Nowhere Is a Place

by Bernice L. McFadden

  A quick glimmer of surprise streaks across Mary’s face. “Like Missus’s dog that died?”

  “Yeah, she loved that dog something fierce,” Henry says, and scratches at his stomach. “Yeah, I think Lou is a perfect name.”

  Mary shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head. “C’mon, Lou,” she coos, and curls firm fingers around the frightened child’s wrist, giving her a gentle tug. “C’mon, now. No need to fret.”

  Mary coaxes Lou out of the wagon and then down to the spring and a bar of lye soap. Curious young eyes gather to watch as Mary scrubs away the dirt, fingers the blue stone around the girl’s neck, and moans something about “pretty.”

  Out now, and soaked through but clean and shivering like a wet rat, Mary throws an old sheet around Lou and guides her back up the hill and toward the slave quarters.

  More faces. Old and young, male and female, watch silently. Some turn their backs and mutter.

  The inside of the shack is dark, cool, small, and musty from the many bodies that live there. Pallets strewn here and there. Wooden bowls, oyster shells for spoons. Tin cups.

  “Gimme that jar, boy,” Mary says, and lowers herself down and onto a small stool. Her knees creek as she considers the child before her.

  “Indian?” someone throws out from the corner of the room.

  “Seem so,” Mary mutters, as she uses one hand to scoop the jellylike substance from the jar the small boy is holding.

  “What she called?” another inquires.

  “Massa say she called Lou.”

  “Lou?” a harsh voice murmurs.

  “What kinda name is that fer a girl?”

  “Massa give her the missus’s dog’s name.”

  Heads shake in disbelief.

  Mary pulls the sheet from the child’s body. “Just a baby,” she says, and begins to slather Lou with the mutton suet.

  Before long, Lou is gleaming.

  Turning her around, Mary begins to tackle the hair, but not without taking a moment to roll the silken strands between her fingers, coveting the texture; a mixture of admiration and hatred hits her way down deep and she gives Lou’s hair a vicious tug.

  “Ow!” Lou cries, and jerks her head forward.

  And just like that, the insidious feeling is gone and Mary pats the girl’s shoulder and purrs, “Pardon.”

  Still damp, but greased down, Lou’s hair is parted, and plaited into two long braids that fall down to her waist. Mary calls for the frock that Henry passed off to her two weeks ago, telling her to “Keep this safe somewhere till I get back.”

  Mary slips the faded green dress over Lou’s head.

  The dress must have been a delight for some little girl a long time ago, but now the hem is tattered and the sleeves are patched at the elbows. It hangs pathetically from Lou’s small body, imbuing her with an even more pitiful appearance than the caked road dust and dirt had.

  The pitifulness reaches out and touches Mary in a place she has worked hard to turn into stone—but not hard enough, because her heart begins to ache.

  ___________________

  It is April Vicey’s tenth birthday.

  Blond-haired and blue-eyed like her mother Verna, but having her father’s height and hefty girth, April’s mouth always seems to be working on something. April does not speak—well, not clearly; she either mumbles through a mouth crammed with food, or screeches.

  An only child, April is more than enough for Henry and Verna. The two that could have been—one before April and one after her—came seven months too soon. Just blood sacks that Verna insisted on naming and burying down near the stream.

  April blows out her birthday candle, greedily snatches at the brown paper that encloses her gifts: a small wooden doll, a jewelry case, a heart-shaped silver locket and chain.

  Verna nods her head with approval and lightly touches April’s hand. “You like it?” she asks, and the little girl fumbles with a word of thanks before she tosses it aside, looks at her father, and asks, “Is that all?”

  Lou is a gift. Not like the one from God, not that type her mother always told her that she and her brothers were, but a gift just the same, and, as if on cue, Mary ushers Lou through the swinging door of the dining room.

  “Well, and her.” Henry grins and points to Lou.

