Sapphire's Grave Read online

  HARLEM MOON

  BROADWAY BOOKS

  new york

  and I saw the cemetery in my dream

  or my back yard

  I cannot tell which

  there was no marker I just knew

  and forgave myself

  my sins

  at the cross at the cross

  where I first saw the light at

  Sapphire’s grave where the burdens of my heart

  rolled away

  it is easier to be angry than to hurt

  I done give up cryin’

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  prologue

  chapter 1

  WARREN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA - MAY, 1863

  LICKSKILLET, WARREN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER, 1873

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - MARCH, 1874

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - JUNE, 1874

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - JULY, 1874

  chapter 2

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - AUGUST, 1874

  ST. JOHN’S PARISH, SOUTH CAROLINA - FEBRUARY, 1772

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - AUGUST, 1874

  chapter 3

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - APRIL, 1875

  chapter 4

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - MAY, 1879

  chapter 5

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - DECEMBER, 1880

  FISHING CREEK, WARREN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA - CHRISTMAS EVE, 1880

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - MARCH, 1881

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - APRIL, 1888

  chapter 6

  WARRENTON, NORTH CAROLINA - JULY, 1900

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER, 1900

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER, 1900

  WARRENTON, NORTH CAROLINA - MARCH, 1901

  WARRENTON, NORTH CAROLINA - JULY, 1902

  chapter 7

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK - JULY, 1902

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER, 1902

  HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY - APRIL, 1903

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - JUNE, 1903

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK - JUNE, 1903

  LOWER MANHATTAN, NEW YORK - JUNE 1903

  HUDSON RIVER - JUNE, 1903

  chapter 8

  RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER, 1903

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - OCTOBER, 1903

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - APRIL, 1904

  WISE, NORTH CAROLINA - JUNE, 1904

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - JULY, 1904

  chapter 9

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - DECEMBER, 1930

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - JUNE, 1931

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - DECEMBER, 1931

  chapter 10

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA - FEBRUARY, 1932

  SANDY CREEK, VANCE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA - MARCH, 1932

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - APRIL, 1932

  SANDY CREEK, NORTH CAROLINA - NOVEMBER, 1932

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - OCTOBER, 1939

  chapter 11

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA - OCTOBER, 1946

  chapter 12

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - JANUARY, 1947

  HIGH POINT SCHOOL FOR GIRLS HIGH POINT, NORTH CAROLINA - NOVEMBER, 1947

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - MAY, 1948

  NORTH CAROLINA COLLEGE AT DURHAM DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER, 1952

  chapter 13

  PATERSON, NEW JERSEY - NOVEMBER, 1964

  chapter 14

  HENDERSON, NORTH CAROLINA - JUNE, 1965

  BULL SWAMP CREEK, WARREN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA - AUGUST, 1965

  epilogue

  reading group companion

  Copyright Page

  prologue

  SIERRA LEONE, WEST AFRICA

  1749

  The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done.

  —Ecclesiastes 1:9

  She was a fierce woman—the kind they did not bother. No, the captain said, raising one hand to stop the advance of several of his crewmen. This one is hostile. She may be violent. The crewmen stopped short, and backed away from her silent, smoldering ferocity. She was black—blue-black, as the crewmen described her—with several stripes carved into each of her glossy cheeks, and wary, narrowed eyes. She did not scream or cry in anguish as did the other women. She had been trekked to the coast from inland, where it was said that the women did not cry, for internment until the ship set sail. Silent and resigned, her angry, level stare had warned of a latent wrath, barely held in check, dreadful as hellfire. The captain was intrigued by her kind. He would have her for himself.

  Long after dark they came to retrieve her from the bowels of the lumbering vessel. She was not asleep, but staring expectantly at the opening to the hold. She had seen the captain’s lechery, and had known that they would come. She was prepared to do what was needed.

  The captain’s quarters were illuminated by a strange glow from a covered receptacle. As her eyes adjusted to the eerie light, she sensed him moving behind her, smelled his alien stench as he came slowly, cautiously toward her. She turned to face him. He was shirtless, with strange, gossamer hairs on his chest that made her skin crawl and her lip curl. He raised a hand as if to fend off an attack. She did not move. Slowly, he lowered his hand. Her eyes followed it to his crotch as he began to speak, softly, in his alien tongue, his eyes moving across her bare breasts, the plane of her belly, the curve where her waist met her hips. Inwardly, she crouched as she waited, marking his steps, measuring the distance between him and herself. For a moment, she was distracted by his phallus, now exposed, pink and erect and defenseless.

  She had steeled herself to face the unknown, watchful and alert for opportunities to escape. She had suffered, patiently, indignities not inflicted upon an ox, things that she must never mention. But she would not suffer the further insult of bestiality with this creature against her will. She would destroy him, and be destroyed.

  He quickened his measured pace, suddenly, and she sprang upon him, her ankles locking around his body, her fingernails digging into his back as she sank her teeth into the flesh surrounding his jugular. He cried out in pain and surprise, beating at her back in a futile, pathetic defense. He bellowed again, but she held her grip, willing him dead, he and all of his kind who had come uninvited from some unknown hellish place to destroy her and hers.

