Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Shan continued smiling as he talked, but her expression had turned thoughtful in a way that Ran, at all costs, had hoped to avoid.

  “Come on!” he protested. “This is my best stuff. Why aren’t you laughing?”

  “Well, to give you credit, you were never cheap.”

  “Hey, tell that to my wife!” Ran instantly knew this was a tactical mistake. “I swear, Shan,” he continued, hurrying on, “it seems like just last week we were on the Ferris wheel at the state fair, gazing over North Raleigh, making plans to run away. And then we blinked, and half our lives are gone. We hardly know each other anymore, but you know what I really feel, Shanté?”

  “What?” she asked, with an expression that seemed wistful.

  “In another way, it’s like no time has passed at all.”

  “It has, though, Ran,” she said. “We aren’t the same people we were then.”

  “I am,” he said, with his bright face. “Aren’t you?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not.”

  “How come you seem the same to me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess the answer has to be because you want me to.” She reached out and took his hand. “Why are you here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, fighting sudden tears and angry with himself for them. “Is that okay? Does there always have to be a reason for everything, for every fucking little thing we do? Don’t you ever do things without knowing why?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I guess I do.”

  “Don’t.” Ran held his finger up. “Don’t do that to me, okay? Don’t look at me like that.” He got up and walked away.

  “How am I looking at you, Ran?”

  “Like that,” he answered, turning back. “Like Claire. Did she tell you two dead bodies turned up in our yard yesterday? Was it yesterday?…Yesterday. Did she mention anything about a black pot?”

  “She said you dug one up and that you seem to think it’s having some effect on you.”

  “I’m asking you flat out,” Ran said. “Are they used in vodou…hoodoo?”

  “No, not in vodou, not in hoodoo. In Palo Mayombe they are.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Palo is another form of Congo practice, Ran. It developed in Cuba. The pots are called ‘prendas’ there. But for a Cuban prenda to turn up on a nineteenth-century South Carolina rice plantation is a stretch.”

  “But Claire’s people had all sorts of Cuban ties, Shanté!”

  She considered. “Claire thinks it’s just a cook pot—I expect she’s probably right.”

  “Are you sure, Shanté? Are you positive? Because one of those bodies was Claire’s great-great-great-grandmother, Adelaide DeLay, and the other, I’m pretty sure, was the plantation steward, a slave named Jarry. I think they were having an affair. I think she was pregnant with his child, and Addie’s husband came home from the war and murdered them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know how I know! Because a little birdie told me so, all right? But, really, Shan, it’s connected to this pot. It’s like the pot, or something in the pot, is telling me. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like it’s dropping pebbles in the woods for me to find, and if you really want to know, I think it sent me here to you. I mean, why would a cook pot be buried with manacles and cowrie shells in it? Why would it be wrapped with chain?”

  “The pot you found was wrapped with chain?”

  “Uh-huh. Does that mean something?”

  Her expression now was grave. “Was it buried, by any chance, in the shadow of a tree?”

  “A tree?” Ran said. “I don’t know, maybe. There are trees around. Actually, it was in an anthill.”

  “An anthill…The pot you found was buried in an anthill?”

  Ransom nodded. “Why?”

  She didn’t answer. “Look,” she said, in the martial tone he liked. “Look, I’m listening, okay? But first things first. I really, really have to get back to the shop. You eat and try to rest. As soon as I get back, I’ll tell you what I know about black pots.”

