back, honey chile. He just over on Lady’s Island. Not far at all. He come for you again, just like a hungry dog.”

WE WENT THROUGH A SECOND CYCLE of indigo harvesting. The work was just as hard, but when our daily tasks were done we were free to cook, garden or mend clothes, and left alone without any buckra to disturb our days. Sometimes, when nobody was looking, I would climb high up a tree in the woods and practise reading the words that Mamed had written out for me. Once I could manage “cat,” “dog,” “lion,” “water,” “father” and the like, I moved on quickly to new challenges. Mamed knew how to keep my interest. He said he was doing it as his mother had done for him. One day it was “The dog ate the cat.” Then it was: “The cat ran from the barking dog.” And then it was: “The barking dog chased the cat up the tree and the birds flew out of the nest.” The language came together like pieces of a secret, and I wanted more of it every day.

When the reading lessons were done, sometimes Mamed would explain
how things worked on Appleby’s plantation, and at other times he asked me questions.

Fomba had not uttered a sound since he came to St. Helena Island. His inability to follow instructions during the indigo harvest infuriated Mamed, who asked me about him one night.

“What did he do in your village?”

“Hunted, and we ate whatever he killed.”

“Good hunter?”

“The best,” I said. “He could kill a rabbit with one throw of a stone.”

Within a few days, Mamed had arranged for an experienced Negro to help Fomba build a canoe out of bamboo. They bound it tight with water reeds and cut down a long sapling to use as a pole. They also fashioned a paddle out of cypress wood. Fomba learned the ways of the boat just as if it were part of his body. Almost overnight, he was paddling or poling the boat along the waterways and creeks of the low-country islands, tossing down nets and pulling up shrimp, crabs and fish. Mamed released Fomba from all indigo jobs on the understanding that he would return every afternoon with whatever fish he had netted. Fomba did even better than that. He brought back squirrels, possums, wild turkeys and turtle eggs for Mamed and the rest of us. Everybody so enjoyed his additions to the cooking pots that they began to accept that Fomba would make himself useful if he was left to work alone.

GEORGIA COMPLAINED ABOUT MY STUDYING but she liked having the cabin to herself in the evenings. When I walked toward Mamed’s place, I would often pass Happy Jack as he walked to our cabin to see Georgia. He was the only man I knew who could walk, whistle and whittle a stick at the same time. He often brought her flowers picked from the woods,
which he kept bunched up behind his ear to keep his hands free for the whittling.

One night when I returned from studying, Georgia had news for me. “Happy Jack and I were rolling and heaving and hot and bothering, having ourselves a right good time, and in walks that big-mouthed African. Happy Jack jumps up and runs out. There goes my man. And I am left looking at this meatless African. He keeps saying your name. I could have slapped that boy three days into next week.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, but I hope it’s far away. The way that boy run his mouth—”

I raced into the woods behind our cabin and called his name. He was hiding behind a grove of trees. I flew into his arms. I hugged that boy until I felt him growing hard against me. I pulled back suddenly. The words came spilling out of me in Fulfulde. I had to know where he was living and where he had been and what he had seen and I wanted to know it all, at once.

Georgia came up to us from behind and said she would be back at sunrise. No, Chekura said, not sunrise. I was struck to see that he did not speak the Negro English nearly as well as I. Georgia didn’t care to stand around listening to translations, so I quickly explained that he had to be back where he belonged before sunrise. She shrugged and went off to find Happy Jack.

Chekura let his eyes fall over me, and I stood proud before him. I learned that the buckra who ran the plantation on Lady’s Island was gone for the sick season, so Chekura was free to wander at night. During this season, Chekura said, dozens of Negroes could be found at night, roaming and boating, trading poultry for rice, vegetables for gourds, rabbits for rum, exchanging news of brothers and sisters and wives and children, sinking the fishnet and pulling it back up. Chekura had found Africans all over the low-country islands: there were two Fulbe on Edisto, a Bamana on Coosaw, and three Eboes on Morgan.

Chekura said he could not believe how quickly I had learned the Negro language. I whispered proudly that I was secretly learning to read.

“I have something for you,” he said. He pulled a cloth from his sleeve, folded it in a square and presented it to me as if it were a traditional gift of kola nuts in our homeland.

