Miss Hannah came to Mama the next day, crying in her reception room. “You didn’t fix him,” she said. “He’s as bad as ever. He really thinks that dead heifer is coming to live with us.”
“He can’t believe that,” Mama said.
“He does. He really does,” Miss Hannah sobbed. “You’ve only made it worse.”
The next week, at church, Mama called to Ben Daisy, “How about you come and see me again.”
“I haven’t got time for that, Doctor,” he said. “I need to buy some things for Daisy, to make her comfortable.”
And he left Mama to go ask Miss Annie, who headed the church’s auxiliary club, to bake him some cakes. “Little ones,” he said. “Dainty ones, because Daisy eats like a bird, you know? But they’ve got to be pink and white. That’s what she told me. Have to be pink and white.” Miss Annie grumbled about it, but she agreed to make him three cakes, because he was willing to pay for them.
A few days later, he saw me again on the road to Culver’s.
“Hey there, Black Gal.”
“Hey, yourself,” I said, wary. I could smell on him that he was unwell.
“I’ve heard,” he said, “you grow pansies nice.”
I paused. “I do.”
“I’ll give you a penny for five of them, for my Daisy.”
I knew I should not agree to give him anything for her. “But how are they going to stay fresh?” I asked.
“Won’t need to stay fresh long, because she’s here,” he said. But his voice was uncertain.
I felt a spasm of conscience. “I could,” I said carefully, “press them for you. If you’d like.”
“All right. But don’t cheat me, girl,” he said, smiling again.
“I can give them to you,” I said finally. “Find me after church.”
I did not tell my mother. By then, Miss Hannah had enlisted the reverend, and the three of them spent evenings talking about how best to fix his strange behavior. “Give it time,” Mama kept assuring. “It takes a while for the dose to even out.” She seemed to believe it, even though the reverend and Miss Hannah perhaps did not.
I do not know what I believed at that point. I thought my mother infallible. But I had also been up close to Ben Daisy, smelled the salt water of his breath and seen the dullness of his eyes. I trusted my mother, but I knew that Ben Daisy had no hope of becoming a steady man.
Still, I was a craven little thing. I wanted the penny he promised for myself. While I was tending the garden, I snipped off the heads of five pansies, big and wide. That was the least I could do for him—give him the hardiest ones. I dropped them into the pocket of my apron, and then, at night, when Mama was bent over her books, I bent over my own and placed each flower’s head between the pages of my ledger, right in the corner, up close to the spine. Then I shut the book and did not open it again until later that week, when they had dried and turned crisp and thin, their color only dimming slightly.
The Sunday morning I was to give them over to Mr. Ben, I wrapped them up in a piece of fine paper pinched from Mama’s writing desk.
Ben Daisy and I were to meet in the little copse by the graveyard. When I saw Mama and Lenore were caught up in the talk of the other women in the churchyard, I went closer to the trees, calling for him underneath my breath.
“Ben Daisy,” I hissed. I stepped past the stones of my father and Mama’s sister with no name, past where the land dipped and sank over their final resting place, into the cold shadow of the fir trees. “I have your pansies for you.”
There he was. I could see his back was straight. He was the sweetest I had ever smelled him. But when he turned to me, his face was broken. “Forget them.”
“But why?”
“She’s already here. Saw her last night. On her finger was three wedding bands—one, two, three—all real gold, too. I said, ‘What’s the meaning of this Daisy?’ And she only laughed.”
He began to cry, great shaking sobs, while I stood beside him with the dried flowers on their sheet of paper, wishing he would stop.
“She betrayed me,” he said. “She betrayed me all over again.”
“At least take your flowers, Mr. Ben,” I said. But he was sobbing so hard, his hands shaking, that he couldn’t hold them.
“Here.” I looked over at the crowd of parishioners. My mother stood in the middle, searching for me, I knew. “Kneel down.”
He sat at my feet while I peeled each papery flower off the page and stuck them, carefully, into the band of his hat.
The church bell rang. The crowd began to move into the chapel. I had to take my place at my mother’s side.
“Black Gal, your penny,” he called.
“You can keep it,” I said, and hurried toward the church.
I had expected him to follow me and join his sister in service, but he didn’t. As I rushed to the doors, I looked back to the graveyard. Ben sat on the ground in the green and brown, his head still low. As the door swung shut, I swore I saw, through a flash in the trees, the figure of a woman rushing toward him, the long trail of her pink silk skirt fluttering in her haste. The church door closed, I walked to my pew, and when I craned my head to try and see him out the window, no one was there. I thought it must have been a shadow, that my pity for Ben Daisy had led me to yearn to see what he did, to bring the dead woman back for him and me—as if that would have healed anything at all.
During the service, I kept seeing that penny in Ben Daisy’s hand, and I thought about the woman who he’d claimed had come to him at night, who wore the rings of other lovers on her fingers, who could not even manage to be faithful as a spirit. Was this what caring for another did? Resurrect them, even in death, to only become your worst fears? Did Ben Daisy suffer from too much care? Mama thought he did not have enough of it. But it seemed to me as though Ben Daisy had too much.
