Sylvia wrestled with the urge to offer him consolation. As a nurse, she routinely doled out consolation right along with a camphor salve or alcohol soak. And she could see that he was ripe for a word of reassurance as she bombarded him with her lamplight. But she did not offer consolation. Right now she was tired of feeling sorry for white people.
“Are you acquainted with those shooting at boats when the people in them are studying their own affairs?” she barked at Linc, even though everything about him suggested to her that he was not.
“Beg your pardon?” He reeled even as he stood firm and continued to look into her blaring light because he couldn’t look away since that would mean guilt, and he had been in that boat, making him guilty by association. It didn’t matter that he’d fought with all he had in him to try and keep the drunken bastard from getting off those shots; he’d gotten the shots off, and Linc had been in the boat when he had, and if she knew that, Linc would be reduced to just another white bigot in her eyes, a disgusting vermin, in no way worthy of her assistance. And he needed assistance right now because he needed Bram. God, Bram!
“A boat was shot at,” she continued. “A group of upstanding people coming here for a wedding celebration, innocent of anything that would warrant them being shot at. Shot at as if they were game. Are you connected to them?”
“Absolutely not, I am sorry, that is outrageous, no, I assure you. Was anyone at all injured?” he asked, bracing himself for her reply, and recalling that he had remained low on the deck as they’d passed the other boat, unlikely he would have been seen, remembered.
“Somebody was hurt, yes.” Her voice shook, and she swallowed hard, determined not to cry again. “When did your brother supposedly pass out? We never got word. We do get word in such cases.”
“This afternoon,” he stammered.
“And he was sent here for what reason?”
“I honestly do not know. His name is Bram, short for Abraham, named for the president, as was I. My name is Lincoln.”
“Mnh. Is that supposed to sweeten me because you were named for Mr. Lincoln. If I were a rebel would your name suddenly be Jefferson Davis?”
The pained look that came upon his face stopped her, softened her some. She lowered her lamp. “Your brother is likely still in Philadelphia. But, regardless, you are on the wrong side of the compound. So go to the other side of the creek and follow the path up to the main house, and just beyond there you’ll see the barges. A bargeman should see you and ask you what your business is. Tell him Nurse Sylvia said for you to wait up there. If he is in a better mood than I am, he should allow it. Once I am able, I will discover what I can about your brother’s situation.”
“Yes, ma’am, Nurse Sylvia. I am deeply grateful for whatever assistance you render.” He thought something about her was vaguely familiar. Clicked through his mental file but could not make a connection, so settled on her familiarity having to do with Meda. Her demeanor was so like Meda’s in the aftermath of Meda suffering an affront by a white person. He swallowed the rise of emotion moving up his throat as he thought about Meda, thought about Bram, and what a drastic condition Bram must be in to have been brought here. He followed her directions until he wound out of her view. Then he departed, following her directions, and walked toward the music. It led him to a pair of houses, and he approached the one that glowed with yellow light.
Inside the house they were beginning to have a time. They’d dried off and changed clothes and spruced up and were now gathered in the parlor, its space expanded with the pocket doors parted so that the parlor flowed into the dining room. Their anger was beginning to thin over their ordeal of being shot at for sport. Their breaths came easier as they talked it out, some loudly over top of one another, others by whispering in a loved one’s understanding ear. They expressed their gratitude that they’d all gotten here alive, especially that Carl was still alive, and that the river had not claimed Carl and Vergie and the others who’d gone in to save him. Some even claimed that the river had helped with the rescue; that it intentionally rose and provided the lift as Carl’s rescuers propped him and made it possible for the hands to help from inside the boat. God and the river, they agreed, had taken their side in the end. Gradually, as they talked it out, they could feel their frayed nerves reconnecting, their sour stomachs beginning to quiet.
