The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  This is the tragedy of slavery. These are the grains of power. There isn’t a true innocence for children whose parents are shackled.

  It was very late that night, when Samuel crept up to the attic. He carried the poppy syrup with him, to drug Eliza Two again. If Samuel had left his lantern on the first floor, his misshapen happiness could have lasted a few more hours, but he was afraid of falling down the staircase. When he cast his light on the scrawls of blood on Eliza Two’s face, her shorn hair, he began to scream. Not her name, but that of Nick, his beloved child. He made his way down the steps of the attic, and out the front door of the big house. He ran to Aggie’s cabin, banging on the door. When she answered, he shouted, where was Nick? as she pretended to wipe sleep from her eyes. She told her master that Nick had not come back that night.

  And Samuel held his head and cried. His plans for Eliza Two had been dashed: he could not abide ugliness or imperfection in any being.

  And Samuel’s affection had been cast aside: Nick, the only human being he’d ever loved had run away, and before that, he had arranged Samuel’s defeat. This is what Samuel would believe for a very long time: he would be unaware of who actually had crossed him. Samuel didn’t know that Aggie had been his opponent. Her woman’s spirit had reawakened, even in the bleakness.

  The Aftermath of Scars

  In North Carolina, a territory far from our land, there lived a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She was the daughter of two mulattoes whose parents had been mulattoes in turn. Such proximity to the blood of her masters had been considered a gift and would be touted as such in the next century, by male thinkers and writers who did not understand the plight of women. Who considered themselves experts on the rivalry between “the house” and “the field.” The ability to place brown paper next to a hand or face and remark on the skin’s light victory. The pulling of a fine-tooth comb through hair with ease, instead of an encountering of resistance.

  Yet when Harriet Jacobs would write about her life as a slave, how, like Frederick Douglass, she would eventually escape bondage, how before her freedom, she had hidden for seven years in the small space of an attic—space that was only rivaled in its misery by the hull of a slave ship—Harriet would describe the labor of those Negroes who lived next to the mouths of plantation big houses. The girls and women who would be forced to bear their master’s light-skinned children. And those children could not claim their masters as fathers, and sometimes were sold. And should we speak of what is tapping at the back of logic’s skull? That enslaved boys and men were not safe from their masters’ reach, either?

  Thus, Harriet would alert her readers that there was no difference between “house” and “field.” Though daytime labor might have been easier in the master’s kitchen or in his laundry, when night fell and the Quarters-folks laid their exhausted bodies on floor pallets, those slaves who tended to the masters slept with fear. And those women and girls—and sometimes boys and men—had aching bodies as well, not from cultivating rice or tobacco or cotton, but from withstanding the weight of their masters—and sometimes mistresses—on their bellies or chests or backs. And these slaves turned their heads toward walls to keep from breathing the conqueror’s air.

  When Eliza Two was shorn and scarred, she was eleven years old. Her father had begged her to run away, but she did not want to leave her mother, and the only home she’d known. Yet she had acquired an adult’s knowledge.

  As a very small child, Eliza Two had been proud of her bright color and her long, glossy hair, which had been remarked upon by the Quarters-children she had played with, before she shed her front teeth. And if she didn’t guess that her lighter skin separated her from her playmates, the larger, two-room cabin where her twin, her parents, Aggie, and Pop George lived announced superiority, for Eliza Two’s playmates were jammed along with thirteen or fourteen other Quarters-folks into a one-room structure. When her front teeth fell out, Eliza Two was not sent to the field wearing a ragged tunic. She was dressed in a linsey-woolsey frock sewn by Tess. Shoes were put on her feet, cast-offs from her master’s daughter. There was food of varied kinds in the big house kitchen. And Eliza Two had begun to take on airs of superiority, though she had been lectured against this by her grandmother. Eliza Two even had felt superior to her twin sister, because Rabbit was dark-skinned with coiled, wooly hair.

  The realization of her past foolishness would take some time for Eliza Two to grasp. Yet before that era of wisdom, there would exist in her a sadness and anger toward her master and her grandmother. Eliza Two would feel ugly and ashamed, and she would retreat into quietness, where before, she had been a sparkling, charming child.

