Dessa Rose

by Sherley A. Williams

  These were the dreary parts of the story and Rufel tried never to tell herself those. She did not sneer at the neighbors as Bertie did, but she knew them to be rough and uncouth. The women, as Bertie maintained, were dowds, for the most part, and gossips. Now and then—always unbidden and fleeting—she had thought, as Mammy had more and more frequently muttered aloud, that there ought to be something more showing on the eastern horizon than a bird lifting above the trees. And always, close upon the heels of that feeling, silencing that vagrant thought as she had Mammy’s whispers, came the knowledge that Bertie had wrested a good living for them out of these backwoods. Rufel had never had to turn her hand to more than an occasional piece of sewing or the soil in a flower bed. She knew Bertie had bought her leisure at some cost and she would not criticize him.

  Worms, spreading from a new field into the established cotton acreage in the fifth year of their marriage, had devastated the harvest and come close to wiping them out. Bertie had proposed an extended business tirp, like the shorter ones he went on once or, more frequently now, two or three times a year. Most often he had returned with a little of the ready money they were always so short of. He traveled the rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and Ohio, where, he said, northern capital met southern enterprise and made “deals,” made cash money. Rufel had only a hazy idea of what Bertie was talking about, something, she thought, like what her father and Uncle Carson did, something to do with planters and cotton, with the buying and selling of goods. And this was only to tide them over, to make ends meet until more land could be cleared, more cotton planted.

  Bertie had returned before the last cotton picking, with money, a bolt of watered silk for her, a saddle and the crippled darky for Timmy. Their own harvest had been smaller—not enough land planted to cotton, Bertie had explained; they would remedy that come spring. And he had gone again in the slack time between the last chopping and the first picking of the cotton, back to the river, to get capital to feed the land. Mammy hadn’t liked it. Rufel was expecting; she had miscarried twice and had a hard time with Timmy before that. There wasn’t a decent driver on the place and the responsibility for directing the half-wild negroes who then worked their fields would fall largely to her. But Rufel could not bring herself to say no; Bertie was always so sure and she was, she thought, in good health. Those expensive waters had done her some good, she had laughed, pleased to be pleasing Bertie, who thought it so important that he go. Had he not gone the last time, she told herself, they would scarcely have made it through the winter, even Mammy could see that.

  It had laddered like a stocking; four of the six hands had taken off soon after they finished stripping the corn fields in August; the baby, Clara, had come early and hard. Bertie had not come at all. Perhaps, as Mammy said, he had gone too far north in search of business, been caught there when a river iced over. Rufel had no clear idea of geography and was calmed by Mammy’s confidence. She had, as Mammy often reminded her, a healthy baby girl; they had taken care of the harvest—though what Master Bert would say about how they had done it, using runaways. Mammy laughed, sure that Bertie would see the joke they had played on the neighbors, and Rufel herself thought it funny after a while. Payback, Bertie would call it, for all the Sutton slaves these shiftless farmers had helped escape.

  Rufel worried less about Bertie’s reaction than her neighbors’, though Mammy assured her that none of the darkies were from the area. Her fears that she would be denounced or arrested for harboring runaways receded as autumn wore on, but she was never as sanguine as Mammy about the arrangement with the runaways. True, they seemed to work with a better will than darkies on the place had ever done; but she could not like Ada, the rawboned darky whose aid Mammy had enlisted when Rufel’s labor with Clara had proved so long and difficult. Ada had stayed on to cook; Annabelle was to help in the House. The darkies had lightened Mammy’s load considerably but Rufel sensed something sly in the way they seemed to avoid her, and secretly fretted that Ada seemed to take up so much of Mammy’s time. Rufel had nothing much to do with the four or five other runaways who had harvested the crops—Mammy and Ada made what arrangements were necessary—but she could not rid herself of the suspicion that, having run away from one place, these darkies would run away from the Glen, too.

