The Salt Roads Read online

  A soul gone beneath the waters? Should I care that this milky child would have been in bondage too, unless its father had choosed to set it free?

  Fear fluttered over Georgine’s face. She clutched at her belly. “More pain, matant Mer! Is there another one inside me?”

  Likely no. “Hush. It’s just the afterbirth. It will come out soon.” I gave the dead child to Tipingee and went to Georgine’s side. A few more groaning contractions and she delivered the piece of liver-looking thing. Still holding the baby in the crook of one arm, Tipingee wrapped the placenta in a piece of flour bag, put it in the calabash I’d brought. Strong science, a placenta.

  Georgine never moved to cover herself, just stared at the baby. “Dead?” she said softly. I nodded. “After all this, dead? And looking more like Pierre than me?”

  Mister Pierre burst back in, his face tight, his arms full up of swaddling. “Here.”

  Me and Tipingee took it from him. He went back out, returned with a cook pot steaming from the hot water inside. Georgine was sobbing, at the end of her strength. She lay back and we cleaned her. She was torn. “Tipingee, bring me the aloe,” I said. Pulp of the aloe plant, mixed with honey. It would sting, but some of that on the cut would help her heal faster.

  Mister Pierre was finally looking at the baby’s body. “A boy? Why aren’t you two lackwits seeing to my child?”

  There had been women’s voices in this room all these long hours. Mister Pierre’s booming was like sudden thunder during a soft rain.

  “He’s stillborn, sir,” I told him. Mama, he was going to blame it on Tipingee and me?

  He flinched like somebody had boxed him. “Tonnerre.” He looked at the little body, the little free soul. Composed himself. Stroked the baby’s tiny arm with a finger. His voice was rough when it came out, but all he said was, “Nine months before you can breed me another, Georgine. I need a son to work with me.”

  Georgine opened red-shot eyes on him, her face a mask. “I’m sorry, Pierre. We will make another one soon.”

  “Mister Pierre,” Tipingee piped up. “Georgine must rest a little bit now. We must leave her to sleep.”

  “Um, ah, of course, of course. You two see to her, then you can be on your way.” He scowled at the baby. Picked up the cradle that had been waiting to receive it. Good work, that cradle. Mister Pierre must have spent plenty time on it. He left. I saw the look of him as he passed me; the look of a man who had just lost a son.

  Tears were making a crisscross down Georgine’s cheeks. “Don’t leave me with Pierre tonight,” she begged. “He doesn’t know how to look after me. Hands always too rough. Don’t leave me with the dead baby.”

  Tipingee’s eyes made four with mine. Wasn’t for us to say whether we could stay or go.

  The baby, Georgine said; not my baby. Wasn’t a baby anyway, with no life and no name. So they had told me about my child. Must be true. I didn’t have no child, and Georgine didn’t have none neither.

  Tipingee finished cleaning Georgine up, put the aloe where her flesh was frayed. Georgine said nothing to us, just made like she was sleeping, though she winced some at the touch of the aloe. A hammering was coming from outside. I helped Tipingee to tidy up the room.

  A knock came on the door. Strange that Mister Pierre would ask leave of three black women to enter his own house. “Come,” Georgine called out. I mouthed the same word quiet in my own mouth, imagined myself like Georgine, in a fancy dress with no rips, lying in a good strong bed; a plain bed but with no splinters, calling out “enter” like I had the choice to say “yea” or “nay.” I made Mer in my head beckon with one hand, felt my own arm twitch, so strong I was imagining it. No use. I couldn’t make my head sit on the Georgine body in my mind. Back home, I would wrap my body in fine indigo, lie on a soft bed. Nobody was so rude either, to bang on your house with their hands. They stood respectful near the entrance and called for your attention.

  Mister Pierre came in. The cradle was in his arms. The rockers were gone and he had made a lid: the cradle had become a coffin for his child. He gave it to Tipingee. “Two carts are broken at the factory and it’s slowing the work down,” he said to Georgine. “I’m sent for to go and mend them.”

  A dirt-poor white man, he. Even he couldn’t keep our master’s work waiting.

