Cion (8 page)

Nicodemus, on the other hand, was punished for learning to read and write, which was a very serious crime for a slave. It turned out that when one of The Owner’s daughters came to the storytelling sessions at the slave quarters she struck up a close friendship with Nicodemus. One thing led to another and they ended up teaching each other what they knew best: she teaching him how to read and write, he teaching her how to fashion a reed flute, how to tongue and slur it to produce full-bodied notes, and also how to play the commies—the unglazed earthenware marbles that the white kids bought from the plantation store. She was so excited that she blurted out these activities to everyone at the big house, including her mother. Nicodemus received the whipping of his life.

The Owner was becoming increasingly restless, and there were good reasons for that. Lately untoward things were happening at the plantation. A trusted white servant escaped with her African lover, crossing the Ohio River at Gallipolis and melting into the Underground Railroad, possibly to Canada. The Owner felt that he was losing his grip because it was the second time there had been such a scandal on his plantation—although on the first occasion the escape was foiled and the woman—who had disguised herself as a man to facilitate the escape—was now languishing in the county jail charged with the theft of Mr. Fairfield’s property. The property, of course, was the man with whom she was escaping with a view to settling in Ohio where they could live as husband and wife since they had heard that there was no slavery in that state. The man was severely flogged and then chained outside like a dog for weeks on end. The Owner hoped this would serve as an example to all those who planned to take such daring but foolhardy action. But now here again he was faced with a similar situation, and to add to his frustration the escape had been carried out successfully. Slave chasers with their vicious dogs and trusty steeds had returned empty-handed.

Random escapes had happened at Fairfield Farms before, but this caused a buzz of excitement in the slave community because it involved a white woman. Whites rarely escaped from the plantation because they had better privileges than black slaves.

The Owner had devised various ways of keeping white women as slaves. Even though white slavery was thought to have come to an end soon after the Revolutionary War, at Fairfield Farms the practice continued right into the 1840s because white women were essential for the breeding of mulatto children. Gone were the days when The Owner could obtain mulatto children from mating white men with black women. With the large-scale breeding that was happening at the plantation, there were just not enough white men to service the black women. White men were free to seek their fortunes elsewhere. And they did. They worked their way up and bought their own farms and their own slaves. Or sold their labor in the cities. Mating white women with black studs was the answer. In an age where women were considered inferior to men in any case, and wives were the property of their husbands, it was easier and more cost-effective to hold white women in bondage than to employ white studs.

The Owner got away with keeping white slaves by marrying white women in reduced circumstances to blacks, which enabled him to hold the women legally as slaves. If any curious official asked questions, especially those self-righteous church people who cringed at the very notion of white slavery and condemned it as unchristian, The Owner took refuge in the one-drop rule, claiming that the women were rightly “colored” concocting some distant non-white ancestry for the wenches. Often he randomly designated some of the women octoroons or quintroons, using manufactured evidence. Their mulatto children were therefore born into slavery.

At Fairfield Farms there were mulattos who had been bred so white it was impossible to tell them apart from the rest of the whites, and they were all slaves. As they were too white to sell easily on the open market, they served The Owner by being overseers and slave catchers.

The breeding of mulatto children who looked mulatto rather than white had become the core business of Fairfield Farms; hence the indispensability of the white female who had to mate with pitch-black studs. On many occasions the boys saw young white women receiving a good whipping for refusing to sleep with black studs. Nicodemus knew that one day he would be one of those studs and would be having a field day among specially selected females of all colors. Abednego, on the other hand, knew that sooner rather than later his head would be on the auction block.

The very thought made the Abyssinian Queen frantic and she intensified her performances. Taking her cue from the Monkey Wrench she packed provisions of extra clothes, dried fruit, ropes and knives for the boys, and had two bundles ready in case they had to take off without warning. Abednego’s bundle was wrapped in the crazy quilt and Nicodemus’s in the sampler.

But now her stories and songs included celebration, for the plantation grapevine had brought it to her that Nicodemus’s father had been manumitted in Kentucky, and had settled across the Ohio River in a community of free blacks on the outskirts of Cincinnati.