  The one blessing in this hooded time was that Samuel Pinchard pretended that Eliza Two did not exist. He removed her from the big house, but did not throw her into the fields, for he still believed that Nick would return, and Samuel did not want Nick to leave again in anger over Eliza Two’s mistreatment. She became the only Negro on the premises without a purpose: silently, she sat in the yard in front of her cabin, listening to Pop George tell stories to the littlest ones. She ignored the apologetic glances of her grandmother, who asked Eliza Two’s forgiveness every day. Yet the girl did not yet have sympathy for Aggie. The memory of the knife was too fresh, especially when the scabs fell from her cheeks and were replaced by wormed scars.

  The Monster’s Continued Appetites

  You should not expect a monster to change, even at the end of a fairy tale. For in a children’s story, the monster must be killed. If he remains alive, his nature will be limned. There is no gentling of an abomination.

  In the months following Nick’s absconding, Samuel made a flyer on a small press he had acquired for his general store. The press had been idle, as there were no new goods that needed advertising. Seed was seed. Cloth was cloth, but Samuel had been proud of his runaway flyer, offering a reward for Nick, until he had overheard some of the yeomen laughing at the sketch of Nick, the white skin, the blond hair, and the light-colored eyes. The yeomen had chuckled that Master might as well have put up a runaway flyer asking people to return his own self, as much as the sketch resembled him. After he heard the phrase “nigger by-blow” tossed about, Samuel took down the runaway flyer that he’d placed up in the general store and sent through the region.

  He began to mope about, and when the New Year arrived, he wrote to the son of Lancaster Polcott, Hezekiah, requesting information about purchasing a new Young Friend. By then, Lancaster had passed away. Of the men that Samuel had known in the county during the time of the land lottery, he was the only one still alive. He was in his sixties but felt vigorous and energetic. He did not think of death. Indeed, Samuel believed himself to be akin to one of those men in the Bible. He would live hundreds of years, for wasn’t he blessed by God? A modestly rich man, Samuel did not have to worry about the upkeep of his slaves, who were self-sustaining and increased his wealth. Nor did he fret about the size of his family, now that Victor had taken a wife. Samuel expected legitimate grandchildren, sooner or later. Even with Victor’s hesitance with Grace, it would only take one or two instances of congress: one thing the Franklins actually did right was fill a house with offspring.

  The child Samuel purchased in the New Year was named Leena. Her skin was the color of a French crust made with butter. Shiny black ringlets the width of a garter snake fell down her back, and she had large, dark eyes. Generations of breeding had made her a testament to rape, compulsion, and smudged currency. The child’s mother, a quadroon, had succeeded in compelling miscarriage four times, but before the fifth, her owner had said that any living new issue would be freed. The owner’s true intentions toward the quadroon were unclear, for he died. To satisfy the codicil of his will, the quadroon was mortgaged for a loan, and by the time the owner’s wife, a lady who was irritated with Negresses’ siren magic on decent white men, began preparation to sell the quadroon, the wife’s son had taken a shine to his father’s leftovers. Thus, the quadroon decided it was time to slit
her wrists.

  When Leena’s front teeth fell out, she was sold to a man living on a country plantation deep in the Louisiana bayou. This man used children, and he gave her to a slave woman, a caretaker who tutored her in finding that internal place that countless other enslaved folks had cultivated, a pleasant numb location in the mind. That owner died, too, and his wife sold Leena once more, though that particular wife had no rancor against Negresses. She just wanted the money. Leena was sold one more time after this as well, before Hezekiah Polcott sold her to Samuel. And at each auction, no one questioned why a child would be sold at all, let alone for such despicable use, instead of nurtured and loved.

