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Speaking Volumes

Conjunctions, Vol. 63

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

From Eclipse

A Romance

Samuel R. Delany

Do you believe that you lived three thousand years ago? No. But for me, I was at the subsiding of the Deluge, and helped swab the ground, and built the first house.

—Melville, MardiWoe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall!

—Melville, "The Sermon," Moby-Dick

Just ... call me—Ishmael?

It's not my name. Try Harry, Hank, even Horace, the Egyptian god of writing and Rome's odist, epodist, and satirist, and the classical world's finest critic till sublime Longinus. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix, as Horace put it in his epistle from the country to city-bound Fuscus. Drive nature out with a pitchfork; nevertheless she will hurry back and burst through your futile contempt, the victress. It's something to consider: That was written by a man who died during a Roman November nearly a decade before the birth at Bethlehem. Nor do I think he was speaking only of sumac and saplings, brambles and berry bushes got out of hand, any more than if he had said it today.

Bankruptcy and our flight to Albany notwithstanding, in their gray silk hats and blue and black scarves, the creditors found us anyway. They arrived early to make their circuit through the house. The first thing they did was step inside, past Mother—she'd been up and dressed in the dark by lamplight for more than an hour—and ignored her "Good morning, gentlemen. Won't you be so kind as to—" Then, blinking, she stopped, since they hadn't even looked at her. She drew herself up in her high-necked mourning dress—brown bombazine traded for the black one she wore to funerals—as if dazzled by a dawn so gloriously golden just breaking outside the door frame, between the hemlocks across the street. She may, however, have simply been nonplussed by their rudeness.

Hauled by three black boys who'd probably been drinking already and an Irishman who certainly had, four long carts creaked and rumbled after them through our front hall door, to press their wheels into our carpets. The mick went open shirted and without shoes. Seconds indoors, he smelled worse than any Jew.

Hired by the real creditors, I suppose, but I didn't realize that either. At least the niggers had jackets and shoes. But through the morning liquor, all four fellows trailed the odor of laborers' sweat unwiped away for days. Following them, watching to see what Mother would do, we got used to it in minutes, if not moments. It was a bit of the urban outdoors coming within.

Mother followed the men into the kitchen and we followed Mother. The shortest of the three turned and said, "Please, Mrs. Melvill, give me all your money—coin and script, whatever you have in the house. All of it. Now."

"Of course," she said, lifting her purse from where it hung on her hip. "I have it right here for you. I've gotten it all together. By the way—I thought you might want to know. I'm changing the name. It's going to be Melville with an e at the end. From now on. I always said to Allan, my husband, that's how it should be spelled: M-e-l-v-i-l-l-e." She paused, then frowned. "Write it down, please. You mustn't think I'm changing the name to ... well, to elude you."

"Ma'am, that's your business, not ours. And Mr. Abernathey's. You just give us the money, now. Then we'll start."

"Oh, yes ..." Mother opened her purse and handed the shortest and dumpiest some folded bills. "But I just didn't want you to ..." Then she went on. "There ..." A mixing bowl (ceramic, not wooden), in which Gerty used to stir up cake batter and pancakes both, while I used to watch, was a third full of silver and copper. "That's all the ... all the coins in the house."

"You went through and got all the children's, now, didn't you? Often they'll try to hide some. If we find any when we're going around upstairs, we'll just have to take it."

"Oh, no ...!" she said. "No. They're good children. They understand." I hadn't understood, actually, though grudgingly I'd given up my pennies and nickels and dimes and the silver dollar Father had given me. Tommy had cried when Mother took his five pennies away, and for moments I'd thought she was going to relent and let him keep them—and, when I thought that, I hated him, and was glad that she'd made him cry. "Really, that's all we have in the house." He'd only cried ten minutes.

Turning to the taller of his well-tailored partners, the short creditor said, "See, she didn't give me no argument." He looked at my mother sternly. "You're a wise widow." Nodding and slipping them into a wallet, he returned it to an inside jacket pocket. "Good, ma'am." He picked up the entire bowl and took it out under his arm.

When we came out of the kitchen, we were already curtainless (I remember the black porters holding the rods, the ivory rings slipping and clicking along them as they came free, and how the black boys stood by the bare windows and clumsily folded them, one summarily taking them away from Paddy's hands, clearly not trusting him), and even while I watched, we became carpetless (another memory from outside the sitting-room's arch, looking in and seeing beneath them, as they come up from the floor; from the horsehair pads beneath them, the ticks and squeaks as tacks tugged loose, another and another. Once a pad and rug were rolled to the side, tacks lay around the boards. The planks had that smoky discoloring they get when they've been covered with rugs for several years. Tacks were scattered like black bugs, till Helen stepped on one—in her shoe: It pierced to her sole, though, so that she cried out—and hopped about and pried it loose with her nails. In exasperation she went to get a broom and a dustpan, from one of the carts. (They were taking those with them as well.) She swept the black things up, realized they'd taken our big wicker refuse basket too, so took the rattling dustpan into the kitchen and pitched them out the window, while the porters inside continued their devastations. Would the roving nighttime Irish get them in their feet? Paddy managed to avoid them, though he cursed the loudest of the three—and the most obscenely—when he saw them). At first, it was just as though we were moving—and had almost the same excitement about it.

