Chapter Sixty-nine
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Who brought the news? The news just traveled, person to person to person, in this instance from the lips of someone from a neighboring plantation who met someone from the cabins out there in the fields, who told Precious Sally, who told Liza—that the doctor lay quite ill in his house in Charleston, and she, who had felt the suffered clasp of slavery every day in her young life now felt it in the most subtle ways, because she wanted nothing more than to go to town and visit her mentor except that there was no way for her to do this.
Except there was one way.
And did she know she could go through with it? The fact that she thought of it and kept it in mind and almost immediately put her plan into action suggests that she knew what she had to do, she knew what would probably occur, and she had prepared herself for that.
Did this mean that she had become a new woman or that everything in the past that had pushed her to this point was now about to begin blossoming? When it happened she had little idea, if any, of how much would transpire in the aftermath. In all of our lives we live in unknowing fashion, acting without thinking about consequences, until one day we stop to consider the consequences before we act, and it seems as though our life has become so strange it might be someone else’s life.
This slave child, daughter of slaves who were children of slaves who in their turn had been slaves, never to see the light or even contemplate the possibility of seeing the world by that longed-for illumination of freedom, how much did she know beyond the immediate plan of action? How much did she fret about what that plan might bring about? What do we know? Do I know, do you? Some doctors and geniuses think they can predict human behavior. I think at best, if we are lucky, that we might with great struggle possibly with some accuracy describe it.
Though sometimes even the actors cannot recall what took place in elaborate and significant detail.
This way, that way. It seems that everyone had a plan in those days. For example, Liza recalled putting her plan into motion by waiting in the big house at the end of her day, waiting for her father to arrive.
He might have been traveling, she didn’t know, and perhaps his return to the plantation took place some days after she first considered what she might do in order to get to town to visit the doctor. In memory hours, days such as this melt together.
Came the hour when he did arrive at the house, whether from the rice ponds or from some journey of further reach we do not know, and she was waiting for him.
Though she did try not to show this, her anticipation and her hope, her worry, and her desire. What good might that have done? She waited for him with a calmness she had never noticed before in herself, as calm as waters some days before a winter storm, as calm as sky before the end of daylight. Such were the ways she tried to describe her state of mind to herself as she waited for this man who had ruined her and yet had kept her alive. The harm he had done her she could not calculate, but aware of his power she understood just how much she had to placate him. As simple and at the same time as complex had been her ties to the gods—the ties she sometimes felt resonating in her limbs and chest and belly—her links to this man seemed both tame and wild.
She despised him, she had to admit to herself, and yet when she heard his footsteps on the front steps and then the sound of the front door opening her chest went taut and she could scarcely take a breath yet she needed to breathe more desperately than ever before in her life. Caught between sucking in air and holding her breath—she took a stance few others could imagine holding until they themselves, unlucky folk, might one day find themselves caught in the same way.
“You, girl,” he said when he stepped into the parlor, “what are you doing here? Your work better be long done. Is there something wrong with you?”
“Not with me, sir,” she said. (Not with me, father, she wanted to say, but he had forbidden such form of address ever since she could remember.)
“With whom, then?” he said. “My missus alright?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “But sir?”
He frowned at her, his hands busy at his sides.
“What is it?”
“Sir, the doctor has a sickness…”
“Yes, I heard he was ill.”
He looked this way and that, as though trying to find something in the room.
“I would like…”
Now he focused on her again.
“You would like what, girl?”
She found a breath and sucked in hard, and then spoke, suddenly, forthrightly.
“I would like to visit him.”
Her father’s eyes sparked, and he made his mouth into an odd shape.
“You would like to visit him.”
“I would, sir, yes, please.”
“Visit,” her father repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
“Follow me.”
Without another word, he led her from the parlor to the kitchen and into the pantry behind it where Old Dou had kept a pallet on which now and then she would nap between large chores. Liza had inherited the chores, and the pallet, though now she was not so happy about the latter. Everything she feared might happen in this encounter began to take place.
“Take off your clothes,” her father said.
She knew it, she knew, but still she hesitated.
“Did you hear what I said, girl?”
Without another word and certainly without looking at him, she removed her apron—easy—and then her dress, and the small cloth tied to cover her lower parts—so difficult she thought she might cry, or cry out. (But then her plan would evaporate and she would be left with nothing but her miserable indentured self.) In a moment she was standing naked before him, as if he were the doctor himself.
Without warning he slapped her in the face and she went reeling against the pantry wall, scattering boxes and bottles and bowls as she staggered.
“You put that man above me?”
“No, sir.”
She did not dare touch a hand to where her face burned and ached.
“Does he own you?”
“No, sir.” Now her breath seemed to fail her, and then started up again.
“Who owns you?”
“You do, sir.”
“Who made you live?”
“You did, sir.”
“Without me, you would be nothing, do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You would not be a thought, you would not be a breath, not a wisp of air or the smallest part of bone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lie down,” he said.
Liza had prepared herself, and pictured a dark rice pond into which she stepped carefully, and then, turning her face to the darkening sky, stretched out on her back and let herself float downward beneath the surface until the frothy water covered her face and breasts and thighs, and still she sank, deeper and deeper.
Liza heard distant noises floating above her where she floated beneath the surface of the water.
And splashing about, and pain down there, below, in her own deepest parts.
She opened her eyes to find her father kneeling next to her, working three fingers of one hand inside her while he held his loose naked member, loosened from his trousers, in his other hand and worked even harder.
For a moment she held off the pain, picturing three horizontal lines engraved on an otherwise smooth stone. She reminded herself of the story that followed from it, the star above Timbuktu, the flight across the desert, the years in the forest. Yemaya, she said in a whisper in her mind, Yemaya-ay! I am yours, the way my unborn mother was yours when you rode the ocean together in the death ship. Come to me or I can come to you…Yemaya, dear…Finally she could hold back the pain no longer.
“Stop,” she said in a whisper. “You’re hurting me…”
“Oh, my little African honey girl,” he said in a sing-song childlike voice, “sweety-weety, I don’t mean to hurt you, little African honey girl, tweety-sweety, I don’t…”
But he didn’t stop, and it kept on causing her pain even as he howled in frustration—the master howling like a dog!—and pulled away from her.
“Get dressed,” he said.
She pulled her clothing on while he stood and pushed himself back into his trousers, of a sudden pulling her close and wiping himself on her dress.
Her instinct was to draw away from him, but she stood there, intent on getting her way no matter what. And the worst had already taken place.
“Go back to the cabins,” he said.
“You promised,” she said, leaning against the door frame of the pantry.
Finally, with a slight nod of his head, he spoke to her as he might speak to a dog, “Very well. Tell Isaac to drive you to town. You may stay only an hour. Do you know how to tell time?”
She knew she risked everything to say what she said next in the tone in which she said it, but she said it anyway.
“You never taught me, father.”
He shook his head. If smoke might ever appear from a human skull, it might have puffed out of his nostrils just then.
“One hour,” he said. “Now go.”
She bowed her head.
“Thank you.”
“One hour.”
“Yes…master,” she said, waiting until he turned and left the pantry so that she might push her face against the wall and weep a while, feeling as though her head might explode. It hurt when she walked out of the room herself, but she did not care. She walked faster. Outside she ran.