1 – A Slave Named Nobody
TOBIAS WAS WAITING AT THE EDGE OF THE HEARTH with
his brother Hamich, two years younger than him and the first in his family to be born on the Hill. Hamich sat down on a shaved, varnished log that was lodged into the wall behind them and leaned back, each rubbing their hands together and holding them up to the fire. In the adjacent rooms, Tobias’ wife Ethel was still asleep and Neddy, his 12 year old son, was wrapped around her back, holding onto her tight. Hamich’s wife Leelee was asleep beside a smaller fire in the storage shed, connected to the sleeping quarters by the extended hearth and low fire.
Tobias watched the sun rise from one corner of the window to the next, lighting up just bright enough to bathe the cornfields just beyond the narrow row of stables and, more often than not, the first order of business would be to unload supplies when the chemist Dr Bradford came by. He’d bring feed for the chickens and the horses, two heavy bags of stag-corn to lure in deer from the thick woods surrounding Rose Hill, a gabled plantation manor in Upstate South Carolina. Many of the slaves had run away, flocking to the banners of the Union Army, all promising to come back one day to get the rest of them. Leelee was young and was learning how to sew, crochet and needlepoint; it was thought that, though Tobias and Hamich would remain, Neddy, Leelee, and Ethel would never have to do that kind of work, that kind of work which set their teeth-a-chatter in the slowly warming day, breaking blue and slowly filling the small room where they slept, one ray of light through a crack in the window moved across the floor as the sun Rose.
“Let’s go,” Tobias said. Hamich rose and pushed another stack of clumped and matted leaves into the fire and went into the other room to raise Leelee as she would be needed for her mistress’s morning. Ethel would attend the Master’s needs shortly after breakfast was started. Two pulled-sausages from a nearby farm off Lee Cemetery Rd. and eggs fresh from the gathering basket that brought in dozens every Monday morning, some being sorted and sold at local swaps and improvised markets in the day-trader South, in the woods where the major fighting had yet to breach.
Neddy’s eyes opened just as his father tried to slip without notice out the door, holding it for Hamich so he could get to Dr Bradford’s mare and tie her off. Tobias gestured, nodding curtly, and Hamich hurried after the carriage that had stopped at the turn-around where members of the Master’s extended family sorted goods into different bags, marking them and weighing them. Hamich took the sacks of chicken feed two at a time, carrying them round to the back wire-fence where the chickens kept. Tobias slid the door back to a resting shut and walked into the room where his son, short for his age with a head full of hair, stood rubbing the sleep from his eyes and not yet letting go of his the tail of his mother’s gown.
Ethel called something out to Leelee as she left with her needlepoint and crochet. The day was upon them when Tobias said goodbye to his wife as she threw the potatoes over her shoulder – a day of washing them and restacking was in order, as her duties were often time consuming though light. With the room emptied of the rest of their small family, Tobias took a seat on the floor beside his son and patted the ground,
“Sit,” he said. “Come on, I’m going to be noticed missing soon.”
“I don’t want to pick pine needles to day,” said Neddy. He looked at his feet, unable to look his father in the eye. “I don’t want to do it daddy,” he somehow found the strength to say. “Now I wouldn’t be mad daddy and I ain’t mad but I want to do work that matter’s all. I could help you feed the horses.”
The idea thrilled him when he thought about the stables, and he remembered standing there in an undefined memory, a suggestive feeling but no solid ground, and he was there with Leelee and his uncle Tobias, and his father, and they waited outside of the regency room as wet nurses went in and out, all hastily attending to Ethel.
The carriages went past as his father hoisted him across an iced-over puddle in the mud. That’s when a horse reared up on its hind legs, spooked, blasts of hot breath issuing forth from his humid nostrils, filling the air as though it were the smoke from a cement chimney. His father breathed like that, and he was so tall to his rather short and meek son, skeletal and thin while his father was strong, broad, and muscular.
` “You can always stay here,” said Tobias. He stood up and tied the rope he ran around the waist of his second-hand woolen trousers. “But if you stay here, you’ll have to keep the fire up and running. If it goes out you know your mama ain’t going to get no sleep if she gets the draft.”
Neddy hesitated, always suspicious of fire, the way it seemingly responded, the way it seemed to come alive. He shook his head defiantly and reached to grab his father’s hand. “I’ll pick up the pine needles,” he said. “If you will come see how nice the path looks once I’ve got it cleared.”
