by Zakes Mda
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” Ruth assures me. “It’s only Orpah and her darn sitar.”
A clean Obed looks quite impressive in his black denim shorts, white and blue sneakers and blue shirt. It is obvious to me that he likes to look good and is particular about what he wears and how it matches with the rest of the outfit. He moans that he is hungry. Ruth sends him out to get some Swiss chard from the garden while she lays the table. I offer to go with him.
The back garden is quite different from the front one. Here we have a vegetable patch: one row each of onions, kale, cabbages, carrots and Swiss chard. Under a plastic sheet that protects them from frost there are tomatoes and peppers. This is Ruth’s garden, Obed says. There was zucchini and lettuce as well, but they are all dead now after the late October frost. Whereas his father, Mr. Quigley that is, cultivates gnomes, Ruth likes to grow vegetables and flowers. Well, they no longer have flowers now because Mr. Quigley has taken all the space, but Ruth still has fond memories of the flowers she used to grow in the front and sometimes talks about them as if they were her dead children. And yet she’s never lost a child to death. Both he and Orpah are still alive, as I can very well see. But Mr. Quigley will never give up his garden. He is attached to it. He spends most of his time tending to it.
“Tending to it? All day long? How do you tend to something like that all day long?” I ask.
“He sits on the porch and looks at it. That’s how he tends to it. Sometimes he rearranges two or three of the figures. Or he straightens a flag that’s been disturbed by the wind.”
I am beginning to hold Mr. Quigley in great awe though no word has passed between us.
Obed says that on some days his father visits the Kilvert Community Center and sits with other brooding elders on the porch or watches the women quilt inside. Among donated items he may pick up a figure to add to his garden collection. A plastic dog or a porcelain pink flamingo. Ruth, on the other hand, spends her time tending to her vegetable garden or quilting in her own living room, not at the Kilvert Community Center, since her falling-out with the women there.
In the house dinner is served and Mr. Quigley is already seated at the table. After giving Ruth the Swiss chard we take our places and she mumbles a few words of grace. Obed says to his father: “Mr. Quigley, this is my friend from Africa.”
Mr. Quigley stretches his arm across the table and gives me a firm handshake.
“My name is Toloki, sir,” I tell him.
“Mahlon Quigley at your service,” he says. And that’s the last I hear his voice for the evening. Throughout dinner he ignores me as he does the rest of the table, as if I have always been part of his family.
The home-cooked food is good, after living on fast foods for the past few days. The corn bread that Ruth breaks with her hands and places on the bare table in front of everyone is particularly tasty. And so is the cannellini bean soup in which lie chunks of meat. I do not want to waste time with the Swiss chard and tomato salad even though Ruth praises the dressing which she made herself.
The meat is pork, Ruth says, expressing her hope that I do eat pork. Mr. Quigley slaughtered the pig a few days earlier. This, she warns me in her conspiratorial tone once more, is illegal because it is against health regulations to kill animals in your own backyard. It is a sore point because it has changed the people’s way of life.
“We used to slaughter lotsa hogs,” Ruth says. “I used to pickle them legs. I still do though we don’t slaughter that much no more because we don’t wanna end up in the pokey. Mr. Quigley likes the liver…the way I do it.”
“It’s against the law, Ma,” Obed cuts in. “You can always buy liver from Wal-Mart. We gotta stop this slaughtering of hogs.”
“Todoloo!” says Ruth, turning her forefinger on her forehead as if to say her son has lost it. “We ain’t doing no harm to nobody. Our people have always grown their own food. We ain’t gonna stop now.”
I have been hearing this refrain about “our people” since last night and I wonder aloud who these people are. But all Ruth can say is: “We don’t belong to nobody. Our race of people is different from any race of people that ever lived on earth.”
Obed adds helpfully: “Yeah, we don’t belong nowhere. White people hate us because we ain’t white enough. Black people hate us too. They call us high-yella-niggers. They are jealous of our complexion.”
This does not help me at all. But I let it go. We eat quietly for some time. Obed wolfs his food while Mr. Quigley chews with a slow deliberate unchanging rhythm, his smiling face savoring every morsel. Ruth looks very pleased with herself that her menfolk are enjoying her cooking. Obed breaks the silence by telling them about my job: I mourn for the dead. Neither parent shows any astonishment at all. Instead Ruth wants to know how I do it. My respect for this family is further enhanced: most people, when told I am a professional mourner, want to know why I do it…not how.
“I came in search of mourning,” I tell Ruth when she inquires what my mission is in these parts. I do not think they will understand if I tell them about the sciolist and Sam Crowl’s challenge. So I leave that bit out.
“Have you found any yet in our good ol’ U.S. of A.?” Ruth wants to know.
“I was at The Ridges last night…at the cemetery there…just before I went to join the Court Street parades. I was disappointed.”
Ruth says the family is disappointed about that cemetery too. Mahlon Quigley’s mother lies buried there and the family has been struggling to locate her grave. They need to lay a memorial stone, which will make him a very happy man and will change his fortunes. He will never really know peace until a proper stone is laid there with her name and her dates of birth and death and words to the effect that she is remembered with love. But no one knows how to go about finding her grave since the graves have no names.
