Sapphire's Grave (18 page)

His chest swelled involuntarily when he and Clovey made their entrance, her loveliness and unusual gown attracting the attention of the entire party for a moment—the moment in which Aldridge decided to marry Clovey.

You have the visage of a goddess, and I would be proud to be your escort,
my Venus.

PATERSON, NEW JERSEY

NOVEMBER, 1964

Clovey had proven an asset of a sort that Aldridge could not have imagined when, at twenty-one, nearly prostrate with devotion and lust, he had proposed to her the life of a minister’s wife. To Clovey, product of a union that had shocked the sensibilities of a community, the proffered position had held a certain redemptive appeal. She had eagerly said yes.

Her vocation as an artist had accommodated his need to move—first to Philadelphia, where he had attended divinity school; then to Paterson, where Aldridge was to pastor a small and struggling church. Clovey had packed her supplies and portfolio, carrying with her from one city to the next her growing distinction as a perceptive, imaginative artist in virtually every media.

Aldridge did not understand his wife’s art. Others did, and to Aldridge, this validated her work, as the appreciative stares of others validated Clovey herself.

The approval of others was important to Aldridge. He prayed, preached, and lived for the reverence of his parishioners. He built a home of impressive dimensions, situated upon a mountain, in order to impress his peers. The grocery store and old folks’ home, created pursuant to his vision, had garnered the respect of the community—the respect that he required. He needed the adoration of his wife—his wife who perceived things; whose spiritual depth, some were persuaded, rivaled his own.

They remarked upon this with sincerity. The Reverend’s laugh, nearly a cough, told them that they had made a mistake; not in their belief in Clovey’s perceptive powers, but in the expression of that belief. Hastily, they reminded him, and themselves, that Clovey was a humble woman who knew her place. With this, the Reverend agreed, but halfheartedly, bedeviled by the sense that he had been outdone by his wife.

But the truth of this was in her painting: the women looking inward at their own souls; inward—their arms were not outstretched, their faces never upturned. Their hands were clasped beneath their chins or upon their laps, and they prayed inwardly, to a power residing not only in the heavens, but within, their supplication not to a shining and external light, but to a light that shined within, unseen, only now discovered.

And her sculptures. Inaccessible. Sold at posh galleries at a cost prohibitive to most. They came nevertheless, to see daring women; leaping women, their legs long and lithe, clothed in dresses like tulip petals, as vivid as marigolds; flying women resurrected from the grave, their eyes empty, the set of their lips intent, intractable; women dancing wantonly—you knew that they had pasts—wanton women, balanced precariously on one toe, one leg raised, both arms raised; women delicate and severe, both graceful and lewd. Ugly women, mutilated, blind; crazy women, their heads in their hands, their environs garish, swirling.

The people saw this. They had assumed that the Reverend honored these women in his wife. They had not understood the tenuousness of his love for Clovey, or his delicate rivalry with her. They did not know that he feared her knowing eyes, feared his own transparence before those eyes.

Clovey understood his fear, although she could not tell him so.

Just as she could not stop the inspiration that was born in her when she heard the simple, lilting speech of her mother, or other mothers weeping as they prayed; when she smelled potato pies baking; saw white sheets hanging from a clothesline, or young girls in choral lines in the vestibules of churches. Things stirred in her. She needed to interpret, to create. For this she had been ordained before her birth.

Her gifts were burdens to her. They woke her at night and sent her stumbling to the bathroom, a thing in her that threatened to be born. She sought to experience more fully the God she had caught glimpses of in her own work—not the patriarchal God of her husband’s dogma, but the nurturing, all-embracing God he had failed to discern in the scriptures; the mother God she felt inside herself. And the man who wished to be her god could only watch her with chagrin. He began to criticize her work, tacitly at first—

“Honey, some people don’t understand your art.”

“Some people do.”

And he would glare at her before descending the stairs of their exalted house. She would often find him, hours later, still brooding in his study.

Then he began to berate her.

“You know, people are getting tired of you doing nothing but women.”

“I do other stuff.”

“No. You don’t. You do nothing. Just women.”

“I do nature and God and—”

“And that dead white man.”

Her lip trembled. “He was my father.”

“He was a white man. ’S what he was.” He waited. She did not respond. “And you think he’s God.”

Months passed. Their bed became a battleground, in which he engaged in a unilateral war against her. And Clovey submitted to his gratuitous assaults for as long as she could keep silent.

“Aldridge, that hurts.”

“You ain’t hurtin’.”