It was a red-striped handkerchief. I clutched it, smelled it, rubbed it on my face and then tied it up around my hair. “You look beautiful in it,” he said.

I held his arm again. I wanted to feel him next to me and I craved finding him next to me when I woke up there in the morning. I tried to think of how to tell him that I wasn’t ready for the thing he wanted, but he saw my hesitation and saved me from having to speak. He had to leave, he said, so he could slip back onto his plantation before his absence was noticed.

CHEKURA WAS ONLY ABLE TO COME see me once a month or so. I longed for his face, and his voice, and the very smell of him that reminded me of home. It excited me to think that he knew me, and knew of my past, before this life in Carolina. We held each other longer each time he came to visit. Something stirred deep down in my belly and between my legs. But I didn’t trust those feelings. I wanted to hold on to his voice and the sounds of my village in them. He seemed prepared to talk just as much as I needed. He did not press the other matter.

THE MOONS CAME AND WENT, and in the colder season when there was no indigo to plant or harvest, Appleby was frequently with us. He returned to the plantation around the time I had spent a full year on St. Helena Island, and opened up his big house. Several of the Negroes had to work
night and day to get his house back in order, and to start cooking up meals for him and his wife. She only stayed for a while, then he took her back to Charles Town and returned alone.

One morning in the cold season, Appleby came to our home.

“Georgia. Get a move on. I’ve got a man waiting to take you to catch a baby on Lady’s Island.”

Georgia swept up her bag with one hand and grabbed my arm with the other.

“No,” Appleby said to her. “This time it’s just you.”

I gave Georgia a pleading look.

“She goes with me,” Georgia said.

“Enough backtalk,” Appleby said. “You’ve got to go now.”

AFTER GEORGIA WAS GONE, Appleby led me into the big house. I wanted to look at all the strange objects inside, to touch the books and to smell the foods cooking in the kitchen. But I had no time. And I knew that it would not be allowed. Still, I hoped any little distraction might give me a chance to think of a way to escape. The cook gave me a long look and left. A man who cleaned the floors of the big house watched me too for a moment, and left.

“Think I’m stupid?” Appleby asked.

“Master?” I said.

Appleby pushed me down a hall and into a room, ripped off my wrapper, tore my red-striped handkerchief in half and flung me onto a bed.

“Who’s that boy sniffing after you?”

“No boy, Master.”

He slapped me. “He ain’t one of mine. Who is that boy?”

“No boy, Master.”

He clamped one hand on my mouth, pinned me down with his chest
and began unbuttoning his trousers with his other hand. His skin pressed down on mine. I could feel his wet skin, sweating. And he stank.

“Who owns you?” he said.

“Master.”

“I say who owns you?”

The wiry hairs on his chest scratched my breasts. The stubble on his cheeks bit into my face.

“Master, please don’t—”

“Don’t you tell me what to do,” he said.

I gasped and pushed but could not get out from under his weight. I thought about biting his shoulder, or a finger, but then he might hurt me even more. Should I lie still, like I was dead, and wait for it to be over? I tried to keep my thighs together, but he yanked them apart with his hands. He owned my labour, but now he was bursting to own all of me.

If only I had had Georgia’s birthing oil, it wouldn’t have hurt so much. But there was no oil, and the pain was terrible as he plunged deep inside my body where nobody belonged but me. I could not shove his heaving body off me, so I lay as still as I could. I just wanted to live through this, and have it end. Live through it, and have it end. His breath quickened, he gave out a wild squeal and he was finished. When he slid out of me, I felt like everything inside me was draining out.

“African whore,” Appleby said, panting. He stood, pulled up his breeches and disappeared out the door.

My blood was all over the bed. Underneath me, it kept on running. Still I couldn’t move, trapped in my own pain and shame.

A figure stood at the door. It was Happy Jack, wearing a cook’s white bib. He had a slice of orange in his hand. He stepped forward and stuck the orange in my mouth.

“Take some of the sweetness, chile,” he said, trying to get his hands under me.