  Men poured into the room, some shouting in horror and shock, others too frightened or stunned to move when they saw the blue-black woman and their captain, locked in a macabre embrace, his hoarse cries dying as she held his neck in her jaws, his blood dripping from her chin.

  It took several men several minutes to detach her, their captain’s agony worsening each time they pulled at the woman, who tightened her death grip, digging into his shoulders yet more deeply, with each tug at her waist or legs or arms, and each blow to her back.

  But when she was finally yanked away from him, she did not fight, only stood quivering with rage, not looking at her captors or struggling against the shackles with which they bound her.

  Had they killed her, she would have won. The captain understood this. He pondered this blue-black woman quaking, he felt, with vengeance and an awe-inspiring and mystic power, as the crewmen tended his near-fatal wound. It had been her intention to kill, and then to be killed. He would see that she lived, in a misery that she could not yet imagine.

  He gave the crew an unconventional order: This devil-witch was not to return to the hold. She would be bound, hand, torso, and foot, to the deck, to be sold not in Charleston but in Santo Domingo. He knew of a trader there who would see that she got her due.

  But a violent tornado prevailed against the great ship, gathering so suddenly and with such migh
t that it took the crew, resting on deck as the human chattel lay secure in the hold, by surprise. The winds seemed to blow in all directions. The ship rocked dangerously as violent waves engulfed the deck and overtook the crew.

  Their bodies were washed ashore days later at the Cape Verde Islands, to the alarm and delight of other crews who waited shipless on the shore. Replacement hands were hastily dispatched to rescue the floundering ship, which lay a day’s journey, it was guessed, from the islands.

  At first the blue-black woman shackled to the deck went unnoticed, lying quietly and still, sunbaked, desiccated, and barely alive as the excited new crew examined the ship’s exterior. When they finally boarded the vessel and found her bound hand, torso, and foot, they speculated as to the reason for her cruel isolation, and the extreme measures that had been taken to bind her to the deck, measures ironically responsible for her survival. She was nursed to health and, exhibiting no signs of aggression, returned to the hold. She would fetch a good price in Charleston.

  And indeed at Charleston she brought a handsome sum at auction, touted as a breeder and field servant, her corded arms and strong back, her slender fingers fit for cotton-picking. No mention was made of a violent temperament or rebellious spirit. No one knew that she possessed a power that had brought the wrath of God upon a great vessel.

  Had they known that she was pregnant, she would have brought an even greater price. But they could not have known. Her pregnancy was barely apparent even at the time of delivery in a rice field in Charleston, some ninety days after sale. Her child, it was said, would not—could not—survive. The tiny girl child, nearly embryonic in appearance, could barely muster a cry when they drew her, a silent and reluctant arrival, into the new world, an ocean away from the place of her conception.

  But survive she did, to grow strong and slender as a reed, blue-black and smoldering with the promise of hellfire in her narrowed eyes. People were frightened by the woman and her child. By the time she was five years old, the girl had become obstinate and sullen toward her masters; and so she was sold away to St. John’s Parish. She would never see her mother again.

  She came to be called Sapphire for her blue skin and flaming, fearsome beauty, alien and frightful and exciting a terrible awe in all who saw her, drawn in spite of themselves.

  At fifteen she received word of her mother for the first time in a decade; her mother—dark shadow of a memory who had instilled in Sapphire a sense of oneness with a God whose nature she could not recall. Her mother, Sapphire was told, had succumbed to a fire of her own setting in Charleston. That part of Sapphire that believed this relinquished its faith in her mother’s God. Her mother had been the only person who had ever loved Sapphire, and even in separation, that love had sustained her—until now.

  She was courted, briefly, by a young man from Cuba called Neptuno, a boxer traveling with his master in the local prizefighting circuit. He was killed during a match in Stono. Sapphire bore his child several weeks later, a premature infant, brown-skinned and green-eyed, whose hair would grow long and straight as sugarcane. Her violent and early arrival caught the attention of the local veterinarian, a young man of Greek descent and gentle disposition. He had been visiting with the livestock when he heard Sapphire’s tortured screams. His compassion drew Sapphire to him. Her glowing black skin and feisty spirit drew him to her. Their affair lasted nearly a year and yielded another girl, this one pale and amber-eyed and, by Sapphire’s calculation, nearly six weeks early.

  Sapphire shared a cabin for a time with a field hand recently imported from across the sea. She was given to him to distract him from the memory of his homeland, to assimilate him and make him feel at home. But after giving birth to their daughter, a dark girl who brought to Sapphire the clarity of her own mother’s face, Sapphire was taken from him one night upon the whim of the Master’s son, who shared her with his friends at a party given on the occasion of his impending marriage.

  Rejected thereafter by her former husband, Sapphire moved to a cabin of her own with her three daughters. She began to receive visits—first a succession of white strangers, usually teenagers from nearby plantations who accosted her in the fields or en route to her cabin at dusk, their hands groping and awkward. Then, overseers and their friends, supposing that she enjoyed, rather than merely endured, their lewd attentions. Eventually, slave men began to take liberties with her, accusing her of disloyalty and asserting their right to exploit as white men had. And she began to give in to them in a desperate attempt to salvage some approval from the enslaved community in which she was forced to live; and when this effort failed, she gave in to them because she had nothing to lose.

