George & Rue Read online

  She say, “After this one, no more, Asa. No more.” And she laughed.

  Asa muttered, “We already got one too many,” and, quick as could be, Alisha slapped the fool man, and the newborn in his mother’s arms wailed bitterly. Asa swore at Alisha to scram.

  “Get fuck out ma house.”

  Alisha spoke, spookily, “If you don’t hang God in your heart, Asa, you—or these boys—is gonna hang.”

  Asa spake: “You mumbo-jumbo bitch.”

  Cynthy warn, “Be kind, Asa.” He glared.

  Alisha spat, “I’m takin the cord to bury.” Then she snapped up her things, snapped close her doctor’s bag, and swept out.

  Asa was alone with his family, and lonely. The sides of Cynthy’s eyes glinted like aluminum in the pungent, smoky, weeping dark.

  II

  WHAT NEITHER Asa nor Cynthy knew was how much their personal destinies were rooted in ancestral history—troubles. Their own dreams and choices were the passed-down desolations of slavery. African Nova Scotia and, specifically, Three Mile Plains were the results of slave trade and slave escape. Three Mile Plains, Hants County, Nova Scotia, was, in fact, five, six miles of rolling hillsides directly southeast of Windsor town, which was forty-five miles northwest of Halifax, the provincial capital. The Negro—Coloured—people come from black slaves freed by redcoats down in Maryland and Virginia, then transported, like convicts, to “New Scarcity” during the War of 1812. They bore names like Johnson, Croxen, Grey, States, and Hamilton—the surname of John, a hellish master back on hellish St. Simon’s Island in hellish Georgia. They arrived just like two thousand black others who came with nothing to nowhere, were landed with indifference and plunked on rocky, thorny land (soon laced with infants’ skeletons), and told to grow potatoes and work for ale. They was so poor, they supposedly didn’t even have history. And could they afford self-respect? Well, they paid for it with their backs, their legs and feet, their hands and arms.

  The Plains people had since mixed with the Mi’kmaq, but only a few ancients knew exactly with whom and when. The results were splendid, though. These saltwater, brass-ankle Negroes had bulbous noses, sharp black eyes, curly and partly straight hair, and skin tones running from deep molasses brown-black to maple sugar cream, auburn copper to red-iron, orange, and to blue. Their black hair could be blondish in places or high red. Also mixed up with whites, they often mirrored gorgeous Gypsies, possessing long black hair and copper skin, or even long blondish hair with cinnamon skin. They were nerve-rackingly, cinematically beautiful, terrifyingly, terrifyingly matinée-idol handsome. They looked like they stepped from a rainbow. Some trespassed onto fairgrounds and passed into carnivals as Moroccan showgirls or Indu dancers, and some posed as suspiciously English-only Cuban gangsters or became, easily, “New Yorkers” and went to Montreal where their shot-up corpses turned up in cars sunk into the Saint Lawrence River. Or they scrimped and saved and sent their children away to become professors of theology and umpteen languages, poets, and preachers, in Massachusetts, New Jersey, even New York City, North Carolina, Texas, and California. Or they became Commonwealth pugilists beating shit out of everybody—Yank, Caribbean, South American, African.

  Three—Five—Mile Plains people had little plots of land to farm on long, sloping hillsides. They’d keep a few chickens, banty hens, cocks; a crude pen’d hold a prize pig; the prosperous could have a lettuce garden, apple trees, a cow, a horse. Other folks be pasted to scrawny fields of hay and tall grass and nothing else. Originally, them stingy, shifty Brits had granted no one nough land to be an independent farmer. It was barbed-wire-fenced rocky, stony, pebbly field, very little red or black soil. Folks had to take hard rocks for pillows—and be happy. It were a starvation kingdom of consumption and cod. Hens clucked like whores. Dogs ate up the people’s air and belched and bayed at their steps. Beyond the barren fields, there was pines, spruce, birch, alder, crabapple trees, oak, elm, maple, hazelnut bush, thorny raspberry canes, jetting blackberry canes, a Lombardy poplar or two, then train tracks and then the main road, Highway 1, yes, serpentine, and connecting the Annapolis Valley farmers (inheritors of land stolen from Acadians) with Halifax, southeast-bound.

