by Zakes Mda
Mrs. Fairfield was not unaware that on the nights he was not in the master bedroom he was with the Abyssinian Queen. She totally accepted his infidelity for breeding purposes. It was merely a commercial arrangement as far as she was concerned. In any event it was fashionable to have an African concubine, and many of his friends had one or two and boasted about them in good company.
Pregnancy gave the Abyssinian Queen some respite from his attentions. She was able to spend restful nights without his flabby body heaving on top of hers. Much as he found her particularly toothsome, he knew better than to bother her in her present state and jeopardize the well-being of the baby. It was important that children were born healthy and grew up strong. He survived the nine months of her pregnancy and the months allocated for breastfeeding without much problem. He was spoiled for choice. Not only did he sample mature women of her caliber, he also had a field day with teenagers, many of them mulattos, and some of them undoubtedly the fruit of his own loins. Like his father before him, he never gave incest a second thought.
Abednego was born and, as was customary, he was not acknowledged by the father. The mother was not supposed to acknowledge him either, for like all the other babies who could not be loved he had been whisked away at birth before the mother could even have a good look at him. The baby was taken to the nursery to be brought up by nursemaids. But the Abyssinian Queen commanded respect and influence. The midwives conspired to keep track of her baby. When nursing mothers gathered at the feeding bay four times a day the nursemaids gave the Abyssinian Queen her own baby to breastfeed. She and Abednego got to know each other very well and bonded.
Other mothers suspected that she was receiving preferential treatment—otherwise why was she given the same baby all the time to breastfeed? Yet they did not say anything about it. She was, after all, the Abyssinian Queen. They would know in later years that the midwives did devise ways of keeping track of their babies too, and when it was safe to do so without being betrayed to The Owner, found a way to secretly introduce toddlers to their mothers—thus pissing on The Owner’s compassion.
Abednego was brought up at the nursery with the other children. As The Owner had decreed that all breastfeeding should stop after six months, the Abyssinian Queen saw less of her son after that period. She was not supposed to see the boy at all or to recognize him if she chanced upon him, but once again with the connivance of the nursemaids she was able to creep into the nursery, cuddle the baby quickly, make a few cooing sounds, kiss him once or twice, remove a tear from her eye with the back of her hand, and then sneak back to the big house.
Abednego was about a year old when The Owner renewed his carnal interest in the Abyssinian Queen. In fact, he was seized by a raging desire for her that could not be slaked. To the extent that there were no longer any conjugal visits to the chamber of the lady of the house. Nights were spent with the Abyssinian Queen. All nights. Silly games were played with the Abyssinian Queen. Laughter was shared with the Abyssinian Queen. So was news of business highlights and lowlights. Even Sunday afternoons, previously reserved for visiting neighbors and entertaining friends, were spent with the Abyssinian Queen. To the lady of the house, who previously did not have a jealous bone in her slim body, this was no longer commerce. The black woman must have used some voodoo potions—or whatever black women use—to ensnare the poor man and render him powerless. He became a blithering fool at the whiff of the Abyssinian Queen’s scent.
He took to following her everywhere she went. This was most inconvenient for her, for it meant she could not steal away to see Abednego at the cabins where he was being brought up by those women who had been assigned the task, or to the gardens where children his age were already being acclimatized to the smell of the soil. But the man’s lack of control was an embarrassment to the lady of the house, especially when it became a source of mirth for the house slaves and white maids.
Sometimes a mischievous little devil possessed the Abyssinian Queen and made her play unkind tricks on the poor man. For example, she took to hanging her most intimate garments up in a hickory tree—hidden among the leaves. She was a great tree climber. He surely caught the scent and came sniffing about with his tongue hanging out. He circled the tree, jumping about like a puppy and caressing the trunk. The shred of dignity left in him did not allow him to climb it, though he was clearly tempted to do so. Then in a fit of passion he stripped the scaly bark with his fingers. All the while she was watching him through the window, while darning socks or crocheting a hat for the coming winter.
There were snide whispers in the slave community about all these goings-on. The Abyssinian Queen’s stature was enhanced among her peers: no one ever thought they would see the day when The Owner was reduced to a raving lunatic by his craving for a mere slave.
The lady of the house got wind of her cruel games and reprimanded her strongly. The Abyssinian Queen, of course, was adamant that she had nothing to do with his behavior. She was merely performing the duties that were expected of her.
“I’ll talk to him,” said the lady of the house. “From now I want you to lock your door at all times. I don’t want him spending his nights with you ever again.”
He came at night and tried the door. It was locked. He knew at once it was his wife’s doing. The doors to his concubines’ rooms were never locked, allowing him free access at all hours of the day or night. He knocked and when she refused to open he threatened her with a flogging that she would remember for the rest of her life. She was not swayed by his threats; she was, after all, carrying out the lady’s instructions. He was banging on the door and threatening to break it down when the lady arrived and ordered him to stop making a fool of himself and to go back into the house and get some decent sleep. He submissively followed his wife, but repeated the ruckus for the next three nights. Again and again Mrs. Fairfield came out to drag him back into the main house.
Until he finally gave up.
