The girl whooshes forward, a spear of air bursting through Simone’s backside, fusing with her flesh, claiming strength in every muscle as she slumps back into the water. A weight pins her to the ceramic tub, seizing her mind and restraining her voice as she struggles to break free. The girl’s vaporous image rises from Simone, hovering over her, arms extended, palms holding her immobile.
Her bony form quivers, transforming.
Scabs along the girls face and chest shed to smooth brown skin. Mud drips from her hair revealing reddish-brown strands, coiling her girlish face. Her breasts and lifeless belly swell with milk and a phantom child. Her agape mouth spills silt loam snaking around her slender throat, sliding beneath her collarbone, a cascading ribbon entwined with breast milk, white and black, burying Simone shoulder to feet.
The girl’s neck arches with an elongated wheeze coursing through her renewed mortal image. Her spine contorts; her head snaps back, dropping toward Simone. Chestnut threads weave and roll in hollow sockets, almond slits with curling lashes.
A captive to her spellbinding glare, Simone recognizes the defiant stare.
Delphine!
A marionette under her control, Simone’s lips move, giving voice to Delphine’s words.
“See me. See my horror.”
Darkness clouds Simone’s eyes, adhered to the girl’s hypnotic gaze, transporting her to another time.
When Sumter thundered, plantations shuttered,
Relented barbarous tricentennial bondage,
Jubilant cries of freedom followed,
‘til Union Armies hollered, halt,
Thwarting thousand’s glory walk.
Detained, rerouted, entrapped, encamped on banks,
Flesh and bone buried where they sank.
Oh, what spoilage stains the bowl-shaped gulch,
Below the bluffs of Natchez Trace.
Delphine
1863, Magnolia Sunrise Plantation
Massa Randolph’s boots crunch along slave row’s dirt path, growing silent in front of the cabin. Maw ambles to the window and gazes into the murky yard at his still shadow, fearful of what’s brought him out so late at night. She prays he’ll keep on straight to the main house, but soil crunches beneath boots again, growing closer.
“Dat bastard, not my child,” Maw mumbles, moving from the window as his boots stomp up steps and across the porch.
The door bursts opened.
Maw jumps in front of the rocking chair, shoved aside by Massa’s strong hand, her petite frame colliding with the wall.
Before Delphine can move, Massa yanks the baby from her jiggling nipple and pulls her from the rocker through the door, her leaking bosom exposed and Maw chasing behind them.
“Massa Henry, please, she juz a child.”
“Delphine ain’t no child no moe, Josie. She ole ‘nough to have babies. Now go on in the house. Lorelei will take care of her.”
Through blinding tears, Delphine peers back at Maw cradling her newborn wailing for her milk, her nipples still atingle from her suckle. She glowers up at his stern face. He’s a monster! No sympathy for her hungry baby or care that her open dress hangs off her shoulder. She stretches the moist frock over her tender, naked breast as Massa wrenches her across the yard.
“Gal, don’t be prideful. You may be thirteen, but you got a woman’s body. You no child no moe, you hear?”
She nods and glances at her bare feet tripping over each other, struggling to keep up with Massa’s long-booted strides.
“Those tits ain’t for maskin’. Now that Lorelei’s hours from givin’ birth, that milk belongs to her infants to feed as long as it takes.”
“My babe needs feedin’, Massa.”
“I reckon with two breasts, you’ll feed ’em both, but Miss Lorelei’s newborn gets priority to that suck. Understand?”
“Yes, Massa.”
Delphine trembles as they enter the home and climb the stairs to Massa’s bedroom, growing closer to the pregnant Missus. Lorelei’s glare made her weep as a child and cringe at horrific stories of servant’s lashings and scaldings at her hands. “A monster lurks in her soul,” she’d been told by Maw. “Lorelei got an evil streak. Her beauty’s deceivin’. Dat sunny blonde hair, icy blue eyes, delicate pale features run skin deep, but her blood’s moe toxic than a wolfsbane flower. Be careful ‘round her, Delphine.”
Chatter in the slave quarters was that Missus Lorelei asks for a young wet nurse, a gal who’d just given birth to nurse her infant. Delphine couldn't hide her belly’s bulge from Massa, her child’s father. She suspected he’d come seeking her.
