The report on nutrition and protein intake of rural blacks compared to the blacks in town wasn’t all roses. They got more protein and had less cancer out in the boonies, in overwhelming support of country living. But they had worms too, to a man, woman and child, because of shallow wells dug too near the cesspool, so for decades internal parasites factored in infant mortality and general health. I don’t mind saying at this juncture that I thought those people plain damn stupid for drinking right up next to where they shit, so stupid you might well have called it genetically deficient. I realized that genetic predisposition can take many forms. I realized that some cavemen were white and nevertheless carried clubs and didn’t drive Chevrolets, much less Mercedes—not even used Mercedes—but nobody called them stupid, because they needed time to see what we today hold as plain truth, because we walked out of the mud and cleaned up all the way to doilies, impeccable manners, failing livers and gossip flowing like a mighty stream.
Maybe cavemen were a bad analogy, because I doubted that squalor out on Wadmalaw hinged on evolution. I asked Jim Cohen about his well when I got there. He laughed without breaking stride to the river, presumably replying that his well didn’t make a shit too.
I wonder where society came from, how it started and how it came to get so full of itself and so way the hell removed from this twilight peace. Maybe I was making progress or getting old, looking up at the black cloud over me without hearing the footfall. Jim had come back down to fetch me. “You gwine eat? Uh sit in de mud?”
My turn to laugh; I came to eat. “Jim. Who was your daddy? How long did he live?”
He offered a hand, taking the unopened bottle with a nod, not reading the label. It felt strange, a man fifteen years and a hundred pounds my senior helping me up, and God forgive me; I felt the amebic microbes move from his hand onto mine. “Dan. My daddy Dan. He dead.”
“Well, I suppose he could be. If you’re seventy-three, he’d be what, eighty-five anyway.” We walked slowly up the bank in silence save the mud sucking on up to where the gravel crunched and then into the hissing grass and on up the creaky wood steps. Jim Cohen shook his head and mumbled something, sounded like de fuck you thank … Maybe he did the math, but here again I intended no insult but speculated only on biological potential.
“He dead fo’ I born. My real daddy Luzon. My mama die too, jus’ soon’s I cry. Juya be’s my mama fuh true.”
“Who were they, these people who raised you? Friends of the family? Kind of people you could count on?”
Stopping in the failing porch light, his half smile changed from scorn to pity; leastways I sensed pity that a man could grow to my age with apparent success and remain ignorant of the drama playing out just yonder south of town. Suffice to say I was driven to sort myself out as contrition for my act of cowardice, but I stayed out at Jim Cohen’s place for something more; I’m not certain what, except that staying seemed likely to provide it, while leaving did not. I still felt cured on the sauce issue, though Jim Cohen wailed in the wee hours on learning of the first bottle’s sacrifice.
“Da’s awright. Dey say you binna drank de good stuff foist.” Then he yelled for the girl to wake up and get us a bottle of sweetwine, because it was too late, and we were too old to get up ourselves. She rose like an android, obedient and uncomplaining, fetching two bottles to spare herself another wakening, and on second thought fetching a third to be sure.
It seemed like a long time later that I lay down on the blanketed mattress as directed by my host. I could easily sense the microscopic osmosis taking place as I gave in to gravity, with the blackness creeping in at cellular level and me, in my daze, defenseless. Could amebic microbes infest blankets too? Well, I was half asleep but not yet half stupid; no, they could not. No, this was a different cootie creeping inward, call it fear of what we suspected all along.
Then I slept like the living dead, for the first night in any I could remember, free of dreams. I did not wake up wondering where I was. I knew, because of the girl observing clinically the struggle of a white man in first regret long after first light. I did not attempt good cheer to cover my pain, because I tried that once in the mirror and saw it distort to grotesque proportion. I did explain: “You know … they say severe hangover is the greatest deterrent to drinking, but … it doesn’t work with me. I’ve been depressed. Years now, more or less, but the one time I feel really good, well … your father … or I suppose he’s your grandfather …”
She ran off, one lap around the kitchen and out the front door, letting the screen slam behind her. There wasn’t a thing for it but to move, beginning with the synapses, then the blood and finally the bones and muscles, or remnant sinews at any rate, seeking coordination so the unified whole might rise and improvise as necessary with personal hygiene. My God.