  But their local citadel was Windsor, or in Mi’kmaq, Piziquid. Situated at the marriage of the Avon and St. Croix rivers, it was a quarry full of “white gold”—“plaster of Paris”—gypsum. It were also business in limestone, wool, and apples. The town fronted on the Avon River, which, much muddier than the Bard’s Avon, would flood and drain twice a day in rhythm with the “World’s Highest Tides” in the Bay of Fundy. “Windsor-on-Avon” is acres of mudflats shimmering when the tide’s bottomed out.

  Plains Negroes had to go into Windsor to work. They went to the gypsum quarries, to the textile mill, the apple orchards, and into the mansions, all for pennies. In the gypsum pits, they saw buddies “axidentally” dynamited—arms, legs, flying through the air, or dropping dead of lung cave-ins, their breaths whitened by gypsum that blackened the guts. In the Windsor Clothiers factory, folks churned out thin cotton socks that disintegrated after one wear and one wash. Other Windsor Plains people made fiddles—and cash playin reels and jigs. There was work on the roads, driving a horse and cart. If a man got out of the quarry, he could milk cows (if he still had his hands). Privation was there in the boulders, in the starving hog, in the men mistakenly blasting each other into amputees for a wage of twenty-five cents a day, and calling themselves lucky. Some died broken, but everybody died broke. The people had to make their history with their sweat.

  Many Plains’ homes was ramshackle, lopsided boards, nailed together on crooked foundations, with no basement, only a hole for keeping potatoes. Rickets hit at tables; bureaus and sofas hobbled along on three real legs.

  Still, in winter, as Asa knew too well, the tarpaper shacks with tin roofs was iceboxes, their cold embittering and chilling even embers. In such inclemency, folks could perish while cooking, or freeze into statuesque sleeping positions like Pompeii’s fossilized figures. Or they had to humble and sip muddy water from pigpens.

  The kerosene guy, Jack Clare, from the District of Clare, come only when the snow was deep. Folks heard the chop-chop of his horses’ hooves over ice. Then they’d feel guilty and buy more than they needed. Then debt’d come on as mean as a gangster. Folks’d spend half the winter doubled up in pain from cutting ice for water or doubled up in fear of flu or bill collectors. When flu hit, people die faster than they can be buried. If it’s Spanish flu, they die by the dozens and the halfdozens. There was tuberculosis set right in the snow, and cholera too. Or polio and rheumatism in how the rain fell. Or arthritis communicated by ice. Winter was no salt pork and brown biscuit to get anyone by. You got up in the dark, went to bed in the dark. You awoke with snow frosting your face because the window’s like a gap between mountains. And no righteous eating, eh? If it wasn’t possible to buy food, folks’d slaughter their horses, if they’d any. People would destroy the horses as they was eatin up the hay folks had to eat. Times they had to boil skinny, filthy rats for meat and take cholera water to drink. They was always between flu and whooping cough.

  Joy was a beer. Food could be mud, drink just rain. Or it was potatoes and spring water, bread and molasses, cold chicken and beer. Holidays? Ill. Dominion Day was a big drunk, all day long. Everyone’d pass out, lie down, sprawling in roads, or stand up and piss against walls or squat and piss on floors. People plunked banjo and whistled harmonica along streams dragging through weedy fields, water gushing, plush, over weedy earth. It were a hillbilly Hell.

  III

  ONCE Alisha had gone off with the great prize of the navel string, Cynthy felt sad again. She mourned her once-loved fantasy that Asa was a gallant who was gonna spirit her out the narrow Valley, just spread his arms like Tarzan or Samson and push away all their troubles, and take her to fabulous Montreal, where style was brilliant, and where Coloured people could live posh—even if they had to speak French. Once, she‘d even dreamt she was purring in a
sixteen-cylinder Lincoln, a double-eight, a gigantic car that was like an aeroplane, and she and Asa were floating down Sainte-Catherine Street in Montreal, as big as life, waving at the jealous gawkers lining the sidewalks. When she smiled, in this delirious fantasy, her luxurious pleasure started at the back of her throat, if not deep in her lungs, then moved out to the surface of her face, rejuvenating and toning already youthful and graceful beauty muscles. The car stopped right at Eaton‘s, and she and Asa—who was wearing a black silk suit with a gold silk shirt, and she herself, in a dress deep-dyed a hymnal red—waltzed into the department store where, with the aid of curtsying mademoiselles, they selected racks of clothes to be put into barrels and sent down home. a voluptuous frisson had thrilled Cynthy’s sleeping body, and when she awoke, she’d felt wet between her legs from what she imagined was a trickle of diamonds. Then she awakened and saw that the flow between her legs was the molten rubies of Life itself. But these material dreams had vanished in her monotonous universe of cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, and beans, beans, beans, beans, beans, beans, beans.

