The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Page 6

  The militia marched down the lane to the road. The buggies rolled by, filled with ladies. Master Wilson held up his hands. “Back to work,” he said.

  I returned to the cane field and my hoeing. As I worked, with the sounds of mosquitoes circling my head, and fifty hoes chopping against the ground around me, I kept on seeing Missus Lila’s withered hand rising up and landing across Chloe’s smooth skin.

  I had seen my mother slapped once when Miss Fannie had deemed the cake too dry to serve at her wedding party. She had landed her blows once across each cheek. I was a boy at the time, but even as a boy I felt that surge of manhood inside me that wanted to protect my mother.

  I was trained though, as every slave was trained, to witness such things and do nothing, even though doing nothing felt like a sickness inside me, a parasite that would devour me until I was but the husk of a locust. It was no different on Sweetmore. On the day I saw Chloe slapped, I felt that parasite gnawing away at me. It felt as though I would be eaten from the inside out, and I could not bear it. I could not bear the knowledge that I was a man only in body, able to work hard and swing an axe in a cypress swamp, yet unable to keep one feeble-bodied old woman from laying a hand against my Chloe. It was this parasite that caused me to begin believing my own lies, for as long as I convinced myself that I really was making a plan, I was doing something, and as long as I was doing something, I was a man.

  CHLOE BEGAN sneaking food out of the kitchen house and bringing it to me whenever we met, and we began to meet far too often and far too regularly. We were giddy with these false plans of mine. It was as though our talk of escape had loosened something in our minds, as though we had folded our caution into tight little bundles like feed sacks tucked into the cracks of logical thought.

  We had our occasional trysts at night, but they were random and scattered and we could not depend on them with any regularity. And so we began to meet each Sunday morning, in different places, after Master Wilson and Missus Lila had left for church. It was foolish to do so, foolish to meet each other with such clockwork precision, foolish to fatten each other’s chimera of leaving, foolish for me to let Chloe steal so much food. But I was hungry. And I worked hard. And I told myself that I deserved it.

  However, if I am to leave an honest account here, I must admit to you that I felt a certain clandestine thrill in eating Master Wilson’s food, and in the way that his fancy willingly gave herself to me. It is crude of me to speak so of Chloe, and in the affairs of her I do not care to be crude, but just this once, I will, because I know of no other way to show you what a diminished man I had become.

  By July the cane plants had grown over my head, and the coast had emptied of its young white men. I would not have noticed their absence were it not for the fact that along the levee causeway young women now rode in their buggies without the accompaniment of young men, and along that same road, the ranks of patrollers were now greatly reduced. Chloe noticed this also, and she talked incessantly of our escape. She dreamt out loud of the little house we would have, and the goods that she would bake and put up for sale.

  “Pies,” she said. “All kinds. Blueberry, peach, apple. With crusts all buttery and flaky. I make a good piecrust, Persy. You see. And cakes. All kinds. Chocolate, white, fig. And biscuits. I love to make a biscuit. These biscuits they servin’ here, they ain’t nothin’ ’pared to mine. You see. If Massuh had any sense, he put me in the kitchen and Katy in his bed.”

  One awkward laugh escaped her after saying this, and then she fell silent. Without discussion we had chosen to never mention Master Wilson’s penchant for her company, and this slip of her tongue fell between us like a thunderclap.

  It was nighttime, one of our rare evening visits. Master Wilson was serving with the patrollers and an hour earlier Chloe had climbed the ladder to the barn loft, balancing a tin plate of chicken in one hand. I had taken that plate from her and set it on the floor and then I had begun unhitching the buttons of her dress. A half moon, leaking through the slats of the barn wall, felled its light across her skin in stripes. I moved her here and there that her body be illuminated in different places, and I touched those places with my tongue until she cried out a slave’s secret passion, a cry that must remain, for the purpose of safety, quiet and muffled.

  Afterward I had lain naked on a horse blanket and gnawed on the chicken while watching her get dressed. I was ravenous. I remember that. “You best put yo’ britches back on,” Chloe had said, reaching between my legs and giving me a playful tug. “You don’t want Massuh catch you without yo’ drawsies.” I’d laughed and obediently dressed.

