Nowhere Is a Place (6 page)

Elk seems sad to see Sherry go. He hug her tight and whisper something in her ear. He come over and hug me too. Say it was nice to finally have met me. Say, I hope you come back again.

I say, Thank you, hope to come back soon.

* * *

We drive off down the road. I look back and twenty people waving at us, then the dust kick up and they disappear.

They were nice people, I say.

Salt of the earth, Sherry mumbles and look both ways before turning left onto the highway and gunning it.

How you know them again?

I lived there for a year, after I left Berkeley.

You did?

I rack my brain and try to remember that year. Nothing comes. She done lived so many place, I can’t keep track.

Uh-huh, I say. What you do there?

Worked the land, learned the customs.

What you want to do that for?

Because I found their way of life fascinating.

Really?

Yeah. For one, they don’t hit their children.

I open my mouth to say something, then close it again when I realize I don’t have anything to say. I’m sure there were other things fa-sci-nating ’bout her stay there, why she just tell me about that one?

I don’t look at her direct, but can see her watching me from the corner of my eye. I say, Watch the road.

* * *

We ride along for a while and then she say all of sudden, I started writing the story.

I nod my head, blow at a tiny black bug making its way across my window; it hold fast, wait till I stop blowing, and then start moving again. I give up on trying to get rid of it, feel good that something else stuck inside this SUV with Sherry and her hurtful words besides me.

The notebook is in the backseat, she say.

I reach back and grab the red spiral notebook, flip it open, and see plenty of words jotted across the lines. I flip the pages, about fifty filled up—back and front.

When you do all this?

Last night.

Ain’t you get no sleep?

I only need a few hours.

You sure?

I know my body. You gonna read it or just keep asking me questions?

I look at her, lean back in the seat, and begin with:
A broad valley
. . .

* * *

By the time I’m done, we running on empty and Sherry pulling into a gas station.

She tell the attendant to fill it up and then turn and look at me.

What you think so far?

I look back at her, tap the pages, and say, I ain’t say all of this.

I know. I filled in the missing things.

With lies, I say.

No, with someone’s reality.

How you know?

I’ve read enough history, heard enough stories to know.

I just humph.

It’s good so far though, don’t you think?

What I know from? I ain’t much of a reader, you know.

The attendant come back and say, Twenty-two forty, please.

Sherry pay him, throw the SUV back in drive, and pull out toward New Mexico.

Tell me more, she say.

I think back and try to remember.

___________________

Henry Vicey was a short man with a soft, protruding middle. Brown-haired with shocks of white and ashy-brown eyes that were always smiling. A jovial spirit, with a booming voice and a corny sense of humor. He talked almost nonstop to the young slave boy named Hunt, who traveled with them.

Hunt drove the horses, fetched the water, skinned and cleaned the possum Henry shot and killed. Hunt had little more to say than “Yassa” and “Nossa.”

Hunt pays little or no mind to Nayeli, but does as he is told and offers her peaches and bowls of corn mush and possum. Nayeli refuses everything except water.

She watches from the back of the wagon as the land changes right before her eyes. Mountains rise up in the distance and then shrink away. The dirt goes from brown to red. Green grass shimmers blue and then emerald. Oak trees are dwarfed by towering pines, the yellow sun turns white hot, and the sky is suddenly stripped of its blue.

On the seventh day, when Nayeli does not think she can take the
clippity-clop
sound of the horses’ hooves, the rolling resonance of the wagon wheels, or the nonstop jabber of Henry Vicey much longer, they turn off the road and onto a narrow lane shaded by pecan trees.

It’s slow going. Beating rains have pummeled Sandersville for three straight days, leaving the earth soft and yielding. Hunt uses his whip to urge the horses on.

An open space greets the end of the shaded path; there, a medium-sized
whitewashed wood plank house stands. A porch, four beams, and a black roof that points and then goes long and flat at the back of the house, offering a resting place for the lazy limbs of the weeping willow that grows alongside it.

