A Spectral Hue

by Craig Laurance Gidney

  “When we moved to Shimmer. Her father had moved up here years ago. He managed to eke out a living as a waterman. But that’s hard living, and his health began to fail. Tamar quit her job at the Orchid Lounge and moved up here. When I was laid off a few months later, I did, too. It wasn’t smooth sailing, though. He wasn’t crazy about his daughter being a lesbian. I remember overhearing a fight between them one night. Tamar said to him, ‘Who has the criminal record in this house?’ That shut him up. About that issue. But Ernest Dupré was a miserable sonafabitch, especially when he developed dementia….

  “Tamar started making her collages after Ernest died. At first, it was just a couple of pieces a week. At the time, I had another bartending job in Ocean City, so I wasn’t really around. After Ernest died, she spent her time settling his estate and dealing with the probate court. I remember asking her about them. She just said it was therapeutic. Something to do, busywork. That sort of thing. Then I began to see more and more of them.

  “All of them were the same—an image of a flower or of a woman. Sometimes the two together. Or one hiding in the other. That’s when I began to think that it was a little odd. You could say that she was obsessed. Then I saw her making one of them.”

  She frowned, remembering something.

  “She cut out all sorts of flower pictures. Roses, daffodils, jonquils. Flowers of all colors and shapes. But when she put them on the pasteboard, they turned into the marsh-bell orchid. They turned magenta, changed shape.”

  Xavier thought, This woman is crazy. She must be drunk. At the same time, Iris looked sincere.

  He said, “Wow.” He hoped that he didn’t come across as condescending.

  “You don’t believe me,” Iris said. “That’s okay. I know what I saw.”

  The night had ended on a sour note. Xavier made a quick exit, telling her that he needed to start work early. When he turned off the light, he saw a flare of magenta from the picture above his bed. A flower-shaped explosion of color. It burned in the air and faded away. It was probably just the afterimage of the lightbulb, nothing more.

  11: Fuchsia (1843)

  At first, Fuchsia just focused on Hazel’s dreams. Her babbling-brook mind slowed down to a trickle then, and it was easier to float images on to the stream. Nothing too complex or even well-formed. She flashed the birds she saw, the hawks, herons, the occasional eagle. They soared in the sleeping child’s mind, borne on the wind of dreams.

  ***

  “Boo!” said Jethro. He had snuck up behind her. His laughter interrupted her focus and startled the hawk that had been perched on the tree that she had been studying. It flew up, brown and white stippled wings flapping towards the marsh.

  “Why’d you do that?” said Hazel. “You scared him away.”

  “Scared who? That bird? I did no such thing. He was probably hungry, and went out looking for a rat or something.” Jethro could be annoying. Recently, he’d taken to teasing her. He would seek out the places where she hid away and chatter inanely to her. His jokes weren’t funny. He’d tell her about the horses in the stable, or some town gossip, stuff she didn’t care about.

  “Boy, quit playing!” she said.

  “I’m not the one looking at birds when they should be straightening up the bedrooms,” he replied. He crooked an eyebrow at her.

  “What are you? A snitch? Stop minding me. I know you have work of your own to mind.” She scowled at him until he left. To her irritation, he started whistling happily as he trudged to the stables.

  The thing was, Jethro was partially correct. The past few weeks, she had been distracted. Judith had snapped at her to pay attention to her work. Missus had called her a “lazy pickaninny, always underfoot.” Even Caleb had taken her aside, telling, “Best do your work, gal. This house ain’t as bad as some of them other plantations. In fact, we’re blessed. The Crosbys whip their niggers if they don’t make their quotas. One of the sons had his way with a couple of house niggers, whelped a few mulattos. I’m telling you this because as comfortable as you might feel here, you—or I—could be sold at a whim. Stay useful. Indispensable. We’re only ‘family’ to them when we work hard.”

  But she couldn’t help it. Night and day, and all hours in between, she was bombarded with stray thoughts that she had no control over. She might suddenly see birds in her mind’s eye. All kinds of them, from elegant herons with their needle-thin beaks to brown-tailed hawks that soared on thermals. She’d think of their feather patterns, the color of their eyes, the shape of their bodies. She wanted—needed—to capture their essence, somehow. She had even found herself drawing simple shapes in the mud. Hazel knew that she even dreamed about these things. She’d wake up with bright images in her brain. Ruffled feathers, clouds, intensely blue skies, awe-inspiring swoops and peaceful glides. Hazel had no idea where this sudden passion for the natural world came from.

