by Zakes Mda
Abednego and Nicodemus learned that there was some rhythm in the madness of her compositions. These were not crazy designs in the true sense of the later tradition. In the seemingly haphazard arrangements, she taught them to identify some landmarks. A hill here. A forest there. A creek. A river. The Kanawha River, the boys later learned. She had painstakingly stitched and knotted the map of the plantation and beyond, using information she had gathered from those who had seen those places. Patches of different colors represented actual landmarks.
She herself had never been outside the borders of Fairfield Farms, yet here she was teaching the boys directions to places that existed only in stories that adventurers and foiled escapees told. It was a rudimentary map, but to the boys it represented a world of dreams out there. It was an attainable world; the mother drummed that into their heads. Dreams could be lived.
“One day you gonna see all them places,” she told them. “One day you gonna cross the River Jordan.”
The boys loved her beautiful voice as she sang to them about the River Jordan and about the Promised Land and about wading in the water. She taught them that there were two promised lands: “One happens after we is dead and gone. But before you get to that one you better reach the Promised Land across the big river.”
This was rather confusing to the boys, but they imbibed the songs and the stories until they were utterly intoxicated by their beauty and promise. It was like the happiness that the preacherman spoke about in the makeshift church on Sundays. But the difference was that the Abyssinian Queen’s promised happiness did not happen after death like the preacherman’s. It happened in this life, in a real Canaan that existed beyond the river.
In the evenings the boys sat under a quilting frame and listened to stories of escape. Though the mother, it seemed to them, had resigned herself to a life of slavery, she had high hopes that her sons would grow up to carry on the great tradition of plotting escapes established by their forebears from the first day they were shackled into slave castles on the old continent. She relentlessly brought them up on a daily diet of stories of great flights and heroic attempts—often repeated with variations and embellishments to make them sink deeper into the boys’ minds.
Soon word of her wonderful stories spread and children from neighboring cabins came to listen. Even white children from the big house came some evenings. They gathered around bonfires of fall leaves to hear of Ananse the wily spider who came with the ancestors from the old continent and whose bag was always full of tricks. She developed a performance where she played all the parts, and incorporated the shadows and the flames and the smoke as characters in the elaborate tales that she seemed to improvise on the spot. To the frenzied drumming of Abednego, who had developed into a keen and nimble drummer, she draped herself in layers of quilts and donned masks of feathers and leaves and woven grass and frayed feed sacks. She pranced around and walked on air; becoming a demonic monster in one story, the wily Ananse spinning a web of deceit in another, and a kindly spirit that guided the children from the world of the unborn through the maze of birth in yet another one.
She climbed the sycamore tree in front of the cabin, stood on the highest branch and flapped her wings like a hawk. Then she swooped down in a spinning flight and landed in the midst of the open-mouthed children. Her gleaming black face reflected the flames and became purple as a result. They danced on her smooth skin until they jutted out of her eyes like red-hot blades. She became the sun as she narrated the story of The Sun. The Sun was very lonely because she was the only living thing in the whole wide world. She sat there brooding and feeling sorry for herself. The sharper children noted that the sun was now female whereas it was usually the moon that gloried in that gender. Yes, she sat there brooding and feeling sorry for herself. A big tear rolled out of her eye and dropped on the ground. It rolled on and on down the hill, gathering dust until it hit a boulder and divided into many tears that became children as they continued to roll. They were Children of the Tear. They lived in peace in a dust bowl and did not have any need for food, clothing or labor. Then one day The Sun farted. Instead of the bad wind coming out, a giraffe and Divided came out. A giraffe is a long-necked animal from the old continent, whereas Divided was a creature with the head and torso of a man and the body of a lion. She paused. She stared into the eyes that were almost popping out with expectation.
The children screamed in unison: “And then what happened?”
She pretended she had forgotten what happened after the giraffe and Divided came onto the scene and challenged the children to complete the story themselves. They came with their various versions of how the giraffe and Divided conspired to spoil the peace of the Children of the Tear, and how later the giraffe and Divided fell out between themselves and then fell into a crevice that The Sun had opened on the earth to save the Children of the Tear.
But one of The Owner’s sons would not buy the very beginning of the story.
“You say there was nothing in the world…only The Sun?” he asked.
And when all the children shouted that it was indeed so, the world was empty except for The Sun, the boy asked: “What about Jesus? Where was Jesus when all this was happening?”
“It was before there was nobody,” the Abyssinian Queen explained. “Not even Jesus. Not even trees and rivers.”
“Not even chickpeas,” his little sister piped. He loved chickpeas and at lunchtime they had fought over some that she had spilled on the floor by mistake.
The next day the Abyssinian Queen was surprised to see the shadow of the lady of the house looming at the cabin door. She immediately put her sewing on a bench and rushed to welcome her. The lady of the house was, however, not in any mood for pleasantries. She told the Abyssinian Queen that she was greatly offended that she was teaching her children voodoo stories, telling them that there was a time when there was no Jesus. Jesus has always been there.