Months ago, when Maw worked in the main house cooking as she did most days, he trapped and pinned her to the ground beneath a row of cornstalks in Maw’s garden and pressed his hand hard to her mouth, muting her squeals. He did to her that awful thing a stallion did to a mare in the stables. After he had his way with her, he pulled up his pants and yelled, “Stop yo cryin’ and get back in the cabin, gal.” Later, bruised and balled up on her bed, Maw nursed her bruises and moaned in anger when she saw blood between her thighs.
“Youse a woman now. Don’t fight Massa. Give him wat he needs. Youse know no pain.” At her side, she opened a basket where she stored her herbal medicines and said, “Use dis after Massa has his ways. The cocklebur roots and bluestone stops da babies from comin’.”
At seven, she saw him do the same to Maw. She woke to hushed groans in her corner bunk, watching, afraid beneath the blanket. When he dressed and left, Maw wept into her pillow so she couldn’t hear. It happened more than once; each time she cried, hiding her suffering at daylight. She’d never asked what Massa did to her in bed. Now she knows her pain.
The day she and Maw got wind Missus Lorelei was scouting for a lactating gal to suckle her newborn, she prayed she’d find someone else. Tonight, when Massa entered the cabin, she nearly screamed, wanting to escape with her child attached to her nipple.
Being at Missus Lorelei’s beck and call, she’s bound to anger her. She’s as frightening as a snake when upset, hissing harsh words or whipping servants as she’d done with the last girl, stripping and lashing her in front of everyone. But if she gives Missus what she needs, they’d let her leave and see her child again. She can’t stand Missus’s sly eyes watching as the newborn suckles her breast for days. Weeks. Months. A year. Until the baby desires no more milk.
One stillbirth and several miscarriages sent Lorelei into an obsessive delirium to get a baby by any means, a craze Delphine suffered for two years at Massa’s pleasure and Missus’s needs. She bore twins conceived from Massa’s seed. Infants easily mistaken for Lorelei’s blood, with blue eyes and fair skin. Russet curls, thick eyelashes, and full lips are the only hint they came from Delphine’s womb. With Lorelei’s wish for more children in the house, Delphine finds herself with child again, one she won’t hand over this time.
Dey can’t have another.
Delphine peers outside the nursery window at Slave Row. Hidden underneath corn stalks and turnip leaves in the small garden behind Maw’s cabin lies a cloth satchel stuffed with items for her escape from Magnolia. News of emancipation reached plantations when Union soldiers marched into town and voiced their freedom. Jubilant cries and spirited dancing flowed through the slave quarters. She feared Massa’s whip on their flesh till she’d heard the words the Union soldiers spoke.
Deys free . . . She’s free.
Days and weeks later, slaves deserted their shanties. Many, too fearful of what awaited up north, and others too old or wanting the salary Massa promised them as freed servants, remained at Magnolia. She should’ve left when others fled days after they heard talk of freedom.
If it weren’t for her babies, she’d have run off the moment soldiers rode into town declaring their emancipation. Massa Henry and Missus Lorelei lied to her and the others, promising they’d pay a salary if they stayed. She’d be better off up north than here as chattel to Massa and Missus’s whims.
Maw refuses to le
ave and insists on keeping Delphine’s firstborn. The child’s more hers since Massa took Delphine away from her child and locked her in the main house, away from other servants when she’s thick with a child. No one knows she carried twins and carries another babe now. Though she’s pained to leave her babies, they’re better off with Massa raised as their young ‘uns.
Delphine jerks her head around when the nursery’s doorknob twists.
He’s too early! Lawd’s testin’ my will.
The door opens as she steps from the window.
Massa creeps on silent feet into the room, making his nightly visit. Her body has grown to expect him. Just as her nipples leak when she hears the babies’ crying, her loins moisten minutes before Massa visits, as if she senses his manly needs. She’s only ever known female pleasures with Massa, no other man, and suspects he desires her more than Missus, as his touch gentles now and his mouth finds hers often and lingers long. Where before she’d squirmed with hatred, now she allows his every need.