  Three years back, when she’d said “I do,” what she didn’t know then, she knew now. Being Asa’s lawful woman, he’d never let her abandon Three Mile Plains and its stony-hearted, stony-faced Negroes, and go on to Montreal, hear the Harlem bands, eat the smoked meat on rye sandwiches with a dill pickle slice, chant hypnotizing French, and spill champagne in champagne-coloured silk sheets. Problem was, it looked like Asa ain’t got no drive; times too, he didn’t even look good. He was clear muscle and hard bone, no fat on his frame: a square-headed, square-shouldered, black son of a bitch. He was so ugly, in actuality, Cynthy thought, that she could wear out a whole dictionary to describe just how sorry her husband was. What had been so beautiful now seemed disgusting. In their marriage she had gone from the molasses keg and its sulphurous sweetness to the pickle barrel and its salty sour. Instead of dying with laughter, out of joy, she felt like a laughingstock. She wanted to be petted, fondled, praised, kissed, licked, lapped, tickled, teased, spoiled, and made love to like in glamour magazines.

  And she ain’t forgotten, wouldn’t ever forget, that red-suited white man at the Kentville train station, that same spring she’d met Asa, who whispered, suavely, “Now, as beautiful as Nova Scotia gals are, ain’t ya the most beautiful brown Nova Scotia gal I ever see?” Why, he’d even pinched her patooty and praised her “plump and pleasant” rump.

  “You’re like a pretty little hurrah’s nest, miss.”

  She were indignant to him, but the man guffawed, said, “You got talent to go with the type, I bet. I bet you could shimmy, tango, and warble blues to go.”

  Cynthy’d switched away from that red-silk-suited white man with the blue tie, but he’d yelled at her sashaying bottom, “Ya come to Montreal, you come by Rufus’s Paradise, he’s a Negro gent who’ll fix you up for big things.”

  Then the train puffed in and the red-white-blues man vamoosed. From then on, she’d craved Montreal. She even kept that name Rufus close to her heart. She knew she’d give it to a son for good luck. When her second son was born, she felt he was spiritually that white man’s son. She’d have to go meet this Montreal Rufus.

  What was Montreal? Her Harlem, her Heaven. From movie magazines and cousins, she knew it was rum that was fire in the mouth and satin in the belly. It was women who could cross ice—black ice—on stiletto heels and never fear losing their balance. It was women who could wear mink in the summer and make a hot day go chilly. It was being a show-offy dancer—a Chocolate Scandal—whose swishing bum would excite a man to dump his stash on drinks and tips. It was rye-and-ginger, Sweet Caporals, and smoky martinis. It was American cigarettes—caramel and tarty—and gangster argot and panache. It was elegant café-coloured legs and Ellingtonlike café-au-lait faces. It was a daily breakfast of brioches, croissants, orange juice, three cups of coffee, three beef sausages, an apple, and a muffin. Montreal was frontier Paris, a Habitant Manhattan.

  Now there were two living babies amid the graveyard that Three Mile Plains could be, if they didn’t get out. Cynthy called the new baby Rufus, or Rue. But he was a bother—rufous in tint and rueful in mood. Too much like his papa. Cynthy was headstrong though. She’d clear-cut a way.

  She had to. It weren’t possible for her to play a slave—Marie-Josèphe Angélique—or a saint—Joan of Arc—and exhibit such a painful degree of hurtful patience or of suicidal humility. Asa was too-goddamn insufferable.

  Asa could raise his bull-faced fist and hit. He could whip her with a thin branch stripped to the green, hot sting. He could swear, “I’ll hurt you in ways you’ll wish to God you didn’t have to be hurt.” But Cynthy knew, on that dull morning in January 1927, she’d purchase a red dress, she’d go to Montreal.

  So what if the Depression got in the way? For a woman without a cent to start with, money was just another luxury unnecessary for a “tolerable” life. Champagne could be rain and ginger ale; a ball gown could be cut from white women’s cast-off curtains; cosmetics could be strained from berries and apples.