I began to choke on the orange, so he opened my mouth, pulled it out and tossed it away. He picked me up like a father would lift his own child and carried me outside. I didn’t know if I would get there alive, but I knew I was going to Georgia’s bed. It was a long walk, and up and down I rose and fell in his arms while Happy Jack took his long, fast strides. The panting of the cook and the wailing of women were the last things I heard.

AFTER APPLEBY’S ATTACK, Georgia had me drink a hot potion of tansy and ground-up cedar berries. It gave me awful stomach cramps and made me bleed between the legs.

“Master’s filth run out of you,” Georgia said, and I was thankful.

I worried about what to tell Chekura, but Georgia advised silence.

“Menfolk don’t have to know everything,” she said, “and some things they don’t need to know at all.”

After Georgia healed me, two things helped me avoid more troubles with Appleby: I never left Georgia’s side when the master was around, and Appleby bought a new Negro woman named Sally. I was relieved to escape his attentions, but it weighed on me that he had turned to another woman. Just a few years older than me, Sally had a kind face, wide hips and full breasts. She was weak, however, and had trouble keeping up with the others during the indigo planting and harvest. Appleby had his way
many times with Sally and might have kept on going, but she and eight others on the plantation died suddenly of the pox. It had taken another woman to save me from Appleby, and only the pox had saved her.

Two years came and went, and it became clear to me that the Negroes who remained on the Appleby plantation either died there of old age or succumbed much sooner to breathing ailments, fever or the pox. I sought to find a way off the indigo plantation and to discover the route back to my homeland. But there was no quick path to the things that I wanted. Every day, I thought of my parents and imagined them telling me to soak up learning and to use my skills. Robinson Appleby owned my body. For him, I toiled in the stink of the indigo mud under the burning sun and the biting mosquitoes. But it was for my father that I learned as much as Mamed about the preparation of indigo mud, and it was for my mother that I became Georgia’s steady helper, catching babies in all the low-country islands.

I knew that I had to understand the buckra to survive among them, so I devoured Mamed’s lessons. Soon I could read as well as he, and there wasn’t much left for him to teach. It came as a disappointment to learn that Mamed had no idea about how a person could get to Africa. He could only say that he had never heard of a slave returning to Africa, or even trying to get there. None of his books addressed the question, but I read and reread them whenever I was free. The safest place to read was in Mamed’s cabin. He never objected to having me there. On the contrary, he protested when I let more than a few days pass without coming by at night to light a candle, sit on one of his cypress stools and keep reading.

The chief advantage of the Bible was its length. Its wonderful stories were endless, and the tales about Abraham and Moses reminded me of accounts Papa had described from the Qur’an. After reading the
Planter’s Medicine Guide
, I made the mistake of telling Georgia that the book recommended bleeding as a cure for all sorts of ailments. She said I’d best
avoid reading if I knew what was good for me.
The buckra man is plum crazy, gal. Imagine. Letting blood run from a sick man
. Mamed also gave me an almanac by a man who called himself Poor Richard. This writer knew all about securing houses from mischief by thunder and lightning, but nothing about how to get from Carolina to Africa.

Reading felt like a daytime dream in a secret land. Nobody but I knew how to get there, and nobody but I owned that place. Books were all about the ways of the buckra, but soon I felt that I could not do without them. And I lived in hope that one day I would find a book that answered my questions.
Where was Africa, exactly, and how did you get there?
Sometimes I felt ashamed to have no answer. How could I come from a place, but not know where it was?

WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE INDIGO cutting season. Early in the morning, while Georgia was still sleeping, I would run out and throw up in the woods. But not long after this began, Georgia put her hand on my arm while we walked to the fields.

“What you going to do when Master Apbee finds out?”

“About what?” I said.

“About the little one making you sick every morning.”

