Dessa Rose

by Sherley A. Williams

  Harker asked me to dance, bowing to me, smiling. I hadn’t heard him the first time—he was standing off to one side of me and I was watching them dance off to the other. When I turned to him, he said, “Dansay?” Something like that. I didn’t understand the word but I knew what he wanted and I looked up, smiling, my heart beating fast. I’d been acting like they acted, like it didn’t make me no never mind that we didn’t talk no more. But sometimes I’d see him or Nathan or Cully about the yard or round to one of the outbuildings and my heart would about bust, I’d want so bad to see them smile or have them say a word.

  “That’s French,” Harker told me then, and dropped down beside me where I was sitting there on the ground. “How many times you been asked to dance in French?” This tickled me and he told me some more French. “Negro” meant black man; “negress” was black woman; “blank” was white. I laughed at that, thinking about Miz Lady. She could sure look like it wasn’t nothing shaking behind that face. Harker had learnt these words down in N’Orleans, he told me. This was the way the black peoples spoke there; they said it was some islands way out to sea, somewheres out from there, where black peoples had made theyselfs free. This was what they had talked about on the coffle and I asked Harker why we couldn’t go there, stead of West like he was always talking about, where it take so much of money to go.

  “Maybe,” he told me, “maybe there is some islands out there where black peoples is free, but we got to depend on strange whites to get us there. Once we get on a boat—which ain’t no sure thing—but once we get on the boat, we totally under the dependence of the whites. Or, say we make for the north; probably Nathan, with the way he handle horses and all, and Cully, cause he young, could make a living, but me and the rest—including you—we farmers. Land expensive in the north and things I know to do in the city ain’t zactly what the law allow. And I don’t have no white man to front for me this time,” he add, trying to make a joke. “There’s a lot of slavery between here and there. And if they catch us up there, they’d just bring us back south.”

  I knew all this was true; I had heard it before; I had proved some of it myself. You could scape from a master, run away, but that didn’t mean you’d scaped from slavery. I knew for myself how hard it was to find someplace to go.

  “No, Dessa,” he say, “I want to go West cause I knows for a fact it’s no slavery there. A black man told me that. He been there, come back from there (and I never met no black man come back from these so-called islands). Slave catchers, neither patterrollers troubles no one there. But whichever way we goes, Dessa, going to take money.”

  It was like Harker was saying to me, here’s the plan I found to handle this problem, and finally, that night, I heard him.

  “Dessa,” he say, “Ada tell me you and the mis’ess don’t even much speak to each other.”

  I wasn’t foolish enough not to say something to her, and anytime she spoke to me I answered. But if she sat down outside, I’d generally find something to do back at the House or down to the shed where Milly was struggling with that loom. So I said kind of careless like, “Slave don’t generally have too much to say to the master that I knows of.”

  “She ain’t your master.”

  “I knows that, but do she?”

  Well he sucked his teeth at me, which, though I do it myself, have always irritated me with other peoples. “What have she done you?”

  Well, put like that, I couldn’t think of nothing right off and I got mad. “Why you taking her part?”

  “It ain’t taking no one’s part to ask what causing trouble between two peoples.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “She say you called her out her name.” Well, everybody knew that was true. “It fit her,” I said. I was tired of them acting like I was the main one in the wrong. “Nice white lady living out here, alone, amongst all these ‘darkies.’”

  “Damn it, Dess,” he start off and I stiffen up right away; I don’t like no man to cuss at me. “Dess,” he say and it was like he’d never called my name before, just “Dess,” soft like that. “What going on here?” He sounded about as hurt as me. I didn’t know myself what was going on; I just knew I didn’t like it. “Walk out here with me a ways,” he say; “I want to talk with you.”

  Wasn’t no privacy to speak of round that cabin, so we walked out towards the fishing hole a ways. We stopped in a little clearing there in the woods and sat down on a log. We was quiet for a while.

  “You liking Nathan for your man now?” he ask all of a sudden.

