Something vast and deep and unnamed keeps its head below the surface of the water. She can feel it rising in her throat, pressing up under her skin as if it is about to break through. The counterpane swallows water thirstily. Its soaking mass feels like the weight of a small child. She bundles it into her arms with straining care. Its weight forces her to inch her way across the yard to the clothesline, high and ready with waiting birds. She chases them away. Tired, sweating now more than ever, with that upset feeling pressing down on her chest, she consoles herself with the promise of rest when work is done. She pauses before the line and looks up into the sky kissed by clouds like white tulle. Then she stretches apart two fists clenched full of wet counterpane, and tries to lift it onto the clothesline to dry.
In Bridgetown, in a shop proudly marked FRANKLIN’S FINE TAILORING, her husband rolls out a piece of cloth. The shoe-store next door spits out a sudden blast of music. Bessie Smith sings the blues to Louis Armstrong’s groaning trumpet. In the rumshop across the street a man bawls out songs by the calypsonians Shilling and Charmer. He screams out of tune: “Too Late Corkie, too late . . . !” Her husband’s fingers slip, the pattern is spoilt. Little girls shriek as they run past her son in the schoolyard. She sees him through the veil that falls over her eyes.
They say it was the counterpane that killed her; too much weight for her weak heart. Her husband kneels in the dirt beside her. Her son cries, ink and dust on his face. A gaggle of men and women gather round her prostrate body to lift it into the house, no longer hers. At the funeral they file past the coffin weighted down with white roses so that she cannot just get up and walk away.
“Remember Miss Franklin,” the Sisters squeeze out from lips closed with respect for the dead.
“Remember Miss Franklin,” the Brothers intone, “a good wife, a good mother, a good keeper of her house.”
“Remember Miss Franklin,” mothers caution their daughters when initiating them into rites of womanhood.
Remember Miss Franklin. What will she remember? What was she thinking as she soared above her body and the earth?
She is a girl terrified by the sound of the river escaping its banks, by the pulse of her own heart, by the dark. She is a child lost in a cave, until she hears his voice, “Big Mouth! Cathy! You there? Big Mouth! You dead or what?”
He asks it first as a joke, then his voice gets shrill, “You dead, Cathy?” For death was something that only happened to big-people.
“No, I here, Pips! I here!”
He shouts back in relief, “Come quick, before night fall.”
On the brink of following his voice out into the blinding light, Catherine waits . . . One thing remains. She turns around and goes down to the water.
Zandria F. Robinson
A Memphis-based writer and sociologist, she focuses in her work on race, popular culture and the US South. She is the author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (2014) and coauthor with Marcus Anthony Hunter of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (2017). Her essays have appeared in Oxford American, Rolling Stone, Hyperallergic, Scalawag and The Believer.
Memphissippi
Memphis is an exceptionally Mississippi-ass place. Some folks call it Memphissippi. I heard some white Memphis cops call it Memfrica. Some people say it’s the biggest city in North Mississippi, but that’s just them trying to sell Memphis short. Because if Memphis were a city in North Mississippi, it would be the absolute only one. Some folks say it’s the capital of the Delta, like the Mississippi writer David L. Cohn who said the Delta starts in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. It is true that Memphis is really an extension of the Mississippi Delta, with similar rates of blues and sadness and babies dying and diabetes. But it has the possibilities of black folks gathered in a place in close proximity and the magic that happens in the big city. If I had my druthers, I’d secede from Tennessee and make a new state out of the Black Belt, the Delta, Jackson, Mississippi, and maybe even the black folks on the other side of the river in Arkansas even though they act funny.