Potted flowering mimosa shrubs sit beneath the shuttered front windows; rocking chairs, one on either side of the screen door, eerily sway in the slight
morning breeze.

Guinea hens cluck around the steps of the house, pecking at the long tails of the sad-eyed hound dogs that lounge in the shade.

Nayeli
stretches her neck and sees that off to the left and right of the house are rows and rows of cotton stalks that seem to stretch endlessly across the land. Just below the cotton rows are two clapboard shacks that look as if they will tumble down the slope they’d been hastily erected on.

To the right of the house is a barn and pen with two grazing horses and three mules.

“We here.” Henry turns around and beams at her. “We home.”

* * *

A week in and out of the back of a wagon left her smelling like the horses and the gunnysacks of yams and overripe peaches and the bottle of sweet-smelling bubbling bath liquid that broke and seeped when Hunt horribly negotiated a boulder that was embedded in the road. That and the road dust that first settled after the rains and then caked and browned on her skin in the beating heat of the sun. Nayeli smelled and looked anything but human.

“Couldn’t get a chance to clean her up none,” Henry Vicey yells down to the black faces that seem to float from everywhere.

“Mary, you clean her up
’
fore April and the missus gets a gander at her.”

Two pair of strong black hands grab hold of the horse’s reins as Henry climbs down from the wagon.

“Yassa, Massa,” the tall dark woman called Mary says, and reaches a hand out toward Nayeli who is huddled behind a bag of yams.

“What we callin’ her?” Mary asks as she offers Nayeli a reassuring smile.

Henry scratches at his chin and thinks about it for a while. “Well, I suppose we should call her Lou.”

A quick glimmer of surprise streaks across Mary’s face. “Like Missus’s dog that died?”

“Yeah, she loved that dog something fierce,” Henry says, and scratches at his stomach. “Yeah, I think Lou is a perfect name.”

Mary shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head. “C’mon, Lou,” she coos, and curls firm fingers around the frightened child’s wrist, giving her a gentle tug. “C’mon, now. No need to fret.”

Mary coaxes Lou out of the wagon and then down to the spring and a bar of lye soap. Curious young eyes gather to watch as Mary scrubs away the dirt, fingers the blue stone around the girl’s neck, and moans something about “pretty.”

Out now, and soaked through but clean and shivering like a wet rat, Mary throws an old sheet around Lou and guides her back up the hill and toward the slave quarters.

More faces. Old and young, male and female, watch silently. Some turn their backs and mutter.

The inside of the shack is dark, cool, small, and musty from the many bodies that live there. Pallets strewn here and there. Wooden bowls, oyster shells for spoons. Tin cups.

“Gimme that jar, boy,” Mary says, and lowers herself down and onto a small stool. Her knees creek as she considers the child before her.

“Indian?” someone throws out from the corner of the room.

“Seem so,” Mary mutters, as she uses one hand to scoop the jellylike substance from the jar the small boy is holding.

“What she called?” another inquires.

“Massa say she called Lou.”

“Lou?” a harsh voice murmurs.

“What kinda name is that fer a girl?”

“Massa give her the missus’s dog’s name.”

Heads shake in disbelief.

Mary pulls the sheet from the child’s body. “Just a baby,” she says, and begins to slather Lou with the mutton suet.

Before long, Lou is gleaming.

Turning her around, Mary begins to tackle the hair, but not without taking a moment to roll the silken strands between her fingers, coveting the texture; a mixture of admiration and hatred hits her way down deep and she gives Lou’s hair a vicious tug.

“Ow!” Lou cries, and jerks her head forward.

And just like that, the insidious feeling is gone and Mary pats the girl’s shoulder and purrs, “Pardon.”

Still damp, but greased down, Lou’s hair is parted, and plaited into two long braids that fall down to her waist. Mary calls for the frock that Henry passed off to her two weeks ago, telling her to “Keep this safe somewhere till I get back.”

Mary slips the faded green dress over Lou’s head.

