Ours, p.10
Ours, page 10
Perhaps, belatedly, those living in Ours saw what Essence saw in her immediately: danger. Pure, unbridled danger. Predictable inasmuch as, sure, you knew it would hurt when it came knocking down trees and singeing birds from their nests. Essence had wanted to protect her people and her unborn child, the most difficult life to protect. If danger takes shape, visits, then lingers around grown folks who have the power to stop it but do nothing, an adult may suffer from its presence, may fall victim despite warning signs and weapons galore. That would be personal; a pity, but personal. However, a child amidst danger meant something must be done about what was dangerous because the child knew nothing of power, not yet, and needed protection from every intrusion that takes shape in whatever shape it takes, including that of an amnesiac woman. So, get rid of her, the source and the burden, though you know she has nowhere else to go and no map to return to the door that never proved return was possible; get rid of the danger even when you once lovingly called that danger “girl.”
Poor Justice, a child sent straight to Saint, the origin of his own suffering, in order to fix himself. By now, folks in town were probably wondering if he would ever come back, if good ole pernicious Saint finally did him in. But there, at the table, he waited unharmed, seething across from her. Saint, just as quiet herself, let him be. To sit like that, if only for a moment in a mimicry of peace, even though its illusion provided comfort Saint had no clue she needed. She wanted to try again. She tried again.
“Justice,” she began. He looked at her. He was tired and so was she. “I didn’t kill your people and I never tried to kill you. You don’t have to believe me.” ‘You weren’t you. That’s got to mean something,’ she thought but wanted to say it to Justice. She felt his heat from across the table. Rage like that needed some place to go. Someone, not her—this Saint knew—was going to have to deal with it. And it ending well? Doubtful. “How your leg?”
Justice shrugged.
“You want more tea?”
“No, ma’am,” he said to the table.
When the table received more respect than she did, Saint decided she was finished. She stood, grabbed her staff leaning on the porch banister, and headed back inside. “You can leave the cup on the table.” Her companion followed her, leaving Justice inside the marbled district of the tabletop.
[2]
Justice couldn’t find his way to the center of the table. Near the end of one tunnel marbled in the woodgrain began another path that led to a death drop off the side. Eventually, he realized he had all that time been following the lighter spaces in the wood’s pattern, which had no way of leading to the center. He began tracing the darker routes with his eyes and found moving around the table’s patterns more achievable, but with the center being part of the lighter spaces, a territory he left for momentum, for fluidity, his only option was to keep circling around his aspiration.
When he had gone home the evening he and Luther-Philip found the scalp, teeth, and maggots in the tree soon-to-be-called God’s Place, he told Honor not of what he found but of what he heard. She went into the kitchen, wetted her hands, and rubbed them with salt. Honor grabbed Justice by the tips of his ears and twisted. He screamed out and backed away from her. She stared at the boy, with a look belying anything had happened at all.
“Sound like the dead want to speak to you. They don’t never got a thing to say worth hearing. I pulled out what you had sitting in your ears. Don’t look at me like that, like you never known hurt. Don’t waste that look on me when you got a presence on you.”
Honor told Justice how she once wanted to protect a friend who had later been killed for stealing a tomato. She called them presences, what remained after the flesh was gone, the who thereafter replaced by a what.
The story goes that one Saturday, after spotting a neighbor’s shirt stuck in a tree, Honor fell into a dizzy spell as the scenery slid by, as though the planet sped its turning but left her behind. The hollow shirt billowed, filled up with nothing, and in its nothingness, Honor rushed back through time, rose up inside the hollow of the bodiless shirt and into a memory of a boy she once saw as a child, a boy she loved like her own brother. He had been shot in the head on a morning so lavish with green and birdsong that for a moment Honor thought he grew from the ground he lied on, as natural as a budding flower. “Why you never tell me you was a flower,” she asked Justice while thinking of her childhood friend. Justice felt the need to answer because in him something warm like an answer welled up.