“Y’all gonna be free, my boys,” she told them. “One day y’all gonna cross the River Jordan to be with Nicodemus’s papa.”

The ghost of Nicodemus takes me back to the city of Athens. I am sitting next to Obed, who is driving Ruth’s rusty GMC and is enthusing about his famous Native American forebear, Harry Corbett, who distinguished himself in this or that theater of the Civil War. He compares him to the strong and ancient sycamores, hickories and walnuts among which the truck is burping its way. I listen without comment, my squinting eyes fixed on a perfectly round sun floating like a big silver balloon above the black trees that are wading in fog. Its rays cannot penetrate the denseness. I wonder how Obed’s eyes are able to see through it since he is driving like a stuntman in a cheap movie chase scene even though only a few feet of the road in front of him are visible. To add to my discomfort the window on his side is half-opened—it is stuck and can’t roll up, he explains—and a crisp wind hits against my face. The smell is clean and fresh, but the chill pierces my skull with needles that leave me with a headache.

He is crunching on tortilla chips as he expresses his disappointment that the man’s name was Harry Corbett and not Singing Ankle or Coughing Horse or something “Indian” like that. He blames the white man for proselytizing among his forebears until they lost their names that were full of poetry and music so that today he is saddled with an “Indian” ancestor with a name like Harry Corbett. I remember that it was with great pride that Ruth told me when the two of us sat on the porch yesterday afternoon that Harry Corbett was a good Christian man who had done away with “them funny Indian names.” I also remember that when I sought assistance from the sciolist on how to deal with the ghosts of the past in rural America, he told me always to bear in mind one thing:
memory thrives on transforming the past to palliate the present.

It strikes me that as he negotiates the sharp bends on this road to Athens: Obed is desperately negotiating his way along the paths of a foggy past to validate his present. He cannot let go, for the past is all he has. They can’t let go; he and his mother. Two sides of the same coin. Even as these thoughts run through my mind I am well aware that I am being judgmental. But I cannot help making these observations even though I have only spent four days with this family because the past is all they ever talk about with joy and pride in their eyes. Ruth told me yesterday as we sipped her homemade root beer: “There’s one darn thing they ain’t gonna take from us…our heritage.” Generations of mothers teach their children to be proud of their origins because, and she stressed this: “We’re everybody. One day the whole world will look like us.”

Perhaps that is why when others were posing as leprechauns, politicians and superheroes, Obed resurrected a ghost from the dramatis personae of his ancestry. And this, unfortunately, landed him in the trouble we are trying to resolve today. He doesn’t seem to be worried a bit about it, though, and would rather boast about Harry Corbett than focus on the plan I have been trying to outline for him to avoid a court case that will surely land him in jail. I wish I could wipe the bravado off his face and force him to face his situation, especially because it took me a lot of patience and persuasion to get the victim of his silly actions to agree to meet us today.

Yesterday I phoned the sorority on Washington Street and talked to Beth Eddy for a long time, begging her to withdraw the charges against Obed. It was in the spirit of the day, I pleaded. He had gone to the house with the sole intention of scaring the girls rather than for any sinister motive. It was an innocent prank that went awry.

After consulting with her sorority sisters she finally agreed to meet us, provided members of the Athens County Mediation Council were invited. Even if we were to convince her to withdraw the charges she would not do so without proper mediation, she said, for there should be some form of restitution for the indignity she suffered. She agreed to contact the mediation people when I explained that I could not do so since I am a stranger in these parts. I would not know how to go about arranging such a meeting. Then I had to persuade Obed to come with me this morning. He was not quite convinced, especially because I could not explain exactly what mediation entailed. I have no experience of it. It was only after I told him the chances of Ruth finding out about his arrest were very slim if we tried to resolve the case before it reached the courts of law that he agreed to borrow his mommy’s truck under the pretext that we were going to fix my papers—whatever that meant—in Athens.

“Much as I’d like to hear more about Harry Corbett I think we should talk about what you’re going to say to the girl,” I finally tell him, seizing an opportunity availed by a pause while he stuffs more tortilla chips into his mouth.