Now they nibbled on starter foods of lettuce and cucumbers, eggs mashed and spread on soda crackers, fried mackerel, stuffed tomatoes. The music was starting up as the tambourines shimmied, in a halting way; the harmonica trilled softly; a base drum mimicked the rhythm of a thumping heart trying to settle itself down. The vibrations carried through them; these were calming vibrations. A little laughter then, someone let go with hand claps, another stomped his foot. Hips could not resist swaying. Arms reached out. The chatter grew wings and flitted about. The taste of hell that had been the boat ride over was gradually replaced by the comfort of a community wrapped up in the music that was both worldly and praising.
Vergie, though, was having a harder time. She couldn’t reconcile the gratitude that the others were expressing right now with the fact that Carl lay wounded in the hospital. Though it was promising that Carl was at least semiconscious as they’d carted him off the pier, Vergie understood the damage a scattergun’s blast to the leg could do. She knew the rivers of arteries running through the leg by name from when she used to hold Sylvia’s books for her as she studied. She’d traced her finger over the drawings, fascinated by the complexity, and match the lines to the names Sylvia recited. She knew Carl’s wound was serious, and that it was all her fault. Though Nevada had refused allowing Vergie to heap upon herself the responsibility. She’d listened and shushed her as she combed and brushed Vergie’s hair to help it to dry. She reminded her, over and over, that the outlaws who shot Carl were the only villains, period.
That talking-to had calmed Vergie, but the relief was only temporary. The sense of guilt was returning in waves, and though she tried to force herself to laugh at Kojo and his wife as they attempted to cut up on the dance floor, she was getting ready to stand up here and cry all over again. Nevada tapped her shoulder then and handed her a pot filled with strawberry punch. “Keep busy, Vergilina Mayella,” she said, calling her by her full name.
“God, Nevada, what will I do if Carl does not survive?”
Nevada held up her bandaged finger to stop her. “If any part of him knows Sylvia’s working on him, his life is good as saved. You know how much he adores her.” Nevada tried not to notice Kojo and Lil on the dance floor, the affection moving with them as they danced. She’d already tired of hearing Bay and the others in the kitchen talking about this one’s wife and that one’s sweetheart. And when they got to Kojo, Bay said, “He got hisself a cute little ole wife, nice disposition, too, real sweet.” “Smiles too much for my liking,” Nevada had said, causing Bay to put her paring knife down and look at Nevada and raise her eyebrows. “Just my opinion,” Nevada rushed to add. “Y’all can like her much as it pleases you.” Then she pulled her attention from Kojo and his wife dancing and focused entirely on Vergie.
“Okay now, I’m countin’ on you to keep the punch bowl filled and my table looking pretty. Moving hands hold the sadness at bay till situations change and the sadness flies away.”
“You just made that up?” Vergie asked as she took the pot.
“Good, whadin it?”
Vergie nodded and laughed despite herself, and then Bay stuck her head in from the kitchen to tell Nevada that the hourglass on her turkey was done, did she want it turned, or basted, or what? “Comin’,” she called over her back, as she blew Vergie a kiss and Vergie puckered her lips in response and went behind the table to fill the bowl.
Linc tapped on the door, to no response. He reasoned that they could scarcely hear him, so he turned the bulbous glass knob to let himself in, telling himself he’d apologize for entering their party uninvited.
Aromas crowded the foyer, sweet and heavy smells, the mus
ic seeming to ride on top of the smells like a bent finger saying “Come ’ere,” motioning him toward a set of pocket doors. He slid the doors apart. Before he saw anything else: before he saw the twenty-five or so people—the women dressed up in linen and cotton and lace, mostly in high heels, the men in vested suits; before he saw the sideboard groaning under the weight of the roasted ducks and accompanying bowls heaped with assorted greens, carrots, beets, and corn; before he saw the framed pencil etching of Lincoln centered over the brocaded fainting couch; or the roses that seemed to be everywhere, he saw a woman standing behind a long table, pouring a strawberry-colored juice from a pot into a carved glass punch bowl. Her race was ambiguous, her face caught in the light reflecting from the glass bowl. As she moved out of the light, she threw her head back and said “Oh drats” over a splash of juice that fell on the tablecloth, his awareness grew that not only was she black, but that she was the same one who’d enraged the men on the boat by flicking her hand at them. He started to turn around and leave lest she recognize him, then reminded himself again that that was unlikely, he’d not stood and raised a bottle with the other two. Plus, he didn’t want to leave; he was drawn to her, her presence provoking a powerful stirring right now. He was ashamed of himself because of it. Not ashamed because he was a white man going weak-kneed over a black woman, but ashamed because he thought his desire somehow devalued her.