  Rufel got into the habit, as she nursed Clara, of sitting by the window, rocking gently, watching the trees. She thought then of Charleston, began to speak of it with hesitant longing as she sat and watched the trees. She did not think, as Mammy teased her at first, that Charleston would appear on the eastern horizon, but she hungered for the city of her come-out with a strength she tried guiltily to conceal. Mammy, concerned and fearful at Rufel’s lingering lethargy, urged Rufel to try one of the foul-tasting teas Ada swore would help a new mother regain her strength. Ada, Mammy told Rufel, might, if asked, stay on when the master returned. As if Bertie were due back any minute! And she spoke casually of Rufel’s deepest fears: It was sure bad of Master Bert to get out of touch like this; Rufel shouldn’t spare him her tongue when he returned. Her calm certainty that he would return bolstered Rufel’s own faltering belief. Bertie, she told herself as she gazed out the windows, would be homebound as soon as the river up north thawed in the spring.

  Rufel remembered hardly anything of that winter (and felt a faint surprise, if she thought of it, that she had no recollection of privation or even scrimping), except that she had been miserable. She had paid little attention to the preparations for spring planting until Mammy began to talk of it. They should marl the cotton fields and put manure on them; they should rotate the crops, putting corn where Bertie had always planted cotton; put in oats or hay or peas; expand the potato field. Plant less cotton altogether. Rufel had been uneasy as the suggestions diverged more and more from Bertie’s practices, but Mammy, citing as justification the experience of the new darky, Harker, who had wandered into the Glen sometime during the winter, had easily quieted Rufel’s hesitant questioning. She was baffled by the larger questions of crop management that were implicit in these changes and found it easier in this, as in so much else, to rely on Mammy’s judgment.

  A cold had settled into Mammy’s chest at the tail end of spring. It had seemed nothing serious at first and Rufel, roused at last from lethargy and anticipating Bertie’s return any day, had enjoyed pampering Mammy, playfully bullying her into drinking Ada’s noxious brews. The cough had worsened and with frightening suddenness, Mammy died. Rufel could not get used to that fact. Nothing in the days and weeks since Mammy’s death had filled the silence where her voice used to live. Bertie would not return. Rufel never voiced this fear aloud or even phrased it to herself. It had been unthinkable to say when Mammy lived; it was impossible now that Mammy was dead. Who would scold her or laugh away her fears? But they were there, darting into consciousness. Only Charleston kept foreboding at bay, the dreamlike images of her first season serving as a refuge from her dull days and the never-ending trees.

  Rufel herself had never seen Sutton Glen through the trees. Oh, she had imagined the elms that would someday line the lane from the Road to the House, their branches meeting overhead, the House standing squarely at lane’s end. But Ives Creek was too narrow, its course too winding for convenient travel and the House wasn’t visible from the Road. She had come to understand these things silently as she nursed Clara and stared out the windows or simply sat singing tunelessly. It was like being swallowed up by the forest, she thought, wanting Charleston again with all her heart. Like the forest had swallowed up everything east of Ives Creek: “If you was to take a ride…”

  Yet, she would tell herself, even now, as far as she knew, there was a spot—on the opposite slope, say—where just so much of the House was visible, just so much and no more. It made no difference, of course, what she or anyone else might see from some distant perspective. She looked out upon the barely kept yard, the slopes rising beyond it, the changing light, changing colors, the empty sky. The trees grew fat, got lean; some water glinte
d silver, imagined among the trees. And now she watched the colored girl.

  The days drifted by. Dessa slept, waking to the colored woman’s gruff urgings to “eat. Eat,” the taste of some strongly flavored broth, the mealy texture of cereal, thinned she thought with milk, the changing of the bloody cloth. Acutely embarrassed and weak as a kitten, she bore the woman’s gentle touch. Often she woke to find the baby asleep in the curve of her arm and, hand heavy, powerless to caress him, she pursed her lips and breathed him love…Or opened her eyes to some smiling face—dark, peach-colored, hair like night or the sun—whose name she ought to know. She would grin feebly; they would pat her arm. Nathan, she would think. Cully. But already they were gone.