  Verna Vicey’s eyes bulge and then narrow. Her lips curl and her nostrils flare as she begins, “You didn’t tell—”

  “Hush, V,” Henry throws at her, then turns his attention back to April. “She your very own slave.”

  April digs her hand into her cake and shoves a hunk between her puffed pink lips, then declares, “She all mine?” White icing spurts through the air and settles on the table and the front of her new dress

  “Yep!” Henry exclaims.

  “How could we afford—” Verna begins again, but Henry’s hand comes, up halting her words.

  “Mary, bring her on over here so April can get a good look at her.”

  Mary gives Lou’s shoulder a little nudge, but Lou does not move an inch, she just stands there staring at the faces that stare back at her. “Go on now,” Mary leans in and whispers in Lou’s ear.

  Lou does not understand these words, this place, the strange scents, the dark people, the white people. None of it.

  Mary nudges her again and Lou takes one cautious step after another, and soon she is standing just a foot from her new mistress.

  April’s mouth smacks at the cake as she considers Lou’s copper-colored skin, sleek black hair. “She don’t look like none of the darkies I ever seen.”

  “No, that’s right,” Henry Vicey begins, but then is suddenly distracted as he begins to pat at the breast pocket of his shirt. “Shoot. Mary, get me one of my cigars from my humidor,” he says, then leans forward so that his face falls between April’s and Lou’s. “You right, darling. She ain’t no regular darkie, she an Injun. I betcha Fannie Gibson ain’t got one of these!” He laughs and slaps the table hard with his hand.

  April rubs her hands together in glee. “She sure do got some pretty hair.” April sighs longingly and reaches for one of Lou’s braids.

  Lou shrinks back a little.

  “Oh, don’t be afraid. I ain’t gonna hurt you,” April coos.

  Mary hands Henry his cigar and moves into the background.

  “Oooh,” April moans, her eyes sparkling and latching onto the blue stone. Lou shrinks farther away. “Gimme it!” April squeals, and quick as a flash her hand comes up and snatches the stone from Lou’s neck.

  Verna eyes the stone. “What in the world do you want with a rock?” she spits at April. “Give it back to her,” she orders before returning her attention to her husband.

  April holds the granite out to Lou and then quickly snatches it from her reach. The teasing goes on for a few seconds and then April tires of the game and allows the granite to drop to the floor, where Lou hurriedly retrieves it.

  “We cannot afford her, Henry.” Aprils words are strained and stern.

  Henry waves his hand at her and lights his cigar. Leaning back into his chair, he puffs and then releases three smoky circles that April squeals with delight over before breaking them with her pudgy index finger.

  * * *

  April’s room is white-walled. Delicate pink curtains hang from the three small windows, a pink-and-green quilt covers the bed, and a rocking chair graces one corner with a pink sitting cushion and a pink-cheeked ceramic doll on top of that. It is a welcoming space with a fireplace and woven throw rug.

  Lou sleeps on a pallet at the foot of April’s bed. The dogs, on the other hand, have small wooden houses behind the main house. She eats with them on the back porch though, seated on a small stool: a bowl of buttermilk and bread in the morning, a plate of corn bread, beans, and salt pork in the afternoon, corn porridge in the evening.

  She is a gift, but also a playmate and servant, forced to stand alongside her mistress swaying a fan made of peacock feathers to keep April cool and to shoo the bothersome flies away.
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  It is a pitiful existence that is made worse by the tears that spring from her eyes when she has a moment alone to long and grieve for her family.

  The dark people try to talk to her, try to comfort her when they see her tear-stained cheeks and swollen red eyes. They speak slowly and use hand gestures to try and make her understand, but for the first few weeks she just drops her eyes away from their thick lips and they chuck her chin and blanket her with reassuring smiles.

  Their eyes are sad for her, and she sees the weight of their existence in the slump of their shoulders and the bend of their necks.

  * * *

  Lou sits picking over her plate of food, eyes moving over the land, always searching for her mother’s spirit even as her mind tackles the new words that are quickly replacing the old ones she grew up with.

