My Soul to Keep (22 page)
“I got this cup here, voodoo man, and I got a razor hid in my skirt. You can bleed yo’self into this. Not much. Just a bit. I’ma go tonight and take him the blood to see if it won’t help. And then you and me ain’t got nothin’ mo’ to say ‘bout it. You unnerstand me, voodoo man?”
A razor in her skirt. Dawit realizes how easy it would be to overtake this old woman, steal her razor, and empty the blood from her own bold throat. Imagine such a request! She must be mad.
But Dawit doesn’t move. This woman has cared for him and shown him kindness. She does not know all the truth about him, so it is not a direct betrayal of the Covenant to help her. It is risky, yes, and perhaps foolish. But, he thinks, why not? Why should he withhold a few harmless drops of blood?
“If you ever tell anyone what you have seen,” Dawit says, his voice rough, “I will kill you, old woman.”
He sees Clara’s face draining, her features falling limp, as she stares at him. She has taken his words as a refusal. He senses that she is a woman whose life has ill afforded her the luxury of tears, but tears run across her face nonetheless.
Dawit lifts his palm to her. “Give me the cup,” he says.
Dawit’s first meeting with Ole Master comes nearly a week after his whipping, when the door to the storeroom opens and the man Dawit saw at the auction strides in. It is a Sunday, so the man is dressed in a black suit. Clara has said they were raised together, but despite the droopiness beneath his eyes, he looks decades younger than Clara. He drops a small burlap sack at Dawit’s feet. Dawit glares at him.
“These are your clothes and a pair of shoes for the year,” Lowell Mason says, not looking at Dawit’s face, ignoring the insolence in his eyes. He speaks with yet another accent—drawling and difficult—unfamiliar to Dawit’s ears. “There’s no need to run from here. You ask either of my niggers—Ben or Clara—and they’ll tell you that.”
Dawit doesn’t answer. His mind is reeling with curses, but he holds his tongue. The man glances at Dawit’s eyes, then quickly away, and Dawit believes he is ashamed.
“I heard what you said, that story ‘bout being a freeman and being sold down the river, and I can’t say if that’s true or not. You talk real proper, not like any slave I ever heard. All I know is you were at the auction, and I bought you because me and my son can’t get on here alone. Mayhap you can read and write, and I can’t unlearn you that. But if I hear of you trying to teach it here, or anywhere else nearby, you’ll be back on the wall. And if my son can’t break you, I know someone who can. I hope it won’t come to that.”
How tempting it is, Dawit thinks, to wrap his fingers around this man’s throat and silence him forever. But what then? He does not know his surroundings well enough to make himself a fugitive murderer. Foolishness has brought him too much danger already.
“What you said you call yourself?” Ole Master asks him.
“Dawit,” he answers.
Ole Master shakes his head. “Name on your papers is Seth, so that’s what you’ll answer to. Your life before, whatever it was, that’s all over now. Sunday is rest day. Tomorrow, you work. I’ve hired you out to Turner’s farm, and he’ll expect two hundred pounds a day in your sack. And pick it clean, no bolls. Picking started in August, so you’ve lost me a fortune in just one week.”
Lowell Mason, Dawit soon realizes, is not a rich man. Gambling losses have taken their toll, he learns from the one who calls himself Nigger Ben. The farm was once grand, but it now provides only the barest sustenance; the majority of its horse stalls and six slave quarters are now empty. He has the old man and woman, Clara and Nigger Ben, but that is all. Both are too old to do much work, so Dawit alone must make farm repairs and tend the three mares. Dawit works from dawn until long after daylight, with twenty minutes to eat at midday and Clara’s cornmeal waiting for him at night. Dawit always wears his towcloth shirt to cover his back, no matter how hot the sun in the endless cotton fields.
He is never whipped again, aside from a halfhearted lash from Ole Master’s son, Gil, when he was drunk with power and whiskey. Dawit caught the rough cowhide, coiled it around his bare hand, and yanked hard until the whip was taut, silently daring Gil to strike again. Gil looked startled. “Let loose of that, nigger,” he said, and when Dawit threw it aside, Gil only leaned over to pick it up and walked away. He never raised it to Dawit again, even as a threat. Dawit has never encountered such weak-willed cowards!