In the following weeks, he did not go to work with the other men anymore. He did not leave his bed in the room he shared with Miss Hannah. He even stopped saying that name. He became a ghost. When Mama tried to talk to Miss Hannah about it, she would only shake her head and say, “I don’t know, Miss Doctor,” before walking away.
One Saturday night, Pete Back Back came to Mama’s door. He would not sit in her big leather chair, only stood in the middle of her examination room.
“Ben finally left his bed last night. Agreed to have a tipple with me,” Pete said. “We drunk from Friday night into this morning. Culver threw us out at dawn. Said we was unruly. So we walked to the waterfront downtown.
“We stood on the wharves. We looked at the ferries. I got paid Friday, so I still had a few coins in my pocket. The wind was blowing the stink of the river into our faces, but we was happy. We was the closest thing to free any nigger’s ever been,” Peter told us. He stopped for a minute, his eyes wet.
“We went to go sit down by the water, to rest awhile. We was going to sit on the bank, near the wharves, when suddenly Ben Daisy lifted his head. All around us, we could smell flowers. I swear to you, Doctor, the air changed. The wind coming off the river was so soft and warm. Ben, he caught a whiff of that water, and he looked up and out across the dark river. He smiled. And then he bolted.
“Before I could stop him, he ran to the end of the wharf, calling ‘Daisy!’ He leapt into the river, and the water closed around him. And he was gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Mama said.
“I tried to call someone to help me get him out.” Peter rubbed at his shoulder. “Some of the kids who live by the wharf, they dived into the water to try and find him. Dived in right after him, they did, but when one of the boys came back up, he only said Ben Daisy was gone, and then they all scrambled out of the water, as if they’d took a fright. That boy wouldn’t tell me what he saw down there, but none of them would go back in, even when I begged them to.”
Pete Back Back took something out from underneath his shirt. “Only this was still there, floating on top of the waves.”
It was Ben Daisy’s hat, t
he pink-and-white pansies I’d pressed for him still tucked into the band, the whole thing dry as bone.
“I can’t bring myself to tell Miss Hannah. So I stopped here first,” Pete Back Back said. He still would not meet Mama’s eye.
That night, after Peter left, Mama said three prayers: one for Ben Daisy and one for his sister, and the final one for Daisy herself. “May her spirit finally rest.” And then I watched as she took her ledger down, the one she’d been keeping her notes in about the experiment, and, with her pen, scratch something out, write something new on the page. Then she tore the whole page out of the book altogether and took it with her to her bedroom, and I never saw it again.
The proving was over. Mama wrote the conclusion for it herself, so I do not know how she explained it. She would not let me read it, and she never published anything about this study. In a few years’ time, this failure would be overshadowed by the hospital for women and children that would make her name, and the consulting room downtown, and my eventual life of ladyhood. But that particular night, she bundled up the last little bit of seahorses in a brown envelope and carefully placed it on the highest shelf.
Nobody in our village would say that Ben Daisy had died. Miss Hannah, in her grief would not allow it. She stayed on with us, her eyes hollow. Ben Daisy’s hat with the dried pansies she took to wearing on her own head. And when we spoke to her of him, if we ever spoke to her of him, we only said the river had him.
That first night when we’d learned of Ben Daisy, I asked Mama, “What happens to the dead?” We had cleaned the examination room, put everything in its rightful place, and we stood side by side, washing our faces and hands before bed.
“Why, they go to heaven with our Lord and Savior. You know this.”
“But what happens to their thoughts and minds?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where does their will go?”
Mama looked as if she was about to cry. “It has been a long day. Hush, please, Libertie.”
“But what happens? Where is Ben Daisy? Is he in the same place Father is and … and … everyone else?”
“Libertie, you ask too much of your mama sometimes.”
And so I understood. Mama did not have an answer. Mama did not know. That great big brain of hers could not tell me where Ben Daisy was. And because Mama didn’t know, the dead were not to be spoken of. They were all of them in another country.
Eventually, we learned, from whispers, what the boys said they saw when they jumped in the river to rescue him. That underneath the water, the boy swimmer had seen Ben, had tried to pull him up, but he was stopped. Ben was wrapped in the arms of a woman, her skin glowing golden in the waves, the pink of her dress flashing through the murk of the river, her hair long. She had looked at the boy as he swam close and reached for Ben Daisy’s hand. He said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and she’d beckoned to him, as if to welcome him into her arms, too. He said he was overcome with the desire to swim into them until she smiled at him—with a mouth full of thousands of pointed teeth. Then Ben had tugged his hand out of the swimmer’s, had waved softly and turned his whole body inward, like a baby’s, to be cradled in the arms of the woman in the water. And the boy kicked away, up to the surface, before he could be tempted to join them.
Ben Daisy and his woman sleep in the river
Sleep in the river
Sleep in the river
Ben Daisy and his woman sleep in the river
Even past Judgment Day
That was the song, I am ashamed to say, that I made up after hearing this story, and the other children sang it, too. It became the anthem of our schoolyard for a year, and children still sing it today, I am told. I sang it because of all that I did not know and could not know about what happened. But even at that age, I knew curiosity could be heartless and I made sure not to sing it around Miss Hannah or my mother.