  “It’s all right,” Georgine told him from behind closed eyes. She knew how things were. It was still crop time. Even with the sun long gone down, the work went on. “Maybe they will feed you in the big house.”

  I didn’t look at Tipingee this time. The great house kitchen, where Tipingee’s Marie-Claire was putting Makandal’s poison in the food.

  “Mister Pierre?” Tipingee said. He looked to where she was standing, like if he was surprised to find anybody there.

  “Yes?”

  “Georgine’s still bleeding a little.”

  “She’s good, strong stock,” he said. “She will mend.”

  I hope the great house gave him plenty of the roast.

  Mister Pierre told us, “You two stay and make sure the bleeding has stopped before you go back to the cane. And bury the child’s body.”

  And he was out the door again.

  “Yes, Sir,” Tipingee called after his back, looking sideways to me. This task would take us until the cane-cutting had stopped. No cane leaf razor cuts for us tonight.

  Just the three of us and the little dead boy, his soul fled to the world beneath the water before ever he had breathed on land. With her owner gone, Georgine let the salt water run freely from her eyes. “After all that, no son,” she moaned.

  “Your master will get another one on you soon,” Tipingee told her. Condolence or threat? Never knew with my Tipingee.

  I picked up the cold little cream-coloured body. He was pretty. But we don’t make plenty fuss over a child born dead. “Where do you want it buried?” I asked Georgine.

  Georgine looked on me with her red weeping eyes. Her face got a determined look. “By the river,” she said. “Where my mother drowned. They will be company for each other.”

  Tipingee kissed her teeth in derision. “And who you think is going out all that way in this dark night, and how are we going to know the right place?”

  “Go on back to the fields then, with your black self. I will take my child there on my own.”

  Tipingee spat on the floor and just looked at her, calm. “Take him, then,” she said. “Let me see you stand up and take him.”

  Georgine glared at her. I looked on this fair-skin, soft-hand house girl, still fainting from her labour. Probably she saw the doubt in my face too, for she set her mouth hard, smoothed down her stained skirts, fought herself to her feet. She took two strong steps to me, for all that I saw she was biting her lips with pain. She reached out her hands. “Give him to me. I will take him.”

  Eh. The slattern girl had some true backbone. She had proved it plenty times already tonight. I gave her dead child into her arms, watched her shape them to receive him for the first and last time. Looking at his little body, her crying started up again, but she said nothing, just sucked her tears back into her nose. “Matant, you will come with me to carry the coffin? I will carry the shovel.”

  “I will come.”

  Tipingee swore. “Both of you have not an ounce of sense in your heads. No, Mer, I will carry the coffin. Wait there and I’ll get the damned shovel.”

  Georgine just sighed, settled her baby in her arms, and sat on the bed, looking into the child’s face, waiting for us to be ready.

  Georgine walked tall all the way, though she hissed sometimes when she would stumble on a rock. Not one time did she ask me for help.

  Saint Domingue, that merciless place, was a beautiful country. The night breeze was cool on the face. Fireflies like little stars flashed all around us. Once we got a little way from the sugar houses, the smell of cooking syrup wasn’t so strong. We passed under the bay tree, breathed in the spiced scent of bay leaves that we mashed under our feet. I was carrying the sho
vel and a torch, Tipingee balancing the little wooden coffin on her head. Hope we got back before Mister Pierre came home to find his shovel and his woman missing. He had folded a soft cotton sheet into the coffin, to lay his child to rest on. Moths came and threw themselves at the guttering torch flame. Once a big one, blue. Nearly so big as my hand. I cursed, almost dropped the torch. The moth flicked its wings as it flew away. Did it have all its feet? Why was this Makandal plaguing me so?

  We went around the slave quarters. Didn’t want nobody to see us. Headed for the trickling sound of the river. Mosquitoes were bad this time of year, singing in our ears and biting, but Georgine wouldn’t even self brush them from her face. She saved all her attention for the body in her arms. Whispered to it while she walked. I wondered what she was telling it. Then she said: “Matant, the baby would have gotten browner? If he lived?”

  “Maybe so. If you had let him run too much in the sun.”

  “No. I would have made him wear a hat every time he went out. Wouldn’t want him to get black. Only . . .”

  “Hmm?”