Soon, Clara dies in her sleep. Dawit regrets that a woman of her years lived her life in bondage, but he is glad his secret has died with her. The blood healed her hand, but it did not give her the Life gift. So Dawit realizes that her great-grandson, Franklin, who survived his foot injury with the Living Blood she brought him but walks with a limp like Nigger Ben, must still be a mortal too.
Exploring when he can, Dawit quickly learns the local geography, the outlying woods and bayous, and he knows he can write himself a pass that might let him travel to the North at any time. But he has taken an interest in Franklin and some of the Turner slaves. On Sundays, their free day, he has begun to teach a group of them to read and write by drawing letters of the alphabet in the dirt. Later, someone steals a Bible to read from. The group has grown steadily, and word of Dawit’s gift of knowledge passes quickly among them. They are as eager to learn as Dawit was when he first met Khaldun, and that desire touches him. That is why he has decided, at least for a while, to remain here.
One day, the news comes that Ole Master’s brother in Virginia has died and left him a new slave. It is a woman, Dawit hears. In the afternoon, Ole Master brings out his carriage for Nigger Ben to drive him into town. He whistles for Dawit to come to him. Dawit, exhausted from labor and the sun, stands before him.
“Seth,” Ole Master says, “the woman I’m bringing is yours. She’ll sleep beneath your blanket. If I had a way of thinking like my neighbors, I would take her for my own bed. Or leave her to Gil. But I’m a pious man, and I don’t allow that here. So I leave your work to you. This is your mate.” And he smiles in a way that makes them conspirators, as though the woman is a gift.
Watching the carriage raise dust as it ambles along the path toward town, Dawit is so enraged that he is shaking. Assigning him a wife! Expecting him to lie down with her, to breed with her as though they are no more than livestock! I must leave this place, Dawit says to himself—the thought that plagues his mind so many times a day. The Searchers may come soon, and he does not wish to be seen this way. Property of such a low creature as this, a hypocrite who believes himself a saint!
After nightfall, as Dawit eats ashcake and bacon on the stool in his one-room log quarters, the door flies open. Ole Master stands there, still grinning, with a dark woman taller than he at his side. Her hair is in tight braids wound across her scalp, her cheekbones jut sharply, and she wears a plain, coarse dress with frayed black shoes. The woman is glaring at him, her arms wrapped around herself. Her face has no fear, only indignation.
“Seth,” Ole Master says, nudging the woman inside his bare, tiny room, “This here is Adele. I want her belly big by winter.”
Then Ole Master is gone, and they are alone in darkness. Dawit can no longer even see the statuesque woman left for him, except the memory of her face. Despite her status, she is bitterly proud; her face is so hard, the beauty beneath is nearly masked. Nearly, but not quite. She is clearly Yoruba, a marvel!
Suddenly, Dawit is afraid of himself. He is afraid to be locked in darkness with this woman, this Adele, expected to behave as a beast. He has not held a woman in a long time.
She seems to hear his mind. “If you take me, nigger, it’s only gon’ be with a fight,” her raspy voice comes from before him. “I ain’t having no more babies. I’ve had three sold from under me. You hear? No more.”
Dawit contemplates her words in silence. He finishes his food and slaps his palms together to rid them of crumbs. “Adele is a lovely name,” he says at last. “Fitting for a lovely woman.”
“I’ve whupped bigger menfolk than you, niggers and buckras too. Don’t try that pretty talk on me.”
Dawit sighs. “Adele,” he says, “are you a human being or a beast? Answer me that.”
“What you sayin’?”
“I said, are you a human being or a beast?”
She exhales, self-righteous and slightly bewildered. “A human being. You?”
“A human being,” he says. He finds his blanket on the floor and tosses it toward her, then slides away to sit against the wall. “Go to sleep, Adele. Lovely Adele. With me, sleep is safe.”
At first, there is no movement. Then he hears the scraping of her feet on the floor, feels the air from the blanket as she allows it to float down, and hears her dress crinkle as she curls on top of it, fully clothed. Still, he listens. A few moments later, he hears her breathing slow as she begins to sleep.