Obed’s face shows that this is not his favorite topic. He suddenly remembers that Orpah also needs to eat. There is silence while he goes to call her from her room. The music of the sitar stops. Obed comes back and announces: “She says she ain’t hungry. Maybe she wanna lose some weight.”
“If that girl loses any more weight she’ll blow away!” shouts Ruth, clearly for Orpah’s benefit in her bedroom.
The sitar resumes with a vengeance.
It is still dark outside. I had a restful night in Obed’s bed while he took refuge on a sponge mattress in the attic. But I must wake up. Force of habit. I find it difficult to sleep beyond 5 A.M. Perhaps I will take a walk in the garden, as long as I make sure that I don’t step on Mahlon Quigley’s crops. I may even venture further into the village; maybe walk to the cemetery while the village is still asleep. Why, I may even mourn a bit. Just for a few minutes. Surely there’ll be names on all the headstones and even epitaphs on some of them. I may be able to engage in my old pastime of re-creating the lives and the deaths of the dead for the pleasure of mourning them. My body cries for mourning. It has been quite some time.
In the living room Ruth is already sitting at the metal table sewing a quilt. She is in a bathrobe and I am wondering if she slept at all. She looks at me tiredly and smiles.
“No rest for the wicked,” she says.
“It’s just that my body is used to waking up early.”
“I’m talking about me,” she says, and offers me coffee.
“I am fine, ma’am; I am not really one for coffee.”
“You know something about quilts?” she asks.
I confess my ignorance. Her eyes brighten as she tells me how her people are a quilting people. For generations and generations before her. Old quilts embody the life of the family. Not only was the batting of some of them made from the clothes that people had worn; but people were made on them—“If you know what I mean,” she adds in that conspiratorial tone—people were born on them, people got sick on them, people died on them. Cycles of loves and losses were enacted on the quilts. The souls of those who are gone rest in the very threads of the quilts.
“Smell these,” she says.
It is a peculiar smell. Musty, yes, but also aromatic.
The two quilts, she says, were made by her great-great-grandmother before the Civil War. One is an Irish Chain—that’s the name of the design. The other one is an African quilt. That also is a design. Or a series of designs. And then she gives me her beaming smile and asks: “Do you know why it’s called an African quilt, you being from Africa and all?” Without waiting for my answer, which would not have been forthcoming in any case because I do not know and none of the patterns look African to my untrained eye, she explains that her African ancestors used these quilts to escape from slavery. She does not elaborate on how quilts could be used to escape from slavery, except to vaguely mention something about following slave trails on the designs.
The peculiar smell is the smell of history. Like Obed’s sycamores, this pile of worn fabric on Ruth’s metal table is a carrier of memories.
The story is told by the earthy scent of the quilts.
2
Quiltales
The story is told that the wizened old woman taught mothers never to love their children. She walked from cabin to cabin dispensing her wisdom. Because her message must be infused through the veins of the earth, the sciolist even makes her walk from plantation to plantation, silent as the air we breathe, without attracting the attention of the owners. Mothers eagerly lapped up her words, for they knew the dire consequences of loving. Those who were weak enough to love in spite of themselves received special lessons on how to cease confusing love with ownership. Invariably they failed to appreciate the fine distinction and ended up regretting that they loved at all. Some women imbibed the lessons so well that they went beyond just not loving their children; they developed a deep hatred for them. They hated them for being the children who could not be loved. If they had had the power they would have strangled them in the womb.
Sometimes lessons failed and the wizened one resorted to concoctions that she brewed in her cabin. Concoctions that she had learned from those who learned them from the shamans of the old continent, generations before. She gave them to pregnant mothers to harden their hearts so that they would be immune from loving what was growing in their bodies.
Men could be loved, but with caution. It was that kind of an age. They too could not be possessed by those who were weak enough to love them. Once more, don’t mix things up: love and ownership are two separate notions. They would be here today and gone tomorrow. But there would be others. The auction block would provide. Or a woman may be fortunate enough to find one from the domestic stock. From those who had been bred to procreate and feed the insatiable markets. Men and women did not abjure what came naturally even though they knew that the unions they formed would be fragile. They continued to manufacture babies despite the ever-threatening dangers of loving them.
David Fairfield was The Owner. He had a better remedy for love…much more effective than the wizened one’s. He was a compassionate man, so he devised a strategy of saving the women from the pain of loving their children. The midwives were given strict instructions that the birthing mothers should never be allowed to see their newborns, let alone touch them. As soon as the babies came out of the passage of life they were whisked away to a communal nursery. At feeding time mothers were not given their own babies to breastfeed. Mothers therefore never got to know which babies were theirs, in the same way that they never got to know who the fathers were. The Owner made certain that there was a rotation of studs—the well-bred young men whose most important function was to impregnate the women to populate the plantation with the future generations that would meet the demands of the auction block.
Nicodemus and Abednego were children who could not be loved.
