Wash (18 page)

They stayed back off Rufus. Seemed like he turned them a hair timid, so Rufus took that slack and he ran with it till folks started calling him Prince, with that shop his castle. He’d been there a year before we got there and had the place pretty well sorted. He knew folks talked about him but said he learned a long time ago to let sleeping dogs lie.

I remember stepping onto the big house porch, fetching those boys some more drink and hearing em talk to their company about Rufus and Cleo. How much they were making on his metalwork. Then watching Cleo walk by and calling her their insurance on Rufus. Saying I sure would stay around for some of that. Egging each other on, saying I know you would. Then all of em laughing till one started coughing, making his drink splash on the porch.

Made me mad but Cleo walked through that talk like it wasn’t even there. Seemed like she shut everything out till all she saw in her life was what she wanted. Her cabin with Rufus over by his forge, set off from the quarters some. Closer to Pickens than I’d like, but they had what they needed.

Then one day, I remember everybody dressed up for a cornshucking. Strolling, meeting and greeting like everything is fine. And for that minute, it is. Those Thompson boys acting proud of themselves, like they was saying see, we can do this. We can let these fine nigger women deck out and have themselves a good man without jumping all over em.

They stood on their porch, calling out good evening Cleo, good evening Rufus, you two sure do cut a lovely figure tonight. And I watched those two just smiling and dipping their heads, saying thank you, like none of that nasty talk from before ever happened. Cleo told me they was having too good a time to get tangled up with those boys and their mess. But it made me mad, watching them shucking and grinning like everything was fine when it wasn’t.

Course I didn’t see this for what it was at the time. I mean I saw it, but took me till later to understand it like I do now. Back then, I was mostly confused. I was confused and I was headed right into those two boys’ worst nightmare, just as sure as the devil. All I needed was time.

Eli

Something about Rufus always took me right back to that first and last batch of saltwater Africans my daddy ever bought. Same stance, same peppery smell. Even that copper bracelet he wore.

I was seven and peeping through the cattails, watching my daddy ride in the lead with his overseer Grove bringing up the rear and a line of ten new negroes walking chained together between them, headed for the lake. But those Ibos didn’t look like the others. They looked like they came out of some picture book. Sea monsters drawn in the blank spaces on my daddy’s maps, rearing up from the water next to the boats.

I caught a few glimpses, then they were gone. I never heard a word about it that day. Then a ruckus just before dinner the next night. My mother had fretted all day till my daddy rode into the yard. I heard them in the hallway as I was coming down the stairs. Low talking ran tight like a wire till I stepped around the corner. My daddy wheeled to look and I saw him scared for the first time. He looked skinnier and his hair stood up from him running his fingers through it too much.

My mother tried to calm him down. Saying that’s a good idea, go do it now, then calling me to her with her hands, pulling my head against her belly because she knew I liked that. I never guessed she was doing it to cover my ears so she could finish what she was saying. I felt her voice humming inside her. My daddy listened and nodded and turned on his heel like he was back in charge.

“Right, I’ll start now. Go ahead with dinner. I’ll be back.”

Me and Campbell and my sister Abigail sat clustered together at my mother’s end of the table. All while we ate, she asked us for stories about our day like we always wanted her to do. And she leaned in like she was listening, but I could tell she was with my daddy in her mind. Her face was flushed too pink because she was already sick. We got sent straight to bed afterwards.

It wasn’t till after lunch the next day when I could sneak away to see for myself. It was hot and the bugs were loud. I headed out through the far corner of the front yard, past the smooth cut grass into the tall reeds where the ground starts to get soft and sinky closer to the water. I knew I wasn’t supposed to go down that far, but those Ibos were working there and I wanted to see. I heard the tearing grunts of their shovels biting into the mud sounding like snuffling dragons. Just a little farther. If anybody caught me, I’d say I was hunting the eddy where the tadpoles swim thickest. I’d say the ones I’d already found died before turning into frogs.

One more step and I fall through the reeds where the bank drops off. I land in a pile of dirt and mud so slick I can’t stand. I’m looking up at one of those new men, much closer than before. I’m right at his feet. He looks down at me from inside a cage made of cut saplings standing in rows for bars, sunk deep in the ground. And there are more laid across the top, making a ceiling for this cage that’s big enough to hold all those Ibos where they dig my daddy’s canal.

The grass is trampled and the ground torn up. Nobody sees me yet but him. Sitting in that slick mud, staring up in his face, I know it’s this man, these men, that had my parents so upset last night. This muddy bank is where my father was while we sat with my mother eating dinner. He was down here with Grove and Grove’s boys, building this cage.

What I look for first is the door. I don’t know whether I’m looking for a door so they can get out, or so I can get in, or just because every cage in every story I ever heard has a door and a lock and a key. Maybe I want to see it for myself so I can know this man is locked in there good and won’t get out that night or the next to hide under my bed. I run my eyes over the whole thing twice before I let myself be sure. There is no door. These men do not go in or out. Ever. They sleep here on the banks and then wake to dig some more. My daddy built this cage with these men already inside it.

This one man looks at me so hard, I keep expecting him to try to reach through the bars and grab me. Then I see he can’t. His hand might fit between the bars if he turned it sideways but not his muscly arm. I see where he tried. I see where the skin is worn flat and shiny into an almost perfect ring halfway up his forearm. That is as far as it will fit.

He squats and we are face to face. He’s got scars. Three lines coming down his cheeks from under each eye, like the lines I draw coming out from the sun. I’m still looking at those scars, wondering who put them there and did it hurt, when I feel his grip tight on my calves. Both legs.

I didn’t know I was so close but now he’s got me and he’s pulling. Trying to drag me inside with him even though I won’t fit through the bars. I fall on my back, scrabbling for something to grab but it’s all mud. I twist around to see the bank rising behind me. There’s a root running down, thick enough but buried deep in the bank.