Honor’s memory was unnervingly pleasant: she, maybe ten years old, could’ve been eight or nine, staring into the fingertips of dusk that faded into a solemn hush of maroon. Only a river yonder felt free to move away from the plantation despite being part of it. It trickled past, an escape that never stopped escaping. She heard what she thought was just a breeze licking at the inside of her ears but realized later that the wind had wrapped around a word. When she plucked the word from the air, she heard whispered, “Help me.” Eight, or nine, or ten years old and damaged by a plea riding the wind like a witch.
So, when Justice came in talking about having heard a voice up in a tree, she damn near snatched his ears from the side of his head to get the voice out. Salt to burn the spirit. A painful twist to shock Justice out of listening to the voice at all. No need for a boy who had never seen a dead body to suddenly hear from one. No matter what once rotted up in that tree, it wasn’t there now, and the presence wouldn’t have her boy. Or Hell be her grave.
If Justice had paid closer attention to the voice and if his mother hadn’t overshadowed his experience with her own long-ago memory, he would’ve heard what the voice wanted him to hear the entire time: “Unsafe. Unsafe.” Perhaps, he wouldn’t have felt so lonely then if he had known the presence was on his side and that its source was the nest of hair and teeth and scalp torn from a grown man killed not so far from Ours. “Unsafe,” the dead man spoke so only Justice could hear. This is for you, it meant. A warning from someone who had no one to warn him when it was his time to be saved. Afterward, Justice never again heard another voice.
* * *
Last night, after Aba shot the snake and Luther-Philip sucked venom from Justice’s leg, the three made it back into town, Aba’s first instinct to return Justice home. When they opened the door, Aba called out to King and Honor. No one responded, so Aba opened the door further, shouted a bit louder. When all three entered, Aba led the way to the one bedroom in the back of the house. All three found King and Honor wrapped up in scales with the rattlesnakes pumping venom into their necks like a second heart. Without any other purpose, the large snakes died locked on to the bodies of their victims. The venom pumped involuntarily from the dead snakes into Justice’s dead parents. Aba cut off the snakes’ heads, returned to the tree soon-to-be-called God’s Place and collected the snake body just to bring it back with the other two, and stuffed the dead rattlesnakes into a bag—the heads first, then the bodies of the decapitated, and finally the one he shot. He told the boys to go to Luther-Philip’s house. “I’ll mourn later,” he had said, speaking out of anger he regretted the following day. “I’ll mourn later.”
Now, stuck in the table’s woodgrain maze, Justice rubbed his ears hoping he could put back inside what Honor desperately tried to remove. Perhaps, Honor’s own voice could come to him from the dead. Maybe his father’s. But after he removed his hands from the crescents of his ears, all he felt was a raw heat, all he heard was wind and leaf on leaf on terrible leaf.
[3]
Saint knew when Justice’s leg healed because she heard, from her bedroom upstairs, a shattering outside. “I liked that cup,” she said to the emptiness in her room, then closed her eyes.
• CHAPTER 6 •
Expose
[1]
Justice placed himself as the first child and survivor in a long heritage of those who had tried to take Saint’s life and failed. Before him, many people had made attempts but suffered, instead, from their own morbid and inexplicable deaths.
Often these deaths mirrored how perpetrators desired to kill Saint, but in the twisted reversals of the perpetrators’ fatalities a sinister fog of dual elements—suicide and accident—draped over any hint that Saint had a hand in their ends. In her life after Florida but before Ours, one Negro overseer fell victim to a lightning bolt while sprinting to introduce Saint’s stomach to a knife. Witnesses said the white-purple bolt dropped onto the pinprick end of the blade as he carried it in his mouth full of rotten teeth and the electric burst illuminated everything wet in his body until his skeleton flashed beneath his skin. The shock was gossiped to have been so fierce that it whitened each dead tooth and scraped the black off his gums.
Another attempt, this time by a white woman trying to hide her enslaved Africans, ended when the woman shot herself in the neck after tripping on something in the road while plodding to Saint for a closer shot. Weeks later, a brave soul, recently freed by Saint and Aba, finally revealed to a friend what he had seen and had been keeping secret, that “a little doll with a leg sticking out tripped the woman. Saw it clear as the face on your head,” the man said, then left the same night to presumed safety in Canada. Aba had been with Saint during that incident and beheld other, even stranger fatalities, each clarifying his own fear and awe of her as they moved from plantation to plantation, freeing the slaves and killing the so-called masters quite on purpose. Each trip reminded him of his own experiences in the grip of enslavement, sometimes with far too vivid force.
