by Bill Harris
“Cretia nonsense,” Odum countered.
Ashe and Caesar were nodding. “You like the river, ain’t you, Eph?” Caesar asked.
“Tell us,” Ashe insisted. “About where you go.”
“Off like the crow,” Caesar said. “Do not you, Eph? Tell us.”
Eph pointing, “Some days off to the North Star. Cool my heels till time to go cat fishing on the moon.”
“Cat fishing on the moon,” Caesar repeated, laughing and clapping his hands.
“And how about at night?” Ashe prompted. “You off like a owl, ain’t you?”
Odum said, “Crow or owl or any-thing else, if you so much gone, how come you do not stay gone?”
Eph said, “Leave before your mind is ready is when they hunt you down and drag you back. My mind been ready. But you’re going to know when I do take a notion and go.”
“How we going to know, Eph?” Ashe asked, anticipating.
“By Biece’s hellhounds howling.”
Ashe and Caesar laughed. “Let me hear them howling,” Caesar said.
Still circling Eph, he began impersonating the pack of bloodhounds on the scent.
Chilled at the sound Odum involuntarily said, “That’s them all right.”
Eph cupped his hands around his mouth muffling the yelping sound of his impersonation of the tired, distant dogs.
Caesar laughed. “Yeah, man.”
“Red Stick taught me how to gab to them sons of bitches,” Eph said. He demonstrated a conversation between himself and a bloodhound pack. “That’s me telling them long-eared rascals goodbye. And them telling me how much they hate to see me go.”
They laughed.
“And old Biece,” Caesar said, “he’ll be crying and shaking his head!”
“Tears size of goose eggs, ’cause he spent all that time raising ’em and feeding ’em gunpowder to make ’em mean.” Ashe laughed. “And you done run ’em to death trying to track you down!”
“And where you at, Eph?” the smiddie’s assistant wanted to know.
“There,” Eph said. “I’ll be there.”
His tone stopped them again. They waited.
Odum did not like the silence. The tune they were taught as children ran through his head.
If you ever break and run,
Mr. Biece’s hounds get you just for fun . . .
“Where?” Odum asked.
Eph looked at him and shook his head.
Better na break and run,
Run you down by setting sun . . .
“Cretia craziness,” Odum declared.
“I e’en look like I’m reckoning on leaving,” Eph told him “you better catch hold to my sark-shirt tail, else it’ll be too late to holler ‘Wait for me.’”
The crew laughed.
Eph circled.
“Mr. McCready hear you say that he’ll fix your doings,” Odum said.
“I reckon he do not need to hear him,” Ashe said. “You’ll tell him ev’ry-thing soon as he gets back.”
“Ain’t nobody said not’ about telling nobody not,’” Odum insisted over their laughter.
An edge, like a fox burrowing its way under the chicken coop fence was working its way into Eph’s tone. “McCready and all of them got they time to learn, hunting ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun.”
Ashe and Caesar threw back their heads and laughed toward the sky.
Eph continued, “McCready went off to do his evil doings, and you act like he standing watch up o’er you with his lash in his hand.”
“Ain’t nobody said nothing about all that,” Odum insisted. He wished Eph would stop circling like that. “Did they, Ashe? We gabbing ’bout something else. We ain’t gabbing ’bout telling nobody nothing.”
“Find hunting ain’t fun when the rabbit got the gun,” Caesar repeated, ignoring Odum.
“Unless it’s some foolishness Cretia told you,” Odum said. “‘Cretia say. Cretia say.’ That’s all you know, ain’t it? You and Cretia. You and Cretia. Y’all thick as flies on sharn-cow flop.”
Eph, his face expressionless, continued circling, head down, but not looking at his feet which were still moving with little more than a shuffling motion. Without raising his voice, changing the speed of his circling, or looking at Odum, Eph said, “I got other business on my mind, Odum. Otherwise I’d make you walk backwards through your shit again. Then thump your melon, see if it’s ripe before I hang you in your smokehouse like a hog.
“That’s another thing,” Odum said. “I’m through being a push o’er. So do not think you can put your hands on me no more. Not without it costing you. Because I got me something now.”
