Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen Read online

  “You … you’re…” I had to lean so close to his mouth to hear him that his breath warmed my ear when he said, “… a woman.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re a … a … black woman.” I had never before heard anyone put those two words together the way he did. Like they were poetry. Like they were a prize and he had just won it.

  “I am.”

  “My prayer has been answered,” he gasped.

  The effort caused a horrible rasping and rattling cough to overcome him.

  I fetched up several more soppings of cider until he was breathing easy again, then I asked, “What prayer is that?”

  “Not to die alone.”

  He spoke the way Daddy had. Educated and with none of the slurry drawl that made Southerners sound lazy or slow or both. And not hurried-up and mean the way Yankees talked, either.

  “I didn’t dare to ask for a black woman to comfort my last moments on this earth. But the Lord knew what was in my heart and He sent you to me.”

  His words and the feel of them forming against my ear caused my belly to quiver and my cheeks to warm like I’d been caught at something shameful. I answered as Daddy would of, clear and powerful and polished, for I needed to sound smart when I told him, “You are not going to die.” It was both an order and what I suddenly wished for with all my heart.

  He answered, “Yes I am,” like it was a fact beyond disputing. In little halting bursts, with many stops to rest and allow me to trickle cider into his mouth, the soldier related, “I was near gone already when Sheridan’s scavenging party came upon me. I’d been left for dead after a little skirmish my unit got caught up in just north of here.”

  “Your unit? So this blue suit? It’s yours?”

  Again, in the halting way of a dying man, he managed to say, “I put the blood in it. Put the sweat in it. Figure that makes it mine as much as enlisting did.”

  “You’re a soldier? A signed-up Yankee soldier?”

  He told me how there were lots of black soldiers, tens of thousands. All fighting and dying to end slavery. Speaking wore him out, though, and with a long sigh, he slumped even more heavily into the sacks of grain. His head listed to the side as though the spirit had left him.

  After several long, motionless minutes, I placed my hand beneath his nose. A long time passed before I felt the warm puff of a weak breath. I started to take my hand away, but the soldier leaned into my palm, and nestled his cheek up against it like a dog wanting to be patted. So I stroked his cheek, and comfort I never knew I had to give flowed out of me. The relief of a human touch allowed him to lower his guard so much that a few whimpers of pain mixed with the fear of the death coming up on him slipped from his lips.

  The feel of his cheek skin was finer than when I was allowed into the big house and would run my hand against the silk-smooth wood of the maple banister. Other than Clemmie’s, I had never stroked another person’s cheek. Certainly no boy’s. Mama had warned me from early on that to catch the eye of a boy, black or white, was to make a misery of your life. What befell Clemmie proved her warnings true.

  Maybe because my nature had never come, I didn’t have the slightest interest in boys the way most girls did. Far as I was concerned, they were just girls in britches. Though, by and large, a sight stupider, dirtier, meaner, smellier, and a whole lot louder. Now, though, a queer giddiness lit me up like hundreds of fireflies were zipping around inside my belly. For a second, I almost understood how girls went calf-kneed and forgot their raising when they were sweet on a boy.

  The soldier slept and I was fixing to pull my hand away, but the instant I did, he groaned deep in his throat. The groan sounded like the noises that came from the other side of the cabin we shared with Maynard and his mama when one of the men visited Maynard’s mother, a woman who was as man-fevered as they came.

  The soldier leaned his cheek further into my palm and I left my hand just where it was, nuzzled against his warm skin. He slept and we traveled many a rough mile in this manner, my hand holding off troubled dreams and fears of the grave. I slept then woke without knowing when I’d dozed off and never certain I was truly awake as we rolled through forests shrouded with Spanish moss and swirling with foggy mists.

  The days passed. I gnawed on sweet potatoes and fed the pullet parched corn, and other victuals the Yanks had stolen. The wagon only stopped when the driver—who had his rations on the foretop with him and never once looked back or spoke a word to me, and would of been happy if me and the soldier’d both gone cold—had to do his business.