“It’s only a story, ma’am,” the Abyssinian Queen said. “Maybe you gotta stop them kids from coming. It will break their li’l hearts though.”
“I ain’t gonna stop them from nothing,” said the lady of the house with finality. “This is their plantation, you know, so they gonna go where they wanna go. All you gotta do is stop the voodoo stories and tell Bible stories instead.”
Of course the Abyssinian Queen continued unabated with her “voodoo” stories and the children, including The Owner’s, continued to gather in the evenings. They even learned to sing along and to join in the choruses and in call-and-response chants.
The Owner never suspected anything subversive about the storytelling sessions, even when the lady of the house complained that they accorded too much mixing of the children, who would normally be segregated and quartered according to their breed and pedigree. The Owner was indeed becoming too soft with age. For instance, the white children who came for the stories were not only the freeborn from the big house—the lady’s own kids, that is. There were also the white girls who had been sold to Fairfield Farms by their indigent parents, and those who were said to be illegitimate and were then given to African women to bring up. All these would be reduced to slavery when they grew up, and would be used for the breeding of the much valued mulatto slaves. In the meantime The Owner turned a blind eye as these children mixed and filled their lives with the magic of foxes and buzzards and rabbits and wolves and scallywags of all types that all tried to outdo one another in knavery.
But stories of how Nat Turner, a preacherman, led more than fifty fellow slaves to take the armory in Southampton County, Virginia, and was hanged after being captured, were told in whispers, when the white children had gone back to the big house and to their various quarters. The pain of this particular story was still very fresh in the community because it happened only three or four years before. Stories of how Denmark Vesey, a respected carpenter and minister of religion, himself a former house slave, led a rebellion against slave owners in Charleston—not their Charleston, but another Charleston in South Car
olina—and was executed a decade or so before, waited for the time when only the two boys remained.
At first the boys took these stories passively, but as they grew older the stories acquired new meaning. So did the quilts that their mother gave them one Christmas. Abednego’s was the crazy quilt with the map. For Nicodemus she created a wonderful sampler with the well-known designs: the Drunkard’s Path, the Log Cabin, the North Star, the Monkey Wrench, Crossroads, and the Flying Geese. Those who saw the quilt admired its beauty—the way she had arranged each of those designs and the color combinations that made each pattern stand out and yet blend in with the rest.
This was not beauty for its own sake; the Abyssinian Queen stressed that to the boys. Each design carried a message. The idea of making quilts talk a secret language first came with the forebears from the old continent, she went on. In the old continent works of art, including garments that people wore and lids that covered pots, talked secret languages that could be understood only by those who had been initiated into the circle.
In the same way that she taught them how to read the map on Abednego’s crazy quilt, she taught them how to interpret the sampler. They enjoyed it most when she told them what the Drunkard’s Path meant, for she acted out with silly exaggerations the staggering walk of a drunkard. The pattern, she said, told them never to take a straight route when they escape. They should always take a zigzag path. That way the evil spirits would not catch them, for evil spirits always traveled in a straight line. Like the evil spirits, slave chasers would be confused and lose track of them. The boys were not only fascinated by the meaning of the pattern but by the actual sewing of the Drunkard’s Path…how their mother cut one-quarter circles and then rearranged them to form the zigzags. It looked so simple when she did it yet so complicated when one looked at the finished product.
The other patterns on Nicodemus’s sampler transmitted messages to escapees along similar lines: the North Star advising them always to follow the North Star for that was the correct direction to Canaan, which existed on official maps as Canada; the Monkey Wrench warning them of the necessity of thorough preparation and of acquiring appropriate tools and provisions for an escape; the Flying Geese and Crossroads once more identifying the directions to be taken; and the Log Cabin denoting Underground Railroad stations. There were many other patterns that they would learn all in good time, most of which she herself had yet to learn from the matriarchs.
What registered in the boys’ minds throughout all these lessons was that rather than identify a specific direction for escape as her map on Abednego’s crazy quilt attempted to do, the designs on Nicodemus’s sampler were general warnings and advice. Although they did not give specific instructions on what to do at a specific time and point, they inspired the boys to aspire to escape. But most of all, as the Abyssinian Queen indicated through her performances, they celebrated acts of escape, hence encouraging others to do the same. She taught the boys the code every night, until they mastered it. It did not matter at all if it would ever serve any practical purpose in their escape. It was enough that it served them spiritually and nourished their hopes of freedom.
The closer Abednego got to the age when he would have to be sold, the more frantic the Abyssinian Queen became. Her stories of escape were filled with more urgency. Songs of escape permeated the very air that the occupants of Fairfield Farms breathed. The mother taught the boys to have sharp ears for every sound spoken of escape. The warbling of the birds in the morning. The croaking of the frogs in the evening. The chirping of the crickets. The hymns that the worshippers sang on Sunday. All these spoke the language of flight.