“Don’t you worry yourself, homeboy,” he says. “I’m gonna walk. And you know why I’m gonna walk? ’Cause I ain’t done nothing.”

“We are not going there to walk, Obed. We are going there to show remorse and to ask for forgiveness.”

“I’m damned if I ask for nobody’s pardon. It’s like saying I’m guilty. You don’t know these guys, man, they gonna nail my ass!” he screams.

“We don’t want a trial because they’re surely going to nail your ass if there’s a trial. We are going to beg Beth Eddy to withdraw the case, so you better humble yourself starting now.”

He throws a glance at me and smiles cynically, shaking his head as if he pities me for my ignorance. Obviously he has no faith in my strategy. I imagine what he is thinking: what does a stranger from Africa know about the workings of justice in America, which, judging from what he was hollering to the police when they dragged him away that night of the parade of creatures, has always been unfair to his people? He brushes his jet-black hair with his fingers, adjusts the rubber band on his ponytail and then, with the same fingers, reaches for the tortilla chips in a packet next to the gear shift. He shoves them into his mouth and then goes back to fiddling with his mane.

“Harry Corbett was an old Shawnee chief,” he says. “This is Shawnee hair.”

Shawnee? The Harry Corbett that Ruth told me about yesterday was Cherokee. She was gushing about her being a Cherokee princess since she was a descendant of Cherokee blue blood in the form of the same Mr. Corbett. Her eyes were shining with pride and her ample body was gently rocking Mahlon Quigley’s swing on which we were both relaxing. Although I don’t know if I can accurately call it relaxing on her part since her hands were quite busy. She was crocheting what she called a Navajo blanket, the bulk of which was resting on her knees in its deep blue, light blue, white and cream colors.

Obed had remarked before he left for Stewart that I had done wonders for his mama because he had never seen her so relaxed. She was always working herself to death and yelling at everybody and didn’t have time for anybody. Yet there she was…sitting with me on the porch sipping root beer and occasionally forgetting about the heavy blanket to focus on giving me an education about her world and its politics.

From time to time she reached for red pieces of some delicacy from the pocket of her sweat shirt and threw them into her mouth. She closed her eyes as the pieces melted in her mouth. Her teeth were red as a result. She told me she wouldn’t share the delicacy with me because I would not like it. It was an acquired taste, I presumed. It was fired shale—she referred to it as red slate rock—that they used to eat as kids and pretended that they were bleeding because their tongues were red. She had been addicted to it from childhood. It was her only vice. It was a habit her people learned from slavery. Slaves ate mud to keep the hunger pangs away. They fired or baked it.

“It’s a tradition now of some folks. When I came from Alabama in a bus a woman and her little daughter were chewing on little pieces of baked mud.”

Down the narrow blacktop a number of men and women were all walking in the same direction. Big mothers in sweat suits and lean willowy fathers in faded jeans and colorful check shirts. Young men and women who were fast approaching the heaviness of the mothers. They walked unhurriedly, some in couples and others singly.

“This is a neighborhood of color,” said Ruth, her arms making a grand sweep in the direction of her passing neighbors. I marveled at the fact that people here all had similar features, as if they belonged to one family.

“They’re all related, that’s why,” she said. “There’s very few people who ain’t my relations.”

“And you all have strong Native American features,” I observed.

“Ain’t no pure Indians no more. Them pure Indians was all bred out. Like whites will all be bred out. That’s what scares them most. They gonna be bred out and everyone in the world will look like us.”

The people of Kilvert were going to vote at the firehouse in Stewart, she told me. Democratic Party sympathizers had organized a bus to ferry those who did not have cars to the polling station because they were scraping around for every little vote they could get for John Kerry, their presidential candidate. She herself had voted quite early in the morning, which was why she could now relax with me and enjoy a well-earned drink. It was Election Day and she was not going to desecrate it by working, except of course cooking dinner for her family. Just like Sunday. Although on Sundays she did sneak in some quilting in the afternoons when she thought God was not looking. Even as she was saying all this she continued with her crocheting. Perhaps she does not consider it work.

