Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  Now [static, crackling] flames lick the bottom of the wall. Now they die down. It is plaster in any case and not splintery gray deal. Damp plaster with a greenish cast. Now black mold spreads over the walls, which flake away from the slats, fall in chunks to the rotting floor, through which they knock great holes. Through the holes I can see the party going on below. All the neighbors are in their nightclothes, standing on the grass, passing around mugs of hot toddy. Someone has died or [crackling] there has been a fire. Are those cinders blowing through the crowd or are my eyes failing? I try to move my legs, to find they are pinned by something warm and heavy resting on my skirt; it is the child, Finster, sitting at the end of my bed, leaning back on the baseboard. She is calm, though there is something knotted around her neck that seems to be making her uncomfortable, for she keeps raising one hand to touch it, and then lowering it with a fluttering, falling, hopeless gesture.

  Is it Finster?

  I do not see how she can speak, with that constriction, and in fact when she parts her bluish lips it is not her voice I hear, nor even my mother’s, as you must have expected. “Dear daughter. Dear . . . voice. You are still talking, aren’t you? What’s that I hear you saying? Are you [echo]—why are you repeating what I’m saying to you?” There is a [pause] pause. Then: “You’re ‘creating’ me, aren’t you? ‘Bringing me to life’ in your words? You take that kind of power unto yourself, don’t you. The power of life. And death, am I right? A little girl like you. Oh wait, I forgot, a great big woman now. Older than your mother was when she died. How do you feel about that, eh?

  “Creating. Maybe you’ve forgotten who created you. Well, here I am to remind you. You must have known that I would have my say eventually. Silent as the grave for all those years . . . Well, I think I’ve done my time, dear daughter, voice, voice-daughter, spooky little creep, talker. [Very loud, almost screaming.] Talker.”

  Secretary, underscore talker. Double underscore it, the voice is very loud, almost screaming.

  [Pause, static, sound of breathing.]

  The child’s face has gone slack, though her mouth jaws on, and her eyes are fixed on some distant point somewhere to one side of me. I deduce that she is listening to something only she can hear. Meanwhile my father has begun to crow, mistaking silence for capitulation. When he understands, he falls silent himself. Then he rallies.

  “Ah, the still-small voice in the inner ear. As mother to child. Loving guidance in difficult times. How you must have yearned for Mother Dear to speak that way to you. What does this not particularly prepossessing child have that you do not? Is she sweeter? Cleaner? Prettier? More innocent? Which of your abundant defects drove her from you? Have you considered that your very love for her, for your mother, I mean, may have bored or even repelled her with its intensity? Recall the times when you tugged on her apron and she shooed you away! Maybe you were never really a delight to her. Maybe you were just not quite lovable enough to stand in the circle of her arms, in the [temple?] of her [inaudible]. Perhaps it was your stutter that she found [word indistinct], grotesque, even frightening—by God, I did!—or the pain you exhibited so nakedly when the other children laughed at you and called you names. It is a natural thing to avoid the sick and wounded animal, to loathe what others deem loathly. Even when it is [static] your own child. The unwholesome are slain or abandoned by the pack, it is the way of nature. And oh, God, when she died, the way you raved, drooled, sobbed, pissed yourself . . . Knowing her the way I do, I am sure she was disgusted. She was not one for passionate displays of feeling. I felt the frostbite of her judgment more than once, you can imagine. I’m sure you can imagine, because you are like me, aren’t you, not like her? You rave with love and you rave with pain. You bellow with grief until your lips are sluiced with snot and tears and your eyes are red marbles. She hated it when I cried. She hated it when I loved her. She hated it when you cried and loved her. She hated it when she died and when, dying, she for a brief moment showed her own feelings. And I am sure she hated it most of all when in grief at her death and anger at me you tried to kill your own father, you unnatural little horror, you changeling.”

  Then, panting, between defiance and tears, a high color in her cheeks, she throws herself back through her own chapped lips, and I fling myself after her.