  The colored woman chatted in a companionable way as she tended Dessa. Not enough to require an answer or force Dessa to questions, but she did listen, her mind holding enough to know the baby was doing well; the white woman meant no harm; she could sleep. She did not dream but she became cautious in her waking. The white woman seemed often in the room and Dessa woke, now and then, to find her settled in the rocker, hands quiet in her lap, dreamy-eyed, looking toward Dessa but apparently talking to herself. “…bonnet…” Dessa heard several times. Half-listening, fascinated, she watched the red mouth move. She knew she could understand what the white woman said if she would let herself. But if she understood the white woman, she would have to…have to, have to do—Something And—“…picnic,” the white woman said. Dessa wanted to laugh. Where did you go to pick nits? Or was that something else only white folks did? She peered at the white woman; her dress looked neat enough. So they had bugs, just like some trashy buckra or freshwater negro who didn’t know enough to keep clean. “Mammy…” That made no sense. Mammy’s name came up often. What could this white woman know of mammy; or mammy of “dropped waists” and “Dutch sleeves”—unless these were cows?

  Once she woke in arms, her face tangled in a skein of fine webbing that seemed alive, it clung and itched her skin so bad. She almost suffocated in her terror for she knew the white woman held her and they were together in the big feather bed. And, really, it was the white woman’s breathing that saved her, brought her to her senses; its calm regularity imposing order on her own wildly beating heart. That breathing, punctuated by a drawn-out sigh of utter satisfaction and the small fragile bundle that nestled at her spine. Turning cautiously, moving with infinite patience, she inched herself and the baby toward the edge of the bed. Squirming carefully into the soft mattress she managed to nudge out a slight rise between herself and the other woman who, still breathing regularly, had likewise turned away. What kind of place had she come to? she thought as her heart thudded against her ribs. Her fingers touched briefly the satiny hair, the thin velvet of her baby’s skin. It was a long time before she slept again.

  The colored woman’s name was Ada, Dessa realized one morning. The long windows had begun to gray with dawn light. No conch or bell sounded here; people must get up with the rooster’s crow. This was the Sutton place except Master Sutton wasn’t here. Ada called the white woman “Miz Ruint.” There was something funny about the way Ada said the name, as though—Was the white woman crazy? Dessa sweated; the thin stuff of her shift clung to her. Shift. Dessa clutched at the garment. She had never in her life owned cloth as fine as the material her hand rubbed against her side. She moved uneasily between the unbelievable smoothness of the sheets. The white woman’s breathing was barely audible in the stillness. Maybe she was crazy, Dessa thought, but not a killer. No, not a killer. Nathan and Cully would not have brought her here. Not a killer; but touched, maybe; strange in the head. What else could explain her own presence in this bed?

  Touched; and Ada said, Miz Ruint said the master was coming home this harvest for sure. The other woman had laughed quietly. Ada said the white woman had said the same thing about the master’s return last year and he hadn’t come. Dessa remembered that; Ada had rolled her eyes as if to say—Dessa couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Crazy—maybe, she assured herself now, but not no killer. Ada spoke also of “Dorcas.” In her mind’s eye, Dessa saw a thin, loam-colored face, surmounted by a tangle of even darker hair. No. That was Annabelle, Ada’s daughter, seldom seen and then only briefly, a slender figure who hummed quietly and showed no interest in Dessa. Dorcas was someone Ada quoted, someone Dessa didn’t think she had yet seen. Never mind, she told herself. Her hand moved to soothe the baby. There had to be someplace else to sleep. She would ask Ada.

  Neither Ada nor her daughter belonged to the white woman; none of them did. Ada’s words plucked at Dessa’s attention. Ada’s face beneath her bandanna was placid and Dessa wondered if she had heard right. Free? Dessa wondered silently, as she watched Ada stir the bowl she held. Dessa tried to gesture but her hand fell limply to her side. She swallowed. “Yo’all—” she croaked.

