She did not know that she would not even live to see her children stuffed, like parcels, into these ghosts’ vessels, nor would she ever know that in their desperation, one would leap and others, chained together, would follow, crashing into the unfathomable gray like a string of ceremonial beads. Her daughter’s children, whose skin would be unrecognizable to her, would live to suffer at the hands of beasts: never to be embraced or loved, merely used to satisfy whims or serve as a receptacle for burdens, forever and ever, Àṣẹ. No. She could not foresee that her rage at seeing her firstborn chained, and Kosii and Elewa in a death stance to free her, would cast her spear-first into battle. She would take down so many—so many of the undead would fall prey to her fearsome heart and her uncanny aim—before a coward would creep from behind, so as not to see her eyes, and unleash a thunderclap deep into her spine. Who would ever imagine that the last thing she would see was Kosii and Elewa wresting the chains from the invaders so that the king’s eldest daughter could run free, only to have new chains wrapped around their own necks?
She did not know that she would not get to hear the skinless curse one another because they wanted to take her alive, but in all her glory she denied them the chance to desecrate her with future abuses, ones that she would have had to be living—and screaming—for them to gratify. Instead, she, unbeknownst to her, would only give them eternal silence, which was, in its way, victory. In the spite of their defeat, they would ravage her children instead, to whom she could offer no solace. But the not knowing, here, would be a wondrous thing. King or not, what mother should live to see her children spiked and mounted?
A tumult would be born of this, of such force that the land would never recuperate. There would be valiant wars fought on the king’s behalf, by the other tribes who respected her honesty and giving, once they discovered the coming plague and the treachery that permitted its spreading. But it would be to no avail. Where peace was once possible, there would be centuries of bloodshed and pestilence, and the earth itself would be robbed of its natural belongings and, thus, continually reject the children it could no longer identify.
She did not know. Could not know. Should not know.
King Akusa nestled next to Ketwa, pulling Nbinga over with her. The last thing these demons should see of her village was what huge adoration looked like, given how apparently puny their own was.
“Where are the children, beloved?” she asked Nbinga.
“There.” Nbinga pointed toward the entrance. And there, King Akusa could see her children dancing—two who looked so much like Ketwa that she could not remember if she had given birth to them or if Nbinga had, or both.
She looked at the Gussu and the three demons beside him. Then she looked down at their bowls, empty again so soon. People who liked her food so thoroughly couldn’t be so horrible. She never considered that perhaps they were only hungry.
“Eat,” she said. “There is plenty.”
The Gussu reached first and the others followed. King Akusa smiled and raised her cup.
“To guardians,” she said loudly.
“To guardians,” said everyone except the demons.
Then the king put the cup to her lips and drank.
Timothy
There was too much red in the face. Timothy would have to compensate with yellow and perhaps just a drop of black. But he managed to capture the unusual expression, something between curiosity and—what was that? Disgust? The subtle tilt of the head, the slight curl of the lip. A smile and a snarl. And the hair like a dark and jagged sun rising from behind. Isaiah was the perfect specimen.
Timothy’s father, Paul, seemed to understand the need to document them, though he chose other, more private methods. While Paul would show Timothy’s paintings to everyone who visited the plantation, beaming with pride at the startling skill displayed in each stroke, he forbade Timothy from hanging them anywhere in the house. “The niggers would get the wrong idea,” he said.
And so they cluttered his room: canvases triple stacked against the base of three walls; every unused surface—whether desk or floor—a resting place for scene after scene of slave merriment or contemplation, even though his father assured him that the latter was impossible. And, of course, his most successful works were the most suffocating: the ones that captured the sorrow. He didn’t know that grief could have such a multitude of expressions—be resurrected similarly, yet uniquely, in so many different faces—until the first time he made a Negro sit for him. His hand quivered and he had nearly missed it. But there it was: wet in the eyes, trapped on the tongue, broken in the palms.
He handpicked Isaiah from a gaggle of Negroes he gathered by the edge of the river. He called them out in the middle of their bathing and told them to stand in a line. The overseers cut their eyes at the interruption. No matter. This land belonged to his father as did their jobs, so the Negroes did as instructed and yes, the overseers spit out their tobacco, but they were otherwise silent.
The Negroes’ feet squished in the mud. Some of them used their hands or leaves to cover their exposed parts. Others looked away. They all glistened in the sun. Timothy scoured the crowd looking for a color that would best match the fruit of the blackberry trees he planned to include in the landscape. He noticed Isaiah’s halo first, surrounding his head in all its shadowed glory.
“Finish washing,” he said to Isaiah. And afterward, instructed him to get dressed and come to the space where the grounds met the cotton field.
Timothy had brought a chair, but not for himself. Upright and solid, the back of the chair rose to just below a seated Isaiah’s shoulders. Timothy positioned the chair so that it faced east and the sun shined on his back and on Isaiah’s face. He made Isaiah sit there for hours, demanded that he not move a muscle, not even to wipe the sweat from his brow.
“Don’t even blink,” Timothy joked, and had to reassure Isaiah that he was kidding.
