Douglass’ Women (13 page)

I became sadly disappointed in Virginia. How cruel to encourage women to work, then end up prizing leisure.

After dinner, I gathered my gloves, fan. I curtsied and went on deck. The sea calmed me. There isn’t anything more beautiful than a night sea. Water, black as velvet. Overhead, a sky filled with bright, glittering stars.

“Have I offended you?”

I swung around, startled. “No, Mr. Newcombe. But your stories became less interesting as the women became more dull. God gave women minds to use.”

“Not all women are unhappy with their lot. Whereas you … ?” His fingers grazed mine.

“You think I’m wealthy?”

“Wealth makes you all the more beautiful. Virginia could still use a woman like you.”

“Scoundrel.”

“A charming word from your lips.”

He meant to kiss me. But as his hands gripped my shoulders, I turned aside.

“Forgive me. I’ve acted less the gentleman.”

“I learned long ago that the words ‘gentle’ and ‘man’ do not usually go together.”

“So harsh, Miss Assing.”

“Merely a realist.”

Mr. Newcombe guided me toward the bow. Sailors were watching us with interest.

“I would like to issue an invitation. Please say you’ll come to my home. You remind me of my mother. Nothing diminished her strength. Until her death, she carried on as well as my father. Tilling, laying seed, strangling hens when needed.

“True, my sisters are soft. And my nieces are as silly and delightful as sugarplums. But what is civilization without softness? Without kindness and good-hearted women? A woman’s duty is to lend charm, pleasantness to the household.”

“Then, I wonder how you ever could’ve loved your mother? If she was indeed as strong as you say.”

Mr. Newcombe flushed.

“Forgive my manners.” I clutched the railing and stared at the moon’s watery trail. I was indeed becoming too bold.

“No, do not apologize. It ruins the effect. I’m almost tempted to offer you tobacco.” Mr. Newcombe chuckled and sauntered away.

I was left blushing.

Sailors guffawed. Mr. Newcombe had neatly put me in my place.

Chagrined, I felt vulnerable. Childish and seventeen again.

I do not know what awakened me. I tremble as I write this, for it was indeed too terrible, what I heard and what I saw.

At first I thought it was the wind howling, shrieking like a banshee of ghosts. There were sounds, too, of a weight being thrown or dropped, then, yawning silence. The noises as much as the unnatural quiet made me want to investigate. How I wish I had not.

I threw on my wrap, not caring that my hair was unbound, and flung open my cabin’s door. The wind was fierce and, for a moment, I thought how it would knock me overboard. Calm seas had turned restless. My resolve lessened and I thought to return to my cabin. The sounds were probably the wind lashing the sails, the wood straining under pressure, the ship creaking, shuddering at its rough progress.

But a scream—a woman’s scream—held me.

There were women, I knew—thin, pale women down below—who were only allowed on deck between the hours of eight and ten and four and six. In first class, there was only myself and Frau Mueller. No honest woman would be out in this early morning with the moon still high, the wet spray stinging, and darkness shielding. The scream, more piteous, echoed again. I stepped gingerly, clutching the rail.

Just around the bend, I saw Mr. Newcombe, no longer neat, elegant. His hair, wind-swept, his shirt wrinkled, open
at the neck, his pants hastily drawn over bare feet. He looked distraught, wild-eyed.

I looked to where he was looking. One leg over the rail, was a woman, stark naked. So black she almost blended into the velvet night. Had she kept still, I might not have seen her. Or else thought she was a mirage come out of the ocean’s depths to haunt. Or, perhaps, some forlorn spirit invisibly riding the Arctic wind. But the cold sent tremors through her body; her entire body contracted to provide less surface for the wind’s kiss. And were that not enough, the silver chains about her wrists glinted almost like diamonds and proved this was no apparition. How I wished that it wasn’t so.

Our eyes met. Hers, brimming, luminous with tears; mine, mirroring hers.

“You are my slave, Hessie,” Mr. Newcombe shouted. “You’ll do as I say.”

The black woman answered. Her words were foreign, but her meaning clear. “No more. No more,” she seemed to say. “I will take no more.”

The Captain, Herr Schmidt, the quarterdeck master, and rough sailors maneuvered forward, enclosing her, trapping her body against the sea.

“Let me help,” I pleaded. “Let me help.”

“No place for a woman.” “Go back to your stateroom.” “Have you no sense?”