  Soon as he set the handbrake, I would jump off, hurry to relieve myself, and gulp down some water before I soaked my shirt, kerchief, and any other bit of rag I could lay my hands on. I’d bring the sopping cloths back and squeeze out a good drink for both the soldier and the pullet in the cage who’d become a friend with her fretful clucking.

  It was during one such foray that I listened in on the white soldiers talking soldier talk and got the lay of the land as to where we were headed and why. Our destination was a place called Harper’s Ferry where Sheridan was gathering up the Army of the Shenandoah along with the Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac, four infantry and two cavalry divisions. All told the soldiers reckoned he’d have him a force of fifty thousand men. This figure was beyond my power to conjure. They were fixing to have one whale of a showdown with the Rebs, who were massing their own men to the south under a general by the name of Jubal Early.

  I couldn’t say how many days passed, other than to note that I had made a considerable dent in the sweet taters, when I started awake from a dead sleep one night with a heavy feeling pressing in on me. Terrified, I checked on the soldier. He was taking his murmurless rest, and though he didn’t wake, he did swallow a mouthful of cider before sagging back into a deep sleep.

  The more time that passed with us bundled up so close, the greedier my palm grew. Soon, it took to sliding down to mold around the strong place where his jaw curved. Then to stroking his neck where the blood pulsed and the apple Eve gave Adam that got stuck in all men’s throats ever after rippled when he swallowed. I brushed my fingertips across the wide flare of his nose, the bristly rasp of a mustache, the softness of his full lips.

  That last, touching his beautiful lips, caused a spirit to take possession of my soul and that spirit desired the touch of those lips against mine. Though I attempted to rebuke such a willful spirit, a weariness greater than any I’d ever known came stealing over me. It made my head so heavy it drooped on my neck like a giant sunflower, forcing me to lean in closer. Then closer. I inhaled the scent of his skin, his breath. I leaned further.

  Just as my lips touched his, the soldier woke. His croak of a voice after such a long silence startled me by asking, “May I…”

  I jerked my head away and, from a respectable distance, answered, proper as I could with my heart thumping like a scared rabbit. “Yes? May you what?”

  “May I…” His hand, trembling and weak, rose. “May I touch your face?”

  I pulled back even further. All the sweet touches and words would stop the instant his fingers found the truth written on my dark face for even a blind man to see: I was a plain girl.

  “Well, now,” I stammered. “I don’t know about all that.”

  “I am dying,” my soldier stated flatly. “Let the feel of the face of a kind woman accompany me to the grave.”

  He reached his hand toward me, palm up, begging. Though I still worried about what he would see with his fingers, I could not deny a dying man his last wish. I guided his hand to my face. The tips of his strong fingers brushed across my cheeks, nose, forehead. They stroked my eyelashes gently, then traced the outlines of my lips. The breath bunched up inside my lungs as he saw me the way Auntie Cherry saw after her eyes went cloudy and gray.

  He considered what his fingers felt and said, “You are a handsome woman. Gallant and stouthearted.”

  That queer giddiness came over me even stronger then for I felt the soldier had seen
me better than anyone outside Mama and Clemmie ever had. Aside from the handsome part, he didn’t just see who I was but who I dreamed about being. It was like when Daddy first laid eyes on Mama and knew right off that she was quality.

  He laid the flat of his hand against my neck and then ran his fingers across my collarbone. “What are these?” he asked, his fingertips resting on the top row of scars like a piano player with his hands on the keys. “Who did this to you?” The way he asked, harsh, like he would of taken out after whoever had cut into my flesh, like he would of protected me, made me want to rest my head on his chest and never lift it from that spot again.

  “No one put them on me,” I answered, my voice so soft, I had to whisper directly into his ear. “My mama marked me the way her mama marked her. And all the girls were marked when…” I couldn’t say “when their nature came.” Instead, I just mumbled, “When it was time.”

  My scars were lies for my nature had never come. When I was seventeen and still had never bled, Mama said it was because I was not a female who would ever be claimed by a man. That I was meant for better than to be a brood sow for some short-weight plowboy. Might have been that or might have been the fact that us field hands had naught but a handful of ground corn and what we could steal and scavenge to eat and because I worked too hard for a womanly nesting to take hold in my nethers.

