Weak from fever and hunger, a young inmate had slackened in his duties. The Keeper had Deke and another bulky captive hold the man down while he laid the snake strokes of a whip across the prisoner’s back. “Please, boss, please, why don’t you juss kill me?” he whimpered, the thick grooves of broken skin already swelling with blood and pus. Without speaking, the Keeper took out his pistol and shot the youth through the temple. The body spasmed and went slack in Deke’s hands. That gal done this. Come between me and my brothuh.
Thinking only of escape, each day he methodically harvested the thick amber resin from the scruffy pine groves that encircled the marshlands. First breaking the bark, then cutting the groove, then screwing the pipes into the pulp, Deke seemed a productive worker. He then “set the box,” boring more deeply into the stringy heart of the tree, draining it of its blood, the glutinous sap that made paint thinner rosin, and enamel for battleships. The slowness of the rhythm bothered him, the closeness of the swamp pulled on his lungs. The thickness of the fumes made his breathing short. Sometimes the mud came up to his hips, the acrid juice burning his fingers so the skin turned to scales. His nails, once buffed and polished weekly, were cracked and yellowed on the surface, blackened at the tips. The rhythm of captive voices pulled him down like an undertow, biting at him like the water moccasins, whose black flashing bodies slithered beneath the swamp water’s surface. Deacon Turner, who used to wear polished spats, now wore shoes handmade from old tires. The resin from the trees stuck to the treads in the soles and made crackling sounds as he walked.
His first pair of shoes had had metal caps from sarsaparilla bottles. He had danced the feelings down then—hammered them down with speed, whirling within the circle that always formed around him and ending on one knee with his cap extended, ready for coin, prayin’ for paper. The morning that Dora May pranced by him, she walked right through his circle of patrons as if it were not there, as if he were not there. Her straw hat tipped low, purse held with both hands, and her skirt rustling at her heels, she stepped out of the way of white folk in a solo dosey-doe, oblivious to all but her own dream. By compulsion and habit, he followed her. He was thinking he might snatch that purse she held so tightly, but when he came upon her, when he came near, he wanted only to impress her, to bring joy to her startling blue eyes and somehow to his own heart. He came alert in his hammock and shook off the reverie. The sodden hemp ties slung between two iron hooks, whined with his weight. He brought his arm to his forehead. Got to keep focused. Go over the plan again in your head.
“Hey Lawdeh, Lawdeh, Lawd! Don’t you know I’m in bad shape tonight. Me an dat gull sho gon have a fight!” Rawley was rattlin’ drunk from the hooch, slurring his words through the hiccups. Even in jail, Deke was ambitious. Tom Winrow had schooled him back in the day when he was a youngster. “You kin make the shine outta anything,” Win had boasted, “grapes, potato—any growin’ thing kin ferment, most anythin’ once livin’.” Deke used this knowledge now to befriend the old-timer. Tomato soup and potato rinds made a potent, if bitter brew.
“I puttin’ ev’day, money in yo’ hand,
Spect you to say I’mo be yo’man,
Prettieh woman Ah evuh seen,
I declare nah, she run down to New Orleans,
Yuh go down juss tuh show yo’ gold,
Yuh gonna die someplace now nice n low . . .”
Rawley stayed in his cups. He had been locked up so long, he was a trustee. Too old to do much hard labor, he still had the sharp, piercing voice that drove the gangs forward. With rhythm and wit, he painted shorthand pictures of the outside, wrote unsent letters to sweethearts, cussed the cheaters and backstabbers and laughed. The simplicity of his phrases told bits of stories that each man knew to be his own.
“I putting ev’day money in yo hand,
Come own, pretty woman, let me be yoah man,
Prettieh woman that ah evuh seen,
I declare now she run down to New Orleans,
Yuh go down just tuh show yo gold,
Yuh gonna die someplace now nice and low . . .”
Stackin’ the tins in the predawn setup for mess, Rawley was still drunk from the shine Deke had passed him the night before. The Keeper wandered over, asking, “You think it’s nice work doin’ yo singin’? Think you can do moah if you slack off?”
“Nah suh . . . It what makes it go mo bettah when you singin’, you don’t have, you uh, you can forgit, you see, an the time pass on way, but if you juss get yosef devoted on somethin’, it look like it be hard for you to make it, so you make a day, day be longer it look like, so to keep his mind from bein’, keep his mind from bein’, keep his mind from bein’ . . .”