Then—the five of us children, with Tommy in Helen's arms—we followed them through the house. The bowl was left in the back bed of one of the carts; the temptation to retrieve a handful of coins was like the temptation to plunge a hand into a cold spring, when you look down and see a mosquito about to feed on the back of it. The porters left the barrow carts downstairs too, one in the hall, one in the kitchen, and two in the sitting room (in one of them the money bowl), then tramped up to collect things and carry them down, singly or in pairs, while—in the hall—we looked up at them through the banisters' newels. The oldest black boy (certainly forty, possibly fifty—at any rate more than twice the age of the others) said the least but was the one to whom the gray-hats gave most of their instructions. He conveyed them to the barefoot Irishman and the other two shod Africans by silent signals with roughened, gray-black fingers.

Finally we grew bold enough to mount behind them and follow them into our rooms— shockingly bare. They'd taken our toys—and the beds they had broken in pieces and carried down, they'd been ours! (I swear, I'd watched till then and hadn't realized it!) My heart began to bang again behind my ribs, as it had on the morning I learned of my father's death, but I didn't feel I could protest any more than my mother did. Soon, in that lingering state of fear, I began to fathom the headman's hand wavings: Now, wait, faster, stop, get that, take this over there, the two of you move that, make a pile of those, load it, wrap those in that, use the rug for padding—to which the other three—the Irish fellow and the two blacks—responded more quickly than they did to the occasional spoken orders from their human masters, lingering at the walls and watching, as we children watched.

I was both frightened and entranced.

At first I thought the old black boy was the only one who knew English. But as we learned the meaning of his signals, we learned as well their names—this one Sam, that one, yes, Paddy (but that's what everyone called pretty much every Irishman), the other Jupe, and the headman himself Jonah. His frizzy gray hair, his salt-and-pepper beard, stuck out about his head in tufts—as well as, from a word here, a phrase there, we learned that Sam and Paddy and Jonah and Jupe spoke well enough.

Only they preferred not to—

A cart passed so that I had to press back against the hall wall—"Watch it, boyo"— barefoot, the mick grinned as the thing trundled up—"or you'll lose a toe!"—and I glimpsed my alphabet blocks inside, red B, yellow M, black O, blue P went past ... though they were Tommy's today, even if he was too young for them—

The cart porters' bosses, or their supervisors—the men in the gray top hats—or the lawyers (or their clerks) hired to superintend the unpleasant affair, once all was carried downstairs and packed in the pushcarts, made a quick apology to Mother, who still stood downstairs in the kitchen, then made a curt good-bye.

Then they wandered out the door—left open all this time, probably because of the carts in the house—into morning.

I glanced after them, wondering nervously if people might have gathered outside to watch our shaming—but (one) it was still very early, (two) it was not that sort of neighborhood, and (three) that's one reason some creditors had taken to bringing their carts inside, rather than taking the goods outside to pack them. It was faster, easier, and drew less attention.

In some neighborhoods boys threw stones at them.

As the porters were about to roll their barrows after them, Jonah called, clear enough, that he had to go back to get some box he'd left on the landing above, so that the other three, tired of moving beds and bureaus, stopped to wait for him in the front hall. The cart nearest was heaped as high as my head. It had two beds in it, disassembled to the slats, and I stepped up to look at what else it held.

Among the hundred fifty or two hundred fifty volumes at the barrow's back (each cart was almost six feet long), once stacked but now fallen over others beside a lot of linen, a carved sphinx that had stood on Father's desk now lay atop brocaded cushions. I fixed on a book and stepped closer. Green and brown and pink swirled over its cover board, like a bit of miraculous sea.

With its drawers stacked in another barrow, its stock in still another of the three-wheelers, and more books around and under it, the desk itself was in Jonah's cart. He'd gone back for his carton.

But I looked back and picked the book up.

It was small enough for me to think it was for someone my size and age.

"One you like, sonny?" asked Sam. Probably he was no more than nineteen, though his hair was the longest and fullest of the three Africans', and while I'd watched him roam our rooms, taking up this and that and packing it in at the verbal commands of his gray-hatted masters or Jonah's silent signs, I'd wanted to touch his tufty wool, to grasp it, to see how it took my grip or, when released, rebounded into its ruff. "Go on." Sam smiled over a mouth—full of yellow teeth? Seldom do those on that level of life show a full set past ten or eleven. "Take it. They won't miss it." And Sam was seven or eight years older.

