by Paula Guran
So he gave her his arm.
They walked, along the deck, and he let her pass into the cabin first.
She turned about, as she had turned her head, slowly, looking at everything, the food and the pan of coals, which did not burn now, the blankets on the bunk.
Then she moved to the bunk and lay down, on her back, calm as any woman who had done such a thing a thousand times.
Jeluc went to her at once, but he did not wait to undo his clothing. He found, surprising himself, that he lay down on top of her, straight down, letting her frail body have all his weight, his chest on her bosom, his loins on her loins, but separated by their garments, legs on her legs. And last of all, his face on her face, his lips against hers.
Rather than lust it was the sensuality of a dream he felt, for of course it was a dream. His whole body sweetly ached, and the center of joy seemed at his lips rather than anywhere else, his lips that touched her lips, quite closed, not even moist nor very warm.
Light delicious spasms passed through him, one after another, ebbing, flowing, resonant, and ceaseless.
He did not want to change it, did not want it to end. And it did not end.
But eventually, he seemed to drift away from it, back into sleep. And this was so comfortable that, although he regretted the sensation’s loss, he did not mind so much.
When he woke, he heard them laughing at him. Many men, laughing, low voices and higher ones, coarse and rough as if torn from tin throats and voice boxes of rust. “He’s going the same way.”
“So he is too.”
Going the way that they had gone. The three he had seen on the deck, the one above the sail.
It was the ship. The ship had him.
He got up slowly, for he was giddy and chilled. Wrapping one of the blankets about him, he stepped out into the daylight.
The sky was white with hammerheads of black. The sea had a dull yet oily glitter.
He checked his lines. They were empty. No fish had come to the bait, as no birds had come to the mast.
He gazed back over the ship.
She was no longer pale. No, she was rosy now. She had a dainty blush to her, as if of pleasure. Even the sail was like the petal of a rose.
An old man stood on the afterdeck and shook his head and vanished.
Jeluc thought of lying on the bunk, facedown, and his vital juices or their essence draining into the wood. He could not avoid it. Everywhere here he must touch her. He could not lie to sleep in the sea.
He raised his head. No smell of land.
By now, surely, the islands should be in view, up against those clouds there—But there was nothing. Only the water on all sides and below, and the cold sky above, and over that, the void.
During the afternoon, as he watched by the tiller for the land, Jeluc slept.
He found that he lay with his head on her lap, and she was lovely now, prettier than any woman he had ever known. Her hair was honey, and her dress like a rose. Her white skin flushed with health and in her cheeks and lips three flames. Her eyes were dark now, very fine. They shone on him.
She leaned down, and covered his mouth with hers.
Such bliss—
He woke.
He was lying on his back, he had rolled, and the sail tilted over his face. He got up, staggering, and trimmed the sail.
Jeluc attended to the ship.
The sunset came and a ghost slipped round the cabin, hiding its sneering mouth with its hand.
Jeluc tried to cook a meal, but he was clumsy and scorched his fingers. As he sucked them, he thought of her kisses. If kisses were what they were.
No land.
The sun set. It was a dull grim sky, with a hole of whiteness that turned gray, yet the ship flared up.
She was red now, La Dame, her cabin like a live coal, her sides like wine, her sail like blood.
Of course, he could keep awake through the night. He had done so before. And tomorrow he would sight the land.
He paced the deck, and the stars came out, white as ice. Or knives. There was no moon.
He marked the compass, saw to the sail, set fresh meat on the lines that he knew no fish would touch.
Jeluc sang old songs of his campaigns, but hours after he heard himself sing, over and over:
“She the ship
“She the sea
“She the she.”
His grandfather had told him stories of the ocean, of how it was a woman, a female thing, and that the ships that went out upon it were female also, for it would not stand any human male to go about on it unless something were between him and—her. But the sea was jealous too. She did not like women, true human women, to travel on ships. She must be reverenced, and now and then demanded sacrifice.