Deke cursed silently, without flinching, “Crazy redbone still toah up, gon be too juiced to hit it.” This was the morning the Keeper chose to hold a conversation.
“I learn dat song in Florida.”
“On the farm?”
“Yeah, county farm.”
“What it take . . . to be a good leader, Rawley?”
“What you mean, Keep?”
“Yoah singin’, lead singuh?”
“Stay in time wid duh ax, is mose potent part, I spoze.”
Runnin’ off at the goddam mouf, dat old man gon get us both kilt. Deke had no choice in the partnership. Rawley coughed blood like his mama used to do, but the old man knew the swamps. He was the last of the Yamassee, a descendant of natives who first roamed the land. As a trustee Rawley walked on his own without shackles, and he had an outside woman who cooked for the camp sometimes. She had helped plot the escape. Rawley knew where the boat was hidden. He knew the landscape. Deacon was counting on him to steer through the channels, the acres of Georgia bayou that surrounded the camp. “The turns kin git you turnt round so you wind up runnin’ right back to Charlie.” Rawley continued, “They keep the dogs hungry and set em on the trail as well, ringin’ the outlands. You kin forgit swimmin’. If the snakes doan git yuh, gators will. Buddy almost made it once. Hid ’neath the watuh wid a reed as a breathin’ straw. They pour kerosene atop the water and set it afire. He come up fuh air, torched hisself each time. Burnin’ n drownin’, both.” Rawley’s cautionary tale did not dissuade him. Deke had his mind set. As if sensing the plan, the Keeper kept pressing Rawley with small talk. “Been on line long time, spoze?”
“Seventeen yeah, come Monday, Keep, mighty long time.”
Deke’s Asiatic eyes watched without looking. Skin stretched taut over the muscle and bone of his face, square and full—Benin or Olmec. His head shaved to keep off the lice, sweat streaming down his face in the noonday sun, he shone like silver. The sound of hammer on bedrock, the saw blade, whiplash rhythm of his feet, his heartbeat.
“Monday it is then. Two days . . . Take care of baby and baby will take care of you.”
Deacon Turner grew up a feral child. His own mah died when he was three or six, depending upon how he counted. She had come to work for Pilar, doing laundry and cleanin’. “She pretty nuff, but nommo good on she back,” Pilar had casually surmised. He took charge, dancing in the streets for pennies. He lived under the plank walk beneath the docks and ran the wards at Orange Street Orphanage. Among the stray and abandoned children on the wharf, he was the leader. Before he was ten, he had lost three of his merry band. Justine was hit by a milk wagon, Ori got the influenza. Robert, whose rickets curled his body against its own will, finally could not feed himself, his wizened eyes confessing that he had not the heart for survival. Deke, on the other hand, tore into the discarded bones and greens from the garbage with no thought at all but that. Surviving. He had to. Be strong or die.
Then one of the new gals—a redbone from the hills, puree-blood some said—got knocked up. Had hid it till her water broke mid-day. Deke set out to find Aunt Sibby, now so old she walked with her cane handle by her breast, raising her head in intervals to see where she was going. Just as he ushered her into the tiny shuttered room, the whore started gushing blood, screaming, her skin turning gray an
d the sweat turning cold. The old woman instructed Deke to hold the girl down as she examined her. “Birth cord wrapped round the baby neck,” she pronounced. “The more she push, she gon strangle him. Stay in the chamber an gon drown. My hands too old fuh dis. You gon hab to help me, Deacon.”
Following the midwife’s instructions, he eased his small hand along the birth canal wall and felt for the baby’s shoulder and head, then loosened the cord from around the unborn child’s neck with his fingers. The baby shot out, floating on a thick black-red flood that seeped into the worn straw tick mattress and formed a corona around the new mother as she breathed her last. Deke took the baby in his small, stocky arms. His skin mottled, bruised blue and purple from his trials, the infant convulsed in a jagged, coughing outrage. Sibby took no challenges in the naming, “Call dis em Osceola. Em uh fightuh.”
“Em muh brother.”
“Now you done brought em here, make sure nuthin’ happen to he.”
“Why you call me Deacon?”
The old seer smiled, her watery eyes turned blue-gray from seeing far beyond the world of that room. “I seen you watchin’. Standin’ there like you in church. You got sompin to watch over now. Your whole life.”