  When she discovered that she was pregnant, and horribly alone, Sapphire gathered all the faith that she could recover, and God sent her an angel of benevolence.

  Concerned about the rising rate of infant mortality among the slave population, and the consequent loss of wealth, a neighboring planter had purchased a midwife—an African woman trained in the handling of difficult deliveries, and hired out to neighboring plantations. Sarah was her name.

  Sapphire, with her history of premature deliveries, was a suitable candidate for Sarah’s care. Such care involved a diet of fish and beans, onions and dandelion leaves, and a regimen of herbal concoctions. It stopped short of relief from backbreaking labor in the rice paddies. Sapphire and Sarah developed a comfortable friendship. Some said that they even looked like sisters. Sarah felt this kinship in her heart; but Sapphire could not truly trust in the kindness of others. Sarah understood this, and maintained a comfortable distance.

  But there was trouble: Sapphire had become coddled, the overseer reported, and was refusing to work. She complained of fatigue, headaches, and swelling of the extremities. The Master of the great house nodded his agreement. On two occasions, he had nearly taken a whip to her himself. He had feared that the care of a midwife might spoil the gal. By the time Sapphire’s child was born—another girl, small, but sound—he had decided to fix Sapphire. He would make an example of her that the others would not wish to follow.

  And something in Sapphire would die, imperceptibly but certainly. The luxury of human weakness would die for Sapphire. She would be imbued with a hardness and tenacity born of hardship that exceeded the limits of human tolerance. Without understanding the import of his deeds, the enslaver would create the beginning of a legend.

  chapter 1

  WARREN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

  MAY, 1863

  One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh.

  —Ecclesiastes 1:4

  At first, the people did not believe; not when they were gathered together, the music of their whispered prayers, their plaintive sighs, silenced; hoes in hand, their faces expectant; their feet caked with the red mud of the field, the lush, May grass beneath them, they listened but did not hear the message, the messenger, through lies and deceit, having lost the faith of the congregants many decades ago. They could go, or they could stay—it was up to them entirely. The people stood stunned, the messenger thought, into a silence of incredulity and joy. But it was only the silence of disbelief, and the fear of deception kept their feet frozen to the grass. The fear of lashing and the loss of children, limbs, bound their feet to the muddy soil, and flattened the grass of a fine spring day, when freedom came four months late to taunt them, pitiless and unkind.

  It was not until they were dismissed, by the nod of the messenger, his face crimson, his eyes afraid, that they turned en masse to return to the fields, the stables, the kitchens, and parlors of their labor. In these, their places, they resumed their work—the mindless, often backbreaking toil that blunted their senses and made possible the breaking of their spirits, that part of them which might have otherwise been free. They would not believe. They set their faces. They would not believe until God himself said it.

  Sister, too, did not believe that she was free; not when she ventured alone, with caution, to the edge of the field, unsure whether she w
as seen, then wandered back to the high, dense tobacco field, feeling foolish and sweating, her heart beating wildly. She paused for a moment, her hoe in hand, and placed her free hand on her pounding chest. No one spoke to her. No lash came down on her back, the onerous heat her only oppressor, the silence of the people a void resounding. You may go, or you may stay. Sister would stay. She would wait until a sign came.

  She had not thought of liberty. She had not thought of bondage. She had worked, her mind numb, not daring to confront the betrayal of a god who had enslaved. She had been offered this god. She had not received him. She did not think of him. But alone in her cabin, alone in a room filled with others—others numb to all things except the fear of an unknown almighty—she closed her eyes and allowed herself, briefly, to peer into heaven with anxious eyes, eyes fixed on the inner, the eyes of her heart, not her mind. Eyes that heard—freedom whispered. And in the field of her labor, freedom whispered. It did not shout. It did not come. When freedom came, its name was Prince. On loan to a nearby farm, where he had sired a brood, he had not heard until his return. People saw him running, ’way out across the field. Some took off their hats and stopped to watch him, their hands shielding their eyes from the sun, from whence there came a more acceptable messenger, his shirt loose and flapping, his arms flailing.

  He arrived to stand before them breathless, his eyes dancing, his face aglow. He smiled, displaying the empty spaces where there once resided three teeth kicked out by the boot of a Negro overseer; and God spoke in the voice of a fool.

  “We free!” he shouted.

  The people stood stunned in the silence of incredulity and joy.

  “We free!” he repeated, and tilted his head in puzzlement at their silence. Sister set down her hoe. She leapt into his arms, her skirt entangling her legs. He spun her around, chanting. “We free! We is free!”

  She lost her hat. Her knees were exposed. She did not care. Freedom had come.

  They were married the next year, on an April day, beneath an elm. Sister wore a crown of hibiscus and juniper. A garland draped one shoulder and encircled her narrow waist. Barefoot in a gown made of bleached white sacks, she felt like royalty beside her Prince as they recited their vows in the setting sun, beneath the elm.