Unlike her neighbors, who were surely going to vote for the Democrats, she voted for George W. Bush. And did I know why she voted for George W. Bush? Because George W. Bush was a man of God. He got his messages direct from God. God’s truth was revealed only through him. And did I know again why she voted for George W. Bush?

“Because the GOP freed them slaves!” she said with a triumphant flourish.

And none of the people of Kilvert knew that. They had all bought into the lies propagated every day by the liberal media. That was why they were out in droves voting for the Democratic Party candidate. The “old-timers” knew the truth, which was why the Republican Party was the party of “them colored folks.” The phrase jolted me a bit because I had only seen it in old books and didn’t know that it was still in use…like the old-time “high-yella-nigger” that was dropped at the dinner table that first evening. The “old-timers” knew what the Kilvert folks didn’t know, that the Democrats fought a whole Civil War in order to keep “them colored folks” as slaves and then committed lots of atrocities during that war. They captured and tortured and slew the revered Harry Corbett to boot. They raped and pillaged and killed indiscriminately. The Civil War hero certainly did not sacrifice his life so that today his descendants should vote for people who were responsible for his murder.

“I tell them every day, if it was not for the GOP you’d all be slaves today,” she said, looking at them pityingly as their numbers increased toward the three-way stop where they would catch the bus.

Ruth looked at me as if she expected me to say something, or perhaps ask a question. She saw my befuddled look and decided to ask the question herself: did I know why “them colored folks” turned their backs on the GOP even though it had freed them from slavery?

“Franklin D. Roosevelt!” she provided the instant answer. “He was a cripple in a wheelchair. He gave them poor people programs. Colored folks got lotsa programs ’cause they was poor. Roosevelt bought them colored folks with food from them Republicans.”

She was fuming as if she was talking of some treachery that happened only yesterday against her own children.

Ruth was a lone voice because everyone else in the village, including members of her own family, was on the opposite side. She saw a political virgin in me, someone who could be groomed and won over to the side of sanity. A prospective ally in the political battlefields of her dinner table and living room.

“You being from Africa and all,” she said, “you gotta love George W. Bush. He give lotsa money to Africa. You know why he give lotsa money to Africa? ’Cause America owes Africa plenty for slavery.”

It was interesting to see how animated she got when she talked about these matters. I was affording her a captive audience, a luxury she never has because no one in her family seems to share her obsession with politics, let alone her political perspective. I was also a receptive audience and did not disagree on any issue as Obed often did—if only to annoy her. Of course, even if I disagreed on any point I would not have the heart to say so. I would not want to hurt her feelings by being a disagreeable guest. She certainly has welcomed me with open arms into her family. Hers is the generosity of the poor. Nowhere in the well-to-do sectors of society would a stranger be welcomed so warmly…without even knowing anything about him.

On my second day here she allocated me the root cellar under the wrap-around porch to sleep in—a big room with the door opening to the outside on the brick portion of the building. This is where she keeps her preserved food. My single bed is surrounded by walls of shelves laden with bottles of sauces and relishes that she has made herself. A salted and smoked side of a hog hangs from sharp hooks on the ceiling. She actually prepared the room herself, sweeping and dusting everything in sight, including the carcass. At the same time she kept on apologizing for putting me up in a cellar: it was not the most comfortable room in the world because of its generous ventilation so that her meat would not spoil. People did not normally keep meat in their cellars, she explained—cured or not cured it would spoil because of the heat and humidity. But her cellar was different. It stayed cool because of the gaps between some rows of bricks which allowed free circulation of air. It was all due to Mr. Quigley’s inventive mind, she beamed proudly. It was a brilliant feat to have a dry cellar in Kilvert, which is low-lying and wet. Of course in winter no one can sleep here. If the smell of smoke from the meat was too overpowering at night I must not hesitate to tell her in the morning. She would transfer either me or the meat to the attic. She could be preparing the attic for me right away but it would take a lot of work and time since it was crammed with Obed’s and Mahlon’s junk and there was hardly room to breathe there.