I get one foot braced on a sapling, but he’s pulling and my foot is muddy and sliding. I’m scratching at the bank, trying to wrap my fingers around that root. Just as my braced foot slides off that edge, I get a good grip. He’s still pulling, but now I’m pulling too and I’m strong.

I look over my shoulder at him and he raises his eyebrows like he’s surprised. I start kicking at him and he starts looking around. My daddy is standing farther down the bank with his back to us. All I have to do is yell but I don’t have any breath. All my daddy has to do is turn around. By the time he does, I’m standing knee deep and covered in mud and the man has gone back to shoveling, acting like nothing ever happened.

I’m standing there shaking, watching my daddy run towards me. When he starts yelling at me for getting so dirty and for coming down there in the first place, I can see he’s still scared. That was the day when I first saw him trying to act like he knew. Mud topping his boots and he didn’t have a handle on any of it.

All I could think was, things won’t be like that for me.

Thompson

What my seven year old Eli didn’t know was that two of those Ibos I bought had already run. Their very first night here and two were already gone. The first without a trace except for a chicken he’d snatched on his way, snapping its neck to silence the cackle. Then the next one, just as gone, but not before tracking his muddy footprints right up onto my overseer’s porch. Right up to the window of his bedroom. The window Grove had left open so he could better hear his dogs.

The windowsill where this second Ibo had left a scattering of small smooth stones not from around here and a bone. A pale, flattened out, T shaped bone that would fit in the palm of your hand. Chipped out from inside a turtle shell. Bottom of that T tapered into a point sharp enough to prick yourself. And this second Ibo had done just that, leaving a few drops of blood to turn dark brown along the windowsill and across those stones, letting the night breeze blow in quiet and soft across all of it, carrying his mojo into the room where Grove was sleeping.

I left so early the next morning that those first two runaways had not turned up missing yet. But I made it home just before dinner to learn I’d lost a good eleven hundred dollars and stood to lose more if I didn’t fix it right quick.

My wife was furious. Not to mention the hell I would catch from my neighbors, trying to explain how it was that two fresh unseasoned Africans were now wandering loose. And everybody knew Ibos were the worst. All the old men had warned me to steer clear of them, but I thought I could save some money.

We all start out thinking we know. I was certain I could handle saltwater Africans. All my knowing did for me was to bury me knee deep in the muck of my canal I’d bought them to dig. After those first two vanished, I had to make the rest stop digging long enough to build a cage around themselves right there where they stood. Cut saplings, hammered them deep, then braided the whole cage from pillar to post with chain. Had to rebuild my cage further down the bank after each day’s work just to be sure those damn Ibos would be there in the morning.

And you bet they slept there. Nighttime was the trouble. I had Grove’s oldest son sit up all night with a fire and a gun, hoping he wouldn’t have to shoot. Then I stood there all that next day with mud cresting the top of my boots, watching those swags of chain running from neck to neck, rising slick and wet up out of the water, stretched tight by their bending to dig. I had em so pinned down they could hardly finish a good stroke. My precautions doubled the days it took, but what was I to do?

It was my young Eli watching me that burned like salt in the wound. He came down to my canal even when he knew he shouldn’t, played in that dirt pile until he was covered in mud, and then stood beside my cage, thinking he knew better than me at seven years old. I was torn. I wanted to watch him find out otherwise even as I wanted to protect him from the rip and tear of it.

Eli

That was the first time I walked away from my daddy while he was talking to me and I liked it. I did. I used my dug out root like a step to climb that bank, then I slipped through that wall of reeds and walked until I couldn’t hear him anymore. I left him behind and it felt good. He never should have yelled at me.

I went straight to our swing. I swung by myself at first, feeling the mud dry tight on my skin, then Pompey and Smart came from the quarters. They wanted to climb up and stand with me like we always did. The three of us could get that swing to go pretty high by leaning way back and then way forward, using our weight. So that’s what we did.

They kept asking me how’d I get so dirty but I wanted to go higher. Everything felt different and I couldn’t get high enough. I looked at Pompey’s dark brown hand holding the rope right next to mine and seeing that made me want to let go. I told them to stop but they wouldn’t, so I leaned way back and used my foot to push Pompey off the swing. I said I mean it and I left a muddy footprint on his back. He landed on his feet but he looked at me funny and took Smart back to the quarters with him. I called after them, saying fine with me, that’s just fine with me. And it was.

When I lay in my bed that night, that ring mark was all I could think about. It wasn’t the man’s grip on my legs or me scrabbling in the mud. It was that ring mark worn shiny against the dull gleam of the rest of his arm. Worn shiny from reaching through the bars and reaching through the bars and getting stuck at the same place every time.

Even while I was lying in my own bed, I wondered was that man out there right then, sticking his arm between the bars till it got stuck then twisting it some more? Like my sister twirls her finger in her hair and twirls it till it’s good and snarled, then my mother works at the knot, asking her what is she so worried about and can’t she see she’s ruining her hair, until my sister wails I don’t know, I don’t know, and my mother yanks to untangle it.

That worn shiny ring mark looked so naked compared to the rest of that man’s arm, looked to me like that one Ibo had finally taken off a bracelet he’d been wearing his whole life, and I started to wonder what his neck looked like under that collar. It was a slippery feeling, as slidy as when that man was pulling on me, and I didn’t like it one bit.

My daddy sold those Ibos after they dug that canal but we lived forever on the edge of something worse happening without ever knowing whether it would or when. We never talked about any of it but I guess I was mad at my daddy for never knowing enough and always acting like he did. And for never being able to make that slipslidy feeling go away. I swore to myself I would get rid of it for good.