I had been meaning to tell Georgia, but I had wanted to let the secret swell inside me a little longer. I was bursting with pride and purpose. My own baby, by my own man! This was the baby I would keep and love. This baby had come not from a buckra but from a man of my own choosing: an African who knew where I came from and spoke my language and came every month to see me. I had come to depend on Chekura’s visits, timed consistently with the full moon and almost entirely reliable during the sick season when it was easier to travel unnoticed at night. We rarely spoke about the journey overland or across the water, but comforted
each other with stories in Fulfulde about our early childhoods, and with observations—often in Gullah—of our new world in Carolina. While we talked and laughed and brought our foreheads together to rest one against the other, Chekura rubbed my toes and my soles and the tops of my feet with oil he had coaxed from Georgia, but at first he demanded nothing of me. With the passing moons, his hands travelled beyond my ankles and then past my knees. Finally desire awoke in me like water bursting from a dam. I brought his hungry lips to mine and took him deep inside my body. We had only devoured each other a few times before my bleedings stopped.

“I was going to tell you,” I said to Georgia.

“Don’t tell me things I already know,” she said. “Just tell me what you’re going to do with Master Apbee now that Sally’s dead and gone.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t tell him about Chekura,” Georgia finally said.

“He already knows,” I said.

“He don’t know names. If you want that boy to stay alive, don’t say his name. And one other thing.”

“What?”

“When that baby comes, nurse it till your milk runs dry.”

“Why?”

“If you are nursing, maybe Appleby won’t take your baby.”

“He would take a baby?”

“If you old enough to have a baby, you old enough to know that Master Apbee owns you from head to toe. And anything you make.”

I fell silent. Georgia and I had caught two babies on the Appleby plantation, and they were still with their mothers.

“He wouldn’t take a baby,” I said.

“Child,” Georgia said, “evil ain’t got no roof.” She glanced at my face and put her hand on my shoulder. “Just feed that baby and pray for milk,”
she said. “Lots and lots of milk. Let everybody see you nursing that baby. How many bleedings you missed?”

“Just two.”

“You got a long ways to go, chile. A long ways yet.”

LATE ONE AFTERNOON, while Georgia and I were stirring vats full of indigo leaves and man-piss, Robinson Appleby showed up with two visitors. Mamed barked at us to stir the vats faster.

One of Appleby’s acquaintances was a well-dressed man who fanned himself to keep off the flies and looked like he wanted to get out of the hot sun. The other man leaned in to get a good look at what we were doing. He was tall, perhaps the age of my father, and he had a beard as dark as my own skin. I kept up beating the water, stems and leaves in the second vat, and when I turned to look, caught the man staring at me. Our eyes met and I promptly dropped my gaze. Was that a smile? I turned back to my work. From a buckra, a smile was a facial gesture I didn’t trust. To me, it meant,
I know something you don’t know
. I kept on beating the indigo.

“Do you know who this man is?” Appleby asked Mamed.

“No, sir.”

“This here is Solomon Lindo,” Appleby said. “He’s the new indigo inspector for the entire Province of South Carolina.”

The man named Solomon Lindo asked Mamed, “What do you have in there?”

“In this beater vat?” Mamed asked.

Solomon Lindo nodded.

“Lime,” Mamed said, “urine and water.”

“How many inches of sludge you reckon to find on the bottom of this beater vat?” Lindo asked.

“Three,” Mamed said.

Solomon Lindo nudged me. I stopped working. “Look at me, please,” he said.

Slowly, I turned my face up to him. Unlike Appleby, Lindo had dark eyes.

“And what are you doing?” he asked me.

“Beating this indigo so the air move through it.”

“How long do you beat it?” The man spoke English in a way I hadn’t heard before. He didn’t sound like Appleby at all.

“Till the blue dust come up on the water.”

“And then?”

“We stop beating and let the blueness settle down on the mud.”

“Do you know what happens if you beat the liquid too long?”

“Dye come out wrong,” I said.

Solomon Lindo turned back to Appleby. “You have good people,” he said. The three men headed back up to the house.

That night, Georgia and two other women and I were made to help the cook put together a big pot of chicken gumbo. “No pork,” Appleby had told us. “I can’t give it to the Jew. The man has come all the way from London. Make him the best gumbo in Carolina, ’cause he’s grading our indigo.”

I wanted to know more about this man who avoided the same food as Muslims. We made enough food for ten Negroes, carrying plates and water and food and drinks, and Appleby and his guests ate most of it. Finally they sat slumped in their chairs in the sitting room, smoking cigars, and drinking coffee with whisky. Appleby sent all of the Negroes out of the big house but me. It was the first time in two years that I had been in his presence without Georgia or Mamed close by. I stood in the middle of the room while the three men looked at me.

