“Say what? You want to research embroidery by enslaved women in the Americas? I can tell you, as a point of fact, that no such thing exists, and textile and fibres are my specialization. Embroidery was a leisure activity for white women during the time of slavery. It required resources, which put it out of the reach of even free black women. Maybe you could look at quilt-making?”
But Denise stood her ground. There was the woman who came to visit her nightly, embroidery hoop in hand. That woman, though she vanished at the first light of day, was real. Oh, so real. It was her job to tell this woman’s story.
Noella told Denise that if she could find examples of any such embroidery, they would reconsider the topic. Denise left Noella’s cushy office at the university that day knowing her advisor expected her to fail.
For a while she too thought that she would fail, despite the woman who came to sit in her mind every night, embroidering ornate and beautiful coloured herbals and bestiaries. Yet, Denise could find absolutely no documentary evidence that enslaved black women made embroidery. One museum curator after another told her no such thing existed in the records. Embroidery-making, it seemed, was a leisure-time activity that only white women engaged in.
“You not looking in the right places,” the woman who came faithfully every night said. “I tell you where to look. But you have to make up your mind whether you believe in me or you don’t. You can’t be half-stepping. You believe fully in me, you find what you want.”
The woman had a thimble in her hand and some rough-looking osnaburg cloth. This time she was making a piece that looked remarkably different from those Denise had seen her make before. It became so etched in Denise’s mind that she was both surprised, and surprised at herself for being surprised, to come across that piece for sale on a website on the Internet a few weeks later, made by an “unknown Jamaican woman, possibly enslaved”. It depicted a brown-skinned woman lifting a basket filled with tropical flowers over her head. Some flowers had tumbled from the basket and had sprouted, growing in profusion at the woman’s feet.
That was the break-through piece that gave way to others. An enslaved woman had made a piece for Queen Victoria, whom she thanked for freeing the slaves. Another woman had made a piece for her daughter being sold away into slavery. And another woman, unknown, who made it into the Jamaican papers, for embroidering a piece of the island so sunny and resplendent that it caught the eye of the governor, who sent it as a gift to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Noella could barely contain her astonishment. She had to concede that Denise was onto something, but the inability to name these women, track them down in records, was a problem for authentication and verification. Academia, after all, worked on facts, on what could be laid down in an orderly manner and examined.
That night as Denise lay in her bed she started talking to the woman. She felt stupid doing it at first, then, after a while, not so stupid at all. “Tell me your name,” Denise heard herself saying out loud to the darkness around her. “Tell me anything you want. Tell me where to find you. I am here and I am listening.”
Denise found herself in a darkened back room with the woman. There was an overpowering scent of sugarcane.
“It take you a long enough time to come,” the woman began ruefully. “All the time I been the one visiting with you.”
The woman was sitting hunched over, working by the light of the window. Yards of cloth were all about, and she squinted as her fingers moved, embroidering something. She was middle-aged, maybe older.
“Somebody important getting married,” the woman continued. “The dress for the wedding come from England, but it not as pretty as they want, so they give it to my missus to pretty up. That woman can sew but can’t do embroidery. All the embroidery on shoes and clothes and household things that bear her name, that people praise her for, I the one that does all of it.” The woman looked up with rheumy red eyes. “Embroidery pretty, but it does make you go blind, you know. Nobody talks about that.”
Denise got closer. The woman was wrapping silky white threads around a needle to create the most beautiful roses and rosettes, flowers that lifted off the delicate material to become three-dimensional on the pristine white wedding dress. Denise looked around the room. There were so many pieces of cloth, things the woman was working on: hats, gloves, aprons, bags.