The boys learned that the biblical chariots that were coming to carry them home referred to the wagons with secret compartments that would take them to freedom. In the fields as men and women toiled they delivered the message about the presence of the Underground Railroad people in the vicinity by singing “Steal Away” or “Let My People Go,” passing the songs from person to person and from group to group, until the excitement permeated Fairfield Farms, and those who were ready indeed stole away. Why, even the rhythms of the blacksmiths talked. The hammer that repeatedly hit the anvil encoded messages of successful escapes or of the presence of abolitionists—both whites and free blacks—who were hiding in the gullies, biding their time, waiting to steal slaves away from their masters across the Ohio River.
The boys’ resolve to escape was strengthened by the flogging they received in the same week for different transgressions. Abednego was caught drumming. A month before, The Owner had decreed that drums and all percussive instruments were prohibited at Fairfield Farms. He had been told by his spies that wily slaves used drums to send messages and to broadcast news of escapes. There were murmurs of disgruntlement in the community, for drums were essential in church services. Abednego particularly found it difficult to give up his pastime. Although his dream of one day playing the drums in church was now smashed, he woke up some nights when he believed the whole plantation was asleep and practiced on his drum, beating it softly under the sycamore tree outside the cabin. He was caught by an insomniac overseer who, after failing to extract a bribe from the Abyssinian Queen in exchange for his silence, reported the boy to The Owner. Abednego was seriously flogged.
Nicodemus, on the other hand, was punished for learning to read and write, which was a very serious crime for a slave. It turned out that when one of The Owner’s daughters came to the storytelling sessions at the slave quarters she struck up a close friendship with Nicodemus. One thing led to another and they ended up teaching each other what they knew best: she teaching him how to read and write, he teaching her how to fashion a reed flute, how to tongue and slur it to produce full-bodied notes, and also how to play the commies—the unglazed earthenware marbles that the white kids bought from the plantation store. She was so excited that she blurted out these activities to everyone at the big house, including her mother. Nicodemus received the whipping of his life.
The Owner was becoming increasingly restless, and there were good reasons for that. Lately untoward things were happening at the plantation. A trusted white servant escaped with her African lover, crossing the Ohio River at Gallipolis and melting into the Underground Railroad, possibly to Canada. The Owner felt that he was losing his grip because it was the second time there had been such a scandal on his plantation—although on the first occasion the escape was foiled and the woman—who had disguised herself as a man to facilitate the escape—was now languishing in the county jail charged with the theft of Mr. Fairfield’s property. The property, of course, was the man with whom she was escaping with a view to settling in Ohio where they could live as husband and wife since they had heard that there was no slavery in that state. The man was severely flogged and then chained outside like a dog for weeks on end. The Owner hoped this would serve as an example to all those who planned to take such daring but foolhardy action. But now here again he was faced with a similar situation, and to add to his frustration the escape had been carried out successfully. Slave chasers with their vicious dogs and trusty steeds had returned empty-handed.
Random escapes had happened at Fairfield Farms before, but this caused a buzz of excitement in the slave community because it involved a white woman. Whites rarely escaped from the plantation because they had better privileges than black slaves.
The Owner had devised various ways of keeping white women as slaves. Even though white slavery was thought to have come to an end soon after the Revolutionary War, at Fairfield Farms the practice continued right into the 1840s because white women were essential for the breeding of mulatto children. Gone were the days when The Owner could obtain mulatto children from mating white men with black women. With the large-scale breeding that was happening at the plantation, there were just not enough white men to service the black women. White men were free to seek their fortunes elsewhere. And they did. They worked their way up and bought their own farms and their own slaves. Or sold their labor in the cities. M
ating white women with black studs was the answer. In an age where women were considered inferior to men in any case, and wives were the property of their husbands, it was easier and more cost-effective to hold white women in bondage than to employ white studs.
The Owner got away with keeping white slaves by marrying white women in reduced circumstances to blacks, which enabled him to hold the women legally as slaves. If any curious official asked questions, especially those self-righteous church people who cringed at the very notion of white slavery and condemned it as unchristian, The Owner took refuge in the one-drop rule, claiming that the women were rightly “colored” concocting some distant non-white ancestry for the wenches. Often he randomly designated some of the women octoroons or quintroons, using manufactured evidence. Their mulatto children were therefore born into slavery.
At Fairfield Farms there were mulattos who had been bred so white it was impossible to tell them apart from the rest of the whites, and they were all slaves. As they were too white to sell easily on the open market, they served The Owner by being overseers and slave catchers.
The breeding of mulatto children who looked mulatto rather than white had become the core business of Fairfield Farms; hence the indispensability of the white female who had to mate with pitch-black studs. On many occasions the boys saw young white women receiving a good whipping for refusing to sleep with black studs. Nicodemus knew that one day he would be one of those studs and would be having a field day among specially selected females of all colors. Abednego, on the other hand, knew that sooner rather than later his head would be on the auction block.