Paddy came trundling up behind, pushing his great cart. (I glanced back.) "You blockheaded nigger," he hailed Sam over his load. "You can't do that! They're wantin' it all, not us handin' it around, like we was the Lords of the Earth and not them."

"Blockheaded nigger yourself." Smiling, Sam showed a few more teeth than the Irishman. "You know they're going to sell 'em a penny a pound to some Virginia gentleman who wants to get the bindings for his shelves—and won't read 'em no more than they will. You want it, son? Keep it. You don't? Put it back then." And, to the mick, "I was in service for one of that sort outside of Roanoke, when I was his age—'fore I run north."

"You run up here—you had a job and your own owner and a cabin roof over your head, no matter how leaky? I swear niggers don't know when they got a good thing. What'd you do that for?"

Sam held up his hand. I blinked at it. Most of his forefinger was gone. Somehow, watching the whole operation, I'd missed that detail. (I'd been paying too much attention to his hair.) "I had 'em all afore the week I run." Had he been keeping one hand in front—or behind him—through his work ...?

Paddy frowned deeply. "What happened?"

"Oh, my gentleman thought I'd snitched something not mine from one of his guests, and after that dumpy doctor had left he decided to teach me a lesson."

"Knowin' you, you probably took it as he thought—like you're doin' from your masters now, for that boy there." Paddy waved a soiled and implicating hand at me, at him. "Hey, if you were fool enough for that, you can't fault him."

"You can if it's your own finger he gets himself drunk enough to hack off with a hatchet on the choppin' block for his pork out back of the kitchen—then staggers off to throw up on the kitchen steps and leaves you screaming on the ground to bleed out." Sam looked at his hand unhappily, as if he didn't too often these days, then shook his head. "Two of his bondswomen, the Bible calls them—nigger bitches to him when he was angry, and to me too, when I wasn't—'cause women and men, we'd learned our talk from him. Clucking, horrified, helpless, the nigger bitches picked me up, carried me back to the quarters, tied up my wrist so tight I gasped. They stanched my stub with pine tar and a bandage—and warned me keep out of his way. Once sober, see, he wouldn't like to be reminded of what his wrath had done—he'd paid good money for me when I was three—and would only get angry again ... at me, for making him so uncomfortable, you understand, that he had to violate his own principles." He turned and looked as if he was about to spit on our rugless floor—but he didn't. "He was the sensitive sort. No, I'm happier with money in my hand at the end of a job and shoes on my feet when I start it. You'd be too if you'd been without both." (I wondered if he had forgotten Paddy was without.)

"Oh, I've had such treatment—or seen similar. Anyway, I still got all my limbs, if not shoes and gloves to cover them—though, who knows, someday I might not. But, no, I've not seen that yet in this country."

Sam snorted. "Today I won't even say the word nigger, unless I'm talkin' of my childhood, before I knew any other. Or to one who plays with it because that's the only way you can feel that you have some control of what flays you when it's wielded serious-like. I do it myself, and have certainly gotten my share of laughter and lightness from it. For the rest, bondsman will do. But I think there's a place for it and there are places that it's not for."

"Oh, that's daft!" declared Paddy. "It's just a word, boy. I used it all my life. I was just a little surprised to find I was one—when my grown sister brought me here on the cursed boat when I was ten. Sister?" He snorted. "Half the micks where we used to live before they done kicked me out said she was my mother and had come to this country to shake the shame of having a child by her own pa. Ehhh. I couldn't care less. By this time shamin's my bread and my water—I figure that's what makes a nigger. At least I guess so, at any rate."

"And that's why they call you a nigger as fast as they call me one," Sam said. "Because you're used to it, though, they think they can get you to do it again and be grateful in the bargain. That's a black thing to have in your history." Sam laughed. "Be glad that's where you have it. Believe me, the day you forget it, they'll win you over. So don't. The world itself has its ways of remembering what everyone in it forgets. That's one of the things my master explained to me he'd learned from his books, back when he still read them— before he grew angry enough to hack me into pieces. And did." His eyes snagged on his childhood mutilation—and he took in a breath.

"Today, they've started selling them cocoa leaves in the apothecaries to chew on for the pain—and they've always had that laudanum for ladies and light gentlemen. But that wasn't what they gave no nigger boy in Virginia who'd run afoul of his owner. Bondsman, if you like—and I prefer that, yes, even when I don't use it. Three days later, he called me in to apologize too. I stood there, with my bound-up hand throbbing, throbbing, throbbing with each heartbeat, as it had throbbed day and night for three days since he'd hacked my ability to work apart. My body was not going to let me forget what had happened, even while I stood and he sat behind his reading table and told he was now contrite. Under the influence, however, he'd simply been unable to think of any other punishment appropriate to a young thief. At the time, there'd been nothing else he could bring to mind to do. Did I understand?

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Excerpted from Speaking Volumes by Bradford Morrow. Copyright © 2014 Conjunctions. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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