That’s it! Ashe thought and looked at Caesar who nodded. Odum got himself a mojo from somewhere! That’s what got him thinking he can tease rattlesnakes and pull the guard dog’s tail. But whatever it is he got and wherever he got it from, this morning, fooling with Eph, it’s liable to get him killed.
“I’m through being your dog, sure, I know that,” Odum insisted. “Try me. See if I ain’t got me something.”
“Something McCready give you?” Eph asked without looking up, changing his tone or expression, or altering his pace.
“Ain’t no-body said nothing about Mr. McCready, but you better watch your-self, ’cause Mr. McCready knows what you thinking. Know what we all thinking. All the time.”
Though Eph’s speed hadn’t changed he was more determined in his gait. With each step his feet were placed more firmly on the ground. “McCready knew all he was going to know when he left here with that young gal,” Eph began.
“Was not Mr. McCready sent her off to be took off to the courthouse to be sold,” Odum pointed out. “It’s M’s Esme who bound Cretia’s Gal for the block . . .”
Eph’s eyes flashed like midnight lightning and still circling, his voice flat as a Highland House tabletop he had planed and sanded, he said, “McCready is gone! But little sawed off Beasley still around here walking. Run get him,” he said to Odum. “I do not care. Be another test. Fair and square. Then we’ll see whose hand meant to hold the flogging whip.”
“Gabbing Cretia non-sense and death gab,” Odum said. “Mr. McCready know . . .”
“Gabbing common sense,” Ashe said.
“McCready know all he going know,” Eph said.
Before he left here he was not but a white man following us around all day. Hell, what is that? That ain’t nothing. Nothing. Just like him.”
“Sure wasn’t.”
“I can out-do Beasley at any-thing. Let him name something and challenge me at it. Foot racing, hunting, fishing, building a cabinet, or chopping down a tree. Let him take a head start, and I’ll still best him. Let us both walk off into the woods. See who come back.”
Eph rubbed at his forehead with the heels of his hands as if he had a fever. “You keep gabbing about what Mr. McCready know.” He stopped circling and squatted in one flowing motion. “What I know,” he slapped the earth with his open palm, “is they all going to end up here.”
Using the edge of his hand he began to scoop a small mound of dirt. “End up here, where Mae Lil and our baby at.” Eph raked a fistful of dirt. “And I’ll be back again.” He pounded the ground with his fist. “Here!” He stood up. “And I’ll be back from there to see it.”
“How you coming back, Eph?” Ashe asked, anxious, but encouraging.
“With brass buttons on my jumper. Have a shiny crow feather in the band of my brand new hat! Be back so they, McCready and Goodsire and squat little Beasley and that heifer M’s Esme, can look up out the ground and I can look down and I can tell all of them I been there. Let them know that!”
“Yeah,” Caesar said.
Back from where? Odum wanted them to ask him. Back from where? Wanted to see him fix up his mouth and say it out loud. See if he had the grit for that.
If you break and run
shoot you
shoot you down with his gun.
Eph let the scooped dirt fall in a slow
dry shower through the funnel at his baby finger.
“Going to see them all planted where they would ne’er sprout no more. And as I stomp the dirt down on their mounds, I going to do a frolic would bust McCready’s and Goodsire’s and Beasley’s little peach pit hearts in their goddamn chests. Esme’s too.”
He did a quick, three-beat, dust-raising dance step, then clapped his hands together once and said, “Do not say nothing to me about what McCready know. I know what McCready know, and what he will not see to know no more.”
“What McCready know and will not see to know,” Ashe repeated.
Eph clapped his hands once and began to gab-sing like those inching their arduous way along: the mule plowers and pickers, their backs bent double under the baking sun, their fingers bloody from plucking the thorny bolls. Their voices rising from them like shimmering waves off a heat oasis, open-throated but tense, as they shout-sang songs or sayings or messages to one another, along or across the rows, or hollered or whined some private, wordless, or coded musing into the air: jokes and anecdotes, tales and hearsay. Urgings, to stir slaggards on, or inspirit the weary, or still the tempted tongue, or tame the rising fury of the frustrated or angry. Accusations and curses and threats and denials, directed at each other. In every sound, but not a straight word of spite or bile or malcontent or displeasure at their work conditions or their masters or their masters’ rules or wants. Some hollering. Some humming. Some moaning. Some groaning. Feelings too strong, too urgent, too bitter, too burdensome to wait for the seclusion of evening and home or Sunday. Every-one. Groaning. Moaning. Humming. Hollering. Anything. Ev’ry-thing.