  His asking about me and Nathan surprised me so much that I laughed. Well as he knew us, Harker ought to knowed it hadn’t been no time for thinking about liking and belly-rub. Not that Nathan wasn’t a fine-looking man—and I loved him. I had a powerful feeling for him, but as a brother; he was like a brother to me. Then I got angry; that was all they could think of when it come to a man and a woman: Somebody had to be lusting after somebody else. I had to be wanting Nathan for myself; I couldn’t just be wanting him to have something better than I knew Miz Ruint was. “That’s all it come down to, huh?” I ask Harker. “Somebody fumbling under somebody else’s clothes?”

  “I didn’t mean you no offense, but—You must be liking him for something. So why you want to lose him as a friend?” I wasn’t specting this and I sort of turned away from him, but he kept right on talking and his words stayed on my mind. “Maybe he think you ought to be proud of him for doing something like this,” and “Maybe she wouldn’t do it just for the money,” and “All we know is she willing to do it.”

  “And what they going continue on to do?” This was a sore with me, that Nathan could be loving up with her all the while he posed to be my friend.

  “I see this ain’t no sense thing with you,” Harker say then and I got mad.

  “Sense? Why what he feel got to make more sense than what I’m feeling? You got all the sense in the world? Is Nathan?”

  “Dessa, Dessa, I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant is, you feel about ‘sense’ one way and he feel about it another; and that’s that. And you-all going lose friendship over a white woman.”

  I didn’t like it put that way, but still, “He seem like he willing,” I told him.

  “Who would you have gived Kaine up for if they had asked you?”

  My heart about turned over when he ask that. “It’s like that, he feel like that for her?”

  “Maybe; I don’t know. Nathan can speak for hisself. But you-all won’t even talk to each others now. You know, I always did admire the way you-all was about each other. That’s why I went back with them to get you. At first I thought you was his woman, some kind of relation to him or Cully, they talked about you so. And I admired it even more when I found out you wasn’t.”

  I hadn’t knowed he felt this way about us. I’d thought it was just the scaping, the idea of that that got his tention. Yet and still, “That mean I can’t never say he wrong no more?”

  “Dessa, you done said it.”

  “And he don’t care.”

  “Care about as much as you do. Dessa, what you-all got between you don’t give you the right to pick Nathan, neither Cully’s woman.”

  I wasn’t trying to pick Nathan’s womens, I told him. “If I was, I sho would find him a more likely one than her.” Harker just looked at me. “I be happy to talk to Nathan, anytime he want to talk to me,” I finally told him, “but Nathan, Cully, you—all you-all seem like you don’t have nothing to say to me don’t have something to do with some white woman or this plan.” He didn’t say nothing to that either. After a while, I said, “You know she wanted to see my scars?”

  “I know,” he said. “Nathan told me.”

  You know they would sometimes make the slaves strip when they put them up for auction, stand them up naked, man or woman, for all to see. They didn’t like to buy them with too many whipscars; this was a sign of a bellious nature. This the first thing flashed in my mind when Nathan told me she wanted to see them scars,
that Miz Lady had to see the goods before she would buy the story. Nathan didn’t urge me to do it, I give him that, but he, neither Harker understood what a low ’ration this was for me. Maybe, by her being a woman, they thought it shouldn’t make me no difference; I know they thought I placed too much dependence on it. And I held this against the white woman, too.

  “I know she ain’t the first person wanted to look under there,” Harker said real rough. Then he was gentle, trying to get me to see his point. “You ain’t the only one been hurt by slavery, Dessa. Everyone up in here have some pain they have to bear. Naw, Miz Lady didn’t have no right to ask, but what is that compared to what she could’ve done—and didn’t do?”

  He stopped, but I didn’t say nothing. “You know, girl, you didn’t have no business calling that woman out her name. We been trusting her all along, just like she been trusting us. How you going stop now?”

  I muttered something about her trusting in her whiteness and not our blackness. That’s when he put his hand on my hands where I had em folded there in my lap. “Dess,” he say to me then, “I’m glad you ain’t liking on Nathan cause I think you great myself.”

