فصل 08

Ethel EVER since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light. She dreamed of the ship that would take her, a magnificent schooner with sails like angel wings, cutting across the violent sea. The perilous journey into the interior, up rivers, wending mountain passes, and the dangers escaped: lions, serpents, man-killing plants, duplicitous guides. And then the village, where the natives receive her as an emissary of the Lord, an instrument of civilization. In gratitude the niggers lift her to the sky, praising her name: Ethel, Ethel.

She was eight years old. Her father’s newspapers contained tales of explorers, unknown lands, pygmy peoples. The nearest she could get to the image in the newspaper was playing missionary and native with Jasmine. Jasmine was like a sister to her. The game never lasted long before they switched to husband and wife, practicing kisses and arguments in the cellar of Ethel’s house. Given the color of their skins, there was never any doubt over their roles in either game, Ethel’s habit of rubbing soot onto her face notwithstanding. Her face blackened, she practiced expressions of amazement and wonder in front of the mirror so she’d know what to expect when she met her heathens.

Jasmine lived in the upstairs room with her mother, Felice. The Delany family owned Felice’s mother, and when little Edgar Delany turned ten, he received Felice as a present. Now that he was a man, Edgar recognized that Felice was a miracle, tending to the affairs of his house as if she were born to it. He recounted her darky wisdom as a matter of routine, sharing her parables about human nature with guests whenever she disappeared into the kitchen so that when she returned their faces glowed with affection and jealousy. He gave her passes to visit the Parker plantation every New Year’s Day feast; Felice’s sister was a washwoman there. Jasmine was born nine months after one such visit, and now the Delanys owned two slaves.

Ethel thought that a slave was someone who lived in your house like family but was not family. Her father explained the origin of the negro to disabuse her of this colorful idea. Some maintained that the negro was the remnant of a race of giants who had ruled the earth in an ancient time, but Edgar Delany knew they were descendants of cursed, black Ham, who had survived the Flood by clinging to the peaks of a mountain in Africa. Ethel thought that if they were cursed, they required Christian guidance all the more.

On her eighth birthday, Ethel’s father forbid her to play with Jasmine so as not to pervert the natural state of relations between the races. Ethel did not make friends easily, even then. She sobbed and stomped for days; Jasmine was more adaptable. Jasmine assumed simple duties around the household and took over her mother’s position when Felice’s heart seized and she fell mute and paralyzed. Felice lingered for months, her mouth open and pink, eyes foggy, until Ethel’s father had her removed. Ethel observed no disturbance in her old playmate’s face when they loaded her mother into the cart. By then the two did not speak outside of household matters.

The house had been built fifty years before and the stairs creaked. A whisper in one room carried into the next two. Most nights after supper and prayers, Ethel heard her father going up the crooked stairs, guided by the bobbing light of the candle. Sometimes she sneaked to her bedroom door and caught a glimpse of his white bedclothes disappearing around the corner.

“Where are you going, Father?” she asked one night. Felice had been gone two years. Jasmine was fourteen.

“Going upstairs,” he said, and both experienced a strange relief now that they had a term for his nocturnal visits. He was going upstairs—where else did the stairs lead? Her father had given one explanation for the separation of the races in fratricidal punishment. His nighttime trips elaborated on the arrangement. Whites lived downstairs and blacks lived upstairs, and to bridge that separation was to heal a biblical wound.

Her mother held a low opinion about her husband going upstairs but was not without resources. When their family sold Jasmine to the coppersmith on the other side of town, Ethel knew it was her mother’s doing. There was no more going upstairs when the new slave took residence. Nancy was a grandmother, slow in her steps and half blind. Now it was her wheezing that penetrated the walls, not footsteps and squeals. The house had not been so clean and orderly since Felice; Jasmine had been efficient but distracted. Jasmine’s new home was across the way in colored town. Everyone whispered that the child had his father’s eyes.

One day over lunch Ethel announced that when she was old enough, she intended to spread the Christian word to African primitives. Her parents scoffed. It was not something that good young women from Virginia did. If you want to help savages, her father said, teach school. The brain of a five-year-old is more savage and unruly than the oldest jungle darky, he said. Her course was set. Ethel filled in for the regular teacher when she was under the weather. Little white children were primitive in their own way, chirping and undeveloped, but it wasn’t the same. Her thoughts of the jungle and a ring of dark admirers remained in her private preserve.

Resentment was the hinge of her personality. The young women in her circle comported themselves in a foreign ritual, undecipherable. She had little use for boys and, later, men. When Martin appeared, introduced by one of her cousins who worked at the shipping company, she had tired of the gossip and long relinquished an interest in happiness. A panting badger, Martin wore her down. The game of husband and wife was even less fun than she supposed. Jane, at least, turned out to be an unexpected mercy, a tidy bouquet in her arms, even if conception proved yet another humiliation. Over the years life on Orchard Street passed with a tedium that eventually congealed into comfort. She pretended not to see Jasmine when they passed on the street, especially when her former playmate was in the company of her son. His face was a dark mirror.

Then Martin was summoned to North Carolina. He arranged Donald’s funeral on the hottest day of the year; they thought she fainted from sadness when it was just the barbaric humidity. Once they got a taker for the feed shop, they were done, he assured her. The place was backward. If it wasn’t the heat, it was the flies; if not the mice, then the people. At least in Virginia, lynch mobs maintained a pretext of spontaneity. They didn’t string up people practically on your front lawn, the same time every week, like church. North Carolina was to be a brief interlude, or so she thought until she came across the nigger in her kitchen.

George had dropped out of the attic for some food, the lone slave Martin helped before the girl arrived. It was a week before the race laws went into effect and violence against the colored population was on the rise in rehearsal. A note on their doorstep had directed Martin to the mica mine, he told her. George waited for him, hungry and irritated. The tobacco picker thumped around the attic for a week before a railroad agent took him on the next leg, boxing him up in a crate and shoving the thing through the front door. Ethel was livid, then despairing—George acted as Donald’s executor, illuminating Martin’s secret inheritance. He’d lost three fingers on his hand cutting cane.

Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn’t be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people’s high-minded ideas. She and Martin argued over the underground railroad as they hadn’t argued in a long time, and that was before the murderous fine print of the race laws manifested itself. Through Cora—that termite in the attic—Donald reached from beyond the grave to punish her for her joke those many years before. When their families met for the first time, Ethel made a remark about Donald’s simple country suit. She was trying to call attention to the two families’ different ideas of proper attire, to get it out of the way so they could all enjoy the meal Ethel had spent so much time planning. But Donald had never forgiven her, she told Martin, she was sure of it, and now they were going to swing from the branches of the tree right outside their front door.

When Martin went upstairs to help the girl it was not in the same way her father had gone upstairs, but both men came down transformed. They reached across the biblical rift for a selfish purpose.

If they could, why not her?

Everything had been denied Ethel her whole life. To mission, to help. To give love in the way she wanted. When the girl got sick, the moment Ethel awaited for so long had finally arrived. In the end she had not gone to Africa, Africa had come to her. Ethel went upstairs, as her father had done, to confront the stranger who lived in her house as family. The girl lay on the sheets, curved like a primeval river. She cleaned the girl, washing her filth from her. She kissed the girl on her forehead and neck in her restless slumber with two kinds of feeling mixed up in those kisses. She gave her the Holy Word.

A savage to call her own, at last.