VIII
Julya
Sunrise lit the coiling mists so an early bird saw the river break where a mama porpoise pushed her calf up to breathe. A thousand egrets broke into flight. A raccoon broke an egg and cooter cracked a periwinkle. Jim Cohen cast his net three times, shook shrimp from it and flung the net to the high bank. On an upturned bushel basket in the mud, I continued the waking process too. He flipped the heads off the shrimp with his thumb and ate them raw as the heads and front feet scratched in vain for the river. You can’t know much on a morning after a night and day like those just past, but among the small truths available was the certainty that I’d not eat raw shrimp first thing, not then or ever.
The next few days swirled like marsh mist and disappeared. Morning to evening we gathered, ate, and talked over the TV. Mama and baby dove, then surfaced downstream, little fish fleeing fearfully before them. I came back out to Wadmalaw with a few things, not meaning to stay but to retreat, which is short of surrender. I needed a break from things, before things broke me. The workaday world and sociable streets, the Library Society and yacht club felt like quicksand. I didn’t sleep any better on Wadmalaw after the first drunken night, still preoccupied with my hard bed and hygiene, yet I woke lively. Jim Cohen was up before me, arranging things on the porch.
We walked to the narrow cut below Bloody Point in the lee of a palmetto stand. The still water looked shallow but wasn’t. The pluff mud there would sink a man to the knees, or Jim Cohen to the hips. So the morning ritual began in the sawgrass tying ten-foot strings to four yardsticks. The far ends got tied to chicken necks, dem fonky biddy biddy; the chicken stank. Poking the sticks in the mud he called over the water, reminding Bruh Jimmy of the good times shared. Jimmy crabs are bigger, meatier and sweeter than she crabs. Sometimes Jimmy goes deep, maybe to ponder his hazardous yen for rank chicken, maybe to get some peace from she. Maybe she runs him off. She’s meaner, smaller, faster and harder to eat. Jim Cohen told me these things like I didn’t grow up same as he did, up next to the crab disposition.
He sat on his crate, and soon a string twitched. So he squirmed into the finger-by-finger, drawing his namesake closer. With the net in place he drew Brother Jimmy to the good times dead ahead, and warm too. Scooping the crab, he laughed at the puzzle part called breakfast, fitted neatly into place. Grunting up and tilting his basket, he pushed the crab under. He caught five. I got two, because he had a flatter bottom to crab on, and I had to drag mine over a ledge, where your smarter crab will drop off every time. I used to catch two dozen at a go but gave most away. I couldn’t say when I’d last crabbed. It felt good, but I got restless, like this was it, day in, day out, grubbing for breakfast before grubbing for lunch and then dinner, sleep and repeat. Pastoral and idyllic seemed best from a distance. A way of life is one thing but this seemed tedious. I’d topped off on simple wonder and flowed over on heat and skeeters. I was ready to roll, like maybe another forty years lawyering in town might feel different on another go-round.
On his last pull, Jim got a fair-sized shrimp to hang on while he pulled it over the net. He flipped it over to me, so I pinched its head off, peeled and ate it. I tried not to wince like you do over cheap
liquor and raw shrimp, and I wondered if Jim Cohen knew I never ate one raw before. Why would I? He glanced up to see for himself, so I looked casual but tipped my hand with a frightful smile as I chewed and chewed, breaking up the sinews like boiling water usually does. And chewed.
Maybe that shrimp is what kept me there, stuck in the mud, chewing grubs first thing. I suggested we fish that morning, to see if Jim could back up his stories, but he said no, too hot; the bass go deep to stay cool. I reminded him it was winter, and the water didn’t fluctuate but half a degree twixt January and April. So why in hell wouldn’t Brother Jimmy go deep too? Impatiently he said, “Jimmy dumb.” So we crabbed. I asked if Waties Waring caught thirty-pound bass like he said he did, and if the old Waring creek house had lunker bass under the dock like he said it did. I asked if Jim thought big bass had worms in their flesh, but blacks smoke them in an old fridge smoker and eat them anyway, because the smoke kills the worms, so what the hell. I asked why he thought so highly of the judge’s father Ned, and if Ned fished like the judge said, hooking up with huge spottail and black drum, playing them slow as a turning tide, then talking to them while he unhooked and released them.