  Cynthy’s real tragedy was, her tyrannical household. She’d take a hotcomb to give her “good” hair more curl, and Asa’d snarl, “Why doncha just wear a do-rag?” The very looks that’d prompted him to give her two boys, now just seemed to aggravate his impoverishment: “Inky bitch gotta have kinky hair.” Or with a mouth that spat pure vinegar, he damned her as a hard-bitten bitch, a narrow, un-manning bitch. His honest emotion was sweat. Her marriage was an orchard of rotten fruit and dry, snapped branches, a wormy atmosphere. Not to mention cold winds, chilly rooms, cold gruel, and a bed frozen in frigidity.

  Asa was no longer crazy for incuntation with her. After a gallon of plonk, he’d go stumbling, jaundice-eyed, tar-faced, cussing, up and down the road, seeking some thoroughbred hussy, with his foul lust sticking out, dripping, his cock looking like dried-up muck, a worm of snot dangling from a nostril, and his whole being reeking of pork-scented smoke. And what he squandered outside their doors, on booze and big-ass broads, Cynthy couldn’t question. She couldn’t say to him, “Come with the truth, or leave your dog-ass home,” cos he’d slap her down, leave bloody spittle on her lips, put her out her own house. Times she was tempted to slink down dusty, pot-holed Panuke Road, to lay her burdens down by laying her head on the train tracks, or to hold her two boys in her arms like two loaves of bread and stand in front of a smoking locomotive stampeding to Halifax. But she needed to survive—to revive soulfully in Montreal.

  Faced with Asa’s fists, his cussing tongue, and his lack of even a pittance of respect for her—a woman whose skin should smell of Moir’s fine chocolates, whose beautiful hair should always boast gold ribbons, and whose wardrobe should bristle with furs and shimmer with silks, Cynthy began to hope Asa would just drink rum and die. Or perhaps another man, hungry for her favours and angry at Asa’s shameless, fitful, alcoholic pawings of her excellence, would stick a shotgun at the back of Asa’s skull and pull the trigger. His horror, his ludicrous rummy’s stagger, his skin transporting the stench of greasy, sallow big fat bitches, all had to perish so Cynthy could be a beauty who could sit in windows and be admired. In a red dress.

  Why’d she need to fuss with some fool whose brain was muddy with rum? She desired fried liver with fried onions, fried chicken with rum, or fish ’n’ chips with salt and vinegar. Not constant pork—ham hocks, pigtails, sausages, tripe from the butchery. How could her looks be sustained by pigs?

  A nightmare of a dream, Asa made their lives a rum-splashed Damnation; he was Satan to Cynthy and their sons. The belt touched them so much, it was like their best suit of clothes. The wanton rage inside him was a lake of fire and melting rocks, as volcanic as alcohol, his one true faith. All they saw was a daddy who, after a nasty slug of rum, would “paint” the outhouse toilet with the dirt of his mouth or his ass.

  Polluted by their papa’s mean drunkenness, the boys grew like poisonous weeds. They were already learning to slip their skinny f
ists into that drunkard’s pockets to find any bit of coin they could—even if they got smacked or punched for their troubles. They spent their thefts on candy, bubblegum, potato chips, soda pop. Cynthy almost regretted letting her boys be born, for they were the phantoms of a devil father: they seemed like two good-for-nothings already, with their household thieving and angry lying, and they’d not even gone to school yet.

  Throughout her sons’ infancy and her husband’s rummy vileness, Cynthy came more and more to fancy a red dress as an emblem of civilization, one higher than that she knew. For four years then, every time Asa came in drunk, and she could get to clean his pockets before her sons did, she’d take the cash and coins and hide them away. She hoarded secretly what she managed to finagle, finesse, and filch from that monster of a husband. For four years, every time Asa cussed, slapped, or whipped her, she found a way to put away money.

  It was possible to live without money, for that’s what Cynthy had to do. But money was still a salve. Money was good for—one day—herring fillets, kippers, unwatered-down wine, a red dress, and a ticket to Montreal. Money was for bucking beds that couldn’t break. Money was for skin smooth as licorice, for hair as straight as licorice, for breath as sweet as licorice, and for eyes as dark as licorice. Above all, money was for a scarlet-crimson-red dress that could be set off by a white scarf. And didn’t she admire redwood, red chile, red cinnamon, and red wine? The best way to ward off Asa’s evils was, Cynthy believed, to indulge in a dress whose red was opulent and perfect for a carmine-lipped woman with apple-smooth skin.