“Missus glad when she buy me. All the way from New Orleans. She need somebody that can do embroidery good-good. I still youngish when I come. I getting old and tired now. I live longer in Jamaica than anywhere else. Missus ask me where I learn to make embroidery good so. I tell her they take me and my mother from the place with the big river where we live, and they separate we. One woman in Morocco buy me and I go live with she. That woman in Morocco in embroidery business, so that’s how come I start learn. In Morocco, they have some beautiful beautiful embroidery. It different based on where you live in that country. I live with that woman in El Jadida, near Azemmour, and there it is all blue-and-white embroidery. I start to think it not so bad in Morocco, because I can make my way back to the big river; one day I can make my way home where I belong. But that woman she sell me to a man in Portugal, who keep me just a short time before selling me to another man in Spain. I stay there in Spain for a while, still doing the embroidery business. But these people, when business not so good, they quick-a-clock sell you to make money. Before you know it, I end up on a boat for a place call New Orleans, where a seamstress woman buy me for my skills. I liked New Orleans. Big river becoming nothing but a dream and a faraway memory. You know? Where you start to ask yourself if it really happen? In New Orleans, they have so many others like me, and I start form friends. My missus, she busy bad on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and I work my fingers down to nothing, so she give me Sundays and Mondays off. Boy, I used to be thankful for that, because by Sunday morning, I have no feeling in my fingers. In New Orleans you have these different nuns, black nuns, they had their own convent and everything. These nuns used to take in black girls and teach them skills, then find them good free black husbands. One day a nun come to ask me if on my days off I would teach those girls embroidery. I tell you, I jumped at the chance, no matter the state my fingers was in, because that would mean I could save up a little money to help myself, to free myself. But my missus was a wretch. One day when I save up about enough to buy my freedom that woman she ask to borrow my money and before you know it, I on a ship and I end up with a new missus and living in Jamaica.”
The woman went back to her sewing. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head after a while, “that was what that woman in New Orleans do to me. This new missus I have, she not bad. But I learnt long ago not to trust these people.”
A pained awkward silence fell over the room.
It was then that Denise saw them, almost covered up by all the other pieces in the room. These were clearly works that the woman embroidered for herself, from bits and pieces of cloth and thread. The short fat stalks of heliconias and red gingers; the purple-blue blossoms of the national tree of Jamaica, which was now endangered; and oh, all the birds! There was the bird that islanders now called the rasta bird because of its red, green and gold coloring, many different kinds of hummingbirds with long tails that curved and met in something of a semi-circle. There was the giant yellow-and-black swallowtail butterfly, now hunted almost to extinction; and row upon row of sugarcane plants. A tapestry of a great house and people chopping cane, men and women working together. An overseer with a long dark whip. The heart-breakingly small children in the pickney gang. Here, too, was the woman lifting a basket full of flowers over her head. Denise carefully took up each work in the pile, studying each for the longest while.
Where had all the work vanished that this woman had created in whatever little spare time she had? She had told the island’s history in embroidery.
The woman, still bent over her work, was talking again: “I forget the name my mother call me. I forget even what my mother look like. I just know she was
tall and dark and a good basket weaver. I was from some place that had a big wide river. I loved playing in that river. They take me and my mother together from near that river. But no matter what my mother said, no matter all the begging and the crying, they did not keep us together. My mother she plant fruits and flowers, and when she put the basket with flowers over her head some of the flowers fall out all around her. She always loved pretty things, my mother.”
The woman stopped talking, as if she had given as much information as she could give.
For years Denise could find no documentary evidence of the woman who visited her at night. But she kept at it, until little by little she was able to build a case, reclaim a history that everyone said was not there. The women had always been there, Denise showed; it was just that they ran afoul of the idea most people had of the kind of women who embroidered.
Denise dedicated her dissertation and the book that eventually followed to the woman who still came from time to time to visit with her, the woman who would be gone by morning, “The Vanishing Woman”.
Malika Booker
A British writer, her work is steeped in anthropological research methodology and rooted in storytelling. Her writing spans poetry, theatre, monologue, installation and education. Clients and organisations she has worked with include Arts Council England, the BBC, British Council, Wellcome Trust, National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Arvon, and Hampton Court Palace.
The Conversation—Ruth & Naomi
Ruth go, sweet daughter-in-law leave me. entreat me not to leave. my son your husband is dead, leave. whither you go I will go. i am old fowl, a homeless chicken. whither thou lodgest, I will lodge. walk back to your people, go rest in your mother’s bosom, leave while you still swing those hips, child. thy people shall be my people. child my body decays, age crawls me to death’s muscled chest. where thou diest, will I die. her words prostrate before me. go leave, child. was this when she grasped both palms, pulled my body flush against her, my sagging breasts against her pert ones. my spread belly rolls against her stone wall belly. was this when she brushed lips at the side of my lips, a flicker, a whisper. was this when her palms splayed in the dip above my buttocks, then the feather tap of fingers. then the slide tickle of the dimpled dips. was this when we prostrate. was this when I found myself on the foor hollering, broken syllables like ughhh, like waaaaa, like . . . that night I found grace. that night “she had eat & was sufficed”. that night. that night I heard my son’s voice from the grave and he spoke about his wife.
