THE BOOK OF NEGROES (16 page)

A woman was lying on a bed next to three burning candles. Georgia asked the new buckra man for cloth and three calabashes of warm water and shooed him and Appleby away. From her pouch, Georgia brought out a stopped gourd of oil.

“Sit by her head and talk,” Georgia said.

While Georgia rubbed her right hand in oil, spread the woman’s legs, and slid her fingers inside, I looked into the woman’s eyes and asked her name. She didn’t answer. “What your name?” I asked again. No response.

“She done ask your name,” Georgia called out. Still no answer.

The woman looked scared. When I tried Bamanankan, the woman’s eyes grew wide. When I tried Fulfulde, words rushed out of her.

Georgia nudged me with her elbow. “Good thing you’re here, chile.”

The woman’s name was Falisha, and she said she had crossed the big river only a few moons ago. Falisha gripped my hand and arched her back.

“Take fast little breaths when it hurts,” I said.

Georgia placed my hand on Falisha’s womb. In one spot, and another, and another. She asked if I felt anything.

“Two babies,” I said.

Georgia’s mouth fell open. “How you know that?”

“I done tell you before. My mama done teach me to catch babies.”

“Could use your mama right here,” Georgia said. “This woman can die.”

All through the night, Falisha rode through waves of pain. But between convulsions, she talked and talked as if she had not spoken to another soul for months. She said she had two children at home. She had been abducted with her husband, but he had died crossing the water. I didn’t want to hear about that and didn’t ask any questions, hoping that she would tire and be silent, but Falisha just kept on speaking. Her other children had seen three and five rain seasons. She had no idea where they were now, or who was caring for them. I felt relieved when she stopped talking and let out a long, low moan. It came from far back in her throat.

Falisha didn’t wait for instructions. She pushed mightily of her own accord and, after several tries, out came the head. She pushed again and the shoulders and butt and little feet came out. Georgia wrapped the baby and had me hold it. It had a tiny, squished nose and a rooting mouth. I wondered how much time would pass before this tiny creature would understand that he was not free to live as he wanted.

Falisha was taking shallow breaths.

“A boy,” I told her.

Falisha smiled faintly but she had no energy to speak.

“You have still another baby to come,” I told her.

The first baby started to cry.

“Good, he is breathing,” Falisha said. “I die now. You take my baby, Fula girl. I die now.”

“Nobody dies,” I said. “You have another baby inside you.”

Falisha slept for a while. I held the baby tight against me until he settled to sleep.

“You all sure talk mumbo-jumbo,” Georgia said.

“Fulfulde,” I said.

“Foo-what?”

“Our language,” I said. “Fulfulde.”

Georgia shrugged. She lit a pipe and smoked tobacco.

I didn’t want to wake the mother or the sleeping baby, but I had been wanting for days to ask Georgia a question. Whispering, I said, “I been wanting to find a man named Chekura.”

Georgia looked at me intently. “You too young for a man.”

“He ain’t my man,” I said. “We done cross the big water together. He is like a brother.”

“Brother,” she snorted. Seeing me stare so seriously, Georgia softened. “If he is in the low-country, the fishnet will pull him up.”

“The fishnet,” I repeated.

“We got our ways,” Georgia said. “Niggers got mouths like rivers. Our words swim the rivers, all the way from Savannah to St. Helena to Charles Town and farther up. I done hear of our words swimming all the way to Virginia and back. Our words swim farther than a man can walk. When we find someone, up he comes in the fishnet.”

“He’s not really a man,” I said. “Just a boy, and his name is Chekura.”

“If he nearby, I find him in the fishnet. Or maybe he find you.”

Georgia used her thumb to stuff tobacco in her pipe. “You smoke?”

I shook my head. “Believers don’t smoke.”

“Believers?”

I pointed up. “Allah.”

“What you talking about, girl?”

“God,” I said.

“What God got to do wit it?” Georgia said.

“God say no smoke. Our book say no smoke.”

“Don’t be talking books. Buckra man not like that at all.”

I was completely confused. I had seen the medicine man reading books by lamplight in his room on the ship.

“What God got to do wit it?” Georgia repeated.

“God say no tobacco,” I said.