  Sometimes, it terrified her. She knew the names of things with no particular education. While Caleb tutored the Whitby boys, he was expressly forbidden to teach any of the other slaves anything. Hazel couldn’t read, but certain words appeared in her brain suddenly, for no reason. One evening, as the sun set, she knew that the sky was a cerulean color. She had never heard the word spoken. But it wrote itself on her mind. She could almost see the shape of the letters. And the word so was rich, so musical—it had a pool in the middle of it. A pool of dark blue. Ce-rooool-lian. The R rolled like water tumbling from a fountain. Flowers weren’t just red or purple or blue. She knew the names of the various shades. Carmine, vermillion, violet, robin’s egg blue. The world around her suddenly became more alive, bursting with hidden knowledge.

  This new knowledge filled her up. She wanted to share it, somehow. Spill it out to the air. To spread it out. Tell people that flower wasn’t just blue, it was periwinkle. That leaf wasn’t just green, it was peridot. At first, she shared her color knowledge with the other servants. When she informed Judith that one of the Missus’s dresses was coral, and not just pink, Judith had given her an odd look. And she told Jethro that the Master’s stallion wasn’t just brown; it was chestnut. He accused her of “putting on airs.” “You just a nigger, like me,” he’d said in huff.

  One afternoon, when Master Whitby was away in town, she was in his study, ostensibly to straighten it up. His desk was a mess. Papers and books were strewn across it, along with the stale crusts of bread and a full ashtray. She carefully stacked the books and arranged the papers into neat piles after clearing the polished cherrywood desk of crumbs. In the desk drawer, there were a couple of old fountain pens, half-full bottles of black ink and sheets of new white paper. Hazel snatched one of the bottles, the ink, and a pen. She buried them beneath her basket of cleaning rags. She knew Viktor Whitby wouldn’t miss a bottle or a few sheets of paper. He was a drunk.

  ***

  Fuchsia was certain that Hazel wouldn’t get in trouble for the small theft. Mostly certain. Vague memories stirred, like slow dust motes in a ray of sunshine. She remembered always cleaning some white people’s messes. Minding their babies, their linens, their lives. The monotonous drudgery. The way white folks thought you were barely human, more like a talking mule to be used. She had lived in a house like the Whitbys’ once, long ago. She knew that life had been unbearable, full of casual cruelty. A Negro boy at that house of long ago had once stolen something, maybe one of the white children’s toys. He’d been whipped like a horse. The red gashes and welts, his squealing like a pig being slaughtered still haunted her.

  No. She would not remember that life. That life was gone, over. She forgot her name. It was a willful act. She drowned it in the marsh, beneath the muddy waters. When she rose again, in her fuchsia finery, she left that name and that history behind. It was washed away, like silt and fishbones. She let her memories evaporate like mist.

  The child’s life was wasted here, as a less-than-human thing to be used by cold and indifferent white folks. Just as her former life had been. Fuchsia wanted to show Hazel that life was not ju
st endless droning service to people who could have you killed at a whim. The pen, the paper, the ink were all keys, ones that could open a door to new possibilities.

  Hazel made marks on the paper whenever she had a spare moment, mostly in the evenings. Her motor skills and unfamiliarity with penmanship made for awkward, shaky strokes. Once, she even spilled ink on her dress. Luckily, she had a pinafore to cover up the stain. Each time she picked up the pen was a failure. It was unwieldy in her hands, and Fuchsia could feel the swell of frustration in Hazel. She was a stubborn child at the best of times. Eventually, she returned the stolen pen to its desk, and managed to quash Fuchsia’s influence, for a while.

  ***

  It was a struggle to get through the day without being distracted. Hazel threw herself into her work, giving every task her undivided attention. Even things she hated, like laundry, or darning socks. She became a model worker, something that even the sour Missus noticed. She even said thank you to her every once in a while. Hazel learned to make bread, how to garden, and how to make soap. She mopped the floors daily, trimmed the candlewicks, and started long neglected projects, like polishing the silver. She sang while she worked, scraps of lullabies or work songs she heard when she passed the plantations on the way to town.