“I’ll see you soon as I take the bones out to the kennels, then I got to pull those trotlines and haul in those jugs. But you’ll be safe there, you know Missy’ll keep an eye on you. Just stay garden and I’ll come by and surprise you!”
Neddy knew his father wanted him to smile. He attempted one, “Okay,” he said. “Let’s walk together.”
“After you get dressed!”
Neddy dropped his blanket and went over to the pile of britches beside the fire, not too close to singe the cotton but close enough to make it warm enough like Neddy liked it in the morning. He pulled them up and his dad helped him get them tied off. He slid a thermal sweat over his narrow chest, the width much too broad and the sleeves much too large, so big the t-shirt almost swallowed him up. It had been his father’s other brother, but they didn’t talk about him. Neddy didn’t ask why.
The sun was boiling good by the time they slid the latch behind them and filled the wheelbarrow up to head down to see Jordan, some relative of the Master who oversaw most of what went on with the slaves outside, as they reported to him in the morning and at the end of the day, first to get their haul and pick up the supplies they’d need for that day’s work and when the sun was getting low towards twilight they’d return with their bags of seed and feed empty, the seeds planted and sewn, the animals – the horses, the pigs (just three now), the sheep – oh so many – and the kennels full of mastiffs and bloodhounds watered and fed. Neddy was unique among them to be born without coming of working age, around 11 or 12 in those parts; yet Neddy had never been taken before the Master, nor was he checked in upon when set upon a task. It wasn’t so much the work that bothered him, the menial task of keeping the pathways in the hedgemaze cleared in case of visitors, such as Sunday when the congregation from Galilee Church down the road a ways came up for supper and they’d sit out on the porch, the Master and his wife and their small congregation watching the farmhands and trainers busying about, Tobias always busy and working hard, sweating in the winter. And Hamich too, he had strong arms and broad shoulders like Neddy’s dad, so strong, both of them, he thought, wondering why he would be so slight. It wasn’t hard for him to think that maybe he wasn’t fit for work, and just sweeping out those paths through the maze was something they gave him so he’d feel like he was contributing.
His father said a quick goodbye and leaned in, pressing their foreheads together and wrapping one arm around the back of his head, pulling him in closer.
“I love you,” he said. “I see you after sundown.”
“Yes, sir,” said Neddy, left on his own by the south entrance to the Mansion’s famous hedgemaze. The original owners had constructed it with the help of hundreds of slave, Neddy had been told, and it was said that there was a way to cheat the maze, and that the slaves who had built it hid away a secret tunnel off the plantation that was only accessible by following the clues planted along each stepping stone that lined the interconnecting paths.
Neddy walked onward South away from the noise. Just yonder a meadow and so bright with the sun on it, twisted elms and pecan trees cast shade on that side of the maze, the canopy of dense limbs and leaves sheltering him from the sun. There was a nature trail, and Jacob loved to take his pony down it just after lunch. It seemed a cruelty that his family’s lot was to work and never get to enjoy the fruits of their labor, looking out for the Owners over themselves. Neddy never understand, and his father, glad at his inability to understand this, believed that it was good not to know.
Neddy stopped as they led out the pack of dogs to head off down that same nature trail, and his father’d be along that stream pulling trot lines too when they put the bloodhounds on those turkeys, they were common then in the late summer. They hunted deer and quail, that unsettling sound of gunpowder putting Neddy’s teeth on edge each time it rang out. Tobias explained that was how a man lived in America, and how he’d get to live someday. They lived off the land, like the Indians, and someday, maybe not for me but for you and your mom, y’all won’t have to be no pack animal like we been. A pack animal, that stuck in mind, as he saw the division between his family, always kept below or underneath some member of the master’s household staff, always carrying some load from one place to another, dragging around seeds and pulling jugs, shucking corn in the hay-loft in the barn’s where Tobias took his 15 minutes when the sun was at its zenith, nowhere to go but down from there. He headed toward the back patio where he knew his mother’d be outside filling up hummingbird feeders and he’d call to her from out of sight, a game he much enjoyed, whispering “Mama!” from behind rhododendron bushes, and scurrying to hide behind another hedge, “Mah-mah!”
She played along, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the towel tucked into her britches.
“Now, now who could that be?”
“Nobody!”