Maw was right. When she submits to Massa without a struggle, he gives her pleasure and grants her wishes, hidden from Missus. Many times, while Missus Lorelei lay in a laudanum-induced sleep, he'd allowed her to visit Maw and her firstborn. When she asked a year ago, he'd shown her how to read and write, her body a bargain for knowledge. Massa brought her children’s books hidden from Missus under a loose floorboard beneath her bed. In a year, she’d learned them all, stories that offered solace as she read in a hush while the babies nursed.
Massa said she could earn two-hundred and fifty cents when she wrote a full sentence. When she did, he placed a shiny gold coin, a quarter eagle, in her palm. Money seldom crosses her path. Only on rare occasions when Missus reaches into her well-guarded silk crochet purse on the nightstand for coins to pay Doc for the laudanum or give to servants to buy food in town. Ignorant of the worth of coins or bills, she supposed two dollars and fifty cents more than enough to buy food up north.
North . . .
She'd hoped to escape Magnolia two hours before Massa's midnight arrival. Now her only chance to leave is while he sleeps beside her. Delphine moves toward the slumbering twins, eyes misty as she suffers a look. Their faces always comfort her before Massa begins to grope. After tonight, she won’t see her babies again. If she could journey north with them on her back, she would. But they’re much too little to travel dangerous trails. Massa’s growing affection for his babies eases her worry. The twins are better off with their poppa. And Missus will be glad to be rid of her and have them to herself.
She leans over and slides her finger between the mattress and the walnut wood frame, running her fingers across carved words concealed on the bottom rail. The first sentence she’d ever written left for others to discover.
The twins were born to Delphine Randolph in 1862.
When Missus slapped her face and called her a negroid ninny, she carved out her anger in furious digs and jabs, wishing it the Missus’s flesh. No one knows that the words exist here, not even the man who taught her letters and numbers. She prays one day someone will discover the truth about the children. She made sure they would. She’d crawled beneath the Dutch box bed where she sleeps with a lantern and carved “The twins were born to Delphine Randolph in 1862” into a wooden plank with Missus’s expensive silver butter knife. She figures as long as the house stands, the words will exist for someone to read long after Missus’s bones are dried and brittle in the ground.
Delphine rubs the watery blur from her eyes and stares at the soothing yellow damasked walls, wishing she was as free as the bluebirds and butterflies perched on the vines drawn across the wall. Again, she wipes tears from her eyes, dries her hand on her dress, and turns from the crib.
Massa pulls the mattress off the wooden Dutch bed as he does most nights so Missus Lorelei can’t hear the squeaking frame. He walks toward her, the stench of whiskey on his breath, and undoes her dress.
“Delphine!” Lorelei’s voice resonates through the walls.
“Massa, please, Missus needs me,” she whispers.
His eyes at her breast, drunk with lust, shine greedier than the infants in the crib for her milk. He places his finger in a hush at his lips, watching her pull the dress over her moist breasts and round belly.
“Delphine, come quick, gal!” yells Missus through several coughs in the master bedroom attached to the nursery where she sleeps. The one-year-old twins stir in the crib but don’t wake. Massa Henry sneaks toward the window and out of view with his finger to his mouth.
Delphine unlocks and opens the door adjoined to Missus Lorelei’s room. She finds her hanging half off the bed with a laudanum bottle in her hand. Thin blonde strands drape her face as she struggles to adjust her frame upright.
“Water,” Missus says, her voice hoarse from coughs. She reaches for the jug on the far side of the nightstand.
“Don’t strain yoself, Missus Lorelei.” She rushes over, straightens her body on the mattress, and fluffs the pillows soured and damp from night sweats behind her back. Reddish-brown laudanum stains the top of her gown. “Let me do dat.” Delphine takes the bottle from her hand. “Too much ain’t safe, Missus.”
“Just a drop this time.” Her chest rattles with a deep cough as though her lungs heaved from her throat.
Delphine places a drop of tincture on her tongue to soothe her cough. Pouring water from the pitcher into the cup, she hands it to her, noticing Missus’s sallow skin, purple-ringed eyelids, and sunken cheeks. The pinched mask of consumption she saw on old, deceased Massa. Missus Lorelei’s poppa ran Magnolia with a kinder hand before he took sick and Missus married Massa Henry. Old Massa took ill and never seed daylight again, never leaving his bed.
