In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  Miss Elizabeth got sorely shrill at one so shiftless, mean-spirited and downright worthless as Luzon, sticking her head under the porch where he liked to hide. He held his breath. “Luzon! You in there?”

  No; he had only to breathe with his eyes closed, even as they ached to open on the mocking white faces and pointing fingers surely waiting for the crazy naked nigger under the porch. She yelled again, “Luuu-zon!” She saw. She knew. He felt it. “Git on out here, you! Git out here right now!” He squeezed till tears rolled and knew they’d sparkle, but she stepped back and foreswore him. “I swear, he’s suh damn black you couldn’t see him in there any how.”

  She walked away, and so he crawled out from under and backed into the woods, watching her and a few neighbors and a few other Negroes in a half-hearted hunt. When they neared, he stooped over his box and closed his eyes. Backing and stooping for the trees like a courier taking leave from a king, he turned and ran the last hundred feet as the torches were lit.

  Luzon loved to tell of his private emancipation, and filigree each telling till his hair turned white and wouldn’t fit under his hands. Till his last sparkle he avoided unpleasantness by sitting down cross-legged, palms on knees, mouth shut, eyes closed. But Luzon and Julya would share forty years before Luzon sat and closed his eyes for the last time. Forty years marked their walk from the mud to what they knew as civilization. When Luzon died in ’05, Julya recounted the years for whoever might listen or nobody at all but the buzzing breeze wafting across her rocking chair on the porch. Some years brought while some years took.

  The first year brought de sparit with undying respect in the anomalous virgin for her husband’s patience. She learned as well his steady compassion, learning thereafter that it was a greater, benign indifference. Luzon viewed life and death as equal time, one day to the next. You ridem on de bawtum uh you ridem on de tawp? Luzon asked. Julya slept outside, three feet away. Luzon departed. He returned the next day with a live coal wrapped in a frond. He’d gone to Rockville, invisible in daytime now, and plucked a coal off the fire easy as you please. He stacked shells in a circle around it and lay kindling over it, topping off with Spanish moss and faggots. When it was fire he threw her tattered smock over her head, wrestled her to her stomach and spared her the view of his enduring sincerity. No longer anomalous to her age, she squealed. He heard rapture, and they were wed, man and wife, to love and honor and do as you’re told till you’re dead. He stoked the fire and kept it burning through the night.

  The second year brought four walls, a door and an iron pot with four feet, so she brewed again from sassafras.

  The third year brought Rozetta, who died that year, when Luzon built a bed and began an addition that would be the main dwelling.

  Near the end of the fourth year Asa was born. She grew strong and was followed by completion of the shack and Jefferson, first child born in the shack.

  Mose was born in the sixth year and lived.

  In the seventh year came a child stillborn. Luzon, his father said of this being in perfect stillness. Liquid limp in perfect blue-blackness, he too achieved mobility with a close-handed, close-mouthed, shut-eyed breathless silence. Julya wept. Luzon pointed out, Dis yidda enfant be’s like me. So we name um Luzon. Looka dat beeby. Luzon held the dead baby up and closed his own mouth and eyes to better show the likeness.

  Soon after baby Luzon, the shack was covered inside with newspapers, layered into the next century, till the newspaper and marsh mud and sometimes flour paste held the shack up. The covering stopped with color comics, whose beauty defied covering.

  In the eighth year Dan was born, one of three brothers and two sisters to reach maturity from eleven starts. When Dan was two in the tenth year, Luzon ran a stovepipe for a hearth, and the Cohens were warm in winter. Julya made a kitchen and learned to cook. Luzon built a table in the ninth year from wreckage planks hauled from the river.

  Cora was born and died.

  Tyra was conceived and born in the tenth year, the last child to survive though three more were born: Oree in the eleventh died that year; Dessie in the twelfth died that year; Lila in the thirteenth died in the fifteenth of yellow fever. The other children fevered but survived.

  In the eleventh year Luzon carried the benches to the yard and set chairs around the table, ladder-backs also built from planking. Julya gathered spices, blending garlic and wild scallion for biddy tea, since it tasted like the chicken broth Auntie Riah once brewed. She found bay laurel and gagged on berry tea but then hung the sweetly scented leaves from the eaves for thirty years. She found basil and planted it near the shack. She was given okra in the fourteenth year and planted it too in time for okra gumbo on Christmas at the end of the fever.