My heart hurt, and I was full of disgust, though for who or for what I did not know. I only knew I did not ever want to care for another if it made me act like Mr. Ben. If it made me wander the fields of Brooklyn, pressing flowers for someone who would never come. If it made me speak another’s name until it became my own, even when I was guaranteed no answer. If it made me try to heal my people and fail so disastrously. If it made me put my brother in a coffin to get him free and still have him die anyways.
Care, I decided, was monstrous.
It was as clear as Ben Daisy’s hat, floating on the waters. I would not be a doctor, no matter what Mama wished. I could not deceive others, and I could not deceive myself, as she did.
Sa ki bon avèk yon kè, sè ke li pa pote jijman
What’s good about the heart is that it does not reason
Was freedom worth it if you still ached like that? If you were still bound on this Earth by desire?
It was a blasphemous thing to think, and I could not speak it to anyone, except to the plants in Mama’s garden. I whispered it into the open blossoms’ faces in the mornings, and then I carefully ran my thumb over each velvety petal. I knew my words were poison, and I was certain they could kill whatever good lived there.
Who was the woman Ben Daisy loved enough to die for? I looked for her where we’d all last seen her—in the water. I looked at the bottom of our well, in the muddy pools that collected in the ditches by the path to downtown. I looked for her in the pond, just past our settlement, where we took our laundry to wash. I looked for her in the wetlands, where the turtles and frogs and dragonflies swept through, where the men sometimes fished on Saturday afternoons. I stood, the tongues of my leather boots stiffening with mud, my feet sinking into the ground, and breathed in that murky smell of lake beds, and knew, in an instant, she wasn’t there. Despite what Ben Daisy had said about her love of cakes and sugar, I did not think a woman who could drown a man in her arms lived in anything as sweet as fresh water. Her domain was brackish. She would live in salt.
The few times we went close to the waterfront, when Mama had to travel downtown and take the cart, I would lift my head to try and catch the smell of it over all the other scents—the rotted fruit in the gutters, the sweet blossoms of the trees planted in front of the nicer houses, the warm breath of horse manure, the sweat of all the bodies teeming around us. At the very top, maybe, when the wind was right, I could smell that other woman’s home. Mostly, though, I listened.
If you listen closely, water, when it laps against the sides of a bucket, when it mouths a riverbed, sounds like hands clapping. It sounds like a congregation when prayers are done. But what is its message? It is not deliverance, I don’t think. It is not salvation. It is something just underneath that, something that even Mama couldn’t reach with her mind. So what hope was there for me of finding it?
A few times, riding beside her in our cart or walking beside her through our town, the rhymes I’d started myself about women and water ringing in our ears, I asked Mama, “Is the woman in the water real?” but she would only say, “I’ve taught you too well to fall for nonsense.” It was a flash of her old assurance, which had gone somewhere underground, inside her, after Ben Daisy was gone.
After he left us, whenever new people came to us, whether by Madame Elizabeth’s coffins or, when that route became too dangerous, by secret means of their own, Mama looked at them with sadness. She did not try to feed them ground seahorses. Instead, when they came, when she encountered them at church, she touched their shoulders and told them to come speak to her about what ailed them.
She still saw patients. She still gave aid. But she no longer imagined new cures, and when the people came with something strange, she looked at the remedies already written and did not offer her own.
People distrusted her. They did not always stop at our pew, first, after services to say hello. Reverend Harland was sympathetic, Mama was sure, but sometimes I caught him watching her, his eyes clouded over. Miss Hannah said, to anyone who would listen, “You can’t trust a woman without a man to fix anything in a man
’s heart. How she know what wrong if she never even live with a man up close? You can’t trust a woman without a man to ever understand what’s needed,” and though most people ignored Miss Hannah, you could feel the air shift around Mama when she entered a room, as if people were deciding something about her.
At night, she no longer disappeared into the trees of her mind but, instead, had me sit across from her while she drilled me on the habits of all the plants in the garden, of the uses of the parts of tongues and ears, of the mechanics of a stomach and a lung. It was as if she had become scared that all bodies would sink, as Ben’s had, and that my voice, naming the parts of anatomy, singing of bile and blood, could somehow keep them on the surface. While I recited, her brow creased and worried, and she would mouth the words as I said them. When I was able to finish a list without error, she breathed so heavily it was as if she’d just run a race.
Mama and I were still haunted by Daisy and Ben, so when the war began, it was easy to ignore it, at first. And we did not know how long it would last, or who, exactly, was our enemy, when it started.
Some men in our town talked about joining right away, about convincing the white people to let us fight, convincing the white people that we were worthy enough to die. Or that’s how Mama talked about it when no one else could hear, when it was just me and Lenore listening. “They think that will fix it,” she said. “That white people will finally respect us when we’re dead.” And then she sighed and shot a glance to Lenore, who rolled her eyes and sighed, too.
I think, those first few months of war, I learned a whole new language from just their sighs.
But then it was at our door. That spring, two years into the war, some of the men had left us to join the armies fighting two states over, maybe marching near.
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