  Now I reached over and rubbed Chloe’s shoulder, but her mood had changed, and she shrugged my hand away. She stared hard at her shoes and began toying with the grommets. “When we gonna leave, Persy?”

  “Soon,” I answered.

  Chloe said nothing.

  “We can’t rush,” I added.

  Still she was silent. Her fingers walked along her shoes, from grommet to grommet. She did not look at me. It was bad enough, I suppose, to hear my lies, but to watch me telling them would have been even worse.

  “The time has to be right, Chloe. You know that.”

  I felt her take in a deep breath and let it out, and in that moment I knew. I knew that she had seen me for exactly who I was. I had no plan for her, no forged papers, no prospects of getting her away from Master Wilson’s lasciviousness. I had no way to fly us over the cane fields.

  The cane plants were filled out now, with emerald-green leaves that would wave in the slightest breeze, and when they did the entire field undulated, making it seem like a bright green sea. I suppose it might have been pretty to someone who did not work it. It had been pretty to me in the dream I’d had the night before, a dream in which I actually was flying with Chloe’s hand in mine, and we were looking down over those fields moving in the breeze and Chloe had said, “That our wind makin’ ’em go like that. Look at it, Persy. That our wind.”

  In the loft of the barn that night, the caskets stacked in a stall down below us, I turned to look at her, and although I could not see her face clearly, I knew that she was crying, softly and silently, the worst kind of tears, the kind that come from knowing that nothing is going to change. “I reckon you doin’ the best you can,” she whispered.

  I sat with Chloe’s moisture still caught between my legs and a tin plate of chicken bones sitting at my feet. I felt as though someone had turned the flame of an internal lamp up, and now it blazed brightly enough for me to see my own cowering soul in the corner of my being. I could not continue this way. I could not go on lying to her. Above all, I would not let Chloe buttress my manhood for me. I would not let her pretend that she did not know I was a shuck of a man, a charlatan, a fraudster. I picked a small stalk of grass from the leg of my britches. “I don’t have papers,” I confessed. “I don’t have a plan.”

  I could feel her sniffling beside me. It was my punishment to sit and listen. I did not think I should be forgiven and so I did not apologize. Chloe’s sniffling continued, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her wiping tears away with the hem of her dress. She reached out and touched me. I felt her fingers through the rough linsey of my shirt. Her small, slim fingers that had caressed me, that had held me, that had wandered across my body and up my neck.

  “Don’t forgive me,” I said. “I do not deserve to be forgiven.”

  I was thinking only of myself. It would have been easier if she had been angry, if she had slapped me hard across the face, if she had left me sitting in the barn loft alone, as I deserved, but this is not what she did.

  “All those pies you talked about,” I said, “all those cakes. The little house.”

  “I ask too much,” she whispered.

  “The food you bring me.” I kicked at the plate of chicken bones and tipped them into the straw. “You over there having to . . .” I could not finish.

  “I ask too much,” she whispered again.

  “We ask
too little,” I answered.

  “Persy, it not too late.” Chloe pulled away from me, forcing me to sit alone in a slat of moonlight that fell across the horse blanket. “We start plannin’ now. Now better than ever. They not so many ’trollers. Yankees comin’ to set us free anyway.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t know what it’s like in those swamps, and that’s where we’d have to go. There are snakes. Gators. Mosquitoes. Panthers. It’s putrid. It’s damp, Chloe.”

  “I reckon I know a swamp is damp.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like in those swamps,” I repeated. “I know. I cut wood there.”

  “And you don’t know what it like in the big house,” she said with so little inflection that I felt a chill go up what was left of my spine. She leaned against the back wall. “Missus Lila gonna die soon. They gonna come a day when she don’t go to church. I won’t be seein’ you on Sundays no mo’. I won’t be bringin’ you no food. It gonna happen soon. Ever since her son left, she been doin’ worse poorly. She don’t eat much. Her skin all pale and drippy. I ain’t told you this. I don’t know why.” She looked down and her fingers found the grommets of her shoes again.

  I knew why she had not told me. It was because she trusted me, and because she did not want to burden my “perfect plan” with the pressure of moving too fast. She would endure whatever she had to endure in order to help make our escape sound, and had I been paying attention to anything but the plates of food she brought me, and the comfort and release she gave me with her body, I would have known this. Chloe had told me of Missus Lila’s attachment to Gerald, and now without her son close by, Old Miss had little reason to live, and Master Wilson, once free of his wife, would have little reason to dampen his desires for Chloe.