After a few weeks he was back to his normal self again, working his slaves hard in the fields and driving them in yokes and chains to auctions throughout the west of Virginia and the whole of Kentucky, and spending his randy moments with the mulatto concubines, some of whom were a more beautiful and graceful version of his image.
Everyone believed The Owner was finally cured of the Abyssinian Queen.
Everyone but the lady of the house. She suspected that sooner or later the power of the woman’s voodoo would return and her husband would fall victim to madness again. She therefore planned to marry the Abyssinian Queen off to a house slave from a plantation owned by a family friend in Kentucky, who paid a good price for her since as the wife of his principal house slave she would now be his property as well. Although the prospective bride and groom would only set eyes on each other for the first time on their wedding day, they resigned themselves to their fate and braced themselves for a lifetime of mutual bondage. There could be worse fates.
There was great excitement at the big house as wedding preparations were being made. The lady of the house, her children, her servants and her house slaves were taking the wedding quite seriously. It was as though a Fairfield daughter was getting married. The meticulous planning took months. The wedding gown was purchased in Charleston: an elaborate construction in silk dupion with gold and silver thread embroidery and layers of lace in places, a long beaded boned bodice with corset, and a velvet train with appliquéd detail. No expense was spared, although everyone knew that she would not be taking the gown with her to Kentucky. It belonged to the big house and would be used for future weddings of house slaves. Marriages that would only be recognized as valid by The Owner and his family, and would subsist at his pleasure.
As the day drew near everyone at the big house was getting the wedding jitters. The lady of the house did not want anything to go wrong.
And yet it did. One morning the Abyssinian Queen came with a bombshell: she could not marry the man chosen for her, because she was pregnant. No, not by The Owner. The Owner had not touch
ed her for months. But by a nondescript field slave she met when she went to see Abednego at the mulatto cabins.
It was a slap in everyone’s face. She had disgraced the family by sleeping with a field slave. She had scandalized generations of house slaves who had been groomed to know and cherish their superior place. Obviously the tastelessness of her original breeding had not abandoned her despite her living in the big house all those years: you could take a slave out of the field but you couldn’t take the field out of a slave. Refined house slaves were those born of house slaves.
The marriage must go on, insisted the lady of the house. A lot of planning had gone into it, and a lot of money spent. The multi-tiered cake had been baked by a slave borrowed from a neighboring plantation. It was waiting to be unveiled in the hall. It did not escape The Owner that her main motive was to get rid of the Abyssinian Queen once and for all. The Kentucky man supported the lady of the house: the marriage could not be canceled at this late stage. Again it did not escape The Owner that his real reason was not that he had already paid for her, for the money could always be refunded, but she had become more valuable since she was with child. The Kentucky man would be getting two slaves for the price of one. The Owner put his foot down: the woman was impregnated by a Fairfield slave, and therefore the child belonged to Fairfield Farms.
“But I had already bought her when she got pregnant,” moaned the Kentucky man.
“From my calculations she conceived even before we engaged in negotiations to marry her over to your property,” said The Owner.
“How would you know that?” asked the Kentucky man. “You weren’t there when she conceived, were you? Unless it’s your little bugger.”
“That’s preposterous, old coot, and you know it!”
The Abyssinian Queen was summoned to answer some questions to determine at what stage she conceived. She was rather vague about it, especially because she wanted to protect the identity of the father. She knew exactly what would happen to him for engaging in copulation outside the sanctioned boundaries: castration. The man would be reduced to an ox fit only for labor. No one personally knew anyone who had ever received such punishment at Fairfield Farms, but it was common knowledge in the slave community that it was meted out to those who were foolish enough to sleep with The Owner’s special concubines.
The Kentucky man, still adamant that the conception must have happened after the transaction and therefore the child belonged to him, suggested that the woman be whipped until she came out with the truth. And she was whipped. Not by The Owner, but by the Kentucky man. The Owner was a compassionate man and never undertook the often necessary but unpleasant task of whipping his slaves himself. He delegated it to others—particularly the burly male mulatto house slaves.
This was the Abyssinian Queen’s first experience of the whip and she found it very humiliating since it was done in public under the very hickory tree she had previously used to play her cruel games on The Owner. As the whip cut deep into her flesh, spectators could not help noticing that not only the wielder of the whip was breathing heavily, but The Owner as well. A sudden bulge had developed in the general area of his crotch, just as it had developed on the Kentucky man. In no time the wielder of the whip was screaming and cussing and foaming at the mouth. There was a wet spot on his pants. He thrashed even harder as the pants got wetter. Yet she was determined to maintain her dignity and only winced inwardly as the whip slashed her bare back. She maintained a stoic face; she wanted to deflate the flogger. And this made him even madder. He lashed out indiscriminately, no longer taking particular care to create symmetric patterns of oozing blood on her back. He even lashed at her dangling breasts. This did not sit well with the Fairfields.
“She messed up my wedding,” said the lady of the house. “But it ain’t no reason to kill her!”
“It’s enough,” said The Owner. “You stop now.”
His pants were wet too, and he was finding it difficult to stay steady on his feet.