  Well this about took my breath away; it was so long since anyone had been so forward with me. And he said it like he knew just the way I wanted to be great and so was qualified to judge. I got up off that log real quick. I was nervous and shy as a girl just come into her womanhood. “That what you call me out here to talk about?” I ask real sharp.

  “You want me to say it in front of Janet-nem?” he ask real innocent like.

  Well, this just seem to me plain foolish so I didn’t even answer it. “What this got to do with Nathan and that white woman?”

  “Well it ain’t no sense in me trying to make up to you if you mooning round over Nathan and jealous of some other female on his account.”

  There didn’t seem to be nothing else to say and we just stood there in the moonlight looking at each other. I was still flustered, wanting to stay and wanting to go, but when he started kissing me, I didn’t stop him. It was the strangeness of him in my arms made me pull away finally. Kaine was slight built; hugging him was like hugging a part of myself. Harker wasn’t big like Nathan—Nathan’s muscles bulged like a stuffed cotton sack. He was tall as Nathan, but more rangy; even so, wasn’t no way I could mistake his shoulders for my own. I pulled back from him; my head was swimming. I was wanting to laugh, wanting to cry, wanting to spite him somehow cause he wasn’t Kaine, wanting to kiss him again. So I ran.

  I never did like to admit I was wrong but the next day when I went up to the House, I apologized for being rude. I wouldn’t say no sorry and I wouldn’t beg no pardon, neither. I was raised in a one-room cabin, had worked the fields all my life. I didn’t know nothing about knocking before you walk into a room. But white woman have a right to say who she want in her room; long as she didn’t ask me, wasn’t my business who she invited in there.

  Wasn’t no “death do us part” in slavery; wasn’t even no “dead or sold,” less’n two peoples made it that. Far as two peoples loving with each other, it was any handy place if you was willing—and sometimes if you wasn’t; or you jumped the broom if the masters let you marry. But you couldn’t help dreaming. Dreams was one the reasons you got up the next day. Kaine had been my dream and I didn’t spect to do no more dreaming about a man—least not no time soon. Yet, there I was, casting eyes at someone else. Seem like everyplace I look I seed the way Harker hair spring back like a sponge when he take his hat off; or how he move easy, easy when he walk. I tried membering how it was with Kaine. I was mad cause this wasn’t him. I was scared and shamed of myself.

  I had cried a long time in that box, from pain, from grief, from filth. That filth, my filth. You know, this do something to you, to have to lay up in filth. You not a baby—baby have clean skin, clean mind. He think shit is interesting; he want to show it to you. But you know this dirt. Laying up there in my own foulment made me know how low I was. And I cried. I was like an animal; whipped like one; in the dirt like one. I hadn’t never known peoples could do peoples like this. And I had the marks of that on my privates. It wasn’t uncommon to see a negro with scars and most of us carried far more than we ever showed, but I felt as crippled as Dante and I didn’t want Harker nor no one else to see me.

  He come and got me one night and we went down to the fishing hole. He spread a blanket under the trees. I wasn’t no Christian then and he wasn’t one neither. I sat up afterwards and kind of draped my dress across my hips and scooted so my back was against the tree.

  Harker was laying up there, naked as a jaybird, calm as you please; his hands folded behind his head, his legs crossed at the ankle just like he was in his own self’s bed, in his own self’s cabin. “Dess?” Voice quiet as the night, “Dessa, you know I know how they whipped you.” His head was right by my leg and he turned and lifted my dress, kissed my thigh. Where his lips touched was like fire on fire and I trembled. “It ain’t impaired you none at all,” he said and kissed my leg again. “It only increase your value.” His face was wet; he buried his head in my lap.

  Six

  Kaine was like sunshine, like song; Harker was thunder and lightning—Oh, not in the way he act towards me; never in the way he act. But in the way he come into my heart, way he shook me. “I never wanted at nothing till I met you,” he told me one time; we was down to that place in the woods. “I let the white man worry about how we going eat, where we going sleep. I always kept me a change of clothes and I knowed how to eat even if he didn’t.” He figured free negroes wasn’t that much better off than he was and they had a whole lot more to make do and worry about. So Harker let the white man worry and never hankered after being free. And he never wanted at nothing, he told me, “till I wanted you.”