Was Ned nuts for fishing or plain nuts, advising the fish he caught on detecting hooks in the future? He was said to listen too. Near the end Ned put away his fishing gear and sat on the dock calling the fish. He’d whisper back and forth with a few favorites.
A marsh hen squawked bloody murder, likely getting pinched by a fiddler—and why in hell shouldn’t we shoot some and then go try for some big, wormy bass under the old dock? He could smoke them. A great blue heron tip-toed down the flat, her neck cocked to aim an eye at a wiggle by her ankles before shooting her needle beak and coming up clamped on a silver shimmy. She took off over a sudden eddy nearby. “There!” I said, pointing a lunker likely feeding, and us without a rig.
Jim Cohen shrugged, explaining that we already got breakfast, so what sense would it make to get lunch too, before we eat what we got? Man, the ignorance of some people. On hands and knees, bushel basket upright, he grabbed the crabs scrambling for the river. I tossed one in by the back fin but grabbed another too high and got another wakening. Tears rolled as I grinned at my bloody hand and dangling crab. Jim Cohen grinned too, squeezing my wrist, freeing the crab from its claw and tossing it into the basket. Then he crushed the meaty part of the claw between thumb and forefinger, gently removed the pincers, carried the basket in one hand and dragged his fly-swarming baits with the other. Wiping my eyes and holding my wound, I followed. I’d been out three days. In another week I’d call it a leave of absence, which seemed redundant.
Jim boiled a pot of grits so we wouldn’t starve to death picking crab for breakfast, a tedious project first thing but a good start for any day, savoring that which is given. So we picked, ate grits and eased out toward noon. He felt that his grandfather Luzon suffered a dual onus of slavery, the first being for sale at any time, which was tough if you had a family. The second was being on sale, like ripe tomatoes late season. Luzon got discounted because of his aversion to slavery and his shiftless reputation for stealing out at night to eat select oysters up from Rockville and drink expensive brandy. So he was tired in the mornings, returning with a bushel for the white folks, who yelled at him, especially Miss Elizabeth. Luzon left the Allston place when he’d had enough of that racket. Then it was time for dinner, fish, if I wanted fish, but first we’d rest on the porch to let breakfast settle and give the flood a chance to come on in.
Okay, Isaac Mikell liked the brown sugar and favored the woman Cloe. I doubted I’d find this memoir at the Library Society, but Jim Cohen’s story rang true, as it was told to him, detailed down to a phrase or jumping thirty years in a sentence. Isaac Mikell humped Cloe on the bluff in view of the half-built house that would be Point St. Pierre. He must have sweated like a bull cock and got things stirring with his own cockadoodle-do aimed at the cabins on the periphery. Then he marched up the bluff and across the yard to press on with construction, likely wondering if his next wife would endure. He’d had three, none surviving the rigors of the place and the man, but he’d get a new one, because a man needs a wife.
He’d bring her in once the house was done so she could walk the marble steps to the piazza where she could entertain like a planter’s wife. Here was the luxury of Charleston along with pastoral elegance among pines, palmettos and live oaks. On the greensward a woman could show off the firmament. Superfine cotton could not fill the French market demand, and with crops sold prior to planting, Isaac Mikell was a wealthy man. Charming speculators in tights and lace brought gifts for Isaac’s wives, pretty and frail but good for a season or two. The wives were buried out back as the gowns became a renowned collection, until it too was lost in the evacuation of ’61.
But on a satisfying morning twenty years before the exodus, Isaac Mikell stuffed his cheek till the drool ran with the sweat on down the neck to the chest. It was hot. Never mind. Isaac’s own private Eden shaped up with abundance. Wiping the dribbles from his chin, he wagged his head at so much sweetness packed into one blessed morning hardly spitting distance from home.
Sweet Cloe, slave queen of that little Nile, got no French gown but lasted longer and was loved dearly as a night wife could be, not in the do-as-you’re-told-till-death-do-ye-part sense but in the poetic sense. Isaac bestowed the comforts of life upon her in gratitude for relieving his pressure and sharing his joy. He never overpowered and remained open to a substitute if personal reasons prevented a tryst. He matched his great need with great manners, though revisionists would mar his name and forget the style he brought to plantation love. Isaac Mikell took care of his own, in sickness and in health, for better or worse.