  “Looooooooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuu!” Her new name cuts through her daydreams, and quick fast she is on her feet, the plate and the remnants of her meal clattering to the ground. Like lightning the dogs are on it, hungrily devouring every last morsel.

  “C’mon, now. Let’s go play.”

  April romps through the tall stalks of corn, laughing and giggling. She slaps at Lou’s arm and runs off. Lou remembers this game with her brothers, but her feet do not skip along; there is no smile resting on her lips as she moves slowly toward the quivering stalk to her left.

  * * *

  By the time April is fourteen and Lou is ten, she has outgrown her place at the foot of the bed and is given a cot in the kitchen. She is no longer needed for April’s amusement. There is water to haul, furniture to dust, corn to shuck, and beans to snap.

  The cook—a large burly woman called Naples—sings her instructions and always smells, it seems to Lou, of clabber and peaches. She talks all the time, even when there is no one there to listen or respond.

  Four years now, and Lou’s Yamasee language is practically gone. She remembers the words for nose, eyes, sky, mother, father, family, and love, but little else.

  * * *

  It is on a Sunday that Lou is sent out of the house altogether.

  Sunday is the day that Verna spots a red stain on the back of Lou’s skirt. To Verna, it is a blinding red smudge against her character, a reminder that yet another piece of property could and probably would produce a bastard child. There were already three running about. Three yellow-skinned, hazel-eyed reminders that her husband was as unfaithful as he was foolish.

  “Come here,” Verna orders.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Instantly Lou halts her stride, turns on her heel, and comes to where Verna is standing.

  “Turn around.”

  Lou does as she is told.

  “You dirty heathen,” Verna whispers between clenched teeth, then her palm falls like fire across Lou’s cheek and she is sent flailing to the floor.

  This is not the first assault. This is one of many. The last one came when Verna stumbled across her husband watching from the upstairs veranda as Lou was bathing in the stream.

  For that, she was slapped and her hair cut down to the scalp.

  “Don’t you have any decency, any respect?” Verna cried, and leapt on Lou, levying blow after blow across her face.

  “Out, out of my house, you!” Verna screeched, rising to her feet and kicking Lou in the ribs.

  * * *

  “Why?” Henry asked later that night.

  “Because she stinks.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Well, she’s a bkye.”

  “Lou?”

  “I found April’s locket on her cot.”

  “You did?”

  “And a shilling. Where would she get it from if she didn’t take it?”

  Henry eyes his wife and pulls at his beard. “What Naples say?”

  “You gonna take a slave’s word over mine, Henry?”

  * * *

  Lou is banished to the slave quarters and to the field where she is outfitted with a gunnysack and beaten straw hat. She is given a pallet on the already overcrowded floor, a plate and cup, and instructions on how to handle the blood that is flowing from between her legs.

  “It’ll come every month from now on,” one of the women tells her.

  “Every month till Massa get to you,” another one says.

  ___________________

  The first time Buena Vista came, Lou was fourteen years old and she had calluses on the palms of her hands, had tried and failed at picking cotton, and had been assigned to assisting Naples in the kitchen and washing clothes in the spring.

  * * *

  “Buena Vista?”

  They roll the name across their tongues. Saying it aloud quick and then slow. Running it together in their mouths and then picking it apart with their teeth.

  He arrives with Oswald and Cora Joseph, the speckled white man and his ailing-looking wife. Oswald is Henry Vicey’s distant cousin from Kentucky, recently relocated to Macon.

  Buena Vista drives their carriage and helps the missus down with his strong hands. Oswald don’t seem to mind, and the missus, well, it seems to the onlooking faces that being helped down from the carriage is the best part of the trip.

  “Buena Vista?”

  His name is repeated and the black faces fold in on themselves. “What kind of name is that?

  “Don’t know,” he says as he fumbles with the reins.

  “You drive the carriage and what else?”

  “Pick cotton, same as you.”