He didn’t mean to devalue her. He’d spent large chunks of his childhood with Meda after all, and Buddy and his friends. He reminded himself of that now. Convinced himself that since black people had been so familiar to him, that he was surely without prejudice, and that the surge he felt as this woman moved closer to him had nothing to do with the realization that she was black—her full lips the confirmation. But he couldn’t deny the surge, the force of it, as it lumbered more than pulsed, rendering him wooden.
“You got clay in your ears? I asked you if you are lost.” She was right up on him now, practically shouting in his face.
Linc stared down at his feet. Shyness had never been among his repertoire of traits, especially where women were concerned. But with her standing in so closely, suddenly he couldn’t get his voice to work.
“A mess,” he stammered out finally.
“I would agree. You are quite the mess. What happened? A frog chase you into the creek?”
He felt mocked, aware suddenly of how he must look, contrasted with the high-buffed shoes and crisp clothes of the people in here. He backed up so that the shadow of the column near where he stood would hide him some. She followed him into the shadow. He took her presence in. She was tall and slender, dark hair, dark eyes—large eyes with a downward slant, eyes that should belong to a timid girl. Her stare compensated; it was a fiery stare. “Or if not a frog chasing you,” she went on, “maybe a big old owl lifted you up and dropped you in the manure pile.”
“I tracked dirt,” he said. “I apologize.”
“You ought to apologize,” she said. “And you ought to be glad my cousin is not about. Sylvia is the nurse here, she’s very serious about cleanliness and does not tolerate mud-trackers.”
“If I offer to clean it up, will you save me from her?” he asked, his confidence seesawing back to normal as the thumping from the dance floor and the music wrapped around him.
“Save you?” she blurted. “My friends and I needed saving from your kind while we were on the river. Now here you are requesting that I save you?”
“What happened to you and your friends?” He feigned ignorance.
“We were shot at!”
“Shot at? By whom? For what cause?”
“By your kind, and for no cause, no provocation.” She looked away then. Her profile was stunning, the line of her jaw, the way her mouth protruded. He felt himself going to mush. He tried to convince himself that his reaction to her was typical, that this was the pull he always felt toward a woman when spurred on by his baser instincts. But he could not convince himself, had to concede that he had never been so affected by a woman in this way, such that it involved his entire self. Told himself now that this was his mind playing tricks, a defense to distract him from the fire in his belly over his current situation, over the fate of his brother. If that was the case, it was working: he was distracted.
Glaring at him now, she repeated, “Yes, your kind.”
“Not my kind, I assure you,” he said and shook his head from side to side emphatically. “In fact, had I been in the vicinity, I would have come to your rescue. I swear it on my dead mother’s smile—I would have, or I would have died trying,” he said, remembering as he said it how hard he had fought those louts on the boat.
“Better if you had saved my friend from getting shot.” Her eyes appeared no longer focused on him as she stared straight ahead and talked into the air.
“What is your friend’s name?”
“Carl.”
“And yours?”
“Vergilina.”
“Vergilina,” he repeated in a whisper, as if he’d been handed a prize. “How is Carl faring, Miss Vergilina?” He touched her arm; it was a forward move he knew, but he did so to calm himself as much as to console her. The starched feel of her blouse was warm against his fingers.
She shook her arm away from where his hand touched. She was glaring at him again. “Who are you, besides?” she asked, exasperation running through her voice. “And what is it you want? You never said.”
He just stood there, mute, thinking about what he wanted. He wanted to be at a card table right now, enjoying the comforting sound of cards being shuffled; wanted to feel the cards against his fingers as he arranged the cards in a fan; he wanted Meda to be alive; he wanted the afternoon back so that he could follow Bram outside of the tavern and be right there with him when he fell ill. He wanted to discard the threat looming over him like a beast’s shadow that he might be recognized. What else did he want? He tried not to look at Vergie’s lips, how full they were as he thought of all the things he wanted right now.