[2]
Aba was a gift of sorts, estimated to be four years old at an auction in South Carolina and meant to be given to an Edward Eccles by Edward’s half sister, Gertrude Towns, who had lucked up in marrying a no-talent journalism student, Ralph Towns, who stumbled his way through Yale Law School and stumbled out just as clumsily. Their inconsistent wealth came from selling two things: poorly written pamphlets about ill-understood political issues and what they called Native African art, the irony being that everything natively African had been destroyed before boarding the ships. When Edward rejected the gift, detesting slavery and Gertrude for her participation, she kept Aba for herself.
When Aba got older, Gertrude found a grotesque use for him in the evenings. Ralph had been warned about leaving his wife alone with a “young, strong slave” but found the warnings more humorous and paranoid than worth heeding. Why, exactly, would he need to show concern for his wife, a human, fending off a beast with her own sharp wits and a gun tucked beneath her pillow? But the warnings didn’t consider Gertrude fending off anyone as part of the issue. Ralph never cultivated a distrust of women like his male peers and more to the point never perceived in Gertrude her full complexity and ability to wreak havoc. Therefore, he remained dedicated to kindling the flames of Gertrude’s nonexistent naivete while unimagining her longings for Aba, which, if he had imagined with any precision, would’ve nauseated him as if she were to lay with an ape.
In Gertrude’s mind, she had indeed committed an act of bestiality and it shamed her, though not enough to discontinue forcing Aba, then nineteen years old, to enter her and suffer her disgustful wrath after she had her fill and refused to look at him any longer, making him the culprit of her own yearning. Not even for the sake of her sanity could she make temporary her embargo on Aba’s personhood, such that her looking upon him before, during, and especially after she raped him was indeed her looking at assorted monsters from her imagination come to life. For the sake of her human marriage, however, she had to get rid of Aba because she couldn’t get rid of her imponderable cruelty.
Gertrude sold Aba, sending him to Kentucky from North Carolina on a buggy filled with other enslaved Africans restrained by chained manacles and ankle braces that slinked across body to body. With the two horses’ unsteady verve, a white driver and his partner who whistled songs he picked up from the slaves working the fields, rode via a path poorly carved through but mostly etched by feet around the Appalachian Mountains. The trip almost killed Aba and did kill seven others, including a five-year-old and a sixty-three-year-old, all heading to their new so-called masters in Mississippi and Kentucky.
Then death came—barely at the middle of their journey—for the driver who had driven the buggy since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. With one cough he fell off the side and landed on the ground. His partner’s death soon followed.
Abandoned at an elevation wholly unfamiliar to them, the enslaved Africans beheld with awe the mountains clawing the sky with slanted facets covered in sugar maples and yellow birches. The fat-hipped and poisonous fruit of yellow buckeye swung temptingly from their rank branches, but their height luckily prolonged the chained ones’ hunger. The only means of navigation lay dead at the hooves of the seemingly confused horses that stomped, wanting to take off but instead lowering their heads in a way easily confused with mourning. For what seemed like an eternity, this horse dance swung intermittently between the two, one horse mourning, the other stomping, until both fell into a peaceful weariness.
A rustle, then the sound of a branch cracking, Saint appeared before Aba and the death-close group of Negroes, peering from behind a tree and smiling. She reached into the old driver’s pockets for the keys and kicked him square in the nose as she walked by. Unsatisfied, she kicked him again and once more in some undesignated place on his face. She wore a dingy off-white dress familiar to Aba for it had once belonged to Gertrude. A splatter of blood blossomed on the bottom right hem. The year was 1810.