“Huh!” Georgia slapped her thighs. “Master Apbee got God, he smoke. Two niggers on our plantation talking all the time about Jesus this and Jesus that, and they smoke. Some of us got God and some of us don’t, but ain’t a nigger in Carolina don’t love tobacco.”

I didn’t know how to tell Georgia that palm wine and tobacco were not allowed, but that kola nuts were fine. I hadn’t even seen a kola nut since leaving my homeland. The Qur’an was just too complicated to explain.

The baby started crying. Georgia took him from me and squished his rooting mouth up against Falisha’s nipple. The baby sucked furiously.

“That’ll get her going,” Georgia said.

Sure enough, Falisha awoke and pushed again. The second baby came quickly then. A girl. Discoloured and motionless.

Georgia cut the cord and listened for the breathing that didn’t come, the heart that didn’t beat. Then she wrapped the baby completely.

“And the second one?” Falisha asked.

“She is dead,” I said.

“A girl?” Falisha said.

“Yes.”

“I always wanted a girl.” Falisha stretched her hand across her eyebrows, covering her face, and she lay completely still.

I stroked her hair for a moment, but Falisha did not move or respond. I stood up to take some air outside. The stars were brilliant that night, and the cicadas were crying in endless song. If the sky was so perfect, why was the earth all wrong?

Georgia came out to get me. “We got to move. Buckra coming soon. The second baby is our secret. Nobody knows. Falisha had only the boy. You hear? You tell her too.”

Georgia bundled up the dead child and put it under her clothes. We left the son on Falisha’s breast.

By the time we arrived back at the Appleby plantation, light was creeping into the eastern skies. We paused at our door for a moment. When we were sure that all was still, Georgia took me deep into the woods to bury the dead twin. Afterwards, we returned quickly to our bed.

“I never seen someone from Africa learn so fast.” Georgia stopped to touch my hair. “But watch out, girl. You know too much, someone kill you.”

“I ain’t killable,” I said.

“You were sure’ nuf half-dead when I scooped you out the yard,” Georgia said, “but I sure is glad you living now.”

THE WEATHER GREW WARMER and more humid. With the meat on my bones that made Georgia so proud, my womanly bleedings also returned. The heat reminded me of home, but the dampness weighed on me like a wet blanket. I saw the first of many rainstorms. Late in the afternoon, puffy clouds started darkening. Long before the day was done, the light suddenly changed as if evening had come instantly. Lightning cracked, the thunder grew louder and then the skies exploded. Georgia grabbed me away from the washtub.

“Lightning fry you up like bacon,” she said, pulling me into her home and putting her arm around my shoulders. “Hope the roof gwine hold.”

It wasn’t just rain. It was like a thousand buckets of water pouring down at the same time. Two trees blew over. Lightning split another one. Our roof held, but another caved in. We heard the shouts of Negroes running from the destroyed house, seeking cover in another. After a short time, the onslaught ended as quickly as it had begun. The sky cleared, the clouds blew away and the coolness brought by the rain turned to steamy vapours in the sun.

Georgia took me along whenever she was asked to catch babies on the plantation or on neighbouring islands. About one out of three babies
died in childbirth or soon after, and a number of the mothers died too. I loved being with Georgia, but despised having to face sickness and death. Georgia didn’t want to leave me alone on the plantation—she said I wasn’t safe without her by my side—but I pleaded to be allowed to stay when she knew ahead of time that an expecting mother was already ill.

It wasn’t just mothers and babies who died. Lots of others died, including buckra and adult Negroes. They died of fevers, with their bones on fire. Georgia told me that the buckra feared the vapours in the low-country swamps. In the hottest half of the year, which Georgia called “sick season,” Appleby stayed away almost entirely.

Georgia was known all through the low-country islands for baby catching and doctressing. Every time buckra or Negro overseers from other plantations came asking for her services, she insisted on some form of payment. The one thing she craved—more than rum, tobacco or bright-coloured cloth—was Peruvian bark. Appleby or other plantation owners had to bring it to her from the Charles Town market, and they complained of its great cost. Sometimes Georgia had to trade as much as ten baby catchings for one pouch of the bark. When she got it, she dried it, ground some of it in her hand-sized mortar and pestle, didn’t allow a grain of the dust to be lost and kept it in a leather pouch, hanging from a wooden beam overhead in her home. Other bits of it, she chewed. She offered some to me, but it was too bitter for my liking. Apart from me and Happy Jack, whom she occasionally took into her bed, Georgia defied any Negro to enter her home. She didn’t want anybody messing with her powders and roots, especially the Peruvian bark, which she said was the best treatment for fever.