Letter from Hegar to Sarai
Miss Sarai,
You say that we picked peas together? You are real demented, Miss Sarai. Woman, I picked peas and you sat in the room talking cobwebs and fireflies, I was your workhorse, vessel, whore, your ant to squash, grass to trample, slut, I was what you wanted. In your bed hands stroking me to cool your heat on the nights he don’t call you.
That night you say you tucked me into his bed is all wrong. You dressed me like you, my dark cheek red with colour, my dress tied up so it ballooned around my hips, my pale blue drawers exposed, I was a black dot burning under an old man’s disc, moving with gravity that night, screaming when my island was breached, then riding, being ridden, and for the first time I liked something, your old man’s hand touching, sliding, stroking, no one had ever touched me that way. So I started to say “yes, oh God yes.” Holla like you never did, whine like you never did, lying still like corpse under him doing your duty.
Why did you pin your ear to the door that night? What did you hear in my sighs to turn your face yellow, make you whip me each morning after, like you whipped your mule? So I had to run, Miss Sarai, run from the underworld of your hate. Run from the death planned for me in your eyes. Run to save this belly blooming here. Run from wildness to wilderness. I’d rather dry up in the desert than be gutted by you, hearing you sing hymns at me like you striking me with cuss word, something whispered “You better run.” Run from sour face, run, place weight one foot in front of the other, run with awkward gait, O pregnant woman, hold that belly defy gravity and run. Seven nights I ran, a pregnant black cloud in motion.
Miss Sarai, I swear we looking at the same sky and seeing different motions.
Hegar
Eve Tells Her Creation Myth
(1)
That night we gathered, squatted
buttocks on thighs, toes tip toe.
that night rain lashed our bodies
sticking silk gown to nude skin.
that night salt packed into my cuts,
to sting, to heal. yea! that sexy salty pain.
that night our bodies uttered whale sounds
guttural grunts for my misunderstood pussy.
night said to me, this is a lullaby for your
cunt, with such logic & etiquette.
(2)
Yesterday I
placed
my
finger
into
my
own
wetness.
It was
nasty
and
sweetcake
at once
yesterday I
was
a
finch
beating
herself
against
a wall
a
thumping
mess
(3)
utterance I create you—ugh ugh ughhh, ughh
high I create you sound
a sigh of breath a punch of gut
sound pattacake this is how I define you.
(4)
so we squatted—white & lilac dresses
creased under sister moon. my depression
was wet rain water. wet sex juices. wet tears.
i dare. i dare. wet with the metallic smell
of blood. i drank my menstrual blood,
oh that taste of full body wine slipping
down my throat. I drank myself to heal.
(5)
they told me I was blue,
a dim sun
in morning.
I told them.
NO
i am a Black
fucking
horse,
all
fling mane
&
striking
hoof
i told them
i
am
utterance.
(6)
when he took the kids, after ice formed in our beds. an ice that would not thaw, I never fight, after all my name is woman. my name is logic. my name is hymn. my name is Eve. i gathered weeds, stool, and mud. I mold a doll into his likeness. ribs and clay—i had learnt from the best. Then i broke him into little pieces. ground him into dust. ashes and ashes and all that stuff. broke him like the little piece of bitch he is. the next morning adam crawled to my gate our kids clinging to his hair. He said take them. take your offspring back. these are no longer mine. typical of man-kind to walk from his sperm. to sever his body easy so.
(7)
I am rock salt
Yea I am thorns on a cactus
I am the moan of night
I am the estatic yes, yes yes
that rocks beds in nights eye, like
flies humming in clouds
I am movement, fire of flight.
I am that thing. Yea I am that thing.
A hushed cuss. Deadly. Sweet pink
grapefruit down there.
Pure water down there.
Oh sanctified pussy.
It’s all ah that down there.
Saint Michael
He was last seen heading to Peckham on the 45 bus.
He left because shame was always the mongoose in the room.
He left his identity behind in an old fashioned briefcase.
He left to escape their muted rage.
He was last seen in pale blue denim jeans.
He left fed up with being the whispered rumour.
> They last heard he had a job as a janitor.
His last words were a letter from Camberwell,
saying every road seems to be leading him back to jail.
He left an orange box of screwdrivers in a side drawer.
He left a mobile number on an answer machine
each time they call the number is engaged.
He was last seen on a street corner chatting with
guant, string beanstalk women, on the prowl.
He left because the family’s silence was nasty.
He left because his mother was sick.
He was last seen leaving bent spoons in a bleached sink.
His family still tell people he is travelling the world.
He left because his family wrote him out of their wills.
He left convinced he sins no more.
New Daughters of Africa Page 67