  “If he had got a little bit of brown to him, not too much, maybe he would see me in his face that way, know who’s his mother.”

  “You will have another one, Georgine.”

  Tipingee just sucked her teeth for impatience.

  We passed the big mango tree, and the tamarind, and the rock high so like a man. Makandal said that rock fell down from the sky, was blessèd. He said an old Indian man told him so, that the Indian man’s people knew that rock from before the Spanish and the French came to this place.

  The river sound was louder in our ears, and the mosquitoes were whining constantly. More of them were here near the water. Georgine was staring into the darkness, looking for something. “Matant, bring the light over here? Ah. No, come down this way.”

  We were in mud now, squirming cool between our toes. Could see flashes of fast-running river water gleaming like fishes.

  “Look, the place here,” Georgine said, softly. “It’s here they dragged my mother from the water.”

  Tipingee peered into the water, looked around at the weedy banks where there was a mapou tree growing and Spanish moss climbing over it. “River’s too deep here so to enter it. What your mother was doing in fast-running water?”

  “She was upstream.” Georgine jooked her chin in the direction. “Washing Master Simenon’s white linen shirts. I was pounding out the dirt from the collars and spreading the shirts on the rocks to bleach for her. His favourite shirt got away from her in the water. She knew she had to get it back, or get beat, so she went in after it. But she slipped. The water carried her away before anybody could reach her. It’s here so this tree root finally caught her dress and held her, but she’d already drowned long time. Dig here for me, Tipingee?”

  Tipingee put down the wooden box. I gave her the shovel. “I will hold the torch so you can see,” I said.

  “The ground’s too wet here,” Tipi said. “The body will just come back up.”

  “Wedge it under the roots of the mapou,” Georgine told her.

  Tipingee sighed and got to digging. I held up the torch, held Georgine who suddenly had collapsed against my side. Probably the fatigue. She needed some time to recover from doing labour. I put my arm around the little thin body of this girl a third my thirty-something years, holding her dead baby to tiny breasts just starting to bud. The mosquitoes sang and bit, sang and bit, and the river chuckled to see it so.

  “She wasn’t the mother who bore me,” Georgine muttered. “But it was she who looked after me when they brought me to this plantation, when they bought me from further down the Cap and took me here. I don’t remember my real mother. I was little little, barely walking. They gave me to her, to Calliope, for her to look after me. Her courses had come for the first time that same year, she told me. But she tended to me, made sure I got food to eat, taught me how to scrub and mend clothes, made me sugar bag dresses to wear. She held me at nights when I was bawling for Mama. I don’t remember that Mama I was bawling for, but I remember Calliope.”

  Tipingee had nothing to say. She only grunted with each strike the shovel striked in the mud. But she started to sing, “Koliko, Piè Jan o! Si ou capab’ ou pito volé, enhé,” keeping time with her shovelling.

  Ay Lasirèn, what a night.

  Tipingee dug and chanted: “Koliko, Piè Jan o! Si ou capab’ ou pito volé, enhé.” (Colico, Pierre Jean, oh! If you could, you would fly, eh-heh!)

  Georgine muttered: “I saw Calliope drown . . .”

  River Mumma, I thought, why do we suffer so?

  “Koliko, Piè Jan o, se regretan sa, ou pa genyen zèl!” (Oh Pierre Jean, what a pity you don’t have wings!)

  “I saw the water take her . . .”

  Lasirèn, take this child.

  “Pierre Jean, if you could, you would fly away from here!”

  “Calliope, look after my baby, please.”

  Take him back to Ginen with you.

  “What a pity, Pierre Jean, you don’t have wings!”

  “Child is cold in my arms like a side of ham.”

  Come and take us, take us all.

  “Fly away!”

  Tipingee dug up a last clot of earth, threw it onto the bank. She looked to me, and what I saw in her eyes made me shiver. Was a lost soul looking back. She opened her mouth, and it’s a baby’s cry that came out.

  “Tipingee?”

  Georgine made the same cry. From her eyes, the same emptiness watched out at me, not seeing. And then something took me. A big, empty knowledge swallowed me, bigger than the sea, and in more turmoil. My own self shrank to nothing inside it and for a while, I didn’t know myself, didn’t know, couldn’t understand.