Some of the other Negroes watched from behind trees or from the entrances of their shacks, straining their vision with wide eyes. But they kept their distance. Timothy saw them. They stayed behind, as if fearful that they would get sucked into the painting and, perhaps, have to contend with two places from which they couldn’t escape.
Isaiah’s face was drenched. Finally, Timothy moved from behind the easel he had placed just off to the left of where Isaiah was sitting so that he would have the proper perspective and capture almost all that he wanted of Isaiah’s nature.
“You are an excellent model for my work,” he then said to Isaiah with a joyful flourish.
Isaiah’s silence followed by his head bowing made Timothy think Isaiah didn’t understand a compliment when one was being given. He shook his head and asked the Negro behind the closest tree to come forth and assist him in carrying his equipment back to the house. At the porch stairs, Timothy stopped. He turned to see Isaiah still seated in the chair.
“You can go back now,” he yelled, not unkindly.
It dawned on him briefly that he had never seen a Negro in the South seated in a chair. On the ground, yes. On haystacks. In driver’s seats. But never in a chair. Maybe that was why the Negro continued to sit: to have a small idea of what it meant to be fully human, to rest a spell on a comfortable surface and to have support for your back. But he got up and Timothy watched him move slowly back to the river and collapse to his knees at the edge of it before bending forward to splash his face.
* * *
—
The trip to Boston was more difficult than the trip coming home. Traveling north felt unnatural. And the things he had seen along the way: it had rained continually, which meant the wagon was perpetually stuck and the rain brought with it a mist so thick that he couldn’t tell where he began and it ended. They had to travel through patches of Indian Territory, he and the others heading north for college because they, too, had to gain the skills necessary to help their fathers manage the tracts of land that
they conquered, and the North, despite its festering treachery, was home to the best institutions for business thought. His time at the school that his father said he must attend to be best prepared for his inheritance was interesting for the wrong reasons. Midnight art and powerful sleep would be of no use to Paul. He had been told by jealous men, the men charged with ferrying past the imaginary line that separated the northern and southern parts of an infant country, that the fog wouldn’t protect them. Indians didn’t need eyes to see them, they said, or, rather, could see them through the eyes of woodland creatures—a snake at their feet or a bird circling their heads. They would kill them while they were asleep and eat their flesh raw as tribute to even more savage gods. He couldn’t erase from his mind the image of bloody teeth tearing at him. And the envious men looked at him, specifically, when they told their scare stories, as if they could see the timidity at the beating center of his heart. He had perhaps not been careful enough: stared too long at a passing gentleman; said a male name during his slumber, maybe; or it could have been the gentle way in which his hand would occasionally drape at the end of his wrist. You could never know for sure what it was that inspired their malice, so every part of your inside self had to remain inside.
He had found that Northerners, unlike Southerners, had no idea that they were the descendants of cannibals. They had been sufficiently protected, by a myriad of myths involving hard work and superior intellectual, moral, and physical character, from such unpeaceful knowledge. But there was a chance that some of them knew it. There were some of them who had kept themselves in a perpetual state of dreaming, imbibing morphine mixed with water. Some ate the powder straight out of the package. Others inhaled it. Its effect on them intrigued Timothy. He would ask them many questions. In their sometimes incoherent responses, he felt he had been let in on secrets that might have otherwise gone unheard. Some of them talked of feeling something, anything, for the very first time; a tingle, they said, in the chest. A feeling that made them want to lie on their backs in the soil and greet the sky and everything else with gratitude. Even niggers, they said. And they would only call them by that name when they were feeling this grateful. Otherwise, “Negroes.”
There they were, pupils as big as buttons, grinning, rubbing on flaccid genitals, not understanding why the genitals were so limp when they, themselves, were feeling so aroused—and by everything; unlocking every part of themselves freely, and letting Timothy in. Saliva was frothy in the corners of their mouths. Timothy suppressed the urge to offer them a handkerchief because he thought it might break their concentration and be seen as an insult.
When one of his dorm mates confessed to being in love with his own mother, of using his baby grasp to hold on to her pubic hairs so as to avoid leaving her womb, to remain there in the comforts of her canal, Timothy had heard enough, had, in fact, heard too much and wished that he could unhear it. He never asked another question of them, and when they went into their induced passion-stupor, he would leave the room and walk the grounds, wishing he could be as ignorant and stoic as the trees.
Out into the silvery light of the North he bounded, allowing the rays to wash over him, letting it in, deeply, where it chilled him to the bone. He hoped no one noticed what the frigidity was doing to his body: flexing his muscles, goosebumping his skin, hardening his nipples and his prick. He walked on, smiling at the stones beneath his feet, admiring the weeds that had the courage to peek out from between them, golden at their edges, but still green at their roots.
When the air greeted him, it carried with it the scent of burning logs—birch trees, perhaps, that had never imagined being cut up this way and shoved into some firepit. The flames they, these pitiful trees, had imagined were much grander, engulfing everything, but only so that they could be reborn, mightier than before, at some other time. This wasn’t that.
Timothy even smiled, faintly, at some of the other students he passed—until he remembered that unlike the stone, the weed, or the tree, they carried secrets frightening enough to chill you to the bone like a silvery light.