  They eye him. His hands look too clean to be cotton-picking hands. Too smooth. Can’t be doing much else than holding reins.

  “Sure ’nuff?”

  “Ay-yuh,” he says, and pulls an apple from his pants pocket. He looks over the crowd again, and his eyes fasten on Lou. He is smitten right then and there.

  The women watch as he slides the apple up and down the front of his shirt, considers the shine, and then bites in.

  * * *

  Second time he comes, his eyes are swimming with the memory of bronze skin and slick dark hair. Eyes black, but sparkling.

  A voice comes from the rear. “Y’all back here so soon?”

  Buena Vista strains his neck, his eyes eager, hand fingering the apple in his pocket. “Can’t see ya. Y’all come a little closer.”

  The crowd rolls and then parts.

  Nellie appears. Stout, but tight. Dark. Strong. Good teeth, he thinks, but she not the one.

  “They just visitin’, I guess,” Buena Vista says, and his hand rolls across the apple in his pocket while his eyes ride her hips. She smiles, pulls her stomach in, and her breasts swell up and touch her chin.

  “Y’all don’t get no passes?”

  “Nah.” It is a collective response.

  “Oh,” he moans. “Too bad, lotta country to see beyond here.”

  “You all get a pass?”

  Buena drops his eyes and studies the dirt. “Nah.”

  “No matter; you here now. Seem like you be coming regular,” Nellie spouts, taking another step closer.

  “Ay-yuh, seem so.” His eyes pick over the faces that gather around him, but there is no bronze among them; plenty of black, though, and a sprinkle of yellow. “Missus say we be making the trip every other Sunday,” Buena adds, and then, “Look here, where are all y’all menfolk at?”

  The three that are there, right up in his face in fact, grunt.

  “No disrespect,” Buena Vista spews out with a little laugh. “But y’all kinda long in the tooth for all these young womens.”

  The men exchange glances and try to stretch themselves into the youth they remember.

  “I means to say, I just wonder who with who,” Buena Vista says, and rocks on his heels.

  “Why you wanna know?” Nellie blows at him, lips pursed, tongue flicking. “You looking for something other than conversation?” Nellie come to stand alongside Buena and rests her hip against the fence. “A woman, maybe?” she purrs.

  “Maybe,” Buena gushes, and his hand squeezes the apple.

 
A cry goes up from behind them. “She the massa’s whore; got three sons from him already.”

  Every head turns, and Mary is standing there, broad and stern, hands on her wide hips.

  “True,” someone whispers, and they all turn back to Buena.

  “And?” Nellie throws back at them. “I ain’t had a whip on my back since.” Turning to Buena again, Nellie stretches a finger out and runs it along his bicep. “So what y’all looking for?”

  “Where’s the slight one with the pretty skin?”

  Nellie pulls her hand back. “What y’all want wit her? She ain’t nothing but a chile.” And then her mouth opens and her tongue runs the length of her bottom lip. “I got pretty skin.”

  “Sure do,” Buena says, but his eyes don’t alight on her.

  Nellie’s back stiffens. “She ain’t our kind.”

  “What kind is that?” someone laughs.

  “Human?”

  “We ain’t even that, ’cording to the white folk.”

  “Mind your damn business!” Nellie barks at the crowd.

  “Hush up, Nellie, with that type a talk; it’s Sunday.”

  “Where she at?” Buena Vista asks again.

  “Down in the field, I s’pose.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “Not a-pickin’, just a-sittin’.”

  ___________________

  They come every other Sunday for three months.

  Buena riding high, grinning, two apples stuffed into the pockets of his overalls, his heart thumping in his chest.

  Those eyes, that skin.

  It’s all he can think about. And every other Saturday night he can barely sleep—up before dawn, horses hitched, and waiting while his owners sit at the dining room table and tap delicate spoons against the shells of soft-boiled eggs.

  He drives the horses, double time, while the missus hangs on tight to her hat and the master calls out over the thunder of the galloping horses, “Goddammit, Buena, slow down!”