Deke did watch over Osceola. He enjoyed seeing the boy progress with the music. Jocelyn and the band men took to schoolin’ him. Deke had outgrown the music, himself, the dancin’. He did, however, enjoy the art of enforcement, protection. His wide chest sporting custom suits, his eyes so narrow they sometimes looked shut, he had so perfected his skill that he rarely had to use force, seldom had to raise his voice. “We can do this my way, or the hard way. It’s up to you.”
Tom Winrow had taught him a few things besides the secret to making good hooch. “I’ma teach you what my daddy taught me,” Win had said. “I kin teach yuh how to read cards front an back and mark a new deck, but knowin’ how to read people is moah important. Tug of a sleeve means he bout to lie. Twitch of the eye or cheek, it be a bluff. Slight cough mean he don’t really wanna give up. Folk what eyes dart to the side is hidin.’ ” Deke’s narrow eyes watched as he was told, only to see his teacher lose his way. Soon as she was born, soon as the color set, all the Neckbone knew that Elma, his firstborn, warnt his child. “A China doll, maybe the Chinaman’s,” people would laugh behind Win’s back. Deke had grown up around whores and crooks. He knew duplicity, but he never understood why Win had stayed with the seamstress, how he walked proud with one step, broken with the next. Soft, over a woman. Weak, over a trick.
The fog was hanging low in the trees. The crescent-shaped moon, low in the sky, sliced through the stream of jagged clouds. He was on the run, crouched low to the ground, putting on speed. From childhood, Deke could run the fastest of anyone, forward or back. Lifting his legs up, his arms movin’, like wings, low to the ground, he flew, his feet barely touching the ground. It was a sacred long run, following old Yamassee trails.
Rawley held up, panting, grabbing his chest, holding himself up with his hands on his knees, panic in his voice, “What I’m to do?” Deke slung the old man over his shoulder like a bag of sticks and pressed on, Rawley directing him with his loose arm as they made their way through the underbrush. But then he stumbled, slipping over mounds of sodden leaves and roots, the hounds in his ear, on his heels, crossing his scent. The two men toppled over each other. Rawley wound up almost sitting. He waved Deke on with his hand.
“I ain’t leavin’ you,” Deke insisted.
“Stay, and we both worse’n dead.”
“I don’t know the way,” pleaded Deke.
“Then you will not succeed.”
Deke set out alone. His feet and legs sank into the earth. He could feel hands, pulling him down, clutching at his feet, the vines curling round his ankles, as he stole away. “Take me, take me, don’t leave me,” grabbing at his ankles, sucking him into the mud, bringing him to his knees. His bulky body fell to the side and he went spinning, tumbling down a ravine to an algae-cloaked stream. Surrendering to his instincts, he knelt, rubbing the green, thick mulch from the water on his arms and chest, smearing his bare flesh with blood-soaked earth mixed with tears. He wrapped himself in the cloak of clinging leaves, taking on the scent of the bayou, then continued low to the ground, his feet skimming the surface of the stream, hurdling the felled trees, dancing atop the bones and rotten flesh of lost souls. He dragged himself up and pressed on into the night, the rain, the sweet heavenly rain covering his escape—the thunder shaking the ground in syncopated time. A ball of lightning burst across his path. He could hear the dogs in the distance, yelping like children. The lightning had frightened them. The black sky cracked open and took him in. He ran with the wind’s howling in his ears. He had traveled up the back roads. Hell Hole Swamp, this weren’t nuthin’—he was free.
He awoke the next day in the boat, the bright sun in the yellow white sky burning his eyes. He dragged his leg over the side and collapsed by the oar and slept. The dugout rocked to the gentle rhythm of waves in open water. He had reached the river. He lay flat till the night struck, then paddled slowly with a sure shoulder stride, making good time. The clang and hammer of the sickle and pick breaking rocks into stone, the crack of an ax ’gainst the pulp of a tree, still hung in his ear. Scanning the shore, he spied a colored vagrant, a wanderer washing his face. Deke paddled downstream, then doubled back by foot, tracking the unsuspecting stranger. Boulder in hand, he swiped the man’s skull from behind, spinning him around as he fell, then leaned over the stranger and smashed in his face. He exchanged clothes with the dead man and nestled the body in the hollow of the dugout. As he set the canoe afloat downstream again, he cursed the hobo for having no shoes. He would have to wear the tire treads a bit longer.