Georgia kept pouches in various shades of blue. She made me remember every detail. In the blue-black pouch went thyme, for speeding delivery and bringing away the afterbirth. In the deep-water-blue pouch went jimsonweed, which she kept as a secret weapon to bring on madness. She
gathered pine-needle clusters in a sky-blue pouch and used them to make tea for stuffy noses. In a light blue bag went sweet fennel and anise seeds, for windy disorders.

“What’s this?” Georgia would say, testing me.

“Plantain and horehound mixture, for snakebites,” I said.

“Good. And this?”

“Pennyroyal, for insects.”

“Don’t tell no buckra about how fast your head work, girl,” she said. “They take you straight to the river and drown you.”

Not long after we planted the indigo, Georgia announced that she was going to make me very sick, but only to ensure that I wouldn’t die later. She said we needed time, and that this was the good time to do it. There was sickness going around the country, she said. In Charles Town. In the low-country. In crowded areas. The sickness came and went, she said, and when it came it took many lives. Georgia said she had learned from an old low-country woman how to prevent the pox.

“I fix you up so it don’t kill you,” she said.

I told her that I didn’t want a knife touching any part of my body.

“Just a little piece of your arm,” she said.

Still I refused.

“Look here,” she said, baring her shoulders and back. I saw numerous pockmarks. “That’s all you get. Some of these marks. I make you sick so that you don’t die.”

“When?”

“Now. You got time to get better before indigo harvest.”

“But Mamed will beat me if I don’t work,” I said.

“Married knows. Years back, I done fix him up against the pox.”

I started to cry. She grabbed my jaw.

“Stop that now. I fix you up like you my own family.”

Using a sharp knife, Georgia made a cut in my forearm. I was expecting
the worst pain imaginable, but it was a quick cut, only an inch long and not too deep. Into the cut, she pushed a bit of thread that she said had come from another man that she had made sick in the very same way. She closed up the cut and placed elderberry lard over it.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“For now,” she said.

“No more cutting?”

“No more cutting. But sickness comes soon.”

“When?”

“’Bout seven days.”

Georgia made me stay put in her little home. I could not go out. I had to eat inside, and use the waste bucket inside. I nearly went out of my mind with boredom. I was feeling fine, and there was nothing to do. I argued with her about sitting all day in the dark, damp hut, but she insisted. Then the fever came. My bones and back felt like they were splitting. It subsided quickly.

“Now can I go?” I asked.

“You not done yet,” Georgia said.

The fever came back. I had a headache so bad that I had to lie down and cover my eyes against the light. When I leaned over the bed to vomit, I saw one of my teeth fall into the pail. Within a day, sores began to fester in my mouth and nose.

“It will smell so bad that you hate yourself,” Georgia said, “but don’t worry. It will pass. The smell will go away. Don’t you pay it no mind.”

Sores started breaking out on my body. The ones on the soles of my feet stung the most. They gave off such a stench that I was ashamed to be near Georgia. I couldn’t bear the smell of myself.

“I knows the smell. I am used to it. You got good sores,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘good’?” I asked. My voice was barely a whisper. I could not get out of bed. I wanted to die.

“The sores are apart. One here. One there. Not together. Not touching. And you only have ten of them. Ten is good.”

I remained sick for nearly half a cycle of the moon. The blisters turned to scabs. I promised myself that if I ever got better, I would never complain—not even to myself—about having to work hard in the sun, or having to work for the buckra. My strength began to return, and eventually turning in the bed became less painful. Then I was sitting again, moving around the cabin and able to eat a bit of dinner. When the last scab fell off, Georgia said I was better.

“Go out and get some respiration,” she said. “You be working again soon enough.”

She checked me over and over that summer. “You got off easy. Just a few pockmarks and none on your face.”