The dress must have been a delight for some little girl a long time ago, but now the hem is tattered and the sleeves are patched at the elbows. It hangs pathe
t
ically from Lou’s small body, imbuing her with an even more pitiful appearance than the caked road dust and dirt had.

The pitifulness reaches out and touches Mary in a place she has worked hard to turn into stone—but not hard enough, because her heart begins to ache.

___________________

It is April Vicey’s tenth birthday.

Blond-haired and blue-eyed like her mother Verna, but having her father’s height and hefty girth, April’s mouth always seems to be working on something. April does not speak—well, not clearly; she either mumbles through a mouth crammed with food, or screeches.

An only child, April is more than enough for Henry and Verna. The two that could have been—one before April and one after her—came seven months too soon. Just blood sacks that Verna insisted on naming and burying down near the stream.

April blows out her birthday candle, greedily snatches at the brown paper that encloses her gifts: a small wooden doll, a jewelry case, a heart-shaped silver locket and chain.

Verna nods her head with approval and lightly touches April’s hand. “You like it?” she asks, and the little girl fumbles with a word of thanks before she tosses it aside, looks at her father, and asks, “Is that all?”

Lou is a gift. Not like the one from God, not that type her mother always told her that she and her brothers were, but a gift just the same, and, as if on cue, Mary ushers Lou through the swinging door of the dining room.

“Well, and her.” Henry grins and points to Lou.

Verna Vicey’s eyes bulge and then narrow. Her lips curl and her nostrils flare as she begins, “You didn’t tell—”

“Hush, V,” Henry throws at her, then turns his attention back to April. “She your very own slave.”

April digs her hand into her cake and shoves a hunk between her puffed pink lips, then declares, “She all mine?” White icing spurts through the air and settles on the table and the front of her new dress

“Yep!” Henry exclaims.

“How could we afford—” Verna begins again, but Henry’s hand comes, up halting her words.

“Mary, bring her on over here so April can get a good look at her.”

Mary gives Lou’s shoulder a little nudge, but Lou does not move an inch, she just stands there staring at the faces that stare back at her. “Go on now,” Mary leans in and whispers in Lou’s ear.

Lou does not understand these words, this place, the strange scents, the dark people, the white people. None of it.

Mary
nudges her again and Lou takes one cautious step after another, and soon she is standing just a foot from her new mistress.

April’s mouth smacks at the cake as she considers Lou’s copper-colored skin, sleek black hair. “She don’t look like none of the darkies I ever seen.”

“No, that’s right,” Henry Vicey begins, but then is suddenly distracted as he begins to pat at the breast pocket of his shirt. “Shoot. Mary, get me one of my cigars from my humidor,” he says, then leans forward so that his face falls between April’s and Lou’s. “You right, darling. She ain’t no regular darkie, she an Injun. I betcha Fannie Gibson ain’t got one of these!” He laughs and slaps the table hard with his hand.

April rubs her hands together in glee. “She sure do got some pretty hair.” April sighs longingly and reaches for one of Lou’s braids.

Lou shrinks back a little.

“Oh, don’t be afraid. I ain’t gonna hurt you,” April coos.

Mary hands Henry his cigar and moves into the background.

“Oooh,” April moans, her eyes sparkling and latching onto the blue stone. Lou shrinks farther away. “Gimme it!” April squeals, and quick as a flash her hand comes up and snatches the stone from Lou’s neck.

Verna eyes the stone. “What in the world do you want with a rock?” she spits at April. “Give it back to her,” she orders before returning her attention to her husband.

April holds the granite out to Lou and then quickly snatches it from her reach. The teasing goes on for a few seconds and then April tires of the game and allows the granite to drop to the floor, where Lou hurriedly retrieves it.

“We cannot afford her, Henry.” Aprils words are strained and stern.

Henry waves his hand at her and lights his cigar. Leaning back into his chair, he puffs and then releases three smoky circles that April squeals with delight over before breaking them with her pudgy index finger.