“Nobody who?”
Neddy was beneath her, imagining that just above him his mother went about the game, pretending to have her eyes peeled, stretching out over the balcony trying to find him in the wall foliage and flowers.
Just then a door opened and there were heavy, even steps moving across the creaking wood just above him.
In the Master’s voice,
“Who are you talking to?”
Mama!
He kept quiet though, in spite of himself, as the footsteps picked up their pace and continued, creaking with each heavy step.
“Now, who was you talking to Ethel?”
“Nobody, Sir, I promise.”
Neddy her the sickening sound of an open hand against sticky, salty flesh, the beaded brow of his mother wrapped in a sun-shoal. And again the slap, skin against skin and horrifying.
“Now,” he said. They were both standing above. Neddy had slid underneath the picketing fence that kept the dogs from underneath the house and was beneath the patio looking up. He could see two hands knotted together, the Master’s knotted knuckles, covered in calluses. His mother’s hands were being turned over, regarded minutely as the shone came down, temporarily blinding Neddy. He threw up his hand to block out the sun and whop! Right against the floor above. The voices immediately stopped talking, Neddy immediately began to scurry out from under the porch and quickly, pulling the picket fence back and heading towards the pagoda in the center. From there he could find his way to either of the four points; the roses in the North, the rhododendrons in the South, the pecan tree in the Western corner, and the tree that bent over the narrow brook and led into the old pagoda was due East, far as you could get from the front door before the house disappeared behind you.
Further than that, Neddy often wondered, returning to the base of that bent over tree each day as he wound his time to darkness down at the base of that felled tree, the shallow brook that it branched over just well enough that a balanced pair of legs could get to that other side. And from there? Neddy could no more imagine that there was a world outside of that little island, isolated from the greater war and contented to be outside of all that. The dogs were out, he could smell them, and it was getting close to the time where he’d meet his father – and the horror struck him instantly, knowing his father was headed to the very spot from which he had himself just fled, with the Master holding to his mother’s hands, questioning her about who she might be speaking to, and, though he would not know it, she had so named him in her answer, but not in a way he could know.
Neddy was weaving in between the knotted hedges toward the South again, hoping he could slip through enough of the gaps he knew so well to come between his father and what would be seen as a scene of some sort of crime, perhaps whispers of rebellion – the sort of madness that the Master had, as his own father it was said was murdered in his sleep by his slaves during a particularly violent revolt, as he was choked by having his chewing tobacco stuffed into his throat until black liquid spilled from his nose and his throat stopped up. It was a real danger, as it was not uncommon for a slave, an older man most often who just wishes to revenge himself upon his tormentor if for no other reason than to die with the score settled.
Neddy arrived just as the group of the Master’s crew was pulling his father down the pathway that he had just a few hours’ prior swept, and with his knees buckled and limp behind him, two arms holding him up as they dragged him up the patio steps. Neddy was quiet enough to slip by the picket fence again and underneath the patio. He crouched again, just beneath his father who, thrown to the ground looked downward, the sweat from his forehead coalescing around his jaw and, unknowingly, dropping square onto Neddy’s forehead. He looked up at his father, his eyes looking at what three inches from his face was just the dark, though a few inches further his son stared up at him, wide-eyed and waiting, rooted to the spot.
..
Rain, rain, go away…
Again the next day when they asked the dreadful Master, “Help!”
He looked around and laughed and laughed.
“Let them help themselves. Who helps us? They do. We can’t help ourselves. Neither than can they. We’re all equal in the end, you know. You think God sees us in different colors?”
When she was dead, another beautiful flower too early plucked, the Master, at last, decided to get the frail girl’s body out of his drinking water.
The masked sad Master sighed, the unhidden Master said, “Bury her behind the shed.”
The day her face went underground, Neddy spoke, sad faces round.
His sister liked the songs he wrote, so he wrote a song for her, a song to sing, her eulogy, trembling hands, monotone words—he read in quiet by the jasmine covered grave.
Three other slaves and nameless grey watched her go into the grave with not a thing to say or do, twitching lips those bubbling eyes with tears of blue crawl out in wrinkles drawn by time.
“Sister, dear, how well I know, how much you meant to me. You were beautiful and saw what was beautiful in the world, the trees, the flowers, those yellow jasmines you picked for me. I felt that way for you, as though you were my flower, and I wish I could see you one more time, holding one of those flowers for me.