“That’s why they are so stubborn,” said the Kentucky man, struggling to regain his composure. “You spoil them.”
Once more the Abyssinian Queen was interrogated about the conception. The Owner looked at her appealingly, and his eyes were clearly pleading: Please give us the answers we want. It kills me to see you going through such pain and humiliation.
She was now aware that her answer would determine whether she remained with the Fairfields or was taken over by the Kentucky man and an unknown groom. Although she did not know when negotiations for her marriage were first made and the transaction was finalized, she came up with a date that was a few months back.
“She lies,” said the Kentucky man.
“The child rightly belongs to Fairfield Farms,” said The Owner.
“We can work out a compromise,” said the lady of the house. “We’ll send the woman over to Kentucky soon after the birth. After all, our children here are brought up by nursemaids and not by their birth mothers.”
But the Kentucky man demanded his money back and left in a huff.
The Abyssinian Queen’s status in the household was reduced. She had to vacate her comfortable room for the cabins. She also had to say goodbye to the luxury of having other slaves clean her chamber and wash and iron her clothes. Although her demotion from her aristocratic position as a house slave was supposed to be serious punishment she was much happier in the surroundings she had known so well as a young girl, and enjoyed the communal spirit that existed among the hoi polloi. The place was brimming with life. Family units were formed, even though everyone knew how tenuous they were. Mothers established new connections with those they believed to be their children, even though most of them did not sleep under the same roof. She discovered that she had gained an even greater stature among her peers. People remembered how she made The Owner run around in circles like a mad dog. She was admired even more for standing up to the masters, foiling their evil plans and depriving the Kentucky man of the pleasure of her screams.
The child was born and was named Nicodemus.
As with Abednego, the father was known in the slave community. When he and the Abyssinian Queen started behaving like a family he was exposed as the culprit to the occupants of the big house, particularly to The Owner, who had been smarting for a long time because his favorite concubine had been impregnated by a field slave. It was more that his ego was hurt, because in any event the concubine’s fate had already been determined through the botched marriage, and he was never going to see her again.
Contrary to every gossip’s expectation, Nicodemus’s father was not castrated but was immediately sold to a different plantation in Kentucky. As he marched in the hot sun chained and yoked to other young men destined for the auction houses of Lexington he hollered to the women working in the fields: “Y’all tell my queen that I’m gonna find my freedom. I am gonna come back for her and Nicodemus. We all gonna be free.”
Slave drivers didn’t take kindly to this type of wild talk. They gave him a few lashes on his naked back.
Like all the slave children of Fairfield Farms Nicodemus was brought up by nursemaids at the nursery, and then transferred to the African cabins at the age of about five or so. The Abyssinian Queen made it a point that Abednego, who lived at the mulatto cabins, got to know Nicodemus as his brother. This was achieved with the active assistance of those who were assigned to look after the children as they grew older and to oversee their labor. Right from the beginning the boys hit it off, and with a great deal of connivance at various levels it became possible for them to spend some evenings together.
The Owner was becoming even more compassionate and more liberal with age. The Abyssinian Queen took advantage of this weakness and asked him if she could have the boys stay with her at the cabin she shared with two aging matriarchs.
“How do you know they’re your boys?” asked The Owner.
“It don’t matter whose boys they are,” said the Abyssinian Queen. “I just like them to stay with me.”<
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“Those boys are marked already,” The Owner warned her. “The black one is gonna be a good stud. The mulatto will be ready for sale soon. In the meantime it makes no never mind to me if they stay with you.”
The lady of the house was dead set against this arrangement. But The Owner, who obviously still had a soft spot for the Abyssinian Queen, prevailed, and the woman lived with her sons in her small cabin. The matriarchs were happy to have young ones under their roof to spoil with treats as grandmothers are wont to do.
The Abyssinian Queen’s main occupation was to sew and mend clothes for the whole slave community. She was one of three women assigned this task. Two of them were the aging matriarchs, who had been saved from the auction block decades before because of their skill as seamstresses. It was from one of them that the Abyssinian Queen learned not only how to sew the most wonderful shirts and dresses from feed sacks, but how to create quilts from scraps of fabric gathered from all odd places, including old clothes from the big house and leftovers from the muslin that the lady of the house occasionally purchased for the Sunday dresses of house slaves’ children.
She spent her nights sewing the quilts. When the matriarchs discovered her interest in and flair for needlecraft they took upon themselves all the sewing and mending tasks, and let the Abyssinian Queen focus on her quilts. She became better by the day, and was voracious in learning new patterns. Soon the matriarchs taught her that the quilts her people made carried secret messages. Beauty that spoke a silent language, they called it. Openly it was there for all to admire, yet its meaning rested only with those who knew the code hidden in the colors and the designs.
Before learning the language of the quilts she used to specialize in crazy patchwork, at least four decades before these constructions of odd pieces of randomly arranged fabric became a fad in that part of Virginia—which had, of course, become West Virginia by the time the crazy quilt flourished. It was in the 1830s, and she did not know she was founding a tradition. Even if she had been conscious of the fact it would not have mattered to her that she would get no recognition for it.