I Am Not Sidney Poitier (10 page)

“And he’ll need a new well again,” I said.

Dolly came over, a big wooden spoon in her hand, talking like the voodun princess she was, “Might be the last well he get.” She stirred the air with her spoon. “It’s comin’. Change be comin’. It’s in the air. Soon, Master Hamish won’t be having his yellow cookies.”

“Dolly, go about your business!” Michelle said. “Take the tea up to that … that new one.”

Michelle watched Dolly leave. “Samantha Moon, that’s her name. She was living high and mighty up in Virginia, thinking she was white, and then the truth came back to roost. She got to live free for a long spell and she ought to be happy about that, but she doesn’t believe she is what she is. I would also feel sorry for her except that she had those free years that I didn’t have. I’m beginning to think the only difference between being black and being white is that if you’re white you just don’t know about your blood, you’re dumb to your blood, ignorant about that one drop. White people fear that one drop like we fear the rope.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, but they also love that one drop. Like the way Bond loved you and will love her. Fleetingly.” I studied her face. “Tell me, do you really love that man?”

“He is so kind.” Her face did a dreamlike thing, it became long, then fat and I had to think to fix it and I was not sure it was ever the same.

“The devil is often kind. He controls with his kindness. His darkies collect and sing him praises for his kindness. They huddle together and parade like a single creature behind that wagon he calls kindness. He kills with his kindness.”

“You ask me why I love him,” Michelle said, her dead-doll eyes locked on mine. “Why do you hate him so?”

“You don’t need to ask that.” I realized I was still holding my hat in my hands. I was nervous because I had no place to go. “So, this woman upstairs, who has been dragged from her home, sold on the block, she cannot accept her blood?”

“Cannot and will not, Raz-ru.”

“She may soon wish that her blood will accept her.”

“She will not,” she said.

“Then she is more than a fool. She is stupid.”

And in the dream, the words felt strange in my mouth, the faces seemed in soft focus, no hard edges, no sharp contrasts, except that rage burned inside me, my not so much feeling it as knowing it. The slaves irritated me with their love of singing. Michelle irritated me with her love of Bond. I irritated myself with my artificial dignity, my station as
boss Negro,
a meaningless designation. The chorus of slaves appeared in the kitchen.
Swing low, sweet chariot, coming fo’ to carry me home.
With the awful music as background I wondered about the pale woman upstairs and wondered why her blood mattered to any of us, except of course that she, like us, was property, and somehow it was an offense that she did not care or that she was incapable of holding that fact in her head. The choir of slaves kept singing, and I turned to shout at them, “Would you niggers please shut the fuck up!”

They looked shocked, taken aback.

“Just shut the fuck up,” I repeated.

Grumbling, they disbanded, and the scene broke away into pieces, and I found myself being asked by Bond to sing a song for him and his sea captain visitor. Though I did not want to, I could not stop the song from finding my throat. My mouth opened and out it poured while I tasted bile. “Blow the man down,” I sang, and as I did, my voice deeper than usual, I sought to punctuate it with irony that of course fell on deaf ears. “Give me some time to blow the man down,” I sang the last line and then walked away from them as a storm approached.

Finding myself in the room of the new mulatto princess I was at once confused, outraged, and saddened. I could find no words to share with her, and it soon became clear to me that she was not only unaware of my presence, but unable to see me. The wind blew the French doors open wide, and the curtains danced like loose sails. Samantha Moon tried to push against the wind to close the doors, but she was beaten back. Then Bond dashed in from the veranda and, as if fighting a wind that possessed agency, he closed the doors and locked them. He went to Samantha Moon and helped her to her feet. They stared deeply into each other’s eyes, as deep as they could stare, and kissed. I wanted to puke over and over while they wrestled through brief and uninteresting sex, not knowing why I was made so sick, not knowing why they were having sex. All this while a slave who looked just like Barry White stood at the foot of the bed singing, “Can’t get enough of your love, babe.”

Spiraling around and around I found myself standing on the deck of a riverboat. As it docked dozens of black people gathered on the hill beyond the dock and began to sing, sing in that mellow and sweet-sad and sickening way of gospel music, sing praises to the master arriving home. I followed Bond and Samantha Moon off the boat and across the dock. There he placed her on the seat of a buckboard that had been decorated with magnolia blossoms and red and white ribbons, and he stood in the bed of it. The wagon carried him and his mistress to the plantation, the singing Negroes dancing behind, singing, cakewalking, grinning, grinning, grinning. One short, spry, bald black man high-stepped the whole way beside the wagon. I lagged behind, wondering at once what I was doing there as Raz-ru and what I was doing in this dream that certainly could not be my own.

Samantha Moon was standing on the veranda wearing a veranda-standing dress, her light skin catching the moonlight. She was asking me why I hated Bond and why I hated her. I told her that I did not hate, but that I was sad for her, for her inability to accept herself, for her refusal to acknowledge her real self. She glided across the room and went on about Bond.

“He has raised you like a son, even broken the law to teach you to read. He never beats any of you,” she said.

“You?” I repeated.

She look upon me, puzzled.

“You mean
us.
”

She stepped more fully into the moonlight, I imagined to appear whiter.

“Oh, yes, he’s a good master. Good ol’ massa Hamish. He sho nuff good. He don beat us or nothin’.” I stared at her. “How would you describe a relationship where one of the good things to say was ‘he doesn’t beat me’? Do you know about his past?” I asked.

“He told me all about it. How he was a slave trader, and he was known as Captain Strike Down and about the Rio Ponga. He told about the burning village that haunts his dreams. He also told me that it was not only white men doing evil, but blacks as well. He told me about Geezo, the black king whose men were burning the village. He told how they would split open heads and run their fingers through the brains of still-living people. He told me all of it, Raz-ru.”

