Sapphire's Grave Read online

  He sat on the cornhusk mattress to wait for her embrace or silent reprimand—he never knew which to expect. At times she was reticent, her eyes angry, refusing to look at him upon his returns from unannounced departures. She held her sensuous lips tightly shut, making them protrude from her face in a way that beckoned him. She would move about the tiny house, her face a wall between them, a closed door, making dinner, sweeping the dirt floor, braiding their daughter’s hair, an open jar of lard beside her on the cornhusk mattress. Sometimes as she moved purposefully from the front room to the back, he intercepted her path, stopping her in midstride, his arms outstretched for the embrace he craved and had come home to obtain. But her icy stare quelled the swelling at his groin, and she stepped around him. His arms fell to his sides.

  “Take me through, dear Lord, take me through . . .” she would croon, softly, her voice deep and throaty and compelling. He would watch her from across the room until he caught her eye, and she would look away resolutely and kneel before the window, her slender torso swaying forward then backward, her eyes closed and her face upturned, singing in her throaty voice a song of pleading and adulation.

  It was at these times that he felt furthest from her. Something in her posture made him shrink from her, feeling himself a rejected sovereign, a lesser god.

  At other times, joy overcame her pride and she fell into his arms, breathless with relief at his return, almost apologetic, he thought, as if it was she who had wronged him. Tentatively, she would touch his face, confirming that he was really here, had actually returned, mercifully to bestow himself upon her.

  “Why you do this?” she would finally ask him wearily. “Why you go away and leave us so long? Prince Junior, he need you—he don’t even know if he got no daddy. We don’t hear nothin’ ’bout you, don’t know if somebody done cut you and lef’ you fo’ dead . . .”

  He would kiss her gently on her forehead creased with concern. She would pause only for a moment, then swallow and continue more earnestly. “Why you stay gone so long? Why you can’t tell nobody where you go? Why you make me worried all the time? I don’t know what to tell people . . .”

  He would kiss her again, this time insistently on the animated mouth to quiet her, and she would struggle free of his embrace to step backward and—“Prince!”—she would say, her chest heaving. “I’m talking to you, but you ain’t hearin’ me. You got to stop now. You’s a grown man with chirren, and you got to stop progin’ ’roun’ in the street, you hear me?” And her voice would rise to a whine as he stepped toward her and wrapped himself around her, cutting off her breath with a fierce and determined kiss, holding her tightly as she struggled hopelessly to free herself, then relented, her body folding lifeless as a rag doll to the dirt floor. It was for these moments that he lived, and for this reason that he made his frequent and randomly scheduled departures: to feel her weak with surrender as he covered her body with his own; to feel her, as he rarely did, truly his.

  He stood to watch her from the window. She had not moved from the wooden chair. Peas and pods fell haphazardly into their respective pots. Her motions were languid and unhurried, her posture relaxed. She paused for a moment to stare absently toward the wooded area behind their yard, but did not turn again to face him. He realized with a pang that she was not ignoring him, but was genuinely uninterested. Puzzled and hurt, he moved into the front room, where his daughter sat fussing with a yellow-haired doll.

  “Daddy, look what they gave me at Sunday school.” He smiled indulgently at her. His son did not look up.

  He opened the door, negotiated the two steps to the ground, and walked around the side of the house with much scuffling and kicking of pebbles. His wife did not seem to hear. He shuffled on and stood in front of her. Intent on her work, she lifted only her eyes, and only for a moment.

  Exasperation and fear made his smile tremulous and his words came out in a whimper.

  “I don’t get no hug?”

  Again she lifted her eyes to gaze up at him bemused, then her face, sarcastically surprised.

  “Who are you?” she asked almost sweetly, the edge on her face, rather than in her voice.

  His mouth worked silently and desperately, and he stammered, finally, “I’m—I’m yo’ husman.”