Saint said she found them by following the voices. She described it as calls for help pouring out of the surfaces of bark, houses, even the ground itself, that pointed her in the right direction. The agenda formed in her mind as she trailed the ghostly signs: free the enslaved, undo traps laid out by patrollers, be still. The others thought she was some wild woman who happened upon them coincidentally and with flawless timing, but Aba believed every word of her story. Nowhere else to go and without any means by which to go, he began traveling with Saint all over the south, acting as a lookout and helping the just-freed escape north. They had a system, fast but not traceless. Abolitionists sometimes helped, but Saint didn’t like the assistance of white folks and frequently threatened their lives if they spoke to her carelessly. She avoided them as much as possible and suffered no casualties in her party for doing so. She inspired Aba in ways that reduced his previous enslaved life to dust. They plotted their raids to the finest detail and laughed in the wilderness when the plots sounded too good to be true.
Aba had his first taste of freedom with Saint, punctuated by her restlessness to free as many people as she could, as many as there were voices calling out to her for help. Had he believed in God, he would’ve thought He spoke directly into her ear. He believed more in Saint, and in the embrace of her intense smile he found comfort where others would’ve seen utter madness. Knowing that freedom could be given and obtained by following Saint, Aba could almost forget what his so-called mistress had done to him. Almost.
* * *
After six years of freedom work, Saint wanted to retire. All the traveling had worn on her and by 1816 rest settled on her mind. During their retirement, Aba made his way to Pennsylvania while Saint went her separate way without offering any details as to where or for how long.
There, he found squalor and invisibility. His first job and payment came in Pennsylvania, and the first time someone cheated him out of his money was in Pennsylvania, charged an unsightly price to live with people from all over the world who in keen desperation stole from each other with such zeal that they ended up stealing back what had been stolen from them without even noticing. Pairs of shoes went missing, a coin stolen from here, a piece of fruit taken from there. Then there were the rats swarming the streets and copulating in the walls, singing with their tiny childlike voices. Half the time he had no soap and the other half he had no water. Wasn’t anyone to complain to and though he wasn’t considered a slave, he had heard tell of free Negroes disappearing in broad daylight. He knew exactly where they reappeared so kept his head low and his mouth shut, having no freedom papers of his own. Winter come and the heatless room ate him up with cold. Summer come and the bugs ate him up just the same.
Almost twenty years later, Saint knocked on his door. When Aba saw her, he nearly fell over in fear, thinking he saw a specter of the woman because she looked exactly as she had when they parted. She may have looked younger, her hair cut scalp-close, a style Aba hadn’t seen on a woman since he was a small child, right before he was taken on a ship whose name he was beginning to remember more than his own parents’ names. Her brown eyes shined in the dull, dreary room and Aba felt shame having her there with his leaky ceiling and vermin scrambling toward various hideaways.
By this time, Saint brought her companion with her everywhere she went. He didn’t speak and didn’t make eye contact. He smelled like he lived outside, pungent as moldy earth and unwashed musk. When Aba reached to introduce himself to her companion, Saint intercepted Aba’s hand and pulled him into his own room. The not-speaking man waited outside.
Saint wanted Aba to live in a new town she would make possible through conjure. “Just for our people,” she told him. Safety like he had never known. So nobody can come in and take what’s yours. So nobody can just walk into your home and steal everything you worked so hard to achieve, everything you ever loved. Her passion inspired Aba. He agreed and became part of her traveling band of the once-enslaved.
Aba knew Saint had changed but not right away. At first, he thought she had merely honed her skills. That they didn’t have to hide anymore startled him the most, that they could travel in daylight with a barrage of Negroes and not be seen, let alone touched. But her torture of the so-called masters when she could kill them immediately frightened him. Illnesses potent as plagues, child-killing madness, her desire to pick them off one at a time so that they suffered bearing witness to the relentless pain of their loved ones. What should’ve taken minutes with her new skills took several days. Aba watched in the shadows as Saint and her companion rotated stones and made a dungeon of the plantations. One night, she set fire to the main house and stayed to watch until it fizzled out, the smoke finally propelled in shrinking braids from the wood and glass that held no more heat to feed it. That the so-called masters suffered held no space in his conscience. But Saint’s willingness to keep her own people enslaved longer than necessary, just to inflict what he believed to be unquenchable vengeance, frightened Aba to no end.