“And you believed him. I suppose you would want to. Poor rich Hamish Bond, living with the guilt of ruining so many lives. I don’t see him sharing his wealth with the ruined. No, he stays rich and we stay slaves because there were black men as evil as him. So says he. It is his burden to care for us.”

Then stuff happened, as stuff happens in dreams, things that I either cannot remember or in fact didn’t happen, though it seems like those things, forgettable as they apparently are, must have happened. But there I was, knowing that Bond had left the plantation only to test Samantha’s love by leaving her alone to the advances of Charles DeMarion, evil neighbor slave owner, beater of slaves, raper of slaves. Knowing also, as I stood outside the closed doors of the drawing room that Samantha Moon was in there with Charles DeMarion and that I would be running in to save her from his inevitable attempt at rape.

And so I did respond to her cry for help and why, I’m not certain. Would I have run in to save a dark slave from his raping hands? Was it her carriage? The way she believed herself to be white? Was I defending her honor? Defending white womanhood? Or was it, sicker still, my attempt to protect the property of the master I so hated? I hated myself as I ran across that room. I pulled him away from her, and he began to beat me with the crop he always carried. I stood tall and punched him. All this while a choir of black voices floated over us, singing, “I Shot the Sheriff.”

Michelle came running into the room, looked at the unconscious DeMarion and then to me. “Run, Raz-ru! Run before he calls the sheriff!”

I ran. I ran for all I was worth, which was a pretty penny I was told, through the acres of tall cotton, through the towering stands of sycamores, over the eroding levee and into the stagnant and stinking swamp where I knew my white pursuers would not follow—not into the swamp, into the deepest of black backwater, full of poisonous snakes and angry gators and long nights with light from only wild eyes. I was happy to be there. A wet hell, but a quiet heaven. All the singing was hushed.

Tornado. Rain. Bird calls. Spiraling. The blue uniform of the Union Army fit tight across my chest and loose in the trousers. The war was pretty much over. Growers like Bond and DeMarion were wanted for having burned their crops and had fled into hiding. The city of New Orleans was awash with blue uniforms like mine. The former town palace of Hamish Bond was empty, and I sat there in it, candles burning on the dining-room table, dusk turning to night outside. Samantha Moon walked into the room from the courtyard and was startled by my presence.

“Come in,” I said. “How does freedom taste? Oh, that’s right, you’ve already tasted freedom. Does it taste the same? Is it sweeter? More bitter? Does it go down easily? Like your master’s sperm?”

“You’re disgusting,” she hissed.

“I thought you might find me so.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to light the candles.” I stood and walked toward her at the other end of the table. I picked up the six-candle holder. Only five burned. Narrow candles with tall flames. I held the light close to her face. “Are you able to see yourself more clearly now? I think that I can see you more clearly. Now that you’re free. And now that I’m free.”

“Where is Hamish?”

“Hamish,” I said. “I don’t know where he is, but I will find him and I will kill him.” I pushed the candles closer to her face. “Can you feel the hot? The heat? The heat they say we darkies burn with? Can you feel my heat?” I moved my face closer to hers and spoke to her left ear, the ear on the side of her heart. “You do feel the heat, Samantha Moon. You’ve always felt the heat between us. It’s starting deep down, isn’t it, like a tickle someplace. You feel it because here I am, waiting to reconnect you to your blood, ready to infuse you with your history, sad and ugly though it may be.” My breath touched her face, and it seemed to me she found it sweet smelling, the way her eyelids fluttered. I whispered to her, “You long to be filled with the juice of lost fruit, don’t you? You need your denied tale, the one I hold between my legs. You feel the blood, don’t you, Samantha Moon?” Her breath was fractured, catching snags as it left her. “The heat, Samantha Moon, the heat.”

Her lips trembled as she leaned toward me, aching for my kiss.

“Sadly, I don’t feel the heat,” I said.

She began to weep.

Then Hamish Bond was in the room. He held a long sword and leaned on it like a cane, like a swashbuckler. “You’ve made the lady cry,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “It saves me the trouble of finding you.”

“You would kill me. After all I’ve done for you? I remember the village so vividly, so vividly. It was on the Rio Ponga in Africa. You think we white men are bad, but you should have seen those black pagans. I saw more than one whack off the top of a head and run his hand through some poor nigger’s warm brain while he could still feel it. I was sickened by them, sickened, I say. And there, under the body of a woman was a two-month-old tar baby. I put myself between one of Geezo’s men and caught a spear through my leg. I saved that little monkey and brought him home, treated him like a son, taught him to read, to move through the white man’s world.” He stared at me while moving closer to Samantha Moon. As he did, Samantha Moon’s skin grew darker. With each step her skin became more like mine. “I should have saved myself the wound and let the spear strike that little bastard dead.” He looked over at Samantha Moon and was startled.

I pulled out my service revolver and shot him in the chest.

The room became filled with hovering sullen, perhaps angry, perhaps relieved, black faces, and none of them sang.

Then I was in a brothel, plush red pillows soft and comfortable behind my naked back. My arm was slung over the back of a velvet davenport, my reddened and sore knuckles grazed the flocked wallpaper. A long-legged white woman with strawberry blond hair, pale blue and vacant eyes, crawled sensuously, yet awkwardly, toward me. I watched her over the distance, coming across the worn oriental rug, her deep red-painted nails like bloody claws. She came to me and kissed her way up my leg to my soft penis, then she took me into her mouth.

My penis was wet. I could feel that. I swam in the darkness of sleep, slowly remembering my pursuers, where I was. I opened my eyes to see the boy asleep across the room. I looked to my left and saw Patrice asleep on the cot. I looked down to find the top of the blind woman’s head in my lap. I scooted away and fastened up my trousers.