  Clemmie, though, she worked in the house and ate regular and never lifted anything heavier than a feather duster, and her womanhood arrived when she was fourteen. So that’s when Mama decided to mark us both.

  I told the soldier how I had kneeled in front of Mama and she used a blackberry thorn to pluck up bits of my young hide, which she then lopped off with a straight-edge razor Clemmie had borrowed from Old Mister for just that purpose. After Mama dotted me thusly thirty times, she rubbed a handful of ashes and some pinches of her snuff into the cuts to stop the bleeding and make the dots puff up pretty.

  “Did it hurt?” my soldier asked.

  “Getting ashes and snuff rubbed into cuts leaking thirty trails of blood down your chest?” My answer pointed to the foolishness of the question. “But I was Mama’s Africa child and if I ever let the water fall from my eye those tears would of washed away the strength and magic and power Mama had cut into me. Then I’d be like everyone else: a slave not a captive.

  “But Clemmie, Lord.” I chuckled at the memory. “Where I’d made myself into a stone on the bottom of a clear river the way Mama had taught me, Clemmie boo-hooed buckets. That’s because she was Mama’s America child and never knew Iyaiya the way I had.”

  I wished I knew the American words for the chant Mama repeated through all the cutting, so that I could tell that to my soldier, too. But it only came back to me in Fon: I cut strength into you. I cut belonging into you. Me to you. You to me. We to our people, to our ancestors, and to our children to come. I cut a warning into you that no unwelcome hand shall ever touch you and go unpunished.

  That last is why I’d been obliged to kill Old Mister, for he had put his unwelcome hands on my little sister and had to be punished. I didn’t tell that part.

  The soldier stroked the tips of his fingers across the beaded rows soft as a bird brushing me with its wing and my breath stopped. “You know who you are,” he whispered, as though that was some kind of miracle. “You haven’t forgotten. They haven’t taken Africa from you. How is that possible?”

  “Iyaiya’s stories,” I answered. “She told them to me every night until Old Mister sold her off. Then Mama told them. They were our lullabies. Now I tell them to myself in the moments before sleep catches me.”

  “Tell me,” he asked. “Tell me about Africa, about the home I never knew. Tell me your lullabies.”

  Chapter 3

  How I wished I could of told those stories in our secret queen language that we spoke when there were no whites about. Iyaiya and Mama and me could paint curlicues, do backward flips, and run across rainbows in that limber tongue.

  Though I missed the musical way the words loppity-lopped like a creek tumbling over smooth stones when the tales were told in Fon, I stumbled along, hobbled by having to speak American and said, “My grandmother, my Iyaiya, wasn’t but a knobby-kneed girl when a scout arrived in her village. He had been sent by King Ghezo who was the greatest of the twelve kings of Dahomey and the one that freed his kingdom from the rule of his brother Andandozan. Old Andandozan, who was crazy as a peach orchard boar, was partial to feeding his prisoners of war, alive and hollering to hallelujah, to the pet hyenas he kept special just for that purpose.

  “But it’s King Ghezo we’re talking about now and it was one of his scouts who came to my grandmother’s village and put all the young virgins to a test. After picking out the six fastest girls, he made them charge through a wall of acacia thorns.”

  “Acacia?” he asked.

  “I don’t mean the kind we have here. I’m talking Africa acacia where they sprout needles three, four inches long that can slice you up clean as a straight-edge razor.”

  The soldier sighed, settling in like a child being told a bedtime story, and I picked up my tale. “Only one girl went at that barbed barricade not once, not twice, but three times, and that was my grandma. So the scouts took her to the capital of Dahomey, Ouidah, to see if she had the grit to be N’Nonmiton.”

  “N’Nonmiton,” he repeated, enjoying the feel of the word.