Dawit’s heart pounds. For long minutes, he sits in the dark wondering what shameful acts he is capable of committing against this mortal woman. Then he, too, closes his eyes and wills sleep to come.
Jessica wasn’t sure how long David had been behind her, his skin pressed to her buttocks, plying himself between her thighs to gently rub his hardened flesh against her. He glided and retreated until her body’s moisture cleaved to him and cleared his path, and then he was inside of her, rocking from behind as if in a sleep-trance. She moaned softly, barely awake herself as his solid warmth crept through her and filled her up.
Through the window, light was glowing faintly as the curtains trembled in a sudden breeze. Dawn was Jessica’s favorite time to make love. Every time she awakened to David’s morning touch, or made him stir from hers, it was startling, unfamiliar. A secret seduction.
She felt David’s hands wander across her stomach beneath her T-shirt, then he found her nipples and plied them until they stood, sending starts of pleasure to her loins. His fingers followed a path across her body’s nerves until they rested against her clitoris, tickling it lightly, just enough to make her squirm and gasp. David’s touch was always just right, just so. She writhed, pressing herself against him so he could push himself farther inside her. She wanted to feel him bump against her full bladder, as far as her flesh would allow.
Even after nearly eight years of marriage, David’s sensuality was so strong that her heart still raced, and her body still jumped beneath David’s fingers. He never seemed to make love the same way twice, always reinventing himself. Sometimes, under the heat of his weight, she felt herself transcending beyond orgasm to another place entirely. Before Kira was born, Jessica could scream without control; the more noise she made, the more inspired David’s efforts. Now, since Kira’s bedroom was directly beside theirs, the strain to be silent sometimes broke her concentration just when her pleasure was sweetest.
This time, once again, Jessica had to grit her teeth as her body below her waist melted away. She quivered inside, bucking against him.
“Yes …” David whispered, enjoying her gratification.
Behind her, she felt David’s abdomen spasm and knew he was coming too. He breathed hard against her ear, biting her earlobe gently, and his hot breath made her shiver to her curled toes.
“Je t’aime beaucoup
…”he whispered.
There was just
something
about French, Jessica thought. “Damn … I love you too.”
Her face and flesh felt fevered. She turned to face him, entwining herself around him, pulling his head against her breastbone to cradle it. She held him with fascination, thinking of how vulnerable he’d been as a child, the orphan. Now, all he had was her.
“I want to take you to France,” David whispered. “I want to show you Paris and Versailles. We can live there.”
“Mmmmm …” she mumbled, already fading from wakefulness.
“Will you and Kira go away with me?” He’d been asking her this question daily for the past week; the phrasing made it sound like he might go somewhere without them.
“Of course,” she breathed.
“I mean it, Jess,” he said, his voice louder, more urgent.
“Me, too,” she muttered, and she was asleep.
When Kira came downstairs for breakfast after the second call, her T-shirt was untucked and her shoelaces were flapping on the floor. She marched to the table and waited for Jessica to pour milk over her bowl of cornflakes. David was in the kitchen making toast for all of them, and coffee for the groggy grown-ups.
“I don’t want to go to school,” Kira announced.
Jessica hadn’t heard this complaint in a long time, since Kira’s first week in Ms. Raymond’s kindergarten class. She took a comb and began to fluff out the natural shape of Kira’s hair. Kira would need a haircut soon—she was beginning to look like Angela Davis, circa 1968. When the comb pulled her head back slightly, Kira missed her mouth with the spoonful of cereal. “Mommy, I don’t want to go to school,” she repeated.
“I heard you.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“You know what I’m going to say,” Jessica told her.
Kira sighed, clicking her tongue insolently. Then, she laughed when she missed her mouth with her spoon again. Jessica didn’t even have time to scold Kira for being sassy before her laugh dulled the sting. This kid has an on and off switch, she thought.
David appeared, resting the plate of toast behind his plastic-covered computer. “What’d you do to your face? You look like a milk monster,” David said, and Kira’s laugh turned to peals.
Jessica peeked around at Kira’s face. Splashes of milk dotted her nose, cheek, and chin. She couldn’t help laughing herself.
“Are you sick?” David asked, dabbing her face with a napkin.
