An Acquaintance with Darkness (8 page)

"Nightflowers," I said.

"I have a whole garden in back. I'll show you later."

"Why did you try to drown yourself?" I asked.

"I jumped off the Navy Yard Bridge." We were paused in front of the parlor door. "I'm one-eighth Negro. I come from below Richmond. I was a slave. My master was my father. But he had three other white daughters, my half-sisters. When their beaux came around they'd always ask, 'Who is that pretty girl?' My half-sisters weren't so pretty. It was a curse that I was. So I had to be sold off. The girls demanded it. I was sold on the block in Richmond. My own half-brother bought me. He was running off to join the Union army. He was so against slavery. He'd fought with Father about it and purchased me as an act of rebellion. He brought me north with him, to Washington, and said, 'Now you're free. And now, so am I. You don't have to go home again and neither do I.' He left me some money, and I lived for a while in a small roominghouse. He went off with the army. He was killed in the Shenandoah Valley last August."

Her calm recitation gave me the chills.

"I ran out of money and had no place to go. I had no way to make a living. I had a choice: Become a fancy woman or drown myself. So I jumped off the bridge. The water was so cold. It was first light. All grayness and mist. No one about, or so I thought. Next thing I knew these two little dwarves were swimming beside me, pulling me out."

I blinked. "Dwarves?"

"I thought I was dreaming. They worked on me. Got the water out of my lungs, then one of them ran off and came back in a little while with your uncle Valentine. He brought me here and Maude took care of me. He gave me a home, got me a tutor, and now I'm instructing the little freedman children at the Ebenezer Free School."

She smiled. "School is out because of the end of the war, and their parents are working. So I brought some here today. He lets me do that, your uncle Valentine. This is the parlor."

All I could see was this girl standing on the block, being auctioned off.
One-eighth Negro.
She did not look Negro. How had she looked up there on the block? I'd heard about slave auctions. Annie had told me of them.
They pick up a girl's dress and show buyers what they're getting.
That's what Annie had told me.
And sold by her own father!

I made myself look at the parlor. It was elegant. In the circular area that formed the bottom tower was a piano. The windows overlooked a side garden and were graced with yellow satin curtains that dripped like tears. The floors were highly polished and there were one or two Persian rugs. There was a cherry highboy, a desk, a gathering of chairs around a round table.

"You like it. You are drawn to it," Marietta said, again reading my thoughts.

I stared at her.
One-eighth Negro. Some of them have powers.
Did she?
I must be careful.

"It's peaceful," I allowed.

"Dr. Bransby likes it that way. Come on upstairs, I want to show you something."

I followed her up the wide, uncarpeted stairs and gasped when she opened the door to a room that was the second-story tower. There was a cushioned window seat in the tower. In the middle of the room was a Sheraton four-poster draped in blue. Again, there was an elegant plainness about it. There was a small ladies' desk, a dressing table with a gilt-framed mirror, a chiffonier, a shelf filled with books. Lying across the blue-and-white bedspread was a blue velvet dressing gown.

"This is your room," she said.

I drew back, angry. "I'm not moving in."

"You don't have to. It's your room when you want to visit. He had it redecorated in blue and white because he knows blue is your color. Go and look at the books in the case. Go on."

Gingerly I stepped into the room and went to the bookcase.

Sir Walter Scott;
The Adventures of Roderick Random
by Smollett; the plays of Shakespeare; John Ruffini's
Lavinia—all
three volumes;
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë; and so many others! I ran my fingers over the books, then backed away.

"Come downstairs now. Meet my charges."

Downstairs in the large kitchen in back of the house, Maude was at the stove, and six brown children, all under the age of ten, were pulling sticky candy. The girls wore pinafores, the boys large aprons. They were paired off into three sets, and they stood across the table from each other, the gooey caramel-colored candy stretched out between them. Their faces were splotched with flour. They were having a grand time of it, and when Marietta and I came into the room, they didn't stop. She had to clap her hands and silence them to introduce me.

"All right, all right, now you all will have to finish soon. Dr. Bransby will be back for lunch, and I told him we'd be finished."