“You’ve no right,” I shouted back. “No right.” But the men paid no further attention to me. All eyes watched Hessie.

Hessie tilted her head. Her eyes blinked, tears overflowed, and like someone dousing a candle, her eyes lost their light and were as dull as Mama’s had been. She looked
straight through me as though I, no, everyone on the deck were invisible.

I placed my fist into my mouth to keep from screaming.

“Come on, Hessie. It’s a misunderstanding. You don’t need to do anything you fear.”

I blushed and even one of the sailors looked away. Were she not black, not a slave, not naked in the frigid air, one might have suspected this was a lovers’ quarrel. Perhaps a virgin bride introduced to abhorrent wifely duties? But Hessie
was
a slave and she’d been chained. How long? We’d been at sea for a month and I’d never until this cursed night seen her. How could it be that I didn’t see her or at least not hear her? Did I mistake her voice for wind howling, sea churning, spray lashing against wooden bows? How many sounds were hers that my ears, no, my mind, mistook for a ship’s course across the rough Atlantic?

“The sea has upset you. We’ll soon be home in Virginia.”

Hessie looked down into the thunderous sea.

“We must be done with this,” shouted the Captain. “A storm will have us all overboard.”

“Hessie,” I breathed. She looked up. I think she heard my soul crying out to her. “Hessie,” I said louder, my arm outstretched as though I could reach over and through the men’s shoulders and backs.

“Oluwand.”

I spoke back her name.
“Oluwand.”

“Mine, Hessie. You are mine,” barked Mr. Newcombe, thumping his chest like some wild beast. “Mine to do with as I will.”

“Grab her, men,” ordered the Captain, and they rushed
forward, reaching, grabbing for her dark skin. Hessie—no, Oluwand—without a sound, twisted beyond their grasp (a graceful, arcing movement), and let herself fall, no, dive, into the choppy, velvet-ink sea.

Gone, without a whisper. Without a trace. Like a seal submerged, refusing to surface. Gone as if she had been nothing more or less than a ghost.

Everyone was silent. Still. Quiet, I thought, out of respect. Waves still lapped against the stern. Sails whistled in the wind. And stars, overhead, blinked, as if they were crying tears.

“Fifteen hundred dollars lost,” Mr. Newcombe whispered, peering over the rail, into the sea. “A dozen children she might have birthed. A fortune. A small fortune overboard.”

Banker Leider solemnly nodded, Herr Schmidt puffed his fat cheeks, and the Captain patted Mr. Newcombe’s back in sympathy. The sailors, some grinning at the excitement, some somber as priests, went back to their posts.

I was shocked. There was no rush to rescue. No “Man Overboard” for a slave. For a woman.

I screamed, “God shall punish you. God shall punish you.”

Mr. Newcombe, the Captain, Herr Schmidt stared at me. They thought me crazy. A witless woman.

Not witless enough.
I will carry Oluwand’s pain to my grave
.

New Bedford

I thanked God to be off that foul ship.

We landed in New Bedford. I planned to rest for two, maybe three days, then travel south to New York.

I remember thinking: “I can make this journey. I can find my dream in America. I must have the strength.” I kept repeating these words, in my head, like a singsong, a child’s nursery rhyme.

Mr. Newcombe refused to tip his hat to me. As though it were I who pushed Oluwand into the sea.

Herr Captain denied my request for funeral rites. “Slaves haven’t souls.”

No words could convince him otherwise.

Frau Mueller taunted me daily until, weary of her harping, I kept to my cabin.
Invisible like Oluwand
. Feeling, almost beyond hope, that the voyage would never end. Feeling in danger of losing my mind. I kept painting canvases of hands reaching out of the sea.

I hadn’t thought of slaveholders as handsome young men. Hadn’t thought of slavery forcing a woman to choose death.

Papa would’ve said: “Through the desire for freedom,
all men shall rise.” But how could Oluwand have risen, chained to a bed?

If Mama was alive, she’d cry with me. Perverted lust. A greater sin than all other sins.

Mama and Papa both drilled in me there was a God. As a woman grown, I’d taken God’s name in vain; but the child in me had always believed deeply. Papa’s God, so fierce, insisting on sacrifice; Mama’s God, so forgiving, insisting all was redeemed. After Oluwand’s sacrifice, I began to doubt either existed. Did Oluwand have a God? At the moment of her death, she didn’t call His name but proclaimed her own.