Until the air was thick with it as May mosquitoes. Until they couldn’t hear themselves think.
Until they couldn’t hear themselves think.
Ashe’s say-singing contained the same tension as the pickers, mindful as they were of McCready’s proclamation, under penalty of short rations or the lash, against their gabbing directly of the misery on their hearts and in their minds. And so Ashe’s shouting, like theirs, was like a hound’s baying its plaintive Why? at an uncaring moon, or like restless roosters trying not just to crow down the loathsome sun, but to crow it down with such evidence and conviction as to keep it from ever rising on another day.
“Take Cretia’s Gal off,” Ashe moaned, “tears in her face.”
“Oh, Mc-Cready,” Caesar added, sing-songing too.
“Bring another one, take her place,” Ashe droned.
Stretching the words out as long as the steadily fattening cotton sacks dragging ahind the hands through the long, narrow, rutted rows. Stretching sentence and syllable as long as the arc of the sun from dawn to dusk, as long as the season from seeding to harvest, as long as their lifelong bondage itself.
“Better not let Mr. McCready hear you singing no sad song,” Odum said, more to take part than as a warning.
And then from somewhere he heard another wailing—it was Red Stick. Howling from some distance. Howling that Indian long note howling.
Ashe began to clap, harder and harder, the sound ringing sharp as lash snaps. “And you know when they leave here they do not come this way no more.”
“Do not darken our door no more,” Caesar added as he began stamping his foot, steady as axe strokes in an oak trunk, and alternately clapping with cupped palms, the sound booming like the stick-struck bottom of a water bucket. “Goodsire and Mc-Crea-dy . . .”
Odom backed away from them. Backed out of sight into the shadows of the smiddie shack. But not from their chanting or Red Stick’s lamenting wail.
“Stole the black gal off . . .” Ashe said-sang.
“. . . Oh, Mc-Crea-dy . . .”
“. . . stole her to market . . .”
“. . . Oh, Cretia’s Gal. Wonder where she gone . . . ?” Caesar pined.
The rain they all had known was coming back had returned. So gentle a smirr they hadn’t noticed when it began.
Eph circling again but now his head nodding to a rhythm.
“. . . middle of the night . . .” Ashe sang-said.
“Wonder where she gone?” Caesar countered.
“Know her mama in the Highland House hollering . . .”
“Wonder where she gone? Wonder where my child has gone . . .”
“Cretia’s Gal gone . . .” Ashe chant-said. “Cretia’s Gal, Cretia’s Gal, Cretia’s Gal, Cretia, Cretia, Cretia, Cretia’s Gal . . . Wonder where she gone?”
“M’s Esme and McCready stole her off.”
“Know Cretia in the big house hollering”
“Wonder where she gone?”
“Wonder where my child is gone?”
Kongo mojo niggers and heathen redskin, Odum thought, apprehensively shaking his head.
As if angry with the earth, Eph began to stamp his feet as he continued once again in the tight circle. “You want to see a frolic?” He said, “Let me live to hear Goodsire ask me where I been . . . Then let them go where they belong, and wait for judgment day.”
“. . . Cretia’s Gal gone . . .” Caesar said.
Nothing but mojo niggers clucking and frolicking in the pour.
Eph began pumping his arms. Bringing his shoulders into it, with quick jerks. His arms were glistening with his sweat and the gentle shower of rain. Finding a rhythm somewhere within that of his walking, Ashe’s singing and clapping, and Caesar’s clapping and stamping.
Odum touched the juju sack and backed farther away from the rain and the rhythm and the loudness, but most of all from the fuss Eph was raising. Mr. McCready liked it when the niggers was singing because they worked better singing. But Eph knew Mr. McCready did not allow no dancing in broad daylight. And Mr. McCready would know what Eph had done. Might know already, e’en off where he was with Cretia’s Gal. Might know e’en there.