  Then I was back. My body mine again. Mosquitoes sitting on my arms, feasting. I slapped them away. Tipingee and Georgine were still standing before me, looking empty, swaying. “Tipingee?” I whimpered.

  “What?”

  She was back behind her eyes again.

  “What happened, Tipingee?” I asked.

  “What happened when?”

  I stared at the two of them. Georgine looked like Georgine again, her face stiff with sorrow. Tipingee was leaning on the shovel, waiting. I knew them.

  Eh. I must have been only tired, me.

  I jammed the torch into the ground, held the little coffin open for Georgine. We don’t fuss over a baby born dead. She kissed her baby, stroked his forehead. Put him in the box and closed the lid. Took the box from me. Let it slip from her arms into the hole. It splashed into the river water that was filling the hole from below. With her foot, Tipi shoved it under a thick root of the mapou tree. We covered it up. Then took Georgine back to her bed. I didn’t point out to Tipingee the mongoose that followed us all the way back from Pierre’s hut to the fields; it went at a limping run, for it only had three legs.

  We had thought our task would take long, but when we got to the fields, the gangs were still in the cane. Tipi and I worked in the fields until it was time to stop.

  We had done a common thing. Common. We had buried a dead child. Nothing strange about that. But that bigness I had felt back there by the river, swallowing me whole . . . ?

  Break/

  I’m born from song and prayer. A small life, never begun, lends me its unused vitality. I’m born from mourning and sorrow and three women’s tearful voices. I’m born from countless journeys chained tight in the bellies of ships. Born from hope vibrant and hope destroyed. Born of bitter experience. Born of wishing for better. I’m born.

  It’s when my body hits the water, cold flow welling up in a crash to engulf me, that I begin to become. I’m sinking down in silver-blue wetness bigger than a universe. I open my mouth to scream, but get cold water inside. Drowning!

  Beat!

  A branding sear of heat crazes my thigh. As the pain bites, I learn the words: brand, sear, heat, thigh. I scream again, swallowing salt. Iron holds me, I can’t control my direction. I roll about, caught
in a myriad memories of dark shipspace, slotted in berths too narrow to let me move far. My chains hold me tied to something—no, someone. I’m too hot then too wet, being tossed and tossed and awash in nausea. Something in me cramps, again. It hurts. Bloody stinking fluxes leak from holes I hadn’t known I had. I vomit up the salt sea.

  Time does not flow for me. Not for me the progression in a straight line from earliest to latest. Time eddies. I am now then, now there, sometimes simultaneously.

  Sounds, those are sounds, from another place. I have heard them before, or am hearing them now, or will hear them later. Three sounds: Song. Prayer. Scream. From a riverbank, from the throats of black women. The ululated notes vibrate the chains that tie me to the ship. I thrash my arms in response, learning that they are arms the second I move them. The iron links of the chains break. Freed, I push out in front of me with my fingers. Those things kicking behind me are my legs. I pump them harder. Begin to rise, rise up through blue water. No, I am not drowning. I do not seem to be a breathing creature, to be drowning. I rise faster and faster till I am flying. The water heats from the speed of my passing—heats but does me no harm—boils to mist until it isn’t any longer liquid, but clouds I am flying through. How do I know them as clouds?

  One-

  How do I know anything? How is it that my arms stretched out in front of me are so pale? How do I even know they should be brown like rich riverbank mud, as they were when I was many goddesses with many worshippers, ruling in lands on the other side of a great, salty ocean? I used to be many, but now we are one, all squeezed together, many necks in one coffle.

  Drop

  I fly.

  What is that infant cry that never was in my head, and is, and never will be; what those three cane-rowed braids of loss, prayer, and bitterness? Sometimes active, sometimes passive, in small things, in large. A fractured melody, a plaited seedscale song of sorrow. Whose voices? Ah, I know whose, knew whose. I see them now/then, inhabit them briefly before I tumble away again. Do I have a voice? I open my mouth to try to sing the three-twist chant I can hear, and tears I didn’t know before this were called tears roll in a runnelled crisscross down the thing that is my face and past my . . . lips? to drip salt onto my tongue.