“Well … maybe a little sick …” she said. “Yes, I think so.”
“Don’t tell stories, Kira,” Jessica said.
“I think I am a little, Mommy. I feel bad.”
“What’s wrong?” David and Jessica asked in unison.
For a long time, Kira didn’t answer. She worked her face around, exaggerating her thought process, then she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
Jessica shared a knowing glance with David. This child could be such a bullshit artist. Maybe someone at school had called her a name, or the teacher had told her to stop talking so much. Only Kira knew best what was going on in her little head.
“When are we going away, Daddy?” Kira asked.
Jessica paused midchew, wondering if Kira had overheard their bedroom conversation, but the guilty expression on David’s face told her he must have discussed a trip with her too.
“Don’t know yet. That’s for Mommy to decide.”
Jessica felt her old mechanisms warming up, shifting into gear. Out of the question. They weren’t going anywhere. She’d invested too much time at the paper and would miss her family too much to simply pack up and leave. Bea would skin her alive for taking her granddaughter so far away, even for only a year.
“Remember, we have money stashed away,” David kept reminding her.
David’s father, who’d been an importer in France, left him a nice-sized estate and a lump of cash. David had been forced into state care, but the money became his when he was twenty-one, and he promptly invested it. The way he described it, one year he was virtually a pauper, living on student loans and macaroni and cheese, and then a letter from the French government informed him that, as of his birthday, he had a quarter of a million dollars sitting in the bank. He’d bought this Miami house, and just about everything he owned, with cash.
As soon as Jessica graduated from college, David tried to tempt her to forget about a career and backpack across the world with him. But in those days, when she still couldn’t get used to the M-R-S in front of her name and the hyphen that joined their surnames, David felt temporary. She just knew he would get bored, leave, or cheat, so she decided to get her own act together fast. The backpacking could come later, if it came at all.
And it
was
later, Jessica realized. David was dying for her to have another baby, which would make traveling a lost cause. But Kira was old enough to handle it now. It’s not a two-headed dragon, she thought, remembering Peter’s words to her.
Europe had culture, variety, freshness, and Africa even more. It would give Kira a foundation she would never find in the States, and give Jessica a new start.
What if she was standing at the threshold between a good life and a
remarkable
life? Her father told her once, in a secret-telling voice he used every time he read fairy tales, that her life was going to be remarkable. That was the first time she’d heard the word, in fact. Of course, he’d probably said that to Alex, too, but Jessica had grown up assuming it was prophecy. She planned to write a story that would change the world—or a book, like David’s, that would make a profound historical contribution. So far, that wasn’t happening in Miami.
Maybe God’s plan would present itself if she had the courage to break away. Courage was all it would take.
Jessica folded her hands to look her daughter in the eye. “Kira … You really want to go away? Even if you wouldn’t see Ms. Raymond or your friends or Grandma or Aunt Alex for a long time?”
Kira nodded, not hesitating. She looked earnest.
“But why, sweetheart? Because Daddy says so?”
“No,” Kira said. “’Cause Grandpa says so.”
Jessica and David scowled and glanced at each other, puzzled. Kira had never known a grandfather a day in her life.
“Grandpa likes Burger King. Just like me,” Kira went on, and Jessica’s heart froze as she thought of her father’s trip to Burger King the night he died. She grasped the edge of the table as though she believed she would fall if she let it go.
“He says you and me have to leave, Mommy. Just you and me, he says. But I want Daddy to come too. Grandpa says if we don’t leave, bad things will happen. Very, very bad things.”
“What kind of bad things, Duchess?” David asked, seeming unaware of the fright that was making Jessica feel dizzy. Maybe he thought Kira had invented an imaginary friend. Good Lord, could that be?
“Very, very bad things,” Kira repeated, and the way she said it, as though she truly were repeating careful instructions, locked Jessica’s muscles. “Like what happened to Peter and Uncle Billy. A monster will come for us.”
At this, Jessica could clearly see the color draining from her husband’s face, leaving his lips looking dry. He’d figured out that something wasn’t right. It wasn’t just her imagination. She wasn’t the only one rendered breathless by Kira’s recitation.
What the hell was going on?