His grandfather had told him how, once, they had had to throw a man overboard, because he spat into the sea. It seemed he had spat a certain way, or at the wrong season. He had had, too, the temerity to learn to swim, which few sailors were fool enough to do. It had taken a long while for him to go down. They had told the widow the water washed him overboard.
Later, Jeluc believed that the ship had eyes painted on her prow, and these saw her way, but now they closed. She did not care where she went. And then too he thought she had a figurehead, like a great vessel of her kind, and this was a woman who clawed at the ship’s sides, howling.
But he woke up, in time.
He kept awake all night.
In the morning the sun rose, lax and pallid as an ember, while the ship burned red as fire.
Jeluc looked over and saw her red reflection in the dark water.
There was no land on any side.
He made a breakfast of undercooked meal cakes, and ate a little. He felt her tingling through the soles of his boots.
He tested the sail and the lines, her tiller, and her compass. There was something odd with its needle.
No fish gave evidence of themselves in the water, and no birds flew overhead.
The sea rolled in vast glaucous swells.
He could not help himself. He slept.
There were birds!
He heard them calling, and looked up.
The sky, pale gray, a cinder, was full of them, against a sea of stars that were too faint for night.
And the birds, so black, were gulls. And yet, they were gulls of bone. Their beaks were shut like needles. They wheeled and soared, never alighting on the mast or yard or rails of the ship.
I’m dreaming, God help me. God wake me—
The gulls swooped over and on, and now, against the distant diluted dark, he saw the tower of a lighthouse rising. It was the land, at last, and he was saved.
But oh, the lighthouse sent out its ray, and from the opposing side there came another, the lamp flashing out. And then another, and another. They were before him and behind him, and all round. The lit points of them crossed each other on the blank somber sparkle of the sea. A hundred lighthouses, sending their signals to hell.
Jeluc stared around him. And then he heard the deep roaring in the ocean bed, a million miles below.
And one by one, the houses of the light sank, they went into the water, their long necks like Leviathan’s, and vanished in a cream of foam.
All light was gone. The birds were gone.
She came, then.
She was beautiful now. He had never, maybe, seen a beautiful woman.
Her skin was white, but her lips were red. And her hair was the red of gold. Her gown was the red of winter berries. She walked with a little gliding step.
“Lady,” he said, “you don’t want me.”
But she smiled.
Then he looked beyond the ship, for it felt not right to him, and the sea was all lying down. It was like the tide going from the shore, or, perhaps, water from a basin. It ran away, and the ship dropped after it.
And then they were still in a pale nothingness, a sort of beach of sand that stretched in all directions. Utterly becalmed.
“But I don’t want the
land.”
He remembered what the land had given him. Old hurts, drear pains. Comrades dead. Wars lost. Youth gone.
“Not the land,” he said.
But she smiled.
And over the waste of it, that sea of salt, came a shrill high whistling, once and twice and three times. Some sound of the ocean he had never heard.
Then she had reached him. Jeluc felt her smooth hands on his neck. He said, “Woman, let me go into the water, at least.” But it was no use. Her lips were soft as roses on his throat.
He saw the sun rise, and it was red as red could be. But then, like the ship in his dream, he closed his eyes. He thought, But there was no land.
There never is.
The ship stood fiery crimson on the rising sun that lit her like a bonfire. Her sides, her deck, her cabin, her mast and sail, like fresh pure blood.
Presently the sea, which moved under her in dark silk, began to lip this blood away.
At first, it was only a reflection in the water, but next it was a stain, like heavy dye.
The sea drank from the color of the ship, for the sea too was feminine and a devourer of men.
The sea drained La Dame of every drop, so gradually she turned back paler and paler into a vessel like ashes.
And when the sea had sucked everything out of her, it let her go, the ship, white as a bone, to drift away down the morning.