"Help us, help us, Marietta," they begged. They gathered around her, sticky hands and all.

She handed me an apron. "We'll both help and get the job done."

I hadn't made candy like this since I was a child. And soon Marietta and I were both helping. Then the candy "set" and we got the children washed and helped Maude pack lunches for them—apples, cheese, biscuits. Six checkered napkins full. Maude made a pitcher of lemonade. They clutched the napkins close, and Marietta had them file out the back door.

Never had I seen a garden like this. "Is that a grape arbor?" I asked.

The children were gathering around the arbor, under the vine, and starting to eat their lunches.

"Not grape," Marietta said. "It's a chocolate vine. See how the branches are covered with small purple-brown flowers? Likely you thought they were grapes. As the afternoon warms, it will produce a sweet-spicy scent. It gets stronger at night. That other vine, growing on the side of the house, is a serpent gourd. The white flowers open late afternoon and bloom all night."

I nodded and walked across a stone path to the shed.

"Don't go there," she said. "Nobody goes there. It's Dr. Bransby's laboratory. With some specimens in it."

"What kind of specimens?"

"He does experiments on animals. Don't worry. They're all dead." She met my eyes.

I shivered in the warm sun. "I just wanted to see the rest of the flowers," I said.

"All right, then, I'll show you. Here. These by the shed wall are mouse plants. Don't they look like mice?"

They did, all clustered in a bunch like that. The flowers had dark brown tops and white bottoms, and a long tail wound out of each one. "Why are they blooming now?" I asked.

"I couldn't resist planting them." She beamed. "They aren't nightflowers, but they just look so dear. Like mice having a meeting."

"What is
that?
"

"Devil's tongue." She sighed. "I had such trouble growing it. I had to start it in a pot in your uncle's laboratory at the college. Under a skylight. And look how the flies are drawn to it. But it has a certain beauty. Sometimes it grows six inches a day. When it gets to eight feet a long liver-colored tongue will grow out of that green spike. And it will smell of decayed fish."

Was she mad? "Why do you want to grow something like that?"

"It has its own beauty. Everything does. Don't you think there is a reason for everything that exists in this world? And everything that happens? Even the bad?"

"No."

"I do. Or I wouldn't be standing here talking to you like this now. So much bad has happened to me. I look at it like fertilizer in a garden. It has helped my soul to grow."

"Well, I've had fertilizer in my life, too, then. But my soul could have done without it."

"You don't know that yet, do you?"

Now, what did she mean by that?

"This," she said, leading me over to a flower with willowlike leaves, "is an evening primrose. It will be yellow at dusk and gives off a lemony scent. This is a night-blooming cereus. The petals that bloom tonight will be white with dark yellow spikes surrounding them. Sometimes I cut one off and bring it into the house. By midnight it will be perfect."

"Those are the ones Uncle Valentine sent for my mother's wake."

"Yes. We often send some when a patient dies. It comforts him to do so."

"Why do you plant only flowers that bloom at night?"

"It intrigues me to know that certain things can only happen at night," she said. "It's a little sad, I think. Thoreau said that moonlight is a light we have had all day but have not appreciated, and proves how remarkable a lesser light can be when a greater light has departed."

We walked back to the pond. She showed me the water flower, spider lily, the turtleheaded flower, the maiden grass at the pond's edge. "The people from the Smithsonian have tried to get in here and see my flowers," she said, "but I won't allow them in."

"Why?"

"I want to keep this private. Your uncle enjoys it. I want it to be my gift to him for saving my life. And taking care of it gives me an excuse to keep coming and seeing him."

"If my uncle treated you so well, why did you move out?"

"Because it was time to be on my own. And because then he could give the room to someone else who needed it."

"Who's in there now? Someone else whose life he saved?"

"Someone whose life he's trying to save," she said soberly. "Her name is Addie Bassett. She's an old Negro woman. Don't go near her, ever."

"You needn't worry," I said. "I won't be coming back after today."