  FORTY-THREE

  With the victories in Virginia, Charleston’s mood is gay that winter, 1861, but Addie, on a brief visit to her aunt’s, finds herself out of step and put off by the gaiety. At a St. Cecelia’s Ball, her cousin, Lavinia Lesesne, shows up in a dress from Paris that cost eight hundred dollars, it is said. It was run in through the blockade on a dark, fast ship with six thousand vintage champagne bottles in the hold. And medicines are lacking for the boys with missing limbs and eyes, arriving daily on the Northern trains, so much soberer than when they marched out in high summer to the sounds of drums. In the Mercury, she reads the names. John Middleton, who got drunk at her wedding and fired off Harlan’s gun—dead, at twenty-one, the first in a long, ghastly toll. Against that black-piped column, those sober boys with pinned sleeves and patches on their eyes, the sight of Lavinia on the stair at the Hibernian in that red Parisian dress, with three-quarters of her décolletage exposed, fills Addie with a premonition she can scarcely name. And the Federals have taken Port Royal Sound and Beaufort, only seventy miles south, where she was wont to summer with her aunt. Is that where Jarry went? When she thinks of him, it’s as if a lightning bolt had struck the earth directly at her feet, and Addie stands there with a pounding heart, hardly knowing what it was or where it went, wanting only what she cannot have: for it to come again.

  It’s to distract herself from this that Addie goes to town, and one afternoon at Russell’s, her old haunt, she hears George Fitzhugh, the philosopher, holding forth to an enthusiastic crowd:

  “Liberty and equality are not timeless human values,” he maintains, and it’s half a minute by the clock before the clapping, stomping audience can calm themselves sufficiently to take their seats. “They are new under the sun. The free states of antiquity were founded upon chattel slavery. Only France and the Northern states have fully and fairly tried the experiment of a social organization founded upon universal liberty and equality of rights. And what is the result? Let us pose the question to the women and children deep within the bowels of the mines, who drag out their lives in darkness, harnessed like horses to heavy cars loaded with ore. Let us ask the pallid children in the factories, who work fourteen hours a day and go home at night to sleep in damp cellars. The experiment has failed. Riots, trade unions, strikes for higher wages—these are the result. Crime and pauperism have increased up North.

  “The apologists of liberty and equality propose to enhance society by encouraging free competition, but it’s chiefly this which defeats well-being among men. My evidence? Look to nature, friends, and tell me what you see…. A war of competition, the result of which is that the weaker or less healthy are continually displaced and exterminated by the strong. Where men of strong wills and self-control come into competition with the weak and improvident, the latter soon become the inmates of penitentiaries. The employer cheapens his employee’s wage; the retail dealer takes advantage of his ignorance, his inability to visit other markets, his want of credit, to charge enormous profits. The free worker is the muzzled ox that treadeth out the straw. Had they been vassals or serfs, they would have been beloved, cherished, and taken care of as our slaves are in the South. Here, we provide for each slave in old age and infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants. A Southern plantation is the beau ideal of communism.” (Addie, caught off guard, laughs aloud at this and ignores the disapproving stares she gets.) “As love for others is the organic law of our society, so is self-love at the North.

  “A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings—the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity, and goodwill arise. A state of independence always begets jealous rivalry and hostility. A man loves his wife and children because they are weak and dependent. When they assert their independence, he’s apt to transfer his affection. But slaves are a
lways dependent. Hence, though men are often found at variance with wife or child, we never saw one who didn’t like his slaves.”

  A hearty, general laugh attends the line, and this time Addie’s is the sole dark face.

  “Greece and Rome were indebted to this institution for the leisure to cultivate their heads and hearts,” Fitzhugh goes on. “Had they been tied down to Yankee thrift, they might have produced a Franklin, with his ‘penny saved is a penny gained’; they might have invented the spinning jenny, but they never would have produced a Socrates, an Aeschylus. Had the Hebrews believed in freedom and equality, where would be King David and the Psalms?”1

  This discourse is interrupted, over and over, by applause, and the women, Addie notes, cheer louder than the men. As she slips out the back, she thinks, How plausible these ideas seemed, and not so long ago, and, now, how wrong.

  “And did I not see you? Did I not?” Under her breath, she reproaches Jarry, in his absence, carrying on the conversation in her heart.

  And as she hurries south on King that day, passing sights familiar since her birth, among the people, her people, whom she loves, she thinks once more: all this is a lie that everyone believes but me, and Addie feels herself a stranger and a spy in her own home. And what if I am wrong? she thinks. What impudence to put herself in opposition to everything she’s known!