Seeing as I was born on the Tennessee side of things, I get more shame sometimes than Mississippi makes Mississippi folks. Tennessee founded the Klan, but when the Union came to Memphis, the Rebels just laid all the way down and surrendered like some punks. It takes eight hours to get from the southwest corner to the northeast corner of Tennessee, during which the physical landscape changes from delta to hills to mountains and the social landscape changes from predominantly black in Memphis to marginally black in Nashville, to even fewer black folks in Chattanooga and Knoxville to a smattering of black folks in Appalachian towns to straight up Klan country. And even though Tennessee, like everywhere in the world, is Klan country, Tennessee really loves being the Klan. If somebody threatens to take down Robert E. Lee’s statue, the Klan is coming out to march and stop all of that. If someone says they are going to try again in a few years, even after we have had a whole entire black President, the state gone pass a law that says no one can remove statues of murderers, warmongers, rapists, and slaveholders. Tennessee gets to hide all of the time because it’s not Mississippi Goddam. But to be clear, there ain’t no border wall between Tennessee and Mississippi. The porosity means that the good and the bad and the brilliant pass through, both ways.
I have not been called a nigger to my face in Tennessee, though I’m sure someone in Tennessee has called me a nigger, perhaps on multiple occasions. Perhaps I have been called a nigger in every one of the contiguous United States. I have certainly been in Tennessee when I have received e-mails or tweets calling me a nigger bitch, which has a special poetry to it, or a nigger cunt or some such, which is kind of like to my face since the screen is in my face and the words are there yelling at me, but these white-on-black crimes are usually of the interstate sort. For instance, once someone called me a nigger in an e-mail, and I traced them to North Carolina. It seems like the FBI should have gotten involved in that. If the perpetrator has some kind of satellite Internet service, though, is that crime even on this planet anymore? Who has jurisdiction?
I was called colored once, though, directly to my little brown face in the early 1990s in middle Tennessee, and it felt like nigger because I was eight or nine and I had seen more confederate flags on the way to where we were going than I had ever seen in real life or on multiple television miniseries including Ken Burns’ Civil War. From the fancy minivan that belonged to one of the parents, I looked out of the tinted windows and pushed myself further down into the seat, mad I couldn’t read because I would get car sick looking down. To resist them I resorted to counting them, the flags, and I would keep a note of the tally and tell Mama how many I had seen as as soon as I got to use the car phone out of earshot. Mama always said that flag is about heritage, all right; a heritage of hate. And then she would cuss. The flags made me mad because they meant slavery and getting your foot chopped off and getting lynched and beat and jeered at and hosed and chased by dogs. From my window seat, they made me especially mad because no one else on the all-white-plus me chamber ensemble trip seemed to notice.
It didn’t help that in our repertoire were Old South-signifying songs like “Millionaires Hoedown,” “Rocky Top, Tennessee” and “Ashokan Farewell,” pieces that had been added to our otherwise dignified classical repertoire to flatter our southern crowds. “Ashokan Farewell” had been in Ken Burns’ Civil War and Mama said, “humph,” when she found out it was written the year I was born. Some of my white counterparts lived in suburban neighborhoods called Plantation Oaks and Plantation Ridge and Plantation Peak and so forth, so I knew how white folks made up pasts and brought them to the present so they could feel comfortable. Mama and Daddy’s nostalgia was old soul music and theirs was plantations and confederate flags and songs that sound like a sad Confederate soldier with a gangrene leg played them after losing a hard-fought battle with them damn Yankees when really they were written after Maynard Jackson had been mayor of Atlanta for
over a decade. I wanted to sever the connective tissue, the sonic mark, the smells of this memory, or at least separate myself from it, because to be associated with such memories as a black girl would ultimately have consequences. I loathed those pieces because they demanded violins be fiddles, and I did not want anybody to mistake me for Fiddler and be reminded of slavery.