  He said, “I don’t want to love you in the woods cause we don’t have no place else to be.” This was another time. Seem like I could be with him for hours and never know tiredness, never be weary the next day. “That’s part the reason I pushed at you to go long with this deal. I want to see at that Mony child I helped you birth and give you more. I can’t do that if I’m slave to someone.”

  And I knew he meant it. I had known him a long time by then; not in years, no. I had known him only weeks. But he had brought me out that cellar, had birthed my baby and sat beside me while I laid in that bed. We’d talked and I felt I knowed him deep. And here he was promising hisself to me, talking about a future he wanted for us, and this frightened me. Kaine hadn’t done this. You know, the future did not belong to us; it belonged to our masters. We wasn’t to think about no future; it was a sign of belliousness if we did. So it scared me to hear Harker talk this way. I felt sometimes that if I hadn’t pushed Kaine to think about running, he would never have hit Master. What was that banjo compared to us? He could’ve made another one. Now here was Harker showing them same signs. Oh, Harker knowed the laws and rules was set against us, but he act like that was just so he could sharpen his wits on them, make doing what he wanted to do more interesting, you know, a little exciting. And this was how he went at that scheme, like all our fears about slips and what-it’s was just something to make everybody think a little deeper, a little faster.

  He taken us over that plan time and time again while we waited for Red to get back with his wife, Debra. Harker, Castor, Ned, and Flora was the ones we sold. Most any one of our peoples would bring eight or nine hundred dollars easy at public auction—so Nathan said, and after three years with that slave dealer we figured he ought to know. I’d never had no experience of money before, you understand, so the number didn’t mean that much to me. What I went by was how he said it and he said it like it was a right smart amount. Harker, neither Nathan wanted to sell any of the womens, though we was likely to bring us much, if not more, than the mens. Womens was subject to ravishment and they didn’t want to put none of us back under that threat. This the way it was during slavery. The woman was valued more because her childrens belong to the master;
this why they didn’t like the mens being sweet with nobody from off the home place, because the childrens would belong to someone else. Increase someone else’s riches. But the womens couldn’t handle the harvest by theyselfs, so Flora—big, roebuck woman with that brown, brown skin, brown to the bone—she volunteered to go.

  We figured to do well enough without selling me or Nathan, and I wasn’t sorry about not being sold. This was a scary thing to me, to flirt so close with bondage again. All the mens could see was the trick—those that stayed was put out. Even Nathan felt he would miss some of the “fun” on account of his driving the wagon. But I could see risk and slips, and wasn’t for the West, I wouldn’t’ve been in it.

  We was to go by wagon to Wilkerson on the shores of Lake Lewis Smith and take a boat from there down the Warrior River to Haley’s Landing, just over the line in Tuscaloosa County. Harker knew the country all the way down to Mobile and cross to the Georgia line—that’s where all that gambling and scheming had caught up with his old master, in Opelika, not far off the Georgia line. And he had roamed all up and down by hisself. From Haley’s Landing, we would go overland, working the towns between the Warrior and Sipsey rivers in Tuscaloosa, Pickens, and Greene counties.

  Miz Lady would tell some story about her husband being laid up with the fever or a busted leg; a couple of times, I think he was dead. We was to meet at such-and-such a place, by such-and-such a day after the sale; we’d wait two days at a meeting place, then we’d all go on to so-and-so. We was not to come back for no one. We was not to talk. We had to be as careful with slaves as we was with the masters. Our life depended on no one speaking out of turn. We was slaves; wasn’t posed to know nothing nor do nothing without first being told. She was Mistress; wasn’t no Mis’ess, no Miz Rufel to it. If they was caught, they was to act dumb and scared and show the pass from Miz Lady, which they all had hid in the toe of they shoes. She was to act high-handed and helpless if she was in a tight spot. We would end up in Arcopolis near the junction of the Warrior and Tombigbee rivers. From there we would take a boat back to the Glen. We spected to be back before the second picking of the cotton in October.