Laudanum has become an addiction she fears will kill Missus before the illness. There’s no stopping her from taking the only remedy from the painful coughing that started a month ago. Doc says she’s getting better, but the coughs are worse. Delphine hoped in her weakened state she’d be more pleasant, but she’s meaner than ever.
“How the twins? They keepin’ you wake?”
“Dey be fine, though sleep fitful,” Delphine states, taking the cup from her hand and placing it on the table.
“You must hate me, gal. To tend my sickness and my babies.”
Delphine lowers her incensed gaze. My babies she wants to yell but dares not backtalk. Such words have only ever gotten her harsh words or a belt to her flesh. She winces at the pain she’d felt when Missus ordered slave hands to strip and whip her in the yard. For hours, she stood buck naked, her body raw, exposed to everyone, even her Maw.
She lifts her gaze, noticing the wretched look on Missus's face, sensing she’s in one of her foul moods. For she only refers to the babies as her babies when she’s angry.
Missus Lorelei tightens her eyes with subtlety. “The lawd will bless you, girl. You’ve done me such favors, given me babies my loins reject. I know how you think of me, taking your picaninnies as my own. But what good can you give them? I can afford them everything, a name, a station in life. Let me remind you not to speak a word of this to anyone. As far as the world’s concerned, those babies sprang from my hips.” She snorts a jab of meanness, pure vileness from her wicked throat, as though yellow-green slime poured from her mouth. “Thank heavens for your mixed breedin’. If they’d been born any darker, their fate might be different. I’d been told at the Forks of the Road auction you got some good genes. Yo Maw sired you from her old Massa. Good French blood I hear.” Lorelei’s chest heaves with a deep hack, rousing cries in the nursery.
Delphine starts toward the door.
Lorelei grabs her arm. “Come closer.”
She steps toward the bed, tensing as Missus’s hand rubs her pregnant belly as if it were her own. Her hands move to her leaking breasts as they have many times, caressing as if she were a blind woman seeking to discern their fullness. She stiffens as she squeezes and circles each breast as though it were a ripe fruit ready to eat. Sometimes she believes if Missu
s could claim her body as her own, she would, just for something real other than her dead womb.
“What’s it like . . . the babies suckin’ on your tits?”
Delphine’s left eye twitches, resenting a word fit for a barn animal. Missus only uses it out of anger. She’s in a dark mood, furious at the world for her ill health, a sickness that stole her looks. The fine features she took pride in are gone, leaving her raucous with hatred. She swallows her pride, realizing Missus Lorelei will never have a newborn’s mouth nourish on her breast. Something she possesses they can’t claim as their own. With spite she states, “Sumthin’ good, Missus. Every woman shuld kno’ nourishin’ a babe. It’s ‘kin to a tingle, a warm liquid string drawin’ relief through the nipple.” At once, ashamed, she lowers her gaze and adds, “Sumtimes sore with constant nussin’.”
Lorelei’s nose flares as if detecting a foul odor. With a simper and wicked grin, she stares Delphine over for a long, silent moment with her shrewd eyes. “My lustful husband’s gentler than the first time he had you, I hope?” she asks through another cough, squinting her eyes, expecting a reaction. When none comes, she sighs. “Oh lawd, gal, don’t be coy. I gathered before I summoned you as my wet nurse that child yo Maw keeps is my husband’s, kin to my unborn infant. Y’all part of Magnolia’s family. I reckoned I’d get you ‘way from the fields here with me. You should be grateful for plenty of food, clothes, a proper room, and my husband’s pleasurin’.” She tightens her eyes with a sly grin. “He satisfies yo needs now doesn’t he, Delphine?”
She drops her chin, bracing for harsher words. It’s no surprise Missus knows her firstborn belongs to Massa Henry. She looks just like the twins. Without a doubt, Missus heard Massa’s groans and choppy breath in the nursery when he took her many nights on the mattress on the floor till she grew sore and his excitement ceased. She imagined her outside the door listening, boiling with anger that peaked to devil meanness. Missus’s wise but feigns ignorance. Wavering without a response, she lowers her gaze, understanding Missus wants her to say yes. If she replies no, she’ll appear ungrateful for the food, clothes, room, everything.
Tainted Harvest Page 6