  “Chloe, I—”

  “Shhh. Quiet,” she whispered, holding her finger up and cocking her head to listen.

  Outside, the ground crunched.

  We froze.

  The ground crunched again.

  I felt my body instinctively wanting to move deeper into the loft, to crawl under the horse blanket, out of the moonlight. But afraid that moving would cause a rustle that might be heard, I stilled my body’s urge. I turned my face to the barn doors, and watched, and waited.

  The ground crunched twice more. The doors twitched. I told myself that a cow must have gotten loose. I listened carefully for the ripping of grass that would indicate this as true, but there was none.

  Again the sound of something stepping, and then, through the crack between the barn doors, I saw a shadow slip by. Chloe’s hand went to her mouth and covered it, and she hid her face in my shoulder. Then the ground crunched again, and then again, and again, the sound moving away from us now, as whatever it had been left the barnyard.

  My breath went out of me. I fell limp against the back wall, still holding on to Chloe. My heart seemed as though it had left my chest and lodged in my throat where it now hurriedly throbbed like the heart of a panicked bird. Slowly, I felt Chloe’s shoulders relax and the fear unfasten itself from her body. “I’ll do it,” I whispered. “I’ll get us out of here.”

  She reached up and stroked my cheek. I raised my hand to meet hers, to turn her hand over, to kiss her palm. “I know you will,” she said. And then she added, “I gotta go.”

  I nodded.

  “I cain’t stay no longer.”

  “I know. You leave first.”

  She smoothed her hair. “How I look. Am I all messied up?”

  I smiled. “You look beautiful,” I said.

  She picked up the tin plate. “You bury ’em,” she said, pointing to the chicken bones lying across the loft floor. “I ain’t got nowhere to put ’em won’t be seen.” I scooped the bones up and jammed them into the pocket of my shirt. She scooted herself to the edge of the loft, holding the tin plate in the fingers of one hand. “Careful,” I said as she swung her legs onto the ladder. The soles of her shoes squeaked against the rungs. When she’d reached the bottom I could hear her hitting her hands against her dress, trying to remove any dirt or dust that clung to it. I pictured her running her hands through her hair, straightening it the way she always did before leaving me. And then I thought of the dream I’d had, of flying over the cane fields with Chloe’s hand in mine, of watching our wind make a churning sea of those leaves.

  I did not know how I would achieve it, but I vowed that I would get Chloe off Sweetmore. I vowed that I would take her away from Master Wilson. I vowed that I would be true to my word.

  Chloe opened the barn door and in the shaft of moonlight that was let in, I saw her turn and look toward the loft. I held my hand up to bid her farewell, but she could not see me. She let herself out, the tin plate hitting softly against the wood of the door as it shut behind her.

  I waited. It would be safer if I did not leave right behind her. I waited until I was certain that Chloe had had enough time to reach the big house, and to let herself inside, and to make her way to her pallet at the foot of Missus Lila’s bed.

  And then I folded the horse blanket we had used to lie on and swung my legs off the edge of the loft onto the ladder. I placed the folded blanket back where I had found it, draped across one of the stalls. A mule blew out a huff of air as I passed by. “Easy fella,” I whispered. “Ain’t no one here.” I pulled the barn door open and stepped outside. The moon had hidden itself behind a cloud. I could make out only dark shapes. A hedge. Another outbuilding. A wagon. One step, then two, and then a third, and my foot landed on something and caused it to flip up and hit me lightly in the shin. I leaned over to pick up the tin plate that had held the chicken Chloe had brought to me.

  “What you doing, Persy?” Wilson’s voice came to me from the hedge of shrubbery.

  I turned to the sound of it. “Massuh,” I answered. I hated the cower in my voice, the quiver, the instant subservience that I used in addressing him. “I’s checkin’ on one of the mules,” I said. “It limpin’ this evenin’ when I put it up.”

  “Mighty late to be checking on a mule.”

  “Yassuh. I’s worried ’bout it. It a good mule,” I added. “You don’t want to lose it, Massuh. I jest lookin’ after it.”