  Caleb complimented her good, Christian work ethic. She was proud of herself, in a way. She kept the thing within her hidden and more importantly, quiet. Not that the presence didn’t flare up every now and then. There were moments in the day when she was bombarded with images. Blue water. Brown reeds. Wading herons. And, most prominently, strange purple flowers. No, not purple. Fuchsia. The word rolled around in her brain like a marble. She loved the sound it made, the way it whispered at the end. The flower, a slender stalk festooned with a sphere of bell-like blossoms, bloomed in her dreams. There were so many bells on each flower. Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred per plant. It grew on wet hillocks, in between strands of marsh grass, where it fed on fungal spores. Sometimes, she saw the shape of the flower, its wide bell-mouths sucking her soul inside. Other times, she would see just flashes of color, bright spots that burned long after she’d seen them, on her hands, on any surface where her eyes just happened to land.

  Was she going mad? Once, during a trip to town, she’d seen a mad white woman roaming the streets, her clothes impossibly filthy, her bonnet more grey than white. She’d been taking to someone who wasn’t visible and twitching. She’d been with the Missus then, and the Missus said, “Poor thing, kicked out of her family. Madness just creeps up on people, like a curse. One day, you wake up seeing things that aren’t there, talking to invisible things.”

  She didn’t hear voices. At least, not yet. But she had the feeling that the flashes of color, flowers and birds were a message of some kind. Who was sending the message? And what did it mean?

  ***

  Fuchsia was trapped inside the girl. Days blended together. Weeks passed. The child became a woman when her monthlies started. She was no longer strong enough to affect Hazel one way or another, at least when she was awake. Hazel’s adolescent changes trampled Fuchsia’s feeble suggestions. Hazel was a raging river; Fuchsia was just a single reed always on the verge of being uprooted.

  Entering Hazel was a mistake. What had she been thinking? Fuchsia saw herself as an essence, a mist. A will-o’-the-wisp that lived in the Shimmer Marsh. She should have stayed far from flesh and blood, from humanity. She would fade away, yoked to this soul.

  ***

  A low fog hugged the ground, blurring everything. Hazel was on the porch, waiting for the sunrise. She’d been having trouble sleeping for the last couple of days. Her nights were punctuated by sudden, disturbing images. Petals on water, sinking. A girl in a bright purple-pink gauze beneath the water, dead but with her eyes wide open. Burning marshes, orbs of glowing color. Things that made no sense. The dreams were fleeting and intense, like sudden downpours. Images flooded her head, swirling around until she woke up.

  Hazel told no one about her nightmares. Who was there to tell? The Whitbys were cool and distant to each other, let alone to their inferiors. Caleb the steward was loyal to the family and took his duties very seriously. Judith was cautious and conservative, and she didn’t trust Jethro. Hazel was alone. And what would she tell someone, anyway? She was too old for this kind of nonsense.

  She’d brought up a basket of fabric scraps and her needles. It was too early to do her chores, so she had a vague intention to do some quilting. She needed a new bedspread anyway, and more importantly, it was busywork. The torrent of images hadn’t bothered her in the daytime for a long while. Hazel thought that they could start up again at any time.

  The basket was full of odds and ends. There was an old blue dress, a couple of calico-printed flour sacks, and some earth-colored work trousers. Hazel tried to see if she could somehow patch them together into something harmonious. It would surely be one ugly quilt, with its mixture of fabrics. She sighed. Negroes weren’t allowed finer things. They got hand-me-downs, and the cuts of meat considered too coarse for white palates.

  She started cutting up the blue dress into more manageable strips. The fabric was soft, probably Merino wool. The color was beautiful, a deep blue that reminded her of the bay’s water on certain days.

  The idea for the quilt hit her like a lightning strike. Blue water, brown reeds. And bright petals. A marsh grew beneath her fingers.

  ***

  And suddenly, Hazel’s fingers were Fuchsia’s fingers. She had hands again, and eyes and muscle memory. Hazel couldn’t draw. However, she could sew. Stitches could shape worlds, just as well as pens.