She was peeling apples for the children. They had crowded around her. "You'll be back," she said. She had the graciousness to flush and lower her gaze. "Sometimes I just know things," she said. "I can't help it and I don't like it, but sometimes I just do."

"And you think you know that I'm going to come and live here?"

"Yes."

"Well, you're wrong."

She sighed. "You'd best go inside and clean up. You've got flour on your face.... He'll be here soon. He likes his guests to be on time. He's a good man. He gives money to the Ebenezer Free School. He cares for the health of my students free of charge. Christmas Day there is a constant stream of visitors here, people bringing him gifts because he helped them somehow. Here." She bent to cut a night-blooming cereus. "Wrap it in a wet cloth, then put it in water. Spanish servants in the sixteenth century dipped the branches in oil and burned them as torches at night."

I turned and went back into the house. Maude was bustling around as if President Lincoln himself were coming for lunch. She wrapped the flower in wet paper for me.

"Who is she?" I asked about Marietta.

She wiped the flour off my face. "Someone very special."

"I don't like her."

"Your uncle does. Very much. So be careful what you say about her."

It was just the two of us at the long, polished dining room table. Maude served. For the honor, she had changed into gray moiré with a white pinafore apron. The dress rustled as she moved about the room. She had made something called felet de beef. The windows were open and the mild April air ruffled the curtains. From outside could be heard the
pop-pop-popp
ing of some firecrackers a block or so away.

When she left the room, I waited to speak. I did not know what the purpose of this luncheon was; I would find out before I went mouthing off about anything.

"On the way here I saw a group of hoodlums attacking a Negro," he said. "I had to send for a policeman. I'm afraid that prejudice is becoming stronger against the Negro." He paused to take a sip of wine. His table manners were impeccable, I noticed, just like everything about his person. He was clean-shaven and his hands were long, the nails trimmed and clean. His shirt was the whitest, his cravat of good silk. And he gave off some spicy scent. Was it tobacco? Soap? I didn't know. But he fascinated me.

"Washington has lived through all kinds of threats. That of a Confederate takeover. Betrayal, physical hardship, and loss of spirit. Now some of our best Southern families here and elsewhere will suffer dishonor and poverty. I wrote asking your aunt Susan to come and live with me. A widow. What will she do in Richmond? It's all but destroyed. But no, she's as stubborn as your mother. This is my home,' she 'Here I will stay. Richmond will rebuild.'" He shook his head. "I just never will understand women."

Aunt Susie was the youngest in their family. Before I could reply, he gave the conversation a new turn. "Have you ever heard of Alexander Shepherd?"

"No, sir."

"In 1861 he was a gas fitter's assistant. He is now one of four owners of the
Evening Star
newspaper.
Family and heritage no longer matter. The war has made instant millionaires. People for whom money is the only reward." He shook his head and spooned his felet de beef into his mouth.

"Mrs. McQuade, my teacher, says the next thirty years will make many millionaires," I told him.

"She's a good woman. Very smart. I have been to visit her at the school. She says you are getting the highest marks in French, English literature, composition, and drama."

"You visited my school?"

"I wanted Mrs. McQuade to know you are not without family. She asked when you are coming back."

I was dumbstruck. In all the time we'd lived in Washington, Mama had never set foot in my school.

"All the girls there have family paying close mind to their progress," he said.

I thought of Myra Mott, Stephanie Wilson, Melanie Hawkes. Family? They had more than family. They had kinfolk that went back to the original settlers of Maryland and Virginia. The girls lived in houses that would make this look like a shack on Murder Bay. Before the war they had summered in Saratoga and their mothers had taken shopping trips to New York. Their fathers had business dealings in Lexington, New Orleans, connections in Boston.
They banked in London, were on familiar terms with Du Ponts in Delaware.

"Mrs. McQuade knows your mother did not have time to attend theatricals you were in. Or your piano recitals. Because she had to work for a living. I would be most happy to attend. If my presence does not offend you."

He was being so kind. It made me ashamed for giving him an uneven time of it.

"There are no strings attached. I assure you. By the way, did you know that Mrs. McQuade's maiden name is Desrayaux? That her parents were guillotined in the French Revolution?"