Read Online Dessa Rose by Sherley A. Williams - Free Book Online Page A

admitted this to herself, even under Kaine’s prodding. She saw the past as she talked, not as she had lived it but as she had come to understand it. White men existed because they did; Master had smashed the banjo because that was the way he was, able to do what he felt like doing. And a nigger could, too. This was what Kaine’s act said to her. He had done; he was. She had done also, had as good as killed Master, for wasn’t her own punishment worse than death? She had lost Kaine, become a self she scarcely knew, lost to family, to friends. So she talked. She was reconciled to nothing, but the dreams or haunts that had crowded about her in the cellar now walked the sunlit air and allowed her peace at night.
    Memory stopped the day Emmalina met her as she had come out of the fields. Dessa came back to that moment again and again, recognizing it as dead, knowing there was no way to change it, arriving at it from various directions, refusing to move beyond it. Out there was nightmare, Kaine’s body, cold and clammy beneath her hands, Master laughing in her face, the horror that scarred her inner thighs, snaking around her lower abdomen and hips in ropy keloids that gleamed with patent-leather smoothness. Once the white man’s questioning had driven her into that desert and Young Mistress had risen from the waste, clothes torn, hair screaming, red-faced, red-mouthed. The four red welts in the suddenly pallid face, the white spot where her thumb had pressed at the base of the red neck filled Dessa with a terror and glee so intense they were almost physical. Frightened at her own response, she was almost ashamed—not of the deed. No. Never that, but surely it was wrong to delight so deeply in anyone else’s pain. She had seen the blood and bits of pink flesh beneath her own fingernails, felt again the loose skin of Young Mistress’s neck. Andclamped her mouth shut, clanked her arms across her chest. She should have killed the white woman; they would have killed her then. It would all have been over; none of this would have begun.
    She didn’t know where “this” had begun. There was no set moment when she knew that the negro driver the white men called Nate was paying attention to her or that the young mulatto boy who often walked the chain in front of her was being kind. Gradually she had realized that she never stumbled when the mulatto walked in front of her, that there was always something extra on her plate—a bit of home-fry when everyone else had only grits, a little molasses for her bread. She expected that one or both of them would come fumbling at her in the dark. The men and women were bound together at night; and, while it was more common for the white guards to take one of the women, the chains were no real barrier to a determined couple. They were encouraged to it. Pregnancy was proof of a woman’s breeding capacity; and the boy was often chained with her at night. But neither man touched her.
    Cully, the mulatto, talked to her about the stars when they happened to lie next to each other at night. She knew the drinking gourd, the North Star in its handle. He showed her a cluster he called Jack the Rabbit, put there, so he said, because of a low trick Rabbit had played on Brother Bear. Often he touched her stomach and marveled that the baby moved. This was all that she remembered of those nights. For at first she had paid him no attention. He talked just like a white man; except for his nappy yellow hair, he looked just like a white man. Later, he reminded her of Jeeter, her only living brother, who had been sold away. The big, bald-head driver, Nathan, had been with the trader the day she was bought. It shamed her somehow to know he had seen her so low and she was glad they could none of them hold a real conversation. The coffle walked twenty miles a day, and even around the campfire, talk among them was discouraged. But Dessa knew herself to be enveloped in caring.