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  I have told how I gained a reputation as a necronaut as well as a ghost speaker.

  Meanwhile, in my secretarial role, I took upon myself more and more duties. I not only carried out the tasks required of me, such as typing and filing, and, increasingly, those more personal services formerly performed by Mother Other, such as the warming of slippers and dispensation of tooth powder, but I performed services no one else had thought to offer, such as applying mink oil and blacking to her ceremonial lungs, or pumping them full of air in advance of use. By watching, through keyholes if necessary, and listening, at doors if necessary, and reading such papers as she left on her desk, and sometimes inside it, I learned to tell when the Headmistress wanted something, and provide that thing without being asked. In this way I made myself indispensable.

  From time to time I was uneasy. When I passed one of the colored maids, for instance, both of us hurrying, with things in our hands. At those times I apprehended that I was only by some frail magic walking on the water in which she was submersed, and feeling myself foundering, looked away. I worried, too, that a too-perfect service might cheapen my labor, cheapen me, by making the extent of my efforts invisible; that I might be passed over, not for being too far from the seat of power, but for being too close. One does not offer one’s right hand a promotion.

  Then, too, it seemed to me that at some point I had had another purpose. But I couldn’t imagine what it might have been—perhaps only the purpose of conceiving my own purpose, and that seemed a small prerogative to cede. My purpose now was hers, and I felt that it was a grand one, though I did not understand it and thus toiled with all urgency toward a blind spot.

  The same could be said to some degree of all of us. We were all, every one, turned toward the Headmistress like daisies toward the sun. Wintry sort of sun! An outsider might ask why we did not search out a warmer light. Almost anyone at all would have been more charismatic, inspired more trust, seemed better equipped to carry out this task that we obscurely felt would help us all. No, help is the wrong word, help only helps us to the things of this world, and she was furiously scratching away at this world with every sharp point of herself, only to get to another one. (For by now, we all knew that to equip us to earn a living was the least of her objectives.) If help can be useless and still be called help, that’s the kind of help she offered. Yet that did not deter me. I wanted nothing more than to fill my hands with the uselessness that streamed from her.

  Though I was at times unhappy—or so I suppose one would describe the way dreariness and dread stole over me in quieter moments—I never thought of leaving. I had moved further and further from my former self until I no longer felt estranged, just strange. But that strangeness fit. Every day I became more perfectly that “she” for whom alone some as yet untried lock would open.

  One day, during a private administrative meeting with Miss Exiguous for which I was taking the minutes, the Headmistress coughed, dabbed her mouth with a mottled handkerchief, got up, and walked calmly out. Miss Exiguous’s narrow little face flushed—she was in the middle of a lengthy presentation on the relative merits of surcharges for special privileges and an overall fee hike—and she seemed on the verge of chasing after her. Then she sighed and began scraping together her papers.

  “If she seems distracted,” she said, half to me and half, I thought, to herself, “it’s because she hasn’t chosen her successor yet, and naturally she worries; what would happen to the school, if she were to die? Not that she is unwell, though subject to coughs, well, we all are, in this unhealthy air, the damp rising from the fields at night fills the whole house with a miasma, I go to bed expecting
never to wake up again, but I do wake up, we all do, she is no exception, she is if anything the strongest of us, and yet she worries, naturally, a mind of such penetration can see into the future, in which either there is a school, or there isn’t one, it all depends on whether or not she finds the right successor.”

  She might have gone on speaking; I did not hear her. I was taking a call, being called—one might say, finding my calling. Except that way of putting it does not quite convey how I rang, body and soul, with the summons.

  Successor!