Those pieces also delighted white audiences, and I hated them because they brought white folks a particular kind of joy. When we started up the hoedown or Rocky Top, their eyes would widen and buck and they would clap their hands and raise knuckled knees to stomp off beat, afflicted by a sonic tribalism. It was the Holy Spirit of Whiteness that took them over, and I tried intently to watch only my black fingers move quickly on the ebony board, but they were white shadows that demanded an audience. I was known to push the tempo of pieces, a habit I developed in home practice to hurry up and get done that sometimes inadvertently spilled over into concert. But for the hoedown, I pushed it because I wanted the white folks to accidentally slap themselves red trying to clap and keep up and dance themselves and their bucked eyes into the ground. Our violin instructor, sometimes leading and facing us, would glare at me in the front row, her slender body, blue eyes, and stringy blond hair imploring me to slow down. Sometimes I returned her look with my own of confusion, to which she would immediately respond with incredulity. Other times I smirked a bit, changing my Resting Blackness Face just enough for her to know I knew what I was doing. Usually, I kept pushing, knowing I would be scolded later, because I needed something to happen in exchange for my specific performance of these songs. If not reparations, perhaps winded white folks in worn-out patent leather.
It was the most earnest and unintentionally harmful thing that could have happened given the history of whiteness in America in general, and in middle Tennessee, in particular. The perpetrator looked white 90, so he could have actually been 199 years old and Robert E. Lee’s first cousin for all I know given how white folks age like that picture of Dorian Gray. And of course Robert E. Lee’s first cousin wouldn’t know any better than to call somebody colored. He had made his way to the left side of the stage during the hoedown, his feet rising and falling in succession in a decrepit dance on the oak of the stage. The audience encouraged his dance, clapping in his direction as he added flailing spotted arms to the movement. We concluded and bowed, exiting the stage past him. “Play it again and dance this time,” he had said. If I had tried to ignore that he was talking directly to me, he hobbled in front of me to make it plain. “Dance,” he said, shortening the command. Oh, I don’t know how to dance, I had said, looking down at my feet like I did when I lied, which was my way of refusing. “I never seen a colored couldn’t dance,” he said. Given as I was the only colored I had seen since we left Memphis and headed to Sewanee, I wondered how many coloreds he could have possibly seen and what kinds he had seen and in what capacities.
I was upset and wanted to go home, and I demanded to call my Mama to say so, even though the adult white folks with me said Robert E. Lee’s first cousin didn’t mean any harm. I wanted to call my Mama anyway so they would know if anything else happened everybody was gone be in trouble. I told her what happened and she said she was sorry that had happened to me, that somebody as old as Robert E. Lee’s first cousin probably didn’t know any better or any of the new terms like black and African American, and that at least he didn’t say the n-word. Mama doesn’t say nigga or nigger or any form of the word. I was about to protest about the implications about my ability to dance, about to say, but why does he get to assume that I can dance? And how many “CULLEDS” does he really know? but I was struck silent by the fact that I couldn’t remember the exact final count of confederate flags I had seen to tell her like I had promised myself I would. There was an anxiety in my chest like I had forgotten something real important and was gone be in some big bad trouble. Hurriedly before the estimate disappeared, too, I blurted: also I saw approximately a dozen confederate flags on the way here. I couldn’t remember specifically how many it was; I just know it was somewhere between half a dozen and half a million. “Heritage not hate,” Mama said, mockingly. “Damn rednecks. Humph,” she continued, chewing on something that I knew was better than anything I was gone eat until I got back to Memphis. Gotta go, Mama, I said.
Tennessee ain’t shit. Ain’t never been shit, really.
Namwali Serpell
Born in Lusaka, Zambia, she is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an award-winning writer. In 2011, she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a prize for beginning women writers, and in 2014 she was named on the Hay Festival’s Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature. In 2015 she won the Caine Prize for African Writing (for which she was shortlisted in 2010) with her story “The Sack”, which first appeared in the anthology Africa39: New Writing From Africa South of the Sahara. Her first novel, The Old Drift, is due to be published in 2019.
The Living and the Dead
Is it coming?
Yes, bwana.