  “Don’t be giving me that shuffling nigger crap, Persy.” The clouds left the moon and Wilson stepped out of the hedge holding Chloe by the arm. He shoved her to his side. “Get on back to the house,” he told her.

  “Naw, Massuh,” Chloe said. “You come on back with me. Let’s leave this nigger be and go on back to the house together.”

  She touched his arm. I looked at her fingers on the sleeve of his shirt as they trailed seductively upward to his shoulder. How I hated him, how I hated all the white men making their little mulatto babies down in the quarters. And I almost, in that moment, hated Chloe, too, for touching him willingly this time, for using his lust in an attempt to save me.

  Wilson coolly tilted his head down and looked at her hand. “Get on back home,” he said again, “or maybe you want to watch me give this nigger a lesson.”

  “Naw, Massuh.”

  “Chloe, go to the big house,” I said, slowly, deliberately, as if I were giving orders to a child. And with that Master Wilson landed a fist in my gut. I felt the breath go out of me. The tin plate slipped from my hands. My body folded over with the impact and the chicken bones rattled from my pocket and fell to the ground.

  Wilson grabbed me by the back of my shirt and shoved my face against the barn door. I could feel him behind me, leaning into my back. I could smell the scent of cigars and liquor on his breath. “She ain’t yours to give orders to,” Wilson hissed, turning me around now to face him.

  Chloe was on him, clawing at his sleeve, begging, “Massuh? Massuh? Massuh, come on back to the house with me.”

  “Naw, Massuh,” I hollered. “I jest checking on a mule.”

  “Mule, my ass.”

  “Massuh. Massuh. Come on to the big house with me.” Chloe’s fingers raked at his jacket, and as he pushed her away, I felt, ever so
slightly, her fingers stumbling across my own skin as she fell. Master Wilson stepped back and hit me again in the gut. And then again and again.

  I fell onto the grass and curled into a ball to protect my stomach, my groin, my organs. Dimly I saw Wilson’s black leather boots flying toward me as he delivered kick after kick upon my person. And dimly I was aware of Chloe, up off the ground now and returned to pawing at him, and saying, “Massuh. Stop. Stop, Massuh. You gonna kill him.”

  “She ain’t yours,” Wilson kept hollering. “She ain’t yours. You got that, nigger. She ain’t yours and she never will be.” The kicks flung into my arms, my legs, my ribs. He circled, working one side and then the other.

  “Massuh, you gonna kill him,” I heard Chloe say again.

  And then Wilson roared, “By God, I will kill him. The damn nigger son of a bitch.”

  He placed his boot against my side and pushed until I rolled over, exposing my gut.

  “Naw,” Chloe said. “Naw.”

  I rolled quickly over once more, again curling to protect myself, and as I did so I saw a flutter of cream that I took to be Chloe leaving at last, her dress billowing as she ran to the big house.

  Wilson stood back from me now. “Stand up and fight,” he said.

  “Suh?” I managed.

  “Stand up and fight me. You’re man enough to be telling my wench what to do, then you’re man enough to fight me.”

  “Nawsuh,” I said.

  “No sir, what?”

  “Nawsuh, Massuh, I ain’t man enough to fight you.”

  “Stand up.” He pulled me up by the back of my shirt until I was upright and swaying before him. “You a goddamn mess, Persy. Just look at you. You think she wants you? You just a common field nigger. I’ll teach her who she wants.”

  Before I knew it I had hit him. It was a punch that landed Master Wilson on the ground, and once I had committed to it, I pounced on him, and I pummeled my fists against him. Even as I did so I knew that I would be killed for this. I would be flogged to death, or hanged, or tortured. Whatever the method, I would die for this action, and because I knew this, it did not matter what I did. I would die defending Chloe’s honor, not that it would do her much good in the long run. But still, I could not stop. I felt my fists sink again and again into his puggish flesh. I felt the breath sink out of him. My muscles coiled like snakes, striking and striking and striking and striking. Through my cottony mind I heard voices. My name repeated again and again and the word stop. “Persy. Persy. Stop. Stop, Persy, stop,” and then I felt hands pulling me away, hands pulling me back from the job I had started and was bent to finish.