  Her expression did not change. She raised one fist over a pot and dropped several peas, then placed her hands on her knees and leaned toward him. He could see her breasts suspended and loose against the denim of her overalls. “You bastard,” she said, her teeth clinched in an otherwise expressionless face. “You my husman?” she inquired, and laughed a short, humorless laugh. “Well. Husman. Where you been all yo’ chirren’s life? An’ who da heifer you been sneakin’ ’roun’ wit’ dis time? Yeah, I know ’bout ya women, husman, ’long wit’ dis whole godforsaken town. An’ I’m ti’ed of it, ti’ed, you hear me?” She paused, and smiled wickedly. His mouth had fallen open. “Yeah. Close yo’ mouf. ’Cause I done got ti’ed o’ foolishness. I don’t need it. I don’t need you, and my chirren don’t need no part-de-time daddy. What you lookin’ at so hard? Oh. I know who you lookin’ for. Well, she gone. I don’t hurt no more. I done give up cryin’. I done give up carin’, you hear me? So you can go back to your whore”—this word carefully pronounced—“or who’es—I don’t care. I don’t care if yo’ private parts lay down and don’t even get up on Judgment Day. Ain’t doin’ me no good no way.”

  He had begun to back away from her, his face shocked and boyish in a way that used to move her. He stared hard into her angry eyes, not knowing this woman, or this thing that had possessed his wife. She stared back unflinchingly.

  She has left him . . .

  She looked away from him, finally. Again she wiped the sweat from her brow and licked her lips, almost teasingly, but with an expression of great seriousness on her face. She nodded, as if he had asked her a question, and without looking at him. “Yeah. You best to be gettin’ on.”

  INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA

  JULY, 1874

  Queen Marie had learned to cope with his dalliances: the many women, wealthy and poor, black, white, and Cherokee, married, widowed, and single; even his wife, she tried to persuade herself, was a mere dalliance. Prince belonged to her—Queen Marie felt this. He had been the stuff of her teenage dreams, the loping knight in shining black armor come to save her from the boredom of chastity. Surely he would recognize the truth in time: He belonged to her, as she belonged to him.

  She had learned also to wait, with the forbearance of Job waiting for his returns from these dalliances, and welcoming him every time with the affection she had quickly learned that he required. For two years she had waited in the boardinghouse upstairs from a barroom, waiting nervously and praying and hoping against expectation that today would be the day that he would come back again as he always had before, sometimes broken by his wife’s rebuff, sometimes drunken and cheerful, wearing pink or red or mocha lipstick on his shirt or on his thigh as he lifted her and spun her in the air. For two years she had loved him and forgiven him, reminding herself that he would come around in time. For two of her seventeen years she had barely spoken with her mother, a dignified widow who lived in a hard-earned house not far from town, close to the white folks. Her devotion to him had been costly. She loved him all the more for this.

  Her rivals were many but manageable. She had persuaded herself of this, and become almost indifferent to the myriad women whose doors he darkened; except for his wife. She had not met the bony old hag, but had heard of her piety and pride.

  “I don’t see what you need wit’ her,” she had told him more than once as they lay entangled and satiated, diagonally across her bed in the boardinghouse above the barroom. “Bet she don’t do this,” she had often urged while demonstrating some erotic proficiency that she had perfected under his instruction. “Or this,” she whispered on darkened dance floors or in a smoke-filled billiard hall. He never confirmed the wisdom of her wager, only stared uncomfortably ahead or changed the subject wheneve
r she brought up his wife, or questioned his reasons for clinging, as if for survival, to the hope of his coming reconciliation to her.

  For he believed that it would come: the day when he would come home to find his wife compliant and ready to love him with the singlemindedness and ardor that she had never demonstrated consistently, but that he believed her capable of rendering. He had told Queen Marie of this, and others of his dreams, babbling drunk and only half-coherent, on the morning they had met at the holiness church.

  She had come with Dottie, her closest friend and only ally at Bull Swamp’s one-room school, where her peers had openly scorned her while they secretly envied her brilliance: She was gifted, and was going to be a poet the likes of which Negroes had not produced since Wheatley. Her mother, who took in sewing, made her bright pink and yellow dresses tied with ribboned sashes, and bound her jet black hair with bows to match. This drew the envy of the other girls, whose hand-me-down cotton dresses had been pilfered or inherited from the families of former slave masters.

