Diann Ducharme (14 page)

After the lesson, I pulled
Robinson Crusoe
from the pile of things on the table. I spanned the pages with my thumb, the paper stirring up the air as it fanned from cover to cover. We had already read through three quarters of the book, I was amazed to see, as I removed the little leather bookmark.

This was my favorite part of the lesson, and sometimes I snuck glances at Ben while I was reading aloud, to see the rapturous expression on his face. At times my eyes would accidentally meet with his startling blue ones, and I’d hurriedly look back at the page. But sometimes Ben would be staring out to sea, lost in the story. I wondered what everything on the island looked like in Ben’s imagination, and if it looked the way it looked in mine.

From watching him under my eyelids the past few weeks I had learned that he paid the strictest attention to the parts of the book that bored me to death with their details, such as the building of Crusoe’s cave house or the descriptions of his tools.

Ben would nod and shout vigorously in approval at his craftsmanship, and outright marvel at Crusoe’s persistence in hunting and fishing. Then he would regale me with his own stories and techniques. I think he was proud that his very own occupations were written about in this book of literature.

In today’s reading Crusoe was finally about to have contact with another human being, after twenty-five years on the island with only himself, the goats, and his parrot Pol for company. A footprint had been found in the sand, and Crusoe was afraid for his life. Ben’s fingers
drummed loudly on the table, and his right leg jiggled up and down as I read.

I sailed through the part about Crusoe saving Friday’s life from the savages, and the bit about making Friday his slave, until Ben interjected irritably, “I don’t get why Crusoe wants Friday to be his own personal slave. You’d think he’d be pleased enough with the company. Couldn’t Crusoe and Friday just be friends?”

My answer came too quickly for me. “It’s repayment for saving the man’s life. You can see that Friday doesn’t mind. He
wants
to help Crusoe.”

Ben snuffed through his nose. “Have you ever been saved by someone? Did it turn you into a dog, your savior into your master?”

“I’ve never found myself in such a situation, thank God.”

“Well, ’course you haven’t. You have your book learning, and it’s mighty fine and all that. But I know about other things, about fishing, hunting, boat-building, and yes, since I have to do all these things on the water, I know about saving lives, when I have to.

“And if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that men don’t go following around the one that saved them like a slave for the rest of their natural-born lives. Might invite ’em to supper or give ’em a haul of fish for their thankfulness, but slaving, no ma’am.”

“Maybe that was the custom in the early 1700s, when Defoe wrote the novel. Myself, I always try to take into account the historical framework surrounding a book. It’s part of the critical interpretation.” My didactic tone landed too heavy on the pine porch, even to me.

“You mean the part of history back when white folks decided that enslaving the blacks was a dandy idea? Seems to me Crusoe is a racist, plain and simple.”

A thick tar bubbled and stirred inside me.
Crusoe, a racist?
“No, I don’t see it that way at all.”

“You know, I find I don’t have as much in common with Crusoe as
I thought I did,” he said petulantly, crossing his arms across his chest. “Friday. What kind of a knucklehead name is that, anyway?”

Ben’s words caught me off guard, as if an adorable, playful puppy had suddenly growled and bitten my finger with its needle-sharp teeth. I had no idea he felt this strongly about anything, except maybe fish.

He pointed agitatedly to the book, in which I was still marking the page with a forgotten index finger. “And ’course, the man’s black. What if he had been a white man? I bet it would have ended up an entirely different kind of book.”

“I don’t think so,” I said stubbornly.

He looked at me with narrowed eyes, as if suddenly seeing me in a bright light. “But I guess you and your family were slave owners, and not too long ago at that. I bet your pap wishes he still had his slave shacks filled to the roofs.”

My sunburn suddenly felt cool on my cheeks. “Pardon me,
Mr. Whimble
, but you are being rude. We have done nothing but help you! You will apologize for your criticism of my daddy, or I’ll have you fired from your guide job!”

I accidentally kicked Ben’s shin under the table when I uncrossed my legs, but I couldn’t apologize.

His face created a crookedly evil grimace I’d never seen him make before. “Now, you don’t have to go and tattle to your daddy. We’re just talking here, you know, having one of your ’critical inter-patations.’ I might as well ask you, though, where it is
you
stand on the issue of black and white, being a planter’s daughter your whole life. What’s it like having folks serve you all day, every day?”

The sickening sludge inside me was sloshing around, hot and thick. I couldn’t tell him that I thought it was a comfortable life, a happy life, while it had lasted.

I said quietly, “I suppose not many folks on the Banks owned slaves before the war.”

There were no plantations, no extensive fields of tobacco, rice, or cotton for the Bankers. Slavery had likely never taken hold on the islands, with nothing to grow except vegetables, nothing to sell except fish and feral horses.

“Guess you could say we’re our own slaves out here on the Banks. We each do our own work. It’s just our way.”

His self-righteousness irked me. I said, “And I suppose you all get along like pie out here. One big happy family of white and black.”

“There’s good and bad of both colors. But I have lots of Negro friends, sure. I’d trust them with my life.”

“
We
care for our Negroes. They’re like our family members. We all get along fine. We know where the other stands. And we are helping them to have better lives. We have made Christians of them, and take them to church with us.”

He rolled his eyes. “Better lives? Christians? You don’t actually believe that manure, do you? Somebody fed you that stuff, and you ate it up and licked the plate clean. You’re not fooling anyone with all that do-good talk.”