He had learned that horror could be planted like seeds, spring to life if given the right tenderness of soil, water, and shine. Unfurl slowly beneath the earth’s skin, burrowing down even as it stretched upward toward an open sky. Hiding, at first, its center, it could be coaxed to reveal its core, exposing colors vibrant enough to make even animals weep, unveiling fragrances that could seduce even the most ferocious of bees. You would never know it was poison until you touched or consumed it, but by then it was already too late. You had already been choked, just like the ones before you. And there was no one left unscathed enough to tell the tale, to warn the next person foolish enough to stop and admire, plucked when they should have just left well enough alone.
He wasn’t the first literate person in his family; Paul and Ruth read extensively: novels, contracts, and the religious text that was a combination of both. But he was the first to have taken his education this far, and so far north. He was bound to learn other things, discover in himself what Mississippi wasn’t wide enough to let prosper. A conscience, perhaps. And something less confined: a white thing with jagged wings that poked at his thighs at night and made the whole room hot.
His art was a sign to some of the other boys at school that their whispers, stolen glances, and subtle gestures toward one another’s groins were just fine and dandy. Timothy had to fan himself and stand behind the easel so as not to make it so obvious that he was receptive to the gazes and wanted more. His yearning went on the canvas before it stretched itself into the real time. He painted feverishly: in the morning before class, after afternoon prayer, doodles during lunch, and sketches by lamplight late into the evening. He had never been so pleased.
But Isaiah . . .
“So you work the barn and the animals. You prefer that to the field?”
“I do what I told to, suh,” Isaiah replied.
“I know that.” Timothy smiled. “Most of you do. But I mean, is it what you prefer?”
Isaiah said nothing, as though he understood that there could be no right answer but silence. He looked down at his feet.
“Please don’t move, Isaiah. Look up at me, please. Hold your head steady.”
Isaiah looked up without looking Timothy in the eye.
“Because I can have my father put you wherever I ask. So tell me: Where would you rather be?”
“I like the barn just fine,” Isaiah said quickly. “Just fine.”
It annoyed Timothy that Isaiah couldn’t tell him very much about himself. He didn’t know his age, who or where his parents were, what he dreamed about, or even what his favorite color was. Not even when Timothy painted a line of every color from his palette on a canvas and asked Isaiah to choose. Although he stared quite a long time at the blue, and then the red, he made no decision, said he couldn’t.
“But everybody has a favorite color, Isaiah,” Timothy protested.
“What’s your’n, sir?”
“Oh, that’s easy: purple. Because purple is two of my favorite colors mixed together.”
“Is that so, sir? Which two is that?”
“Blue and red.” Timothy smiled and winked.
“Then I like purple too, sir,” Isaiah said with startling conviction.
Timothy smiled and patted Isaiah on the head. But he wanted to know more.
Isaiah must have been close to his own age, but Timothy couldn’t be certain. His father kept impeccable records of everything. So if Timothy searched, perhaps he could find their names in ledgers. This is how he came to venturing into his father’s study one day, spending almost an hour perusing religious texts, bank statements, bound letters, and other things, each arranged in rows on shelves surrounding the room.
He took a second to sit down at Paul’s desk. He leaned forward and spread his hands over its surface. No. He couldn’t imagine this being his destiny. It hovered too high and made
him feel less corporeal—just like a cold sun’s silver rays could.
He stood up and was careful to return the chair to its previous position. He walked over to a shelf and discovered that it held precisely what he was seeking: inventory. The first books listed sacks of flour and sugar, hogs and horses, some of the furniture Ruth would allow very few people to sit upon, along with the purchase of some Negroes. When it came to the latter, there was no specificity. He could more readily identify the furniture based on the description than he could any of the slaves.
Timothy imagined, briefly, that Isaiah could have been his playmate at one time if he had been permitted to play with Negro children. Paul frowned upon any contact with Negroes that was not utilitarian, however shifty his definition of that word was. So Timothy endured loneliness, and loneliness never failed to make a child resourceful.
He scoured through stacks of books finally narrowing it down to about 1814, a year after his own birth. There were five births recorded in August alone. If Isaiah was born on the plantation, then it had to be 1814. If not, if Isaiah was purchased from another place, then it might have been in another ledger, the one from 1818 titled “Virgins,” in which Paul detailed how twenty slaves, chained together, had been brought in on an uncovered wagon from Virginia, which made stops in South Carolina and Georgia, the youngest among them a child of about three or four years of age. Timothy wondered why Paul titled the ledger so but eventually shrugged his shoulders, certain his father had his reasons.
As he turned through the pages of these documents, Timothy thought his father uncharacteristically sloppy: he didn’t write down any of the names of the Negroes he acquired, even though the first thing his father and mother always did was name the slaves upon their arrival. They said they did that to immediately gain mastery over them and erase whatever personality had been brewing on the passage over. In the ledger, Paul opted instead to identify them by ambiguous terms like “scar” or “watch,” so oblique as to be useless. How easy would it have been to write “Cephas” or “Dell” or “Essie” or “Freddy”? It didn’t matter in the end, Timothy supposed. Perhaps for his father, in the case of the record, the name of the tool was less important than its function.
The Prophets Page 19