“Aldridge . . . that
hurts.
” And she tried with all her might to push him away. But he ignored her pleas, and her tears. She bit her lip and dug her fingernails into his back until he collapsed on top of her, breathing heavily, his breath like that of the wood-burning stove at Aunt Suzanne’s house, like fumes from the hell into which she had descended—not the infernal pit of writhing reptiles, but the hell of understanding. She had been here before, when she was a small child. She was back.

Sobbing, Clovey pushed again at Aldridge.

He rolled away from her like a stone.

She stood and stumbled toward the bathroom. Across the dark corridor that separated them, Aldridge was speaking. Sickened and hurt, Clovey was not aware that she was hearing.

She painted a confusion of red labyrinthine tissue, its walls curved like the petals of a massive rose in bloom; and sodden velvet vulvae the color of pain.
oh and you think that white man
loved
your mama? you got no idea what
love
is
snaked its way through a tiny opening in the subtle folds, and slithered through the tiny corridors.
you got no idea
who god is (i am god) A bolt of steel, solid and black, forced its way through a narrow corridor of red hot ferrous, the walls glowing. Sparks flew.
love you i don’t love you? what you think
this
is

Later, these paintings would be hailed as the foretelling of a yet unborn and feminine consciousness, distinctively black in complexion. Colored women would bite their lips but would not speak.

Aldridge did not attend the exhibit.

No one asked.

To have left her would have confirmed what they all no doubt believed.

Aldridge set up a narrow cot and began to sleep in his study.

The urge to consume red clay moved Clovey to the fields of North Carolina, from which she had come.

Little had changed since her last visit. Tobacco still waited for harvesting in June. Potted geraniums still graced the windows of the house on Chestnut Street—her mother’s house now. And although he had been deceased for some time, her father’s love still made her feel particular, as her mother’s understanding spoke to her of the mother god who waited for reaffirmation in Clovey. She spent idle days outside the house in Henderson, drinking the sun, attentive to the buzzing of bees.

Jewell had been licensed as a midwife. She counseled Clovey to rest, to avoid confrontation and to eat no salted pork. And she lay beside Clovey in the bed in the upstairs room, holding her as she had been held, rocking her as she had rocked Jessie; humming the tune that her own mother had known, when upon a raining night in a never-slumbering city, Vyda Rose had begun to hum—a tune she could not recall learning, or associate with a person or place or experience.

But Clovey seemed to recognize it, and succumbed to peaceful sleep. Time passed. And still, her mother hummed, murmuring, rocking Clovey uneasily.

She did not ask of Aldridge.

But she told Clovey to go home.

“Your adversary has surrendered,” Jewell said. She paused to smooth back the copper hair, and to squeeze reassuringly Clovey’s hand. “Your moment of glory awaits you,” she said. “Go home.”

HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA

JUNE, 1965

Then shall the dust return to the earth
as it was: and the spirit shall return
unto God who gave it.

—Ecclesiastes 12:7

They whispered of her in ladies’ bathrooms, in the clammy cold basements of Methodist churches. They dared not pronounce her name aloud, even those who knew it. She had been, they knew, appropriately ashamed, or at least discreet. So they spared her, to the extent they could, the humiliation of open scandal. Jewell had not, after all, been a whorehouse wench.

And he—the white man—had treated her well. She lay for two days in a fine polished casket, in the parlor of the house that he had left her. In her own name. And in her own name she lay sedately; the name unknown to many. Ashamed of this, they sneaked glances at her name as they fanned themselves with programs printed on heavy paper. 1902–1965. She had lived among them for more than sixty-two years. And they had denied her name.

But what else could they have done?

The husband had been dead for years. And the children had moved. To Philadelphia. And New York. Away from the shame. Even the youngest one—especially the youngest one, they had whispered—the one who was
his,
had moved away.

But they had come. The dark-skinned girls had become sturdy women, serious, settled, their manner as firm as their broad buttocks, their husbands solemn. They had made arrangements, as was expected of them, efficiently, prudently, nodding approval of the body, the yellow gown and strand of pearls, ordering the removal of the heavy powder from the face. Respectable women.

The boys had become silent men, their heads bowed, their hats in their hands, respectful if not respected.

And the youngest one had arrived on the day of the service. After the plans had been made, the work done. Smiling. Cordial. Pregnant, her black dress a tent draping the protruding belly that preceded her into the parlor of the house on Chestnut Street. She spoke softly, a catch in her voice occasionally as she dabbed with a tissue at the corners of her eyes. Proper, she spoke, like white folks, as did the husband of thunderous voice who was a preacher.
Hmph!
they snorted. And his wife in a dress above her knees! They stared at her, their brows knit, their lips turned down at the corners.