At the crossroads Rawley had described, Deke found the woman waiting. She spoke to him in her language, knowing, by the absence of the old man, that Rawley was all but dead to her. In a tongue Deke could not understand, she cursed him and walked away. He straightened his jacket and moved on, staying out of sight of the main road until he got to the state line. “By the time I reach Charleston, I’ll have me a new suit, a new money clip, and a new woman.” He got back to Charleston, and found Pilar’s, the whole red light district, shut down and boarded up by order of the United States Navy. No place he could run, no place safe. He retreated to a sanctuary from his youth, back to the Neckbone. Every time he ran away from Orange Street, the sewing lady had given him food. Would set it right there on the stoop for him. Hide out under there. The storm cellar. Wait for the night train or steamer maybe. A December chill in the air, he could see his breath. White like a dead man’s.
Lizzie had no intention of following in her mother’s footsteps, workin’ up under Yum Lee. Still, being a duet of one wasn’t much fun. Pilar was not too fond of her, blaming her not just for Ossie but for her father and Deke runnin’ off as well. Even the Bijoux was a bust. With Flip gone, she had to sit in the crowded colored peanut gallery section like everyone else, nothing special. Dancing on the street she was more likely to get catcalls than loose change and a rough arm-twistin’ from the police. Her lithe adolescent body was giving way to something else. If it wasn’t the police it was the mattress girls harassing her for clogging the trade. Makin’ money, havin’ fun? She wasn’t doing much of either on her own. Still, she had no intention of following in her mother’s footsteps.
She stomped down the crooked wooden steps. Her father, then Elma, now Ossie. Gone since August and here it was December and she had not heard from him. The confusion of anger and worry distressed her even more. The night air was brisk. She hurried toward the cellar door. “Firewood, the woman want firewood. Ain’t you never heard of no coal?! Or gas?!” She alternately imitated Mah Bette and her mother, both fussing at her. “I won’t stand for this, one say. Help your mother out some, the other say. Ol’ yelluh Yummy Lee sittin’ up there not sayin’ nothin’! Just once, could one of you act like you could give a good goddamn about me?” She sucked her teeth. The wick of
the lamp began to flicker in the glass as she lifted the heavy cellar door. The air within was cool and clammy. The cellar would be damp with soot and cobwebs and rats scurrying. She didn’t like the feel of it. She thought to turn around, but she defied her fear and loudly descended the stairs. Lizzie Winrow ’fraid of the dark? I ain’t ’fraid of nothin’!
She stepped onto the damp cellar floor and immediately felt something sticking like gum or glue to the soles of her shoes. It made a crackling sound and tugged at the weight of each foot as she walked. The sound was odd, like the rattling of bones beneath her feet. The air smelled of turpentine. The lantern hit Deke’s eyes. “Whatchu doin’ here?” she asked, startled.
“I need you to bring me some clothes and some money.”
She scoffed, “I ain’t bringin’ you nothin’.”
He grabbed her by the neck and pushed her against the wall. The lantern clattered to the ground, sputtering out. “You my brother’s woman. That make us family.” He kissed her hard on the lips. She bit him. He slapped her and kissed her again. Full on the lips. Pressed his mouth to hers, breathing her in, frantic. He pulled her to the ground, pushing her against the cold stones, and got on top of her. He placed his hand over her mouth. “Sh Sh shshsh.” Her skin was soft. Her breast smelled of salt and sweat and flowers. Her breath was hot, steaming through his fingers in muzzled screams. He tore at her, pushed up her skirt, pushed inside her. She squirmed beneath him, attempting to scratch, claw, her arms pinned down by his size. He pressed his wrists against her neck. Let her know he would break it. She was tight, unyielding, then gave way. Holding her, he thrust himself inside her. She stopped the muted screams. His hand slipped from her mouth, agape.
Outside, sailors headed back to their ships bound for war, their singing in unison. He had not known she was untouched. He laughed to himself, as he stood up and adjusted his clothes. She didn’t move but lay in the position he left her. Girls at the parlor, he had seen all types—sex fiends, addicts, cutters, fucked by they daddies, ruined by a white man, waifs, dummies, business women, entertainers. Never anything pure. Untouched. What a fool his brother had been. Wasn’t even bangin’ huh.