  To slay “that Death, the Self,” to learn to suffer without rebellion, she turns to God in prayer, and why she seeks His help is because rebellion is so strong.

  No, Charleston leaves her in a restless, anxious state, and she goes home to Wando Passo and throws herself into her work. They’re winnowing the seed rice for next season now, at the little hip-roofed house on stilts beside the barn. Addie watches the rough rice fall through the square hole in the floor, where the wind catches the tailings and carries them over the river in a sifting, golden plume. Under Jonadab, the new steward, the men are bringing in the firewood now, mending fences, mauling roads; the women, picking apples, putting up the pork. For two weeks, they slaughter, and Addie works beside them, holding a glistening sleeve of gut between two fists, shaking hot salt water back and forth, then letting it spill into the great smoking hole, carrying away the smell of shit from what will now be casings for the Christmas sausages. She spends five days sunk to her armpits in corning brine, until the flesh shreds off her palms in sheets. At night she reads, sometimes till one or two. Irving’s “Sketchbooks,” Gilpin, Cowper, “Lalla Rookh,” and Scott, “The Lady of the Lake” and “Marmion,” “The Story of Rimini” by Leigh Hunt. She’s drawn, especially, to tales of lovers who come to tragic ends. Her Byron, though, sits on the table, unopened, with the green feather at the place; beside it, Percival’s old Wordsworth and “Evangeline”—she never touches these, nor lets them far outside her reach.

  It’s this winter, soon after her return, that the fright begins. One night, alone in the house, brushing out her hair after Tenah and the others have retired, Addie glances up and sees a figure in the mirror—fleetingly there, half glimpsed, then gone. A hand over her pounding heart, she sits there as the cold wind blows outside, tossing the old trees against the moon, and she remembers what hasn’t troubled her in all these years.

  When she was a little girl in bed upstairs at Blanche’s house, sometimes she closed her eyes at night and saw her mother’s face—something she’d, no doubt, confabulated from a photograph—but not as she had been in life. The woman Addie saw wore a black wreath of waterweed and came flying like an angel through a current undersea, her torn, drenched clothes rippling and streaming out behind. In the mirror, Addie sometimes glimpsed her pale, drowned face, before her eyes registered what was really there: herself. For the whole of one dark year—was she seven? Six?—she avoided mirrors, would not on any dare gaze down into a puddle in the street. She always fancied it was to tell her why she’d walked into the sea that day that her mother came, and at the bottom of it all, Addie was terrified to receive this confidence. For once you knew…what then? What, then, would there be to prevent you—you, too…? Was this it?

  And then, when she was eight, as suddenly as it arrived, the vision went away. And from that day to this, not until tonight, has Addie given it a thought. So why this winter, with such good news from Virginia, with Charleston all so gay, why after Jarry leaves, does Addie see the figure in the mirror once again? Why, now as then, does she look up each time a board creaks in the hall? Why does she wait, with bated breath, for silence to redescend?

  And one night—not this first one, but the second or the third—the creak is followed by another. There are footsteps.

  “Tenah?” she calls, and her heart is like to burst. “Who’s there?”

  No one answers, but Addie, sitting there in bed, fancies she can feel an awareness, not her own, on the other side, an awareness like that of the hound dog, Sultan, the moment when he looks up from his bone, sensing an intruder, not yet seen.

  There is something in the house with her—the thought is very clear…. Clear, too, the intuition that it’s not her mother. The presence is a man.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Ran was far too wired to sleep. After showering, he gave consideration to a shave.

  “What, though, would be the point?” Apparently agreeing, his reflection shrugged, and so he kept the growth and snooped discreetly, running his finger down the spines on Shanté’s shelf. Folklore from Adams County by Harry Middleton Hyatt; Pow-Wows, or The Long-Lost Friend by John George Hohman; El Monte and Reglas de Congo by Lydia Cabrera; Hoodoo in Theory and Practice by Catherine Yronwode; The Master Book of Candle Burning by Henri Gamache; The Book on Palo by Raul Canizares; Secrets of the Psalms, The Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses, Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston.