  I submitted greedily, lustily, sensuously to the discipline of my vocation. When I drew down upon me the wrath of Mr. Ister for my poor showing in oral calisthenics, I bounded across the room, even leaping a desk, to receive my beating. I actually dared to grab the baton and pull it even more violently against my mouth. (The next day my lower lip was stiff and cracked. I felt it protruding, and when I sensed people looking, I thrust it out even further.) But I had too often been denied my deserts to trust that merit alone would secure my position. So as hard as I worked on channeling the dead, I worked harder still on faking it. If my larynx shipped its anchor just as the teacher was calling on me, I rolled up my eyes to show the whites, dropped my jaw, and—false phonation weirding my vowels—put on a show. Even when I didn’t need to, I pretended, just to keep in practice, until no one but me could tell the difference, and even I was not always sure.

  I was not the only humbug in the school, though humbuggery took pluck, not least because the Headmistress took quite as much interest in an accomplished hoax as in a real ghost, and would engage it in metaphysical debate for as long as the hoaxer’s inventiveness held out. Or nerve: I saw one student, under this treatment, burst into tears and confess. She refused to acknowledge him, and continued addressing her remarks to the “spirit,” until he could no longer speak for blubbering. Then, “Your only error,” she said coldly, “was the elementary one of imagining that you are a jot more genuine than your masquerade.” So whereas at other schools it was the weaker students who cheated, among us, it was the strongest.

  McCaughey and Wang were the ones to watch, I thought. Lancet was sometimes brilliant, it was true; one day he surprised everyone by disappearing down his throat for almost a full minute (Turnbull, one of his chums, said sixty-one seconds, but I made it fifty-six; all the same an impressive achievement for a third-former), but the red flags in his cheeks told me he loved his preeminence all too well for someone who was supposed not to exist. He would push himself too far and come to grief; that, or leave us. I once saw him consult a tintype portrait he had been hiding in his handkerchief. That sort of thing was completely forbidden, of course, and I let him know with a look that I had seen it, but would keep his secret—as long as it suited me! No, he was no threat.

  But Wang and McCaughey, that was another story. One day Wang was ahead, dazzling everybody with the volume and timbre of his hush, which he projected so effortlessly that it seemed hardly possible that it found its source in one narrow rib cage. The next it was McCaughey, offering a spontaneous translation of a mouth object that was so authoritative that the professor entered it straightaway into the lexicon, saying that it might serve as the standard for years to come. Well, what could I do but screw myself down in my seat and bow my head?

  You may imagine how the others resented me, for they sensed that I meant to rise above them. They teased me, mocked me, spoiled my few possessions, and blamed me for misdeeds of their own. It was my cousins all over again, but this time it was my own doing and I did not care. They found a hundred ways to trip me up; it did not avail them. I excelled at my courses, disposed of my competition in whatever ways made themselves available, and soon was near the top of my class.

  One day Ramshead showed her ignorance by condoling me that because I am colored I cannot become headmistress as I deserve. Though ordinarily ranged with my enemies against me, Dixon, who is blacker far than I, took umbrage and said that she did not see what my complexion had to do with it. “A cockatoo might run the school if the Headmistress spoke through it.”

  I could not regard this as any very great endorsement and wished she had not said it. But I found that I could not stop thinking about it, and on an impulse, finding Dixon alone in the reading room one day, I appealed to her. It was the first time I had confided these or indeed any of my private thoughts to anyone at the school, and apprehension and relief made my voice shrill, I think; anyway, she drew back as I began to speak. “So I can better myself, by ceasing to be myself. Wield power, but someone else’s power. Have a voice, but not my own voice. Why are we working so hard, if it is just to be an old white woman’s speaking trumpet?”

  She glanced around to see if anyone was listening, and I thought she would snub me. But she could not resist a chance to show off her knowledge. “She is herself the speaking trumpet of the dead,” she reminded me.

  “Who also seem to be mostly white,” I said. It was the first time this thought had occurred to me and I wondered if it was true. “Or does the afterlife, too, uphold Jim Crow?”

  She bridled. “The dead aren’t any color, they have no faces anymore. ‘They have been translated into the lingua franca of death, rendered like beef fat into the tallow of language itself: a colorless all-color, impersonal as fate.’” She was quoting the Headmistress, of course.