  By the sixteenth year the gumbo lost its slime when she learned vinegar and planted apple cuttings for two years before one lived and became a tree that bore fruit in the twentieth year. She picked rabbit tobacco, stripping the leaves from the stems with thumb and forefinger for a tea that took the place of sassafras and was called life everlasting.

  X

  Dan and Lena

  By the sixteenth spring Luzon sold oysters and learned currency in the handwritten scrip from the man at the Rockville Store. Two thousand feet of quarter-inch line knotted every three feet cost the two-dollar scrip the man wrote for ten bushels. Another fifty-cent scrip bought the bull’s tongue, or what the man called bull’s tongue but was more than buckets of bull tongues. It was cow tongues too, and lips, eyeballs, noses and spleens looking to crawl out the buckets braying stink loud as an ass, whose tongue and gizzards were likely in there too. The Cohens then saved their cooter guts, chicken necks and feet, possum bellies and snakeheads for tying onto the knotted line.

  So night fell on the fetid reeking buckets in the center of the Cohen clan as Luzon unwound and passed seven knots of longline around the circle to Julya, Dan, Mose, Tyra, Asa, Jefferson and back to Luzon. They reached for the bull’s tongue and tied a hundred times seven lumps of bait. At dawn he loaded the bateau, rowed out Bohicket to Ledinwah to the Edisto River and floated the ebb out to where the crabs still stayed in early spring. He anchored the line, buoyed it with a hand-painted jug, then drifted two thousand feet, hand-over-handing overboard. He buoyed the bitter end, then rode back easy on the first of the flood and out again near dusk, ebb again. He pulled in a crab or two on most knots till he was ankle deep in them and laughed out loud at the rising moon. The next day he traded crabs for another longline and twice as much bull’s tongue.

  Sharks took three lines the sixteenth summer. But Luzon had money and sat up late, thinking, sometime till sunrise.

  In 1886 he became a farmer. He bought plowshares and planned hundred-foot rows. He squared the field and cleared it and stole a moldboard and made a harness from old hides. He traded two rows’ yield in advance for the use of a mule and planted more basil and okra. The crop was blighted and infested but he bought his own mule in the twenty-first year. Asa moved to Charleston that year to work domestic for a dollar a week at the Pringles’, who vacationed at Rockville.

  Mose sailed the next year on a Connecticut shad schooner to Savannah. He was sixteen and fished forty years before coming home in ’28, three days before his mother died, then went back to his family in Guadeloupe in the French West Indies.

  Jefferson picked tomatoes the year Mose first left then followed corn to Johns Island. He picked melons inland till they played out, so he bought a machete and headed out behind the long sugar cane harvest the next spring and never came home.

  Three years’ toll of three children left the shack quiet. Luzon gathered less and farmed eight rows instead of twenty. Still, by the twenty-sixth year he had more money than he needed, so when Dan proclaimed his yen for Lena Hope, Luzon planned a wedding. Julya boiled yams and poured molasses over. She cut onions into collards and field peas, cow peas, black-eyed peas, snap beans, butter beans, lima and string beans. She cut fatback into parsnips and turnips and blended okra gumbo with cooter soup an
d served it in the shells of the diamondback terrapins to use as bowls. She baked cornbread and bought a keg of molasses. Luzon fried mullet, whiting, bass, shark and a dozen eels in the yard cauldron. Two hundred people came to celebrate. The spirit of the hour was a social benchmark on that side of Wadmalaw. In appreciation of his wedding, Dan gave his father two blue tick pups that began Luzon’s coondog business. The sign read:

  CONeDOg FOr SALe FOr reNT WILL TrADe

  Dan walled in his sleeping areas and re-planked an old bateau half again as big as Luzon’s, which economy of scale was plain to see. He sank it again to swell and seal then rowed to the best beds over on Edisto. He went early, pulling hard against the ebb to gain more time up the creek and picked two small mountains of oysters fore and aft. One mound filled his needs and the other was pure gravy. So he rowed hard to the fork against the flood, cleared the shoal jutting from the point and rounded to deep water and a sweet drift home.