First came Abednego. They called his mother the Abyssinian Queen, even though none of her forebears ever set foot in Abyssinia. The first of them in the new world had been captured from the mouth of the Kongo more than a century before. She did not know that. The Kongo man’s family tree was chopped down successfully after a generation or two and no one knew anything anymore.
She was the Abyssinian Queen—black like a moonless night with dark clouds hiding the stars. Yet her big white teeth beamed sunrays into people’s hearts, leaving them melting.
Her face was round and smooth. So was her belly. It radiated life: there is nothing as beautiful as a pregnant stomach. The fullness of the moon. Gleaming stretch marks like moonscape rivers. In the folk tales that were told when work was done and fires were roaring the sun was king and the moon was queen. Perhaps that is why they called the woman a queen, for the sobriquet started only when she was sashaying in voluminous dresses, with Abednego kicking in her body.
In her case the father of the child was known, for he never allowed any rotation to take place on top of the Abyssinian Queen. She was his and his alone. Of course he never acknowledged the child. It was an age when some children were destined never to be acknowledged by those fathers who prided themselves on being pillars of the community.
The Abyssinian Queen cleaned the big house and took care of the acknowledged children. She provided friendship and companionship to the lady of the house. When work was done she took care of the needs of The Owner, providing him with alternative warmth during those long winter nights. To facilitate this last task of the day she was allocated a comfortable room adjoining the big house, and did not consort with those who lived in the cabins and toiled in the fields. Her duties were to the family and the hawk-eyed Owner.
The Owner had to be vigilant because he knew the kind of shenanigans property was capable of getting up to behind the master’s back. He had seen it all when he was growing up at his father’s plantation in Fredericksburg, Virginia, decades before.
Charles Fairfield, David’s father, had determined quite early on that slave children were a more profitable crop than tobacco or cotton or corn, especially after the 1808 abolition of the foreign slave trade. Since the Fairfields—then famous in all the South as slave traders of repute—could no longer import slaves from Africa and the West Indies, they decided to start their own slave breeding farm to meet the growing needs of labor in the thriving plantations of the South.
The Fairfield operation in Fredericksburg was quite rudimentary. The breeding process was not formalized or planned in any scientific manner. Children happened when they did and were sold just before they reached their teens. Shenanigans were not discouraged for it was from them that new stock would come. Rather than discourage them, Charles participated in them with gusto.
There was a lot of inbreeding. But the senior Fairfield never gave any thought to its implications, nor was he bothered by the possibility that he was sire to some of the mulatto teenagers he bedded.
Mulattos were highly priced, as long as they were not so light in complexion as to be mistaken for whites. So, the senior Fairfield was eager to have more of them at his plantation. He used to organize binge parties to which students from a nearby college were invited and let loose among the females, which helped in the production of more mulatto children.
David Fairfield started his own adventures with slave girls in his early teens. By the time he got married in his mid-twenties to a beautiful debutante from a neighboring plantation he had become so addicted to black pussy that his daddy feared it would jeopardize the marriage. And it did. After only two years the wife decided that she could not share him with property anymore and divorced him.
He was an enterprising sort. Whereas his siblings were content with inheriting the plantation and continuing with business as usual, he trekked to the west across the Allegheny Mountains and settled in the Putnam County of his home state of Virginia where he bought a small plantation with his portion of the inheritance. It was more of a farm, really, although its occupants ambitiously called it a plantation. He had observed as his train of wagons and oxen and
horses and slaves crossed the Appalachians that in this region there were no real plantations. There was therefore a new type of slavery where slaves worked for families as farmhands—quite different from the grand plantation slavery he had been used to in the eastern part of Virginia from which he had emigrated.
It occurred to him that on this new farm the only viable crop would be slave children. But unlike his father, who cultivated other cash crops and only dabbled in slave breeding as a sideline, he would go all out to devise new ways of improving production. Slave breeding would be the sole business of the farm, and all arable land would be utilized for cultivating vegetables and cereals only for subsistence. The husbandry of hogs and chickens and cows would only serve to provide meat, eggs and dairy for the family and the slave population. It was important to have strong well-fed slaves who would fetch a good price at the market.
In a few years the place became a prosperous breeding farm. David Fairfield married a literate Appalachian woman who blessed him with acknowledged children and with management skills that benefited the business. He bought more land from neighboring farmers and established an efficient plantation, with rows of cabins for studs, black females, selected mulattos, white slaves and nurseries for the children. The whole machinery was geared for the smooth and fast production of children, who were then sold when they reached fifteen. Only those boys who had the potential of becoming excellent studs and those girls who looked sapid enough to spur the most tired of studs to action were spared the auction block.
The Abyssinian Queen had been one such woman. The Owner first noticed her when she was sent to deliver some vegetables from the gardens to the big house. He immediately harnessed her for duty as a house slave, which was regarded as a promotion. Even though the household was well served by a team of white female indentured workers, who were in practice slaves, she became Mrs. Fairfield’s daytime companion. She won this position because of her storytelling abilities and her great humor. She also became Mr. Fairfield’s nighttime companion. She was their own special pet and was therefore never in any danger of being sold.