  Like her predecessors, when Leena became a Young Friend, she was denied contact with other slaves, except those responsible for her comfort and imprisonment. Near dusk, Venie would come to the left cabin to feed, bathe, and dress Leena a second time in fresh clothes down to the skin. After evening fell, Pompey came to trim the flowers and pluck the weeds inside the fence. He carried a lantern to light his way. Another gardener would have come during the daylight hours, but Pompey did not like to see the Young Friends. Their presence made him feel guilty and he did his best to never interact with them. Yet in the year that Leena was purchased, Aggie had spoken to Pompey and told him to engage Leena in conversation. And Pompey, a man whom Aggie had tended when he was a child with a mouth full of milk teeth, began conversing with Leena through the gate.

  The Love of Rabbit

  Nick’s other child had been grieving his absence, too, in the five years that passed since he had escaped. Rabbit was the more sensitive twin, born smaller, with a tender shell and a feeling heart. Her limbs shook with revulsion of the outside world. Her bald head had shined with just a few strands of reddish-brown hair, and her skin had darkened to match her mother’s.

  In her first years of life, no one would have called Rabbit an attractive child, taken beside Eliza Two.

  At the age of sixteen, however, her woman’s blood arrived—on the same day as her twin’s—and Rabbit’s beauty emerged. She remained tiny, but the curves of her body began to form. Her dark-dark skin stretched over sculpted cheekbones, with a reddish cast beneath. Her full lips turned upward, even when she wasn’t amused. Her hair, so sparse when she was a little girl, had deepened in color, and grew into a tall, thick mass of kinks. Young Quarters-men smiled to see her on Sunday, walking to visit her family’s cabin. There go that purty Rabbit girl, they’d say.

  Yet Rabbit hadn’t cared for her looks as a child, and she did not care for her looks at sixteen. There were no mirrors around her, and the adults she’d lived with hadn’t made a fuss over such things. Rabbit only cared for her family and their suffering touched her.

  Her mother had gone deep within herself. Always a strange woman, Tess now mumbled about messages imparted to her by her favorite pecan tree. She claimed to have a dream vision where Nick had landed safely in a place with many buildings, with white folks and Negroes walking on hard-packed streets. There were carriages crowded onto a road and such noise as no one on a plantation ever had heard. Tess claimed in another dream she saw Nick reading a book with two white children painted on the cover. When Tess woke up from that particular dream, she waited until the plantation had awoken, then sent her mother to the kitchen house to tell Rabbit what she’d seen. She hadn’t wanted to wait for her child’s Sunday visit. And solemnly, Aggie had communicated Tess’s wish, her frown deep, and Rabbit knew the older woman was withholding her own sorrow.

  Rabbit did not worry about Aggie or Pop George, however, for with her sensitivity, she knew that her father’s departure had not broken these two. Still, she felt their pain. She saw how they ministered to the Quarters-folks and their children on the plantation. How they felt it was their responsibility to keep everyone safe, and that “everyone” now included the Young Friend in the left cabin. How, when Jeremiah Franklin had taken over for his father as overseer, he had freely used the whip, in addition to abusing the field workers with mean, careless words. And on her Sunday visits, Rabbit heard her grandmother and Pop George whisper their concerns for victims who had been striped in the fields.

  Yet Eliza Two was another matter. To Rabbit, her twin was still the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen. Eliza Two’s hair had grown and fell down her back again. Her eyes were large and expressive. Even her scars made her striking, but when she told her twin this, Eliza Two looked at Rabbit, wounded. She believed her twin was ridiculing her. Thus, Rabbit, the kindest girl with the most sensitive spirit of anyone who lived on Wood Place, could do nothing for the person she loved more than anyone else.

  And so the only thing that she craved was the comfort of Nick. That was the year that Rabbit decided that she would run away from Wood Place and find her father. He would make Eliza Two all better. Rabbit didn’t know what freedom was, but she knew love. It was a gift that she craved to bestow on others. This ability to love was her resistance to the cruelty of the plantation.

  The Cook’s Helper and the Young Friend

  When Samuel purchased Leena as his Young Friend, he was unaware that Venie began giving him food and drink designed to cut his vigor using substances that had been provided by Aggie.