  Ada paused with the spoon halfway to Dessa’s mouth. “Free?” she said smiling, brown eyes looking closely at Dessa as she replaced the spoon in the bowl untouched. “Cat let loose your tongue, huh? Come on, it just a bit more.” She stirred the remaining grits and lifted another spoonful toward Dessa. “Come on; eat up.”

  Dessa opened her mouth obediently. The grits had been thinned with milk and seasoned with butter and Dessa held the spoonful in her mouth savoring the richness.

  “I wouldn’t zactly call it free,” Ada said, doubtfully. “We runned away,” she added brightly, as though this explained it all. “She let us stay here; she need the he’p. Man gone; slaves runned off.” Ada shrugged and smiled. “White folks think we hers but didn’t none of us never belong to this place.” She spooned the last of the cereal into Dessa’s mouth and rose.

  “Ada.” Dessa managed to grasp a fold of the woman’s skirt. “Ada, sleep with you?” She struggled to one elbow, then fell back weakly, her eyes seeking to hold the other woman’s. “Me and the baby?” She couldn’t spend another night in the white woman’s bed.

  “Honey.” Ada bent over her, eyes warm with concern. “Honey, me and Annabelle sleeps in that little lean-to they calls a kitchen; it just barely big enough for us and it ain’t no wise fitting. You ain’t even out of childbed—”

  “Quarters, we could—”

  “Worse than a chicken run.” Ada sat on the bed, stroking Dessa’s hand. “Tell you, honey, these some poor white peoples. Oh, this room and the parlor fine enough, but you know what’s outside that door? A great big stairway lead straight up to nothing cause they never did finish the second floor.” She laughed. “The ‘Quarters’ is a cabin, one side for the womens, one side for the mens. ’Sides,” she added when Dessa would have protested further, “she the only nursing woman on the place. Even if you go, you ought to leave the baby here.”

  Dessa had suspected from the way the baby turned from her, fretting and in tears, that she had no milk to speak of. Her baby, nursing—Her breathing quickened and her heart seemed to pound in her ears. There was more, but Dessa turned away.

  Ada talked as much to herself as she did to Dessa, almost in the same way that the white woman did, never really expecting an answer. Already she seemed to have forgotten that Dessa had spoken. Dessa surrendered to the familiar lassitude. Runaways. Ada, Harker, how many others? And the white woman let them stay, nursed—Dessa knew the white woman nursed her baby; she had seen her do it. It went against everything she had been taught to think about white women but to inspect that fact too closely was almost to deny her own existence. That the white woman had let them stay—Even that was almost too big to think about. Sometimes it seemed to Dessa that she was drowning in milky skin, ensnared by red hair. There was a small mole on the white woman’s forehead just above one sandy eyebrow. She smelled faintly of some scent that Dessa couldn’t place. Why had they all run here? Because she let them stay. Why had she let them stay?

  “…behind. She was that put out about it, too.” The white woman was sewing this time, setting big, careless stitches in a white cloth draped over her knees. Against her will Dessa listened.
“…night of the Saint Cecilia dinner and of course Mammy had to dress mother for that.”

  No white woman like this had ever figured in mammy’s conversations, Dessa thought drowsily. And this would have been something to talk about: dinner and gowns—not just plain dresses.

  “…all by myself. And scared, too—the Winstons was related to royalty or maybe it was only just a knight.” The white woman paused a moment. “Now, often as Daphne told it, you’d think I’d know it by heart.” She shook her head and laughed softly. “Mammy would know it.”

  Maybe, Dessa thought, with a sudden pang, Mammy hadn’t “known” about Kaine, about Master selling Jeeter…

  “…Mammy doubted that, when it all happened so long ago wasn’t no one alive now who witnessed it.”

  I seen it, Dessa started to say. Master sold Jeeter to the trader same as Mistress sold me. But the white woman continued without pause.

  “…the pretty clothes. Well, I know Mammy didn’t know a thing about history, but I knew she was right about the clothes. She used to dress me so pretty. Even the Reynolds girls—and their daddy owned the bank; everyone said they wore drawers made out of French silk. They used to admire my clothes.”