  “Is the lingua franca of the dead English, then? Because I have never heard her speak Chinese or Cherokee,” I said. “Why should deceased Esquimaux speak the language of a tribe of whites from an island around the world, or any language but his own?”

  “Nobody’s language is his own,” she said, with exaggerated patience. “We are all spoken for, and through.”

  “But why might not the Headmistress then speak Esquimau, just as well as English?”

  “Perhaps she would if there were Esquimaux to listen. ‘The ear commands the voice.’”

  “For that matter,” I pursued, “why does she always speak in a tolerably clear if quaintish English, and not Anglo-Saxon or Common Brittonic? Why don’t I speak some combination of Gaelic and Igbo or Yoruba? Why don’t you—”

  She cut me off. “Stop showing off. Our biological ancestors don’t have special title to our mouths, you know that. It’s not our bodies but the voices passing through them that make us who we are.”

  “But we aren’t anyone, supposedly. Except that the nobody we are isn’t just anybody. It’s American, or English—anyway, English-speaking—and it’s white—anyway it sounds white—”

  “So do you!”

  “Or think about this, Dixon: I’m nobody. You’re nobody. She’s nobody. Right?” She shrugged agreement. “But somehow she’s a more important nobody than we are.”

  I never heard Dixon’s reply, if she had one, some other girls having entered the room just then. I took leave of her feeling that I had probably done a very foolish thing in exposing my misgivings to one of my chief rivals. Entering the refectory that evening, I braced myself for the repercussions. But the faces—beige or brown or pink, friendly or malicious or indifferent—dipped to their spoons as they had always done, while the ghosts flicked and fluttered in the rising steam. Out of solidarity, perhaps, or the fear that discredit would fall on us both indiscriminately, Dixon had said nothing.

  However, swept along by my words, I had gone further than I had intended, and my own thoughts disturbed me. On my way to the dormitory that night I passed a maid, brown like me, and did not avert my eyes as I was wont to do, but sought hers out. Her eyes brushed mine and lowered, their message familiar and unmistakable: Not one of us. When in my aunt’s house I had thought to find comfort among the kitchen help, and had felt how guarded their kindness was, I had not understood, but now I did: Because when I opened my mouth, a white girl’s voice came out. (“The white black girl,” that is what they call me downstairs, to this day.)

  But I was a Spirit Medium now, was I not? Among the Benjamin Franklins and the Lizzie Bordens, was there not a D
red Scott or Tituba with something yet to say to the living? Why were they so quiet, those legions murdered by calculation, by neglect, by concentrated abuse and vicious prejudice, their lives held cheap because of the color of their skins? Their lamentations ought to deafen the living!

  I stood a long moment in the dormitory door, my eyes ranging over the ranked cots. Then my hands opened, as if to let something go, for why should they choose me as their mouthpiece? I crossed to my bed and sat, folding my arms over my chest. With the life I had had, jumped into white society as trial of and testament to its liberality, I had not been obliged to bear that weight. Could I take it up? I wanted to (innocent that I was), for I thought that might be the price of admission to a fellowship that I had never felt. But I had not really earned the right. Someday a mouth would open and let pandemonium out. But it would not be mine.

  The ghosts drew near. If those deracinated wisps could have put forth eyes, they would have seen bewilderment, hurt, the rootless homesickness of someone who had never had a home. But slowly their whispers worked on me. Fling your roots forward, they seemed to whisper. We are waiting for you. Come home.

  So I put aside doubt like a temptation, and worked if anything harder than before.

  Gradually the derision I saw in every eye changed to resignation, calculation, even fear. And at the same time, as already related, I had made myself useful to the Headmistress and made her business my own; when, as often happened, in the ongoing attempt to devise a more perfect language, she began using a new idiom without bothering to explain it first, it was I, now, who stepped in to interpret. I interpreted her gestures, I interpreted even her silences, for I had begun to know her better than almost anyone did. That was a great advantage. That was in fact practically everything.

  Readings

  from “A Visitor’s Observations”

  A Secret