  “When my Iyaiyah first came upon the city of Ouidah, she was struck dumb by its magnificence. A mud wall, near thirty feet high and two and a half mile long, wrapped around the whole city. On top of the gates set a dozen enemy heads shriveled black in the sun, each one with its own bib of dried blood. Off in a special area were a hundred acres of royal residences, tombs, and memorial shrines all shaded by thick palm trees. King Ghezo and his six thousand virgin queens lived in a palace at the very heart of the capital. But what really impressed Grandma was that King Ghezo had him a low, wooden throne setting on the skulls of four enemy kings that his warrior-wives had laid on the cooling board for him in battle. Iyaiya wanted nothing more than to live with the king in Ouidah and be one of his wives.”

  The soldier gave a throat rumble of interest, encouraging me to go on.

  “For the next few months, hundreds of the strongest, fleetest girls from all over the kingdom of Dahomey were brought to Ouidah to be trained and tested. They ran barefoot over burning sand, shot flintlock muskets with flowers scrolled into the silver trigger plates, wrestled each other, and stormed more of those acacia-thorn barriers. The same time they were getting deadened to body pain, trainers were working on deadening their mind pain.”

  The soldier nodded like he approved of this toughening and I went on. “This they did by having the new recruits climb up a sixteen-foot platform. At the top the girls found three dozen prisoners of war, gagged and trussed up like shoats going to market. In the large central gathering place below, a mob howled for the blood of their enemies. Each new girl had to heave a prisoner off the platform so the howling mob could air them out with the sticks they had sharpened for exactly that purpose and then tear the ventilated carcasses into little souvenir chunks.

  “Any girl who hesitated or whimpered or let the water run from her eye was sold to the Portugee for a miserable sum, because who wanted a girl in the first place? And a coward to boot? My Iyaiya hurled captives off the platform easy as chunking rocks into the river. And sang while she was doing it.”

  The soldier’s forehead furrowed and I realized that I’d gone too far and shut up. He was too American for Iyaiya’s story.

  A moment passed before he asked, “Well? Was she chosen?”

  “Of course.”

  He murmured in an interested way and I went on.

  “After my Iyaiya was taken on as one of the king’s wife-warriors, she was given all the tobacco she could smoke and all the palm wine and millet beer she could drink. And when she set foot outside her royal quarters, one servant stood waiting to shade her head from the sun with
a parasol and another ran ahead ringing a bell to warn the men to lower their eyes and not to look upon one of the king’s virgin wives.

  “But what I remember best,” I said, “was her describing how she wore a blue tunic and carried a saber that gleamed like the sun. And how, when she stood, shoulder to shoulder, with the bravest, strongest girls in all the kingdom, the line they formed was as straight as a bar of iron. And dignitaries from around the world came to marvel and call them les Amazones.”

  Just like Iyaiya, my voice swelled with pride. But it all drained away when I reached the sad ending of her tale of glory.

  “My Iyaiya used to say that the only regret she had about being an Amazon was that she hadn’t ripped the veins out of the neck of the Yoruba warrior who captured her while she was out hunting a rogue elephant with a dozen other warrior-wives. The Yorubas did to her exactly what Iyaiya’s people would have done to any enemy they captured: they sold her off to the Portugee.”

  I hated that part of the story. It was like dreaming of running and waking up to find the manacles still around your ankles. So I quickly added, “Iyaiya never thought of herself as a slave, though. She was a captive. And that’s what she raised Mama knowing and what Mama raised me knowing: we were captives. Prisoners of war. Never slaves. Captives.”

  “Captive,” he whispered, seeming to like the sound of the word. Then a long, low breath whistled out of him and he said, “I wish I wasn’t going to die. You are fit to be the wife who would bear me the children not broken as we are.”

  Wife? Children?

  I could not speak.

  “Dying has made me bold,” he gasped out. “Made me greedy for what I will never have.” He took hold of my hand, and for the first time in my life, I understood what shy meant. Though I wanted more than anything to show off, to be someone for him, I couldn’t of spoken if Jesus had been taking orders for salvation.

  In the silence, the pain came back on him hard and I saw that he was one of those, like Daddy, who had such a big, busy brain that it actually hurt for it to lie fallow. That the ideas and stories in his head meant more to him than the world outside it.