  In the morning and midday, Venie prepared Samuel large, steaming cups of sugared spearmint water. These tisanes were lovely for older women going through their change, but they would reduce desire in men. The homemade licorice root candy that Venie made and that Samuel absolutely loved did the same. Then, too, there was the richness of the food that she prepared. The breakfasts of new bread slathered in butter, along with thick slices of ham, grits sitting in cream, the eggs, and peach preserves. The midday meals of meat and root vegetables. For supper, more meat with greens and corn bread topped with bacon grease. And desserts of cakes and pies. When summer came, Venie would bake a cobbler of sugared peaches and spices and topped with a latticed French crust. Samuel began to put on weight, which diminished his vigor even further, so that when he went to visit the left cabin, he had no interest in abusing Leena. He only would sit and hold her hand for a few minutes, then return to his big house.

  When Samuel purchased Leena, he’d assumed she was a child, when in fact, she was already reaching puberty. So shortly she journeyed into womanhood: oddly enough, her blood had shown in the same year as Nick’s twins’. When she revealed this to Venie, the cook told her to keep that information to herself. She gave Leena rags. When Venie reported the event of the Young Friend’s blood, Aggie gave instructions, and Venie began saving and adding this blood to the portions of food served to Samuel. This weakened him further. And though time passed, he did not contact the slave trader to buy back the girl at a discount, as he had with Young Friends in the past. His lack of desire made him undriven to do so. Thus, Leena stayed among the children’s furniture and toys in the left cabin. Though she matured, she wore the clothes of a little girl.

  The day that the link between Rabbit and Leena was forged occurred a week before Christmas. Samuel walked back to the kitchen house to discuss the special menu for the left cabin and found Venie ill. He called to Rabbit, ordering her to cook the meals for the left cabin. And he sent Venie to the place where she slept, the tiny cabin out back of the kitchen house.

  When Pompey let her through the left cabin’s gate, Rabbit found Leena outside, sitting on the grass, where the sun warmed the chilled air. She had dressed herself in her winter frock and pantaloons, cap and bonnet, as if she were still a child. Over these was a fur-lined blanket that Samuel had ordered from the north and for which he had paid far too much money. Rabbit carried a silver tray supporting small crockery wrapped with gingham. The other girl sat on several layers of quilts. Her hands and head were visible, and, covered as she was by the dark fur blanket, only her pale face kept her from looking like Tar Baby, as in the funny story Pop George told.

  Rabbit spoke a greeting, but receiving no answer, she placed the tray on the quilts and turned.

  “My doll’s name be Agn
es,” the girl called.

  “Is that right?”

  There was no doll in sight, not on the quilt or on the ground.

  “I got three more inside my cabin. One be name Beth. One be name Amy. The last one be name Sally. But this one be name Agnes.” A rustling. She pulled a doll through the narrow enclosure of the fur blanket.

  The doll had an ivory bisque face, with golden curls and blue-painted eyes. She was clothed in a maroon dress with blue ribbon fringe, a waistcoat of the same material, and under layers of petticoats trimmed with ribbons, white pantaloons. The tiny shoes were made of silk the same color as the dress. Because the Young Friend was hidden, Rabbit could not know that underneath the fur blanket, her outfit was identical to the doll’s.

  “And what might be your name?” Rabbit asked.

  “My name be Leena. That’s what my mama name me, but she dead.”

  She offered the doll, but Rabbit told her she could not take it.

  The girl pulled the doll back under her dark cover. “But I ain’t got nothing else to give you.”

  “Why you got to give me something?”

  “’Cause I want me a friend. And I ain’t got nobody else but Pompey and that white man. And I doesn’t like that white man. You ain’t g’wan tell on me, is you?”

  Rabbit lowered herself to the quilts. There was one napkin, and that contained a spoon but no fork or knife. She offered that to Leena, who emerged from her blanket to take the napkin. Rabbit untied the gingham from around each of the little pots. Inside one were chicken and dumplings, another held sweet potatoes cooked down with butter, and the last contained greens and ham hocks cut up in tiny pieces as if to feed a toddler. There was no dessert or bread, nor would there be. Samuel did not like his Young Friends plump.