“And now another flower in the field has laid its head, back onto the garden where once it lay in bed.”
A preacher read a solemn prayer. Neddy bowed his head.
When Galilee was a little girl, how bright then was all the world; she knew, at ten, it would begin, her servitude unfurled. She would become a slave. No more walks, no late night talks, just that far-off vacant gaze.
When she was young she often sung, walking in the gardens with the Master’s wife, and often ate inside at night. None of the other slaves got warm food, or custom dresses, fancy clothes— and they dressed her, Galilee, in a thousand outfits and she posed…
Neddy didn’t understand their concern for Galilee, or why they didn’t treat all of the slaves that way. Neddy had cold bowls of grits and molded bread for breakfast every day, the sour taste of tears, unwelcome Heaven over head; a hole in the mud where they screamed trapped, walking in quicksand desperate circles until swallowed by the Earth.
They won’t see the shore tonight…not with the lighthouse out; ships are crashing, people screaming heads on fire faces dive into the ink black sea.
They saw the stars as iron bars above them in the sky—the sight of Heaven blurred—that often overhead passed by to blot out all the stars, leaving them like jailbirds looking up, singing songs about a place for which they longed, whose door for them was always shut, and locked, the key long thrown away.
That growing hole was always there, forever at the Rose, where on the hills, where men once tilled, a thousand jasmines flowed with listless wind and to no end.
When you’re a slave you work and strive yet never have a thing. All your tears and prayers won’t consolation bring. That’s how the Master wished for it to be. That is how it was.
Neddy was a slave who worked inside the ivy maze, behind the house in endless patterns of intersecting hedges, false directions. Neddy in comfort walked alone into the maze though overgrown—I’ll figure it out, he thought.
He trimmed the bushes, trimmed the hedges, and often lost his way. He did his best, day after day, to avoid the other slaves; he could not look them in the eye.
After a day, and hard at work, on stained cobblestone he walked alone; quiet, in his way, in silence passed a lonely grave. He turned his head. He would not look, a silent requiem for Galilee sang. He stared at the ground as he walked without sound. Tired at home he lay.
His home was bare; nobody there. His sister’s empty bed was made. His mother must’ve been he thought in Master’s kitchen where, every night by lantern light a hot meal she prepared.
When Neddy slept in his poor house he often dreamed he was a louse.
In that dream, how small he seemed; trapped on a free man’s head. Around he went, by God’s hand sent; a light shone overhead. It rained and rained, less lice remained, and those who did yelled, “No!” as they were swallowed by the memory hole.
The lice who didn’t oft would shout at fingers that with just a hat could blot the sunlight out. Tense fingers crawled the scalp about ten times every day. When they were gone he was alone. One louse still remained.
And Nobody was his name.
Neddy the slave, Nobody the louse, lay on the bare floor of his house. In his mind he strayed. He saw a thousand vacant, forlorn faces, different people, different races, wild-eyed and staring plain—on a stairwell to nowhere walking again.
He’d stand at the bottom of the white stairwell, worried, eyes wide, the bitter taste of sweat, the frightened animal looked at the sky.
Steps receded into clouds and step by step he walked into the sky. When he made it to the top another step was added, another and another, more, the unending walk to no where.
He turned around, and looked back down, and no longer saw the ground—where once he saw his home—his family and friends—there was, instead, nothing but those dread white stairs, descending in the billows of the clouds.
By the stairway in his dreams he saw a grave with no last name. His sister’s ghost sat on a gravestone by the rose white steps. She wore a sky blue dress of lace.
“Hello?” Neddy halfway asked.
She wouldn’t look—eyes to the side—downcast a drooping frown.
“Hello!” he screamed, her face unflinching, mannequin like and terrifying, blank unwavering eyes as white as snow, a stagnant glow.
“Hello!” the hollow word in monotone echoed back. She would not look his way. She pulled petals from a rose and one by one they fell. Each petal plucked made Neddy’s chest go numb and twinge, then dry heave, roll around a while in leaves—the burning, electricity of panic, nervous system set on fire, flooded adrenaline alight, fight or flight or run into the night.
Galilee hummed a haunting jingle in the dark:
‘And now another flower in the field has laid its head, back onto the garden where once it lay in bed.’
“Hello?”
She’s dead. She can’t hear.
She’ll always hear me.