  The white teacher had fawned on her from the beginning, coaxing and praising her, urging the talent that, in a short time, would bring her the accolades of her elders and the envy of her peers. She had taken extra assignments in reading, writing, and public speaking, creating phrases and sentences, then finally prose, melodic and lilting and beautiful, lofty and soaring, or scathing and provocative, while the other children struggled with letters and words.

  Her mother’s business had become increasingly lucrative and consuming, and as she reached her teens, Queen Marie had found herself left almost entirely to her own devices. Encouraged by the teacher, she filled much of this time by reading voraciously, Trollope and Austen and the Brontë sisters, her imagination growing more and more vivid and inventive. At night, she would slip out while her mother worked or slept, and sneak into the barrooms in town. In these dark places, full of immodestly clad women, and dressed-up men bearing the wages of a week’s labor in the tobacco fields, she discovered new mystery and the promise of adventure. In these places, she became aware of a peculiar power that she possessed: power that made men leer and whistle and all but drool when she passed by them, making women giggle or laugh aloud, “You betta quit foolin’ wit’ dat gal. She justa baby. Gal, what you doin’ up in here? Yo’ mama know you up in here? You hear me talkin’ to you?”

  But Queen Marie was gone, not wishing to suffer the humiliation of being ejected, or worse: being found out and reported to her mother. But something kept drawing her back to these places. Her stories became dark and filled with veiled passion, expressions of things she could not fully comprehend but found words in her heart to describe.

  Only with Dottie did she share these stories: melancholy stories born of loneliness and boredom and anger at her peers; increasingly sinister stories, deliberately shocking or frightening and, as she began to discover the power of her own sexuality, increasingly lewd. Dottie was alarmed. “Girl, you betta stop talkin’ dat stuff. You gon’ git in trouble.”

  But Queen Marie had sucked her teeth and waved her hand. “Oh girl. I ain’t gittin’ in no trouble. What kinda trouble you think I’m’a git in? I ain’t gittin’ in no trouble.” Unconvinced of this, Dottie had invited her to church, hoping to save her from the darkness of her imaginings and the magnetism of her newfound sexuality.

  The service had been uneventful and uninspiring, as Queen Marie had expected, until he had wandered into the hot and overcrowded little church, world-weary, despondent, and impressionable, his gait betraying his intoxication even before he passed close enough to assault her with the aroma of corn liquor. He stood for several minutes in the doorway, his face rapt with attention. She thought him beautiful, tormented, and disconsolate, like a character from a tragedy.

  Under the spell of the minister’s dogma, he soon lay rigid with sorrow and repentance on the plywood floor. At Dottie’s urging, Queen Marie had come to the altar, too, not in sorrow for her transgressions, but intrigued by the mystery and despair of this handsome man. Sitting beside him on the mourner’s bench, she had not been able to fight the temptation to raise her skirt, ever so slightly, revealing her shapely right calf, slung over her left knee. He had blinked, but slowly, and shook his head before opening his eyes to meet hers, and they had smiled.

  He relieved her of her virginity in the woods outside her mother’s house that night, after a Sunday dinner marred only by her mother’s inquiry as to his marital status. He had lied unconvincingly, squirming beneath her mother’s disapproving stare, and disappeared before dessert, mumbling apologetically about a sick mother to visit. But her fifteen-year-old heart had been pricked by the possibility of him. She met him while her mother slept soundly, slipping out of the house in her white cotton nightgown to allow him to undress and adore her by the light of a brilliant moon, filtered by the branches of the elms.

  She had asked him then if he still loved his wife, as he had this morning before their bonding. For surely, he could see now that theirs was not a passing desire, but a union spiritual and fundamental, leaving no hope for his ill-destined marriage, no future with his wintry wife.