Oluwand
.

Ottilie
. I had much to think about. Much to reconcile.

I saw things differently in New Bedford. Instead of landscape—arching trees, solid rock, plains caressing the horizon—I saw people. All manner, but the colored in particular: some, barefoot, dressed in rags, some in elegantly cut coats with polished boots. Most were dressed simply like the workers in Germany. Plain, good, cotton fare.

A charcoal man, his callused hands holding the reins of a job horse, waited at the far end of the wharf. I hurried up to him, bypassing fine, private carriages, job horses and carriages driven by white men. Colored men were last in line.

“Are you a slave?” I demanded. I could no longer keep my emotions in check.

“No, ma’am. Free. In the North, most coloreds be free.”

I started crying, balling my fists against my eyes to stop my tears. I hadn’t cried before and now I cried for Oluwand and for everyone I ever loved. I cried for all the injustices
I’d seen. The attacks on Jews, the poverty of a butcher’s child, Mama’s agonizing death, the despair that leeched into Papa’s soul.

The driver took pity on me, for he checked his startled horse. I leaned against his cart.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Oluwand diving into the sea
.

My knees buckled, and the driver, leaning forward, his hand cloaked in rough leather, clutched my elbow and steadied me.

“Do you want Mr. Garrison, ma’am?”

“Who?”

“Mr. Garrison. The Abolitionist Society. They fight against slavery.”

“Yes. You will take me to this Mr. Garrison?”

He looked at me quizzical. He must’ve thought me a crazed, wild-eyed woman.

“You should rest first. You look tired, ma’am.”

“As do you.” I was feeling more myself. Ottilie Assing. I smiled at him.

“Me and my horse work all the days and all the nights.”

I exhaled and smiled again. “What is your name?”

“Moses.”

I laughed. “You are my sign, Herr Moses.”

“Just Moses.”

“No, Herr Moses, as they would say in my country. I insist. A mark of respect. Will you help me? Lift my bags? Carry me to a hotel?”

“My pleasure. My work, too. To carry things.”

“Good. You’ll carry me. I’ll change clothes. Then, you’ll take me to Herr Garrison.”

“And eat, ma’am? You look like you could use warm food.”

“Yes, eat.” I smiled at the kindness of the man. The first real kindness anyone had shown me in a long while.

He jumped down and lifted my bags into the wagon bed. Not a big man, but strong. A workingman. He laid a blanket in the wagon crib and motioned for me to sit.

“No, Herr Moses. If you please, I’ll ride beside you.”

“Where you from?”

“Germany. A cold place. Far away. Weeks by carriage. Months at sea.”

“They all like you? In this Germany?” He scuttled onto the seat, then held out his hand to help lift me up. He smelled of soap and sweet hay.

“I think there is no one else quite like me. That is why I left.”

He chuckled. “None like me either, I expect.”

“Yes, that’s true. Not in Germany.”

We laughed.

Sitting on the wagon perch, this was the closest I’d been to a colored man. I thought this was the closest Herr Moses has been to a German woman. I felt excited about new possibilities. America was still my land of dreams. Moses, like God’s gift, had started me on a new stage of my journey. For a moment, I felt lighthearted again. I was found in the promised land.

Moses clicked his tongue, snapped his whip, and the horse jerked forward.

Oluwand was sitting in the wagon beside me
. I nearly screamed. The wagon moved steadily. I knew Moses couldn’t see her.
My hand moves through her, touches air
.

One day in America and I was seeing ghosts. Bones rose from the sea, walked on land.

Oluwand and I had become fast friends
.

I went to see Mr. Garrison. He was a fierce man—bushy hair, mustache, his nails stained black with ink. He was of fair height with a lean nose and a gaze that sweeps judgmentally over everything. I imagined him taking seconds to decide if the day was too cold, the clouds were too low, and if his sole visitor was a waste of his hard-earned time.

“Work. I need workers. I don’t need another society matron who weeps but will not work.”

I thought of nothing to say except “Guten Morgen.”

His brows rose. “Fräulein?”

“Assing.”

“Excuse me. I thought you were one of our local matrons here to interrupt my work with needless weeping. Or worse yet, one of Griffiths’ disciples.”

“Griffiths?”

“Humanity, Rights, and Reason.”