  On Shanté’s worktable, bath crystals, incense, and sachets were being weighed and placed in foil packets with dramatic, retro-looking labels featuring black cats, dice, lightning bolts, and flames. Bundled candles had been sorted by their use and color—green for money, red for love, purple for power, black for evil deeds, and white for opening the way. There were small flannel bags in similar colors in a section labeled “Mojo Hands.” There were loose herbs, roots to which the earth still clung, and perfume-sized bottles of anointing oil with scores of different names, the same ones on the packets of incense and sachets: “Van Van Oil,” “Do as I Say,” “Cast Off Evil,” “I Can You Can’t,” “Come to Me,” “Follow Me Girl.”

  “‘Essence of Bendover Oil,’” he read. “Hey, dute, I think someone may have been using that on you—meaning me!” Addressing the interlocutor, he laughed, knowing what he thought he meant.

  Outside, he sat propped against one of the buttresses of the great tree and glanced at the Saint Christopher. He’d wanted it inscribed “To Shanté…Love, Ran” but the jeweler had said there wasn’t room. “Love, Ran,” was all it said. Love, Ran… Fatigue stole over him and he lay down, hands behind his head, feet crossed, gazing up into the tree’s broad crown and listening to the rustling leaves. Beyond, great clipper ships of cumulus were sailing east through azure seas. On a journey, too, he thought. But where? Same place as you. Same place as me. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the light had changed, and Shanté sat beside him with a book.

  “Hey,” he said. “I didn’t hear you come.”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Was I asleep?”

  She smiled. “All afternoon.”

  “Really? Damn…” He took a beat. “You know, this is an amazing tree.”

  “Is Mama Iroko speaking to you?”

  He turned his head to her. “Mama Iroko?”

  “It’s a ceiba, Ran. In Cuba, they’re considered sacred. In Palo, the leaves are used to make a tea that’s said to open the third eye.” She put her finger in her book and leaned against the trunk, gazing up with him.

  “You look at this and have to wonder if humans really are the peak of life on earth,” Ran said.

  “You thought we were
?” She smiled. “Think of what it does. It turns sunlight into life. It takes what’s dead out of the earth and converts it back to life. It harms nothing, kills nothing.”

  “It isn’t conscious, though.”

  “Who says? Close your eyes.” She put her hand lightly over them. “Don’t you feel its awareness of us? We’re like this little mosquito whine of energy on its periphery, but what it’s mainly conscious of is the sun. It’s like a mighty being deep in contemplation of that fundamental source. And it takes that energy and lives on it and turns it into life. Can we do that? No, Ran, we aren’t the top.”

  “That’s sounding kind of New Age, Shan.”

  She laughed. “No, baby, what you hear is Africa. Africa’s as Old Age as it gets.”

  “I’d like to go there. I’ve always felt some sort of tug.”

  “Maybe it’s ancestral.”

  Ran smiled, thinking he was supposed to.

  She did not smile back.

  “You’re suggesting I’m part black?” he asked with skeptical amusement.

  “I’m not suggesting it; it’s true. We all are. The difference is, my ancestors left Africa two hundred fifty, three hundred years ago; yours, sixty thousand, give or take.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Sure, don’t you know that? You think white people evolved separately in Europe from white European apes? No, Ran. Humanity evolved one time, in Africa, and then spread out. Geneticists think there was a single migration around sixty-five thousand years ago. A band of hunter-gatherers, probably no more than a couple hundred of them, followed a coastal route to India. They or their descendants spread into Southeast Asia and eventually reached Australia fifty thousand years ago. Offshoots of that wave went northeast to China and Japan, over the land bridge to North America—they became the Indians—and westward into northern Europe. The colder it got, the less sun they saw, the lighter their skins became to absorb vitamin D. Archaeologists think there were multiple migrations, but whether there was one or twenty, if you trace the family tree back far enough, we’re all black Africans.”