“My prize Coromantee,” Appleby said to the others. “Just three years here, and perfectly sensible. She helps the others cook. Makes soap. You’ve seen her handle indigo. And the most amazing thing is that she doctors
pregnant slave women. Got her for a steal in Charles Town. She was wasted away to nothing when she came off Sullivan’s Island. I didn’t think she’d survive. But look at her now. Could sell her for twenty times what I paid.”

“And what would you sell her for?” Solomon Lindo asked, eyeing me quickly.

“No less than twenty pounds,” Appleby said.

The third man put down his cigar and stepped up to me. He had a huge belly hanging over his belt, and a big red nose. “How old are you, Mary?” he said.

Buckra men called Negro women “Mary” when they didn’t know their names, but I hated it. I kept my eyes down and my mouth shut.

“Girl,” Appleby said to me, “this here is William King. He practically runs the slave trade in Charles Town. He asked you a question.”

“Fifteen, I reckon,” I said.

“You reckon that, do you?” King said.

“Yessir,” I said.

“She looks more like eighteen to me,” King said. “Any babies yet?”

He was talking to Appleby, so I said nothing.

Appleby suddenly put a drinking glass in my hand and said, “Have some Madeira.”

“Don’t give her that,” Lindo said, taking the glass away. “You’ll make her sick. Don’t give wine to a child.”

“More woman than child,” Appleby said.

“She is not far from childhood,” Lindo said, carefully.

“I’m the trader,” King said. “You stick to indigo, and I’ll tell you about nigger women.” He turned to me again. “How did you learn about indigo?” he asked.

“Mamed taught me.”

King eyed me suspiciously. “Say what?”

Taught
. I realized my mistake.
Taught
was a buckra word. Mamed had warned me never to speak proper English to a buckra. “Done teach me,” I quickly said. “Mamed done teach me indigo.”

Appleby took King off on a tour of the house, but Lindo stayed with me. He scratched his beard. His fingers were long and slender. They were not the fingers of a planter, or an overseer. Perhaps all indigo graders had smooth fingers with clean nails and soft skin.

Lindo wore a tiny cap on his head. It wasn’t anything like the bandana that I liked to wear. It covered a small part of the back of his head. He caught me looking at it.

“Know what that is?” he said, touching his cap.

I shook my head.

“Want to know?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Curious girl?” he said.

I kept staring at him.

“It’s a yarmulke. I’m a Jew. Know what that means?”

I didn’t answer.

Solomon Lindo walked to a desk in the room, pulled out a quill and an inkpot and wrote a message on a piece of parchment. He showed it to me. It read: “Turn around. You will see your mother.”

I spun around. Nothing. I turned back. He smiled, broadly.

“Little trick,” he said, “but I won’t tell anyone.”

I stood frozen before him.

“Don’t worry,” he said again. “I could use a girl like you.”

I heard loud conversation just outside the door. Appleby and King returned, drinking from leather flasks.

“So you are pure African,” King said.

I nodded.

“Let me hear some African talk,” he said.

In Bamanankan, I said that he looked like an evil man.

King laughed. “I don’t understand any of that,” he told the other men, “but I like to see if they can truly speak one of the languages.”

Something burst out of me before I could contain it. “Where do I come from?” I asked.

King smiled at me. He seemed to think this was truly funny. “That’s for you to tell us.”

“Where is my land?”

“Going back, are you?” King said.

Appleby laughed again.

King stepped over to the desk, opened a drawer, unrolled a large piece of parchment and spread it out. He drew wavy lines and told me that was water. On one side of the lines, he drew a circle, and said that was Carolina. On the other side of the lines, he drew an odd shape, something like a mushroom with the left half of the cap overgrown, and said that was Africa.

He drew a dark circle on the mushroom. “She is from here,” he said to the men, pointing to the upper left.

“Coromantee is the best kind of African,” King said, “but, my good man Appleby, there weren’t any Coromantees on the shipment you got. I can tell just by looking that she’s not Coromantee. That’s your very finest breed. Good symmetry and a proud bearing. Handsomer than most. So handsome you almost forget they’re black.”