He courted his dark women as if they’d blushed at high tea. They giggled like debs, like Pinckneys, Rutledges or Middletons, which many musty women came to be. The wenches had no family names then but were a source of pride and elixir. Isaac traced his vigor to steady work, sultry air and fine black women. They moved languorously, like ripples on a sultry afternoon as the master drifted through the fields watching them pick, hoe and bend to the common fortune, glistening with grace. He watched them idle, eat, laugh and sleep, until evening, when he sent an invitation through a nappy-headed child.
On arrival she got a flower, wine in a glass and a walk to the bluff in starlight. This heaven on earth was God’s gift to Isaac, who chose daily from his box of chocolates; this was Divine Mercy. Moonrise over the creek glimmered out to the sound as the corn shucks rustled and whispered nothings drifted, and the old ramrod pumped steam till the whistle blew. Cloe bore a daughter, Julya, when the big house was done.
As the master aged, the Negro women coveted his invitations because the gifts were greater for the greater task at hand—lamp oil, molasses or sugar tits—butterballs mixed with sugar, wrapped in linen squares tied with a thread. Auntie Riah, the cook, measured the master’s vigor by his need for sugar tits. “Maum Jane jus foal, Riah. Reckon I fetch her a box a sugah tit.” The gooey balls pacified the babies, ten minutes to a tit for a twilight hush. The master went to French candies and perfumes, silk in bolts and, near the outset of The War, money. So they lie with the master as he expounded the virtues of seminal relief as supported by recent studies in Northern journals. Oh, those Yankees had time for that sort of thing, and before you knew it, it was time again for love. No medicine went down so well.
Isaac’s happiness was challenged when the fourth wife denied him her bed till he gave up his vile habit. She died directly, and a fifth wife followed, along with a syphilitic sore on Isaac’s lip that grew instead of shrank till it matched the one on the donkey short-tethered by the cabins on the periphery. The new wife died directly, as the chancre vanished, never to rise again, except prior to the master’s death after The War, when he cursed from the bluff to the sound, “God damn you, Margaret!” He demanded dark women by then, but they wouldn’t love him after The War; he was so old and had that nasty lip. He died in
’65 with naught but heavenly memories.
A social class had evolved at Point St. Pierre between the white class and the black class. High yellow was not white but felt equidistant from black. The tawny mulattoes scorned the darkies. Among the oldest and lightest was Julya, a full-fleshed, big-boned woman with round cheeks, sloping nose, high forehead, a big butt and thick lips. Yet she strutted, chin up, chest out proud, even as her peers sniggered; twenty years old and yet to find a man. She wore crocus sack sleeves to protect her fair complexion, but pushed her sleeves up in the company of white men or pulled her shift down to reveal her ocher bosom. She stood apart, declining miscegenation to keep the line pure. Pride became buffoonery, but she held out, wondering what could take her white prince so long.
In November of ’61 the Confederate steamboat Beauregard landed at Edisto Island with a courier from Charleston: Yankees and freedmen will land directly; the only course is evacuation. White women cried and wondered where to bury the silver, china, crystal, jewels, linens and lace, what to pack and what to leave. White men mulled over brandy, the fleeting nature of greatness and the end of civilization. The men packed weapons, drank what they could of the liquor and ordered the crops burned to minimize the spoils. The Negroes packed a rag, a shirt, a dull knife for shucking. Edisto scurried like an anthill under a boot, leveled and revealed.
Rude as the Yankee threat, the recalcitrant slaves sauntered, slept or sat on porticos, on the marsh or in the yard. Mostly the mulattoes eased through that day into a niche newly opened, inheriting the earth at last. They watched the changing of the guard. Julya waited in the yard, explaining to herself why breakfast was taken as it had been for a hundred years, and dinner was on the wing. To those fleeing she admonished, “Jus’ run off.” The small federal force found her brewing tea the next morning in a three-gallon kettle, her morning chore. Cold and tired, they hailed Miss Julya Mikell in accordance with the new order. She poured carefully. Time had come today. With the federals and freedmen she wandered the big house, sorting the finery, trying the divans and beds. In the portraits of the Mikell forbears she sought insight and the family likeness.
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 13