A
dream,
David mouthed to Jessica after his head snapped with the realization. “What kind of monster, Kira?” David asked her.
Kira shrugged and didn’t answer at first, as though she couldn’t think of the words. She looked directly at Jessica. “A mean monster,” she said. “Or, maybe a good monster too.”
“There are no good monsters, Kira,” Jessica said suddenly, her voice barely a breath.
“That’s what Grandpa says too,” Kira said sadly, and she brought a spoonful of soggy cereal to her lips.
Jessica’s quickened heartbeat had given her an instant headache, and she couldn’t think of what else to say. Should she ask Kira if she’d seen Grandpa in the cave? Did she really want to hear her daughter’s answer?
Abruptly, as soon as Kira finished eating, David tied her shoelaces and sent her upstairs to brush her teeth. Jessica saw his eyes, glassy with worry, as he watched her go.
“What was she talking about?” David asked.
“I don’t know,” Jessica whispered. Her mind was still stuck on Kira’s words:
He likes Burger King, like me
. How could Kira know her grandfather liked Burger King, that he’d been eating a Whopper when … ? When what? Jessica had to force herself to finish the thought: When she’d talked to him in the cave. When he’d told her to warn Kira that there were no good monsters.
“You okay, Jess?” David asked, hugging her with one arm.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“She’s afraid of something. We’ve had so many bad things happen, first Princess, then Peter and Uncle Billy. Maybe that’s what it is. I’ve tried to shield her, but…” He sounded so down on himself, Jessica squeezed his hand.
“Well, Lord, there’s only so much you can do, David. We’ve both tried.”
“This environment is bad for her, Jess.”
Jessica blinked. “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to leave. Maybe we should. There are too many bad memories for her right now. If we plan for this summer …”
“We shouldn’t wait until summer. We’ll enroll her in an American school in Paris. The sooner we go, the better. That’s very clear now.”
His face was uncompromising. This was no longer a discussion of a remote possibility; it was becoming a plan, full of details and weight. It sat heavy on her shoulders. She’d felt this way with Peter, when she realized their book idea was more than talk.
“It just feels like we’re running away,” she said.
“Sometimes the only choice is to run away,” David said, and kissed her.
Jessica knew some of her coworkers were still grumbling about her quick rise to the I-Team, the most coveted position for idealistic reporters with visions of
All the President’s Men
dancing in their heads. When she’d interviewed with Sy the year before, she’d known full well she had a decent shot at the job, not only because she was good, but because the team had never had a black reporter in its existence. As her mother put it, the system had been working for everybody else for so long, it was damn well time it worked for her.
So, here she was. The state was investigating the facilities she’d exposed in her nursing-home package, which was still being complimented and believed to be a shoo-in for the Pulitzer finals. And her tips from Boo on drug dealing by county maintenance workers were panning out better than a dream. She’d just contacted a former low-level Dade County HUD supervisor who’d moved to Arizona and seemed willing to talk off the record. She’d felt a little like Bob Woodward during their telephone conversation, which he cut short when his son had to leave for school: “Knowledge of this goes high. Higher than you’d think,” the man said before he hung up. What more could she want?
A month ago, a development like this would have sent her into an adrenaline fury, and she’d be pulling twelve-hour days to knock on public housing residents’ doors, probe her sources in the local DEA office, and swap information with her police buddies at Metro.
Instead, Jessica found herself halfheartedly scribbling down her telephone messages from HUD bureaucrats and stifling a yawn at her desk. She checked her watch. Only noon. Either the days were getting longer or she was just getting plain bored.
And she was alarmed at herself. Could it really be that she’d reached her career goal and had no idea what she wanted to do next? Her job was beginning to feel like a forty-hour-a-week distraction from her life at home with Kira and David, the part that mattered.
“It’s hard to explain,” Jessica said to Alex on the phone during their customary lunchtime conversation. At the UM lab ten minutes away, near the hospital, Alex was no doubt sitting on a stool with a tuna fish sandwich in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. Jessica had stolen away to sit with her sister enough times to know her daily menu. “It’s like we’re courting again. He’s trying so hard. But not in the way that makes me feel smothered. He’s starting to let me inside.”