Abdullah left the bedside and went to the entrance—the thatch was open where they had brought bwana in on the kitanda. Darkness had soaked the curtain of the sky, the fire under the tree gently ripping its edge. The boy, Majwara, heaved the kettle of hot water from its flames, the insides of his elbows flexing. A flock of shouts rose in the distance.
Is that our men making that noise? bwana called out, rising slightly.
No. Villagers, scaring off a buffalo.
Bwana grunted and settled back into the heady swamp of his cot. Abdullah beckoned for the boy to hurry. Grimacing with the weight of the kettle, Majwara barreled toward the hut, the steam shifting uneasily whenever he stumbled.
Is this the Luapula river? bwana croaked.
No. Chief Chitambo’s village.
Majwara stood panting at the entrance, his knuckles knotted on the handle of the kettle.
Sikun’gapi kuenda Luapula?
Na zani zikutatu, bwana.
Oh, dear, dear.
Abdullah was in the middle of a dream about beetles when Majwara woke him again.
Bwana. Come, I am afraid.
Abdullah leapt up and was running before his eyes opened. There was only one candle lit inside the hut but he could make out the shape on the cot. Bwana was on his knees, curled over. Abdullah heard the others slipping in behind him. He had watched their bwana closely ever since his medicine box went missing, and he knew the effort it took for a sick man to kneel. Now, bwana was tipped forward onto his pillow as if falling, his face buried in his hands. Abdullah felt a sudden awe that would not admit touch. After a moment, he reached his hand to the bwana’s neck for the second time that night. It was cold.
At dawn, they carried the corpse out of the hut. Abdullah held the ankles, J. gripped the underarms, the body pitched in a vee between them. They lowered it to the ground inside the enclosure, then closed the entrance of the stockade to keep the villagers out. The limbs were stiffening in ticking increments. The arm that the lion had mauled years ago was already frozen. The skin was dull and waxen. A scatter of blood had risen to the surface, mottling it purple. Farjullah, the only doctor left among them, gave instructions.
Hold here. Now here.
Abdullah placed his hands on either side of the abdomen. Farjullah slid the knife into the skin’s viscid layers. A blood clot, the size of a hand. Abdullah gagged once, twice.
Farjullah removed and poured water over each organ, then handed it into a large tin box. They watched, hypnotized, as he unraveled loops of purple and yellow entrail. By the time the body was empty, the sun was full. They bent the legs back and packed the trunk with salt. They buried the box of organs under the mvula tree and sat on the ground around it. Wainright read the service. The stockade was tall around them, nearly shadowless, blazing white at its center.
Who is here?
Chitambo’s mourners.
J. let the two men from the nearby village into the stockade.
One mourner danced, the seed pods on his ankles rattling as he leapt and gamboled. The other mourner droned and played the drums. When the dirge was over, the older man asked for payment. Abdullah pulled out a sachet of beads.
Why do you not bury him here? the man asked out of professional curiosity.
He is an Englishman.
Still a corpse, the man grunted. He took the beads and started counting.
They wrapped the corpse in calico and a cylinder of bark. They sewed it in sailcloth. Finally they sealed it in tar. Bwana would have said to think of ethereal Heaven, the mortal coil shuffled off. That was before he left this rotting flesh for them to tend. It was impossible to ask him anything now. For days they debated whether to bury his body in the still, still forest, as he had asked, or to carry it home. In the end, they threw stones to decide.
It took five months and ten deaths before they reached Unyanyembe. Disease, lions, fights with hostile villagers, empty stomachs. We are almost cleaned out, J. warned Abdullah. And the fifty or so men left were bristling with mutiny. When they started tapping war ditties on their hollow rifles, J. took up his own and marched around the bearers carrying the corpse. Abdullah watched, listening to the creaking, purring sound of the wooden box on their shoulders. J. strode around the litter, his hammer clicking as he went from one man to the next. They turned their heads and showed their teeth. The last man stood upright and glared, but said nothing.
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