But Clovey was not unnerved. Her gaze was steadfast upon the tithes box at the New Bull Swamp. It was nothing in particular. But she stared at it as they stared at her. And she did not, would not apologize. She crossed her thin legs clad in sheer black leggings, and she looked them full in the face for a long, defiant moment.

Secretly, men dreamed of her. As her husband spoke, passion in his thunderous voice, they parted the proper black-clad legs. She looked at them in surprise. Their wives touched them, discreetly. They were brought back to reality. But they knew that she knew—had known in that moment between her legs and reality—that she was to them what her mother had been: black, but less so by association with her father; desirable because she belonged to the white man they supposed to be their oppressor. They would not have been surprised, they mused, if Clovey had married a white man—too good for their boys, as her grandmother had been for them.

They had forgotten their long-ago rejection of Jewell.

But they remembered the whispers of their wives. The touching, discreet, when her path crossed theirs.
Evenin’, Miz Fanny.
Or
Mo’nin’, Miz
Rose Lee.

Mo’nin’,
their wives had replied, and smiled falsely, thinking that they recalled her name, but not certain; grateful for her never lingering, but hurrying on, crossing the street, her basket full of geraniums that spilled over the sides, or cornmeal and flour, en route to the house on Chestnut Street, where it was said that they lived together in sin. It was said. It was not seen. Until the day that Clovey had been born, and the sun had hidden it’s face in shame. And they had completely forgotten her name.

They burned the body after. Blue flames leapt and murmured. And Jewell’s ashes were placed in an urn. The youngest—the one who was
his
—had insisted upon this. Miraculously, the sisters had relented. The black-clad Clovey sealed the urn and placed it in a safe deposit box in Henderson. As if the ashes were precious stones. People shook their heads.
She sho’ got white folks’ ways.

But they lusted for her still, those men rejected and of dream-filled eyes. They lusted for Jewell despite her passing—the woman who was of them, and they of her. Mother. Sister. Would-be lover. But never truly theirs. She belonged, they supposed, to their master. They did not know that she belonged, had always belonged, to herself.

The ashes rested, nameless in their urn.

To the women, this was just as well. They had neither needed nor desired her.

But the spirits that had lived within her returned to the places from which they had come. They did not rest. They returned to come again.

BULL SWAMP CREEK, WARREN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

AUGUST, 1965

And the graves were opened; and many bodies
of the saints which slept arose.

—Matthew 27:52

The pains had begun at the scattering of ashes—weeks later, when Clovey had resolved to set her mother’s ashes free.
Drive me to the bridge over Bull
Swamp Creek,
she had said, because it had seemed as good a place as any. Aldridge had worried about her health, her far-advanced pregnancy. But she had insisted upon the trip, and Aldridge, not wishing to upset her, had set out on the nine-hour return drive South, dutifully, though not without reservations.

He had stopped the white Lincoln at the edge of the bridge, and stood with her to whisper a prayer.

And there at the bridge over Bull Swamp Creek, her swollen fingers still wrapped around the empty, downturned urn, Clovey folded herself in pain.

The tearing at her womb had begun without warning. It stopped just as suddenly.

And a dark child was born without labor as the ashes sailed away in a flurry.

Clovey looked down at the thin black face, the sharp black eyes wide open beneath a cap of dark satin hair, and she knew that this was no ordinary child; knew that in the blood and the spirit and the person of this child lived all of the ancestors; and the child’s own spirit, rising, on great black wings bearing without shame the scarlet past. Clovey stroked reverently the small velvet face, the skin soft like down against her knuckles. When she asked for a name, her heart whispered
Rae’ven.
She whispered this in Aldridge’s ear.

Rae’ven,
she whispered,
our mothers returned in spirit.

And Aldridge agreed, though he did not understand:
Surrender,
Clovey had sought to call her, conjuring images of the letting go, the spreading of beveled wings in surrender.
Freedom,
she had meant to convey, the shame and the secrets that remained of the ancestors made incarnate, set free.
Triumph,
she had meant to say, the bearers of those secrets releasing shame, releasing bridled anger and tears, unburdening at river banks to dance beneath feathered wings spread like a canopy over the diaspora.

Back home, they dressed the baby in celebratory red, and debuted Rae’ven at church.

But some looked warily upon the chiseled dark face, so unlike her mother’s. Lifting the thin blanket to peer at the tiny visage, some shrank back, discerning in spirit a warrior woman; and three small, angry girls who could not cry, at a grave near the edge of a wood.

Some knew of, but could not name, the woman said to have been buried there.

Rae’ven,
Clovey whispered, when they asked the baby’s name, and kissed the top of the bonneted head.

But those not ashamed to recall their mother’s name; those who knew her whispered,
Sapphire.