My rage lowered my voice to a hiss. “My uncle Jack died fighting for the South. He was the best man I have ever known. And our Negroes loved him. They saw his goodness.”

I could hardly discuss my dear uncle with this disgusting fisherman who didn’t know me at all.

“I’m sorry about your uncle, I truly am, but he died in vain, fighting to keep black folks in bondage. Owning other people just ain’t right.”

I shook my head. “I love Winnie like my own mother! She didn’t leave us after the war, because she cares for our family. Can’t you see
that? We have given her a home, with a bed, and good food. You can’t call that wrong.”

“Are you that simple? You don’t even know the hardships she’s had to endure at the hands of your family. As for the woman’s bed, I’ve seen her sleeping in a hammock on your porch! I don’t see any of
you
sleeping out of doors. You should ask her sometime how she really feels about you folks!”

He was an insufferably ignorant buffoon. I couldn’t even look at him anymore. “How dare you judge me, my family? What do you know about anything, Benjamin Whimble? Fishing? Hunting? Anyone can do those things, and probably better than you can!” An angry tear squirted from my eye and ran for its life down my cheek. “You don’t fool me. You’re an expert at killing, not some benevolent nature saint, like you want me to think. You take the lives of ducks and geese looking for a place to rest, a bite to eat. You ambush those beautiful waterbirds for their feathers! For ladies’ hats! And you lay down nets at the exact spots fish come to lay their eggs. You chase down turtles for stew! So be careful who you judge, Benjamin. We all take advantage when we can. You’re no better than anyone else.”

He looked at me, his face a mask of gray revulsion. “I reckoned you to be a different kind of gal, Miss Sinclair. But you ain’t nothing special after all.”

He stood up and walked quickly down the porch steps, taking out a little piece of paper from a trouser pocket and throwing it down in the sand.

“Don’t bother coming back here, Benjamin. You’re not welcome!” I hollered, even though he had already disappeared around the corner of the cottage.

I stood up slowly on trembling legs, my head throbbing in shock. Ben’s scrap of paper skittered over the sand like a gull feather. I stumbled down the porch steps and chased after it. It was a torn piece
of old envelope, folded in half. My name was written on the outside:
“Deer Abee.”

I opened it to see Ben’s childlike lettering over every inch of the paper. He had tried to write in smaller letters than he normally did, so that he could fit everything he wanted to say on the little paper.

“Heer iz the res apee fer cootr stu.”

He went on and on, describing in minute detail how to make a stew from the turtle’s meat. At the bottom of the paper, he wrote,
“keep the shel fer a stu bole.”

He thought he was so smart. Didn’t he realize that Winnie couldn’t even read a recipe card?

Keep the shell for a bowl
, he wrote. How lovely. I could just imagine proper company taking notice of it on our dining room table back home.

As I crumpled the note in my hand, I hiccupped laughter through a stream of tears. I looked over at the turtle shell sitting innocently on the porch, the headless body curled inside somewhere.

Winnie walked up beside me and placed her big warm hand on my miserable head. “Don’t you worry none, Miz Abby. This messed-up world ain’t nothing to do with you.”

I turned to look at her with my sore eyes. She had somehow been listening to our every word. “Were you spying on us? For Mama? Even you don’t trust me to act a lady?”

She shook her head. “Your mama don’t know nothing about me setting at the window, so don’t you be saying nothing about it, mind?”

“But why?”

She looked at me with the mischievous eyes of a child and recited the alphabet, right there on the beach. Then she bent over and, with her forefinger, scrawled her name in the sand.

I realized then that Ben hadn’t been the only person I was teaching.
She must have been standing right by the porch window during the lessons, memorizing and reciting along with Ben.

But the thought of Winnie, sneaking around in the name of learning, pulled me down with a bucket of sadness. She was trapped in her dark skin even though the slaves had been free for three years now.

Mercy! All around me people were yearning for just the smallest amount of education. Twenty-six letters, that was all. They all lined up in my mind now, a row of orderly sticks and curls. Five vowels, twenty-one consonants. Endless combinations, and the basis of all education.

In Winnie’s handsome face I saw myself, a baby in her rocking black arms. The seed of racism grew inside me even then, an infant in the arms of a slave. It was as common and as simple as the alphabet, the origin of all of my future learning. Since then, it had penetrated and poisoned each and every part of my mind. I doubted I could even think without it.

I grabbed Winnie’s hand and held it so tightly I thought I’d break the bones in both of our hands.

I
DIDN’T EXPECT
B
EN, EVEN THOUGH
I
SAT MYSELF IN A ROCKER ON THE
porch every afternoon, watching the shell chime dangle in the breeze. I squinted at the male beachcombers as they strolled up and down the
shore, but they didn’t have to get very close for me to pick out their unnatural gaits and virginal skin.

I wanted to reread
Robinson Crusoe
, to try to see the book with fresh eyes, to figure out what went wrong that day and try to make things right again. I opened it up to where we’d left off and read a couple of sentences, but I was distracted by some grains of sand that had lodged themselves along the spine of the book, and the pages that had warped a bit in the humid air. I closed the book without swiping the sand away. And now it stared at me from the porch table, its innocuous brown cover disguising its questionable contents.

As the afternoons dragged by, my spirits deflated so markedly that Winnie hurried to procure some cloth and a pattern from New Bern. The package had arrived midweek, and she was still busily sewing my bathing costume. Whether Mama had given her approval for it or not remained a mystery. Except for Winnie, no one had laid eyes on her for days. We just heard her hollering for lemonade and toast.