CHICAGO 1927
Jewelle Gomez
Jewelle Gomez’s writing—fiction, poetry, essays, and cultural criticism—has appeared in a wide variety of venues, both feminist and mainstream. A social activist with careers in theatre, public television, the arts, and philanthropy, she is best known for her novel The Gilda Stories (1991). The vampire, Gilda, is an escaped slave who comes of age over a span of more than two hundred years. Vampirism itself is a gentle and mutually beneficial exchange: Gilda delves into a human mind and, in exchange for the blood taken, she leaves a belief the individual can achieve something very important to them. Taking a lesbian/feminist perspective, Gomez places her protagonist in a series of adventures in different eras and communities that exist at the edge of white middle-class America. Gilda herself—black and lesbian—is an outsider among the ultimate outsiders: vampires. Gomez also authored a theatrical adaptation of The Gilda Stories, retitled Bones and Ash, which toured thirteen U.S. cities in 1996.
“Chicago 1927” gives us a slice of Gilda’s immortal life as she experienced it during the Roaring Twenties…
High and light, the rich notes of her song lifted from the singer like a bird leaving a familiar tree. The drummer stopped and only a bass player snuck up behind her voice, laying out deep tones that matched hers. Gilda stood at the back of the dimly lit room, letting the soothing sound of music ripple through the air and fall gently around her. Her gaze was fixed on the woman singing on the tiny stage, whose body was coiled around the sound of her own voice. Gilda had come to the Evergreen each weekend for a month to hear the woman sing. LYDIA REDMOND, INDIAN LOVE CALL the window card read outside underneath her picture. On her first night walking through the streets of Chicago, Gilda had seen the sign and been drawn by the gleaming beauty of the face.
The sheer simplicity of Lydia’s voice rang persistently inside Gilda’s head.
The smoky air and clink of glasses crowded around Gilda, filling the room almost as much as the attentive audience. Black and brown faces bobbed and nodded as they sat at the tiny tables on mismatched chairs.
Others stood at the short bar watching the set along with the tall, light-skinned bartender, Morris. Some stood in the back near the entrance transfixed, as did Gilda.
She had finally created the opportunity to meet Lydia Redmond through the club’s owner Benny Green. It had taken only a slight glance held a moment longer than necessary to plant the idea, and Benny treated Gilda like she was a long-missed relative. Lydia had been full of playfulness when they’d sat together at Benny’s table after her show one night. The luminescence in the photograph that had drawn Gilda shimmered around Lydia when she laughed. The sorrow that cloaked so many club singers had only a small place within Lydia. When she looked into Gilda’s eyes, she’d read her so intently that Gilda had to turn away.
The last note of a sweet, bluesy number wavered in the air, then was enveloped in unrestrained applause and shouts. Gilda smiled as she slipped out of the door of the club’s entrance into the short alley and was startled to see Benny holding a young boy by the collar.
“I ain’t jivin’ you, Lester. You get home to your sister right now. You want me stoppin’ by to have a talk to her?”
“Naw.”
“Naw what?”
“Naw sir.”
“I done told you don’t hang in this alley. You ain’t heard they shootin’ people this side of town?”
“Yes sir,” the boy said blankly as if he’d been told he was standing in a loading dock.
“I’m tellin’ you there’s been shootin’ here, boy! Don’t crap out on me.”
“Yes sir.” Lester let himself show the surprise he felt,
“Here,” Benny said as he handed the boy a folded bill. He looked about seven years old and was dressed in pants and a jacket much too large for him, like many children Gilda had seen.
“Take that to your sister.” Benny’s thin mustache curved up as his lips could no longer resist a smile. “Tell her come by my office tomorrow … no, not tomorrow. Make it the next day, tell her come at noontime. Ya hear?”
“Yes … yes sir.” The child’s face lost its stiff fear and as Benny shoved him toward the mouth of the alley, he almost smiled.
“Damn.”
“A colleague?” Gilda said lightly.
“He’d like to be. How in hell can you keep ’em out the game if you can’t keep ’em in the house?” Benny’s voice was raw with anger.