  He had been silent. Their breathing had joined the chorus of the crickets, the solo of an owl, and she had felt the two of them one with each other and with nature. And although he did not answer, she had known that as of this night, his marriage was over, his wife a mere phantom, not yet aware that she was dead to him.

  Her mother had been appalled to find the muddy nightgown crumpled beneath her bed. Her baby, child of a slave and the pride of her race, a candidate for college at the age of fifteen, turned so suddenly into the brazen wench of a drunken field laborer! After weeks of disapproval and consternation, the distraught mother had finally been reduced to begging: What about her writing? What about her scholarship to Bennett, the Methodist school for Negroes, soon to open at Greensboro? But the girl had found her life’s vocation: the pursuit and keeping of the man who had brought life to her life, that previously missing and masculine mystique, embodied in this bumbling man-boy, worldly but lost, heroic and precious to her. She would care for and live only for him.

  Before Prince could fully comprehend the extent of her preoccupation and delusion, she had declined the proffered and much-celebrated scholarship to take a job as dishwasher in a barroom. He heard of this by chance at a roadhouse near Fishing Creek: The estimable seamstress, proud freewoman and widow of a slave, had put her only child—a student of considerable talent, with a scholarship!—“outdoors” for philandering with a married man. Smart girl, right smart you know, but forward and never quite right in the head. Um, um, um! You don’t say!

  Prince had tried to discourage her. Sober and apologetic, he had encouraged Queen Marie to continue her schooling, make amends with her mother, and find herself a nice boy. She had responded with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, threatening starvation, self-mutilation, and suicide. Confused and frightened by her ardor, Prince had finally withdrawn, only to find her waiting for him one night outside the roadhouse near Fishing Creek, bleeding from her wrists and begging him to give her reason to live. This stratagem worked beautifully: He was bound to her by guilt and obligation. She was pleased to have secured his attention, no matter how ill-obtained.

  For Queen Marie had discovered early on that, despite the accolades of her teachers, and the envy of her peers, in her world of women so recently liberated from the fetters of forced whoredom to the men of two races, the necessity of male patronage was obsolete in theory only, not in fact, outweighing in importance all other considerations.

  And if she did nothing else in her misspent life, she would have this man. Questions of right and wrong and sin and morality became abstractions to her—interesting from a philosophical standpoint but irrelevant. She would have this man at any cost.

  chapter 2

  LICKSKILLET, NORTH CAROLINA

  AUGUST, 1874

  And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God know
eth); How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.

  —II Corinthians 12:3, 4

  Sister saw the woman again on countless occasions. Bits and pieces of the woman’s life fascinated and repelled her. Often, Sister’s children found her sitting in the yard, tears filling her eyes, and thought she cried for Daddy. Sister’s small daughter—Lilly was her name—kindhearted and always full of compassion, put her arms around her mother’s neck, whispering the words of comfort that her mother had taught her, and that had often stemmed her own tears.

  “Sh-sh-sh, Mama. It’s awright. It’s awright.”

  The boy—Prince Junior—looked away.

  For days, it seemed to Sister, the mysterious woman remained locked in the barn; bloodying her own hands while beating the doors or walls; demanding, screaming, and finally begging to be released. At other times, she yanked at her own short hair, screaming her frustration; or walked the perimeter of the small barn muttering incoherently, pausing occasionally to fall to the floor, giggling uncontrollably and clutching her stomach. Sometimes, she shook her fist and ranted at everyone and no one in particular, uttering a stream of epithets both lyrical and vile.

  But some days she was somber, lying quietly on her side, hugging her knees to her chest; or kneeling on the floor, swaying gently as she hummed a melancholy tune. Always, she carefully avoided the lifeless child whose body lay uncomfortably on the red clay floor, a trickle of blood, long dried immobile, snaking a path to the center of the barn. As hunger and dehydration began to set in, she moved about the barn less frequently and much more sluggishly. The impudent lips began to turn downward at the corners, and at night she moaned, a low tortured sound that made Sister shudder and beg for someone, something, to free her from these visions that imposed themselves upon her without warning or preface.