  Hazel cut out the rough shapes of trees and flowers. Muddy hillocks, drifting grasses. Fuchsia fed her the images, and the colors.

  Hazel was, of course, interrupted frequently from her work. She had to do her chores. She did them quickly, making sure not to make any mistakes. Then she went back to quilting whenever she could spare a moment or two.

  Ten days later, after a couple of sleepless nights, the quilt was finished.

  Mostly finished. Something was missing. It had most of the colors of the Shimmer Marsh, the blue, the brown and the green. But one color was missing. One shape.

  Hazel cut out the shape from the blue dress, fully intending it to be the woman who appeared in her dreams. It turned into a flower, but the color was all wrong.

  Fuchsia was her name. Her name was a color. Color was also a sound, a song. All color was made of other colors, other songs. She added the song of bright red to the gentle blue song of the marsh waters. Red, like a cardinal’s feathers, leaves in autumn, of rage and blood. Red, intertwined with blue, gradually staining the fabric flowers the color of her name.

  12: Lincoln

  Working at the museum was the best job Linc had gotten so far during his exile on the Eastern Shore. He was a combination security guard, maintenance man, and, on occasion, a tour guide. Not that the Whitby-Grayson Museum was particularly busy. The most people he’d seen in the building for the three weeks he worked here was a group of ten. He wondered how it managed to stay open.

  “Eugenia Fraser is the one who opened the museum,” Howard told him. “She was the heiress to Fraser Fisheries. She collected both Hazel’s quilts and Shadrach’s paintings back in the 1960s. The museum was constructed in the ’90s to house her collection. It stays open through her endowment.”

  He’d shown Linc a picture of Fraser. By the ’90s she was elderly, maybe in her late seventies. She had been a tall woman with a striking sense of style. With her silver hair in a short, spiky cut and a tailored pinstripe pantsuit, she could have been a fixture in the New York art scene. “She thought that Hazel and Shadrach were overlooked Outsider Artists.”

  “Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is an ‘Outsider Artist’?”

  “It’s a kind of umbrella term. In a broad sense, they are visual artists who have no formal training. In particular, though, they are people who create things because of some compulsion. They often view thei
r work as messages or portals. In other words, what they make has a meaning beyond just being displayed.”

  There were, roughly speaking, two main types of visitors to the museum, the Quilters and the Ghost Hunters. Groups of middle-aged African-Americans came to pay homage to Hazel’s work. Most of them were fellow quilters coming to marvel at Whitby’s work. These women were respectful and followed the museum’s rules (no photographs). They would spend hours carefully discussing each and every tapestry. They marveled over the artistry and originality. For the most part, they ignored Grayson’s work and the small gallery dedicated to other artists inspired by Whitby and Grayson. The other audience was made up of hipsters. Girls in baby doll dresses, Ugg boots and oversized sunglasses. Men with scraggly beards, skinny jeans and porkpie hats. They mostly gravitated towards Grayson’s work, its stark, sea-washed landscapes dominated by glowing fuchsia orbs.

  He once overheard a group of them theorizing about Shadrach Grayson: “I think he was on drugs of some kind. Like, datura,” one porkpie hat wearer said. The cadence of his deep voice suggested that he was under the influence of something or other.

  A girl with an asymmetrical haircut that was dyed a dandelion-yellow replied, “You say that about all abstract art. Rothko was on hallucinogens. Leonora Carrington did opium. That’s such weak sauce.”

  “Okay, then Ms. Art Forum. Why do you think he painted those orbs?”

  “I don’t know. But I read somewhere that Grayson was directed to paint by a spirit of some kind.”

  “A g-g-g ghost?”

  “Very funny. Besides, it doesn’t matter whether or not there actually was a ghost. Grayson believed that there was one.”

  In each group, there was always at least one person who was either unimpressed (“It looks like a kid could do it,”) or downright disturbed (“Those paintings make me want to take a Dramamine!”). Linc went back and forth on Whitby vs. Grayson. Whitby’s flowers that were sometimes women (or, a woman) were a little dizzying. Grayson’s glowing orbs were calming, save in the way the color seemed to luminesce with some secret fire. By his third week, he no longer found the paintings and tapestries either creepy or enthralling. Instead, they were comforting.