Rebecca Ore: Scarey Rose in Deep History

“I can get the dining room on line sometime next week if the engineering department has more glass fiber the right size,” Sarey Rose said.

Dining room, bedroom, parlor, slave cabin. A quartet in two centuries, Sarey Rose thought as she brought up the screens on July 31, 1853.

How long could Ann and Joe meet without Flint killing one or the other of them? Sarey Rose decided Flint had killed Ann. She was pregnant, nervous.

In the slave concubine’s cabin, Flint met with his slaves. Mistress ain’t faithful. She’s gonna bring you a poor white-trash baby.

Joe disappeared, a man who knew when to run. Sarey Rose taped the next several weeks, running the tapes fast to see if Joe reappeared.

Ann swelled. The black mistress swelled. At dinner, September 14, 1853, Flint looked from the black woman’s belly to his wife’s, his fingers moving to the count of nine.

Martha said, “Oh, shit.” Sarey had forgotten she was there. Peter left them alone most of the time now, wondering perhaps if he was the true heir to the estate, not Martha, the descendant of a poor white-trash overseer who helped run a pro-Union deserters’ camp, and who came back only when the man he’d cuckolded was dead.

Sarey remembered her great-grandfather saying, “The Southern men died in the War for pure meanness.”

And the local black schoolmaster, a former slave, chose Sarey’s grandfather to be his lord back in the 1920s. Every black man needed a lord in those Klan-addled days, and what better choice than a Lincoln Republican?

Ann twisted her wedding band, ate, twisted her wedding band, ate.

The concubine spoke to Flint, saying, perhaps, I’m a truer woman than she is. Now you gonna let me free ?

Perhaps Flint didn’t quite believe that Ann carried another man’s baby. White women didn’t like sex. All men needed it to prevent illness. That white man’s burden, sperm. Old Flint purged his system every chance he got, stayed healthy.

Sarey Rose wondered if Martha believed that herself, if that’s what made her so tolerant of Peter, or if, as a historian, she accepted the foibles of study cultures.

Ann said something that might have been, But I loved you. You could have loved me.

Flint looked up at her sharply and spoke. I married you, provided for you. Even if you brought slaves to the marriage as a dowry, you needed me more than I needed you. Slaves don’t work for women the way they work for a man.

The slave concubine must have spoken. Her back was to the optical pick-ups. Flint seemed contrite. He might have said, Sorry. The pregnant slave woman left the room. Ann picked at her food. Flint shoved his into his mouth, cutting his meat with a clasp knife he pulled from his pocket.

Sarey Rose said, out loud, “We never owned slaves. Never.”

Martha said, “But they wouldn’t work for women.”

“You read that the same way I did?” Sarey asked.

“Yeah. I talked to someone in linguistics. We could do a program that would give us best approximation, see the several choices.”

“We’re recording.”

“But…”

“We’re only getting an approximation of the light patterns as is. I don’t know if a lip-reading program operating on real time would help the visual recognition program or cause feed-back distortions.”

“But we both read that.”

“We’ve got more context than a lip-reading program would have, too. If we’d decided that Flint was perfectly white, he’d be looking perfectly white on the screen now. I’d have corrected once, the computer would have assumed it was in error if it came up with darker than white values for his skin.”

Martha said, “I want to hear them.”

“You can’t. Soundwaves are too big.”

“We’re not even really seeing them.”

“Close enough. Maybe she’s smiling, not grimacing.”

Martha said, “And your ancestor disappeared like a coward.”

“Should he have died for her? The law then was on Flint’s side.”

“Couldn’t he have taken her away?”

“We don’t know that Joe didn’t ask. We don’t know…”

Martha interrupted. “Was he married?”

“I never heard of a wife before the war,” Sarey Rose said, resenting the interrogation. “But maybe Ann was too big a snob to marry him, even though she would sleep with him.”

“She cared for him more than that,” Martha said.

“Only definite ancestor in the mix you’ve got left, isn’t she?” Sarey Rose said. Lip-reading program, shit, she realized she didn’t want to install it now, coordinate it with the visual recognition program. Bitch of time to do it.

At the table in the past, the two people ate in silence. Flint’s mistress left the room and a second female slave brought in a dish of stewed apples.

Sarey Rose said, “At least, he’s considerate of one of them.”

Brain congestion—Sarey Rose remembered brain swelling was often a side effect of a failed strangulation.

In one month, the half-white baby was born from a squatting woman, caught by an older black woman. In the next month, the white baby came down onto boiled and dried scrap sheets on the bed in the master bedroom. The same black woman caught the baby. In the future, the observers came in, stared, left, came back, stared, went without talking.

Flint came in to see both sons, held both of them. Peter said, “There have been worse fathers.”

Sarey Rose heard that as a rebuke to her ancestor.

Martha spent less time on site, took recordings of the raw data as though a different computer and screens might show her a past she approved of more. She wore jeans more often, seemed more casual about her hair.

Perhaps, Sarey Rose thought, Martha decided to has succumb to her technologically discovered white-trash roots. Sarey took a day off and bought a suit. When she came back, Peter said, “Joe’s back.” Martha was watching the screen in the master bedroom as though she wanted to turn into photons heading pastward.

“Back?” Sarey Rose wondered if the people in the rooms they watched ever noticed the future light—too small to be more than sparkles in a black room, something that could be explained away as an eye twitch. But the human eye could catch a photon.

Joe sat on the bed, talking desperately to Ann, leaning on one arm. His body bobbed closer, then moved back, over and over, like a rocking toy. The baby lay in her arms, looking at the stranger.

Ann’s lips moved. No, he’s being decent about it. But then he’s got another son down in the quarters.

“We haven’t picked up Flint all day. I scanned today’s tapes when I came in and saw this,” Martha said.

The overseer bent over Ann then, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. The baby began squalling. Joe picked up the baby. According to the lip-reading program, he said, I