Gilda didn’t have to listen to his thoughts to sense the anxiety and concern swirling around underneath his hard tone.
“I already got two laundry women. Looks like I’ma have to hire me another one. She lost her job.” Benny jerked his thumb in the direction of the darkness where the boy had disappeared. “His sister, she takes care of a passel of them.”
Maybe you should open a laundry house. Gilda let the thought slip from her mind into his.
“Maybe … you know I got the back end of the joint, facing off North Street … Maybe I’ll set them girls up in there. Get us a laundry going! Damn. That’s it.”
“You have a good heart, Benny.”
“What else I’ma do?”
“That’s what I mean,” Gilda said.
“Lester’s okay, he just ain’t got nothin’ to do but hang around trying to grab some pennies. Morris had to snatch him up out some trouble last week.”
“You and Morris need to be on the city council,” Gilda said with a laugh as she started toward the mouth of the alley.
“Hey, you comin’ by the party later? We got a fine spread.” His smooth brown skin was like velvet in the light of the alley. He pulled at the cuffs of each sleeve under his jacket and smoothed his hand across his short-cut hair, readying himself to return to the bar.
“I’ll be there.”
“You know, cousin, you need to be careful walking these streets by yourself in the middle of the night.”
“Thanks, Benny, I’m just going up to the corner. I’ll be right back.”
“Umph.” Benny grunted his disapproval, then said with a smile, “You know I can’t handle it when a good-lookin’ woman stands me up.” Gilda waved as she turned and walked swiftly out to the street. She looked north, then south before she picked her direction. The air felt brisk and fresh on her smooth skin, untouched by the decades that had led her to this place. The deep brown of her eyes was still clear, sparkling with questions just as they had when she was truly a girl. Her full mouth was firm, tilted more toward a smile than a frown, and inviting, even without the faint trace of lipstick she occasionally applied.
The fragr
ance of fall was in the trees just as it had been every season for many years. Gilda marveled at how different each part of the country smelled; and over time, the scent of everything—grass, wood, even people—altered subtly. Nothing in her face revealed that eighty years had passed since Gilda had taken her first breath on a plantation in Mississippi. After journeying through most of the countryside and small towns west of the Rocky Mountains, this was her first stop in a major city in some years.
As she strode through the streets, Gilda was self-conscious about her clothes. Although some women had worn pants for almost fifty years, she was still frequently among a select few wherever she went. It had caused ripples of talk since her arrival in town, but she would not relent or be forced to maneuver in the skimpy skirts that were currently the rage. Her solid body was firm with muscles that were concealed beneath the full-cut slacks and jacket. The dark purple and black weave of her coat hid the preternatural strength of her arms. Her hair was pulled away from her face, in a single, thick braid woven from the crown of her head to her neck. There was nothing about Gilda that any of the men who frequented the Evergreen would call elegant, yet the way she moved through the room left most of them curious, attentive.
Gilda removed the matching beret she wore and tucked it inside a deep pocket in the lining of her jacket. Tonight, few would notice her as she passed. She turned off of the downtown street and walked toward the river. Here the noise was louder, lower. The echo of Lydia Redmond’s voice receded as Gilda’s body succumbed to its need. She remembered the first time she’d gone out into the night for the blood that kept her alive. Running through the hot, damp night in Louisiana with the woman, Bird, who’d first given her the gift, Gilda had been astonished at the ease of movement. They’d passed plantation fields as if they rode in carriages. She’d barely felt the ground beneath her feet as the wind seemed to lift them through the night. They’d found sleeping farmhands, sunk deeply into their dreams, and Bird, always the teacher, had allayed Gilda’s fears. Whatever horror there might be in the act of taking blood was not part of this for them. Bird taught Gilda how to reach inside their thoughts, find the dream that meant the most while taking her share of the blood. In exchange for the blood Gilda learned to leave something of help behind for them and in this way remained part of the process of life.