“You surely do not work on the Lazaretto”—Vergie filled the silence left by his non-response—“because the white workers were given leave for the weekend, allowing us to enjoy ourselves unhampered.”
“Unhampered?” Linc almost shouted to be heard over the music.
“Yes, unhampered. It means we get to enjoy the festivities and be who we are without having to look over our shoulders to determine how our actions are affecting your kind. You never heard that word?”
“I know the word. And surely you would have no need of looking over your shoulder at me. You could enjoy yourself to your heart’s content and I would likely get enjoyment merely watching you have a good time.”
“You are not a normal white man, then.” She looked away again as if she were trying not to cry.
“Neither are the ones who shot at your boat and hurt Carl.”
“They are in fact closer to the normal that I know.”
“I wish you could know me, then,” he said. “My name is Lincoln, Miss Vergilina, and, well, I wish you could know me, because if you did, well, you would know with every certainty that I am in fact your kind, every bit your kind.” He surprised himself that he’d said that; he hadn’t intended to say that.
Vergilina’s mouth dropped. “Are you telling me that you are a colored man?” she asked.
He looked around this grand room that smelled of bourbon and sage from the barbecued pork that had just been put out on the sideboard. He stopped and swallowed and in an instant flashed back to that night when he’d just left the tables at a house on an alley of a street on the rough edge of Manhattan’s Tenderloin district; he was pushed against the wall by more black men than he could count, a knife held to his throat by one of the men intent on avenging the death of his little brother at the hands of a white man. Linc knew that the fact that he’d had nothing to do with the crime would mean nothing to them—he was white and would do as a fill-in for whoever had murdered the man’s brother. So Linc had deepened
his voice to save his life and swore that he was every bit as colored as each one of them, had a colored mother, he lied, who’d encouraged him to pass for white that he might make a better life. “I wern’t able to try and pass for no white man. Man know his dern soul, den he know his soul. I hail from over on Fitzwater Street in Philadelphia,” he said, calling out the block where Buddy lived. “Would a white man be living ’mongst niggers if he was truly white?” He used the inflections in his voice that were so familiar to him from having spent time with Buddy. As his good luck would have it, one of the men knew Philadelphia, knew Fitzwater Street. They’d let him go, even dusting the cement flakes from his back.
He looked at Vergie now, even as he thought about his brother, blond-haired, pale-complexioned Bram. Bram had looked deathly sitting across from him at the tavern, his skin the color of a boiled chicken, his eyes yellow like a cat’s eyes, his shirt bleeding sweat. Linc’s entire life, he could always sense Bram’s nearness. Now he could not. The feel of Bram’s absence was like a bludgeoning. He exchanged it now for the feel of Vergie’s nearness; the look on Vergie’s face, her head tilted slightly, her fleshy mouth pulled to one side in a smirk, her stormy eyes fixed on him, questioning, waiting for his response.
“Yes,” he said. And when he said it he felt a lug drop in his stomach as if he’d just betrayed Bram, betrayed the mother who’d died birthing him, the father killed fighting for the Union, even as the words slid out with such ease. “I am telling you exactly that I am a colored man.”
He felt dizzy then, as if the earth no longer expressed its gravitational pull and was about to spin away, unhinged. He felt the blood draining from his face, so he coughed into his hand in hope of bringing color back to his face, as the last thing he needed was to appear whiter than he was.
Before he could say more, there was the thump of the front door opening and closing. And now Vergilina was squealing and running and calling out Sylvia’s name. “You took so long, Sylvia, I was dying waiting for you to get here. How is Carl?” There was an onslaught then as everyone in the parlor moved at once to the foyer where Sylvia was, even the banjo player and the one clapping the tambourine, only the one blowing the harmonica remained. Linc pushed himself harder against the column, trying to blend in with the vanilla-colored wood as the notes coming from the harmonica fell at his feet and sounded like a grown man crying. Or moaning, about to cry.
Lazaretto Page 18