Eph: turning and clapping and stamping, finding a rhythm, as the rain increased. Clapping and stamping harder and harder, as if trying to stamp the hard, scarred rain and sweat-wet black flesh from his bones, as if, through his pounding, trying to embed his footprint on the earth.
Stomp.
As if to punish it.
Stomp.
As if it was a sign or warning in remembrance or revenge.
Stomp.
As if his heel could split the ground like a blunt wedge, or even better, like the keen, stone-honed edge of his axe; cleave into the earth to rend a fracture or fault or fissure as wide and deep as the distance between his desire and his reality, a crack rupturing to the core of the world, splitting it in two; a rift to run from his footprint in the work shed’s yard, through the center of his rough and tumble shack in the Bottom, running then up the path to Highland House, splitting it all asunder until it toppled like Pharaoh’s army into the Red Sea: Goodsire on his gray mare, and M’s Esme in her buggy, and Beasley and the host of them, cast down in the rift, and drowning under the deluge of dirt rained upon them, like the dirt shoveled into Mae Lil and their baby’s grave on Hutchinson’s Plantation. Split, like the news of Mae Lil’s and the baby’s death had split him, forehead to breastbone to belly to balls, and his soul and his mind had tumbled, out, into the rift of the earth that was their common grave, onto which the dirt was heaped. And his mind flew off, and his soul, like a wisp was blown away, as with a strong wind blowing away a locust.
Helping Eph, Caesar and Ashe continued their singing and clap-a-tclapp-a-t-clapp-a-tclapp-a-ting. Circling him, slowly, as he circled, not to contain him, but to assure him he was safe within the ring of their guard.
Odum looking on.
It was getting faster and they were getting louder, and the pour-rain came down. Harder.
One thing to carry on like that in the night in the Bottom, or at Christmas frolic, but to do it in the broad open daylight. Loud enough, Odum feared, for Beasley in his shack in the Bottom to hear and be drawn to it.
Eph turned. Stamp. Stamp. Faster. Stamping harder. Then no longer just on one foot and then the other. Rapid now as running. Two-footed and one-foot
leaps, with straight legs, then with bent knees. As if leaping on hot coals. Left one-two, right one-two-left-right-left-left-right-right-left-left-leap-leap-leap-leap-left-right-right. Twisting, shoulders one way, hips the other, head weaving like a reptile, arms flapping like wings, hands clapping, hands slapping his chest, his arms.
A rhythm, shimmering up his leg, would meet a rhythm that had begun with the shaking of his head and working its way down through his neck. Or a rhythm from his shaking shoulders answering counter rhythms from his waving arms and his clenching and unclenching hands. The spasms and jerks and contortions flowing together like torrents of water cascading down a falls into a swirling delta.
Tha-dump tha-dump tha-dumpatha-dumpa. Clapp-a-t-claptapclapp-a-t-clapp-a-t, as he stamped and spun and pumped, pumping, like his heart during his night rambles, like his heart when making the baby with Mae Lil, the combination of their hearts, drumming, combining with the drumming hearts of Cretia and Cretia’s Gal, starting off to market, to the block, the pressure building like a blocked bellows being pumped, like the blood in his brain, threatening to burst out of him.
Remembering, Eph flung off his sark-shirt, and they could see where he had carved himself and where the flog marks carved themselves into his chest and back and arms. The pumping of his heart making him remember last night’s flogging of Cretia’s Gal, and he couldn’t do no more than watch as the rain and the whip in Beasley’s hand fell on her naked shoulders and back and buttocks and thighs. And the sight of the helpless hands, forced, or who forced themselves to watch, their tears falling like rain. But not enough to blind them.
And last night in the woods.
And Eph remembered it all and danced and they clapped and chanted, until they were all more exhausted than the work for their master had ever made them. And more joyous.
Until he subsided like a spent storm.
Eph was bent over, his hands on his knees. Panting. Water was raining on and dripping from his body, then spattering against the mud between his feet.
“Yeah,” he panted, “I’ll be gone. But I’ll be back. Again.”
He saw, lying in the mud between his feet, the mojo hand Cretia had made him.