  In a single season Dan’s back stooped when he hunchbacked down the street then lined with shacks where Luzon first bound fronds to a sapling. Dan walked like an old man with arms swelled to twice their right size. He sometimes twitched, itchy to engage their horsepower on a half-ton of oar.

  By his second season Dan was legend; Oyster Man to white buyers from Charleston in shirts and pants waiting to pay cash for his whitefoot oysters. Prosperity was measured in bushels, his for the picking. His father smoked rabbit tobacco on the porch as Oyster Man described wealth like a far-away place. Dan reckoned oysters more dependable than crabs, because dey be’s where dey is, widdout no running ’bout it. Dey foun’ money, cuz dey is whea dey is. He explained that a success would require money flowing free as water in a creek. So he prepared with a new Dutch oven for a dollar and a dozen pre-packed spices for another dollar and two calico dresses on the installment plan for two more dollars owed, plus interest. Lena prepared for birthing.

  Oyster Man paid what he could to the white man in Rockville for boards, nails and tin sheets. He hired two men and began his own house on the far side of the garden. He stopped for oyster season and Lena’s miscarry. She urged him on, and the house was done by mid-’94 in time for oyster season.

  Tyra turned nineteen and moved to Church Creek with her new husband John Bohne.

  Dan and Lena moved across the garden and soon had enough money for a pot-belly stove from Charleston, half down, two bushels a week. They bought new clothes and pondered a new wagon, so Dan might carry his own oysters into town, where surely they’d bring more. Lena swelled again. They talked of what to buy and the new way of buying, in which you don’t have to wait till you’re old to enjoy a thing. Julya sat up watching the new house across the garden.

  Oyster Man rounded the bend pulling hard against the tide and the load that grew with each trip, his stroke often licking the last inch of freeboard, and he laughed with great goodwill for the power flowing beneath him. He beached easy on a reverse current, except for twice when a late ebb on a westerly breeze bucked the flood and kept him out overnight. When waves came in, he chucked the load.

  But an ambitious man will take a risk, and he might as well chuck dollars overboard as ditch whitefoot beauties. In his fourth season, soon after an eight-place setting for four dollars down, Dan gave back a load so he could get home. Dropping in a pile for easy re-gather, he bought back five inches of freeboard, but alas was too deep in deficit spending. Five inches could not fend the waves, so all debts got settled, three feet and breaking over the gunwales with foreclosure. Dan learned conservative planning with his mouth and eyes agape. He drowned.

  Oyster Man’s body floated up the creek on the flood and back down a mile before snagging near the Ledinwah confluence and stayed aground with the falling tide. Marcus Seabrook found it and towed it home to the small beach on Ledinwah Creek and called, Tell Luzon e boy e drown. Tell Juya she son e gone. When his bateau rasped the sand he pulled the body in by its towline, and in minutes Wadmalaw knew: Oyster Man be dead. Julya walked to the little beach, saw her son, looked down Ledinwah Creek, looked up to the gray sky and fell to her knees.

  The body was carried home, where Luzon cut benches for the coffin. Neighbors brought planks to finish. He nailed to dark and bade the neighbors leave, so he could be alone with his son. In the coffin Dan’s knees rose above the gunwales. His feet curled over and the arms squeezed out too. Dan be’s layin straight. Be’s layin straight. Luzon repeated these words to make them come to pass, till lo and behold it did, once he broke both legs with the blunt side of his ax, smashed the knees and broke both arms too. Dan fit the box and looked more peaceful then. Luzon stood in the doorway to say Dan be’s ready. The women carried their chairs outside. They helped Julya to sit out near the fire and the coffin, and the vigil began on low moans.

  A mourner spotted Oyster Man in the smoke; the others saw him too, just there twix’ dem flame tumbling to Hell. They lamented the fall, giving voice to the dead gone before who spoke now through their children. Seeking a common timbre they avoided harmony, their discord eerily scoring the misty chaos. Some bayed. Some shouted what they saw. Some called out at Oyster Man coughing up oysters he’d taken from their homes and eaten—Puke! dem awshtuh. Oyster Man gave up his life’s fare of cooters ’n dem rattuh snek ’n all dem fush ’n stingaree ’n soif trout and all dem po misfotunate crab ’n clam folk too. Then came the others, possums to periwinkles, squirrels, rabbits and shorebirds, all purged so Oyster Man could get his name back. Julya spoke it softly.

  Dan locked spirits with the devil and looked good, young and strong, but the devil was tricky, so they grappled to the wee hours, the mourners finally hooting at the turning tide. Dan stood over the fallen one: E whup de debil! Whup um, Dan!

  Near dawn the vigil and fire played down to embers, moans and groans. At first light a woman ended the bout with a song:

  Angel roll de stone away.

  Angel roll de stone away.

  On a bright new Sundy mawnin

  Angel roll de stone away.

  Oh, yondah come de Angel

  By de breakin ob de day

  E bring good news fum Heab’m

  Angel roll de stone away.

  The women sang in harmony at sunrise, except for Julya, who wept. Dan was ready.

  At the funeral Luzon closed his eyes and afterward shuffled the street wearily till he sat on the porch and smoked. Lena whimpered like the young girl she was, not yet eighteen, but her grief before the funeral gave way to fear after, facing her last month of pregnancy alone. She feared solitude and hardship. She feared the omens. Don’ bode no good; Julya sorted omens to sense how things might change. She boiled water in the huge skillet on the hearth and added rabbit tobacco so life everlasting could steep and steam. Don’ bode no good, she told the empty cup, filling it, carrying it out to Luzon, who winced again.

  Christmas began the condolence, postponed three weeks for birthing preparation. Callers brought sympathy and birthing aids. Most brought linen-wrapped spider webs taken from hearth cornices for warmth and from rafters over the bed for potency. Spider silk would hasten clotting. A few brought ergot tea to induce labor. Julya arranged these things near the swathing.

  Luzon walked to Rockville for laudanum in a vial. He dripped it onto his thumb then drank the rest to feel good. He returned to Rockville for a bottle of the tincture, pledging to pay bushels as necessary, because this was a critical time. So the man at the Rockville store made history by issuing credit.

  By New Year Lena showed no sign, which was a sign unto itself, and so she remained. On January third the sun rose in a cold, blue sky. Ergot tea would be given by the rise of the new moon. It couldn’t get any clearer. Haggard and weak, Lena moved little and spoke less but assured that little Dan would come home today. Julya poured a teaspoon of black tea down Lena’s gullet and held her jaw tight against the spew. Lena bolted, fading dull as the iron pot, but anyone would; this was no convulsion. By dark she weakened. Julya wept then sobbed, pouring another dose of tea and
another, stroking Lena’s neck to make her swallow. Lena shuddered as the sheet turned red.

  With her ear to Lena’s mouth, Julya heard nothing, felt nothing. Like a sorceress conjuring one last spell, she crawled under her own bed for the Mason jar, goose quill and snuffbox. With a pinch of snuff on the back of her hand she held it behind the feather and bent to Lena. Inhaling softly, she blew the snuff so it sifted through the feather onto the face. Lena moaned. Julya blew harder, and with a sudden, voracious inhale interrupted halfway by a sneeze, Lena sneezed again and again, eyes open over a whimper. The mattress flooded. The great mound moved, and Julya moved down to receive. Soon it was free, breathing gently beside Lena, whose comatose face beaded with droplets of melted frost fetched by her silent father-in-law.

  Luzon spoke at last after a dozen trips to the frosted grass. Pulling the swathing to reveal the infant as male, he said, Dis yiddah beeby look like Dan. Call um Dan.

  Lena quivered, perhaps with approval, then she died. No, Julya insisted. Call um Jim.

  XI

  Jim Cohen

  Jim Cohen laughed; to think, he could cause such a fuss and not even be born yet. I concurred, especially in view of the fuss he caused for the next seventy years, meaning the whole Negro commotion—I meant that to be a joke, which seemed obvious to me. He didn’t laugh but looked up like a duck in a downpour, saying he caused no fuss whatever after that first one, and the commotion I alluded too wan’t nothing to do wid dem black folk. It wan’t nomo ’n a passel o’ white folk sortin’ dey trouble. That’s how he saw it, because a black man minding his own business out on Wadmalaw had no reason but to get on with folks.

  I hadn’t intended the tar brush and regretted my ill-timed and obscure jocularity. I was one of those folks who depended on the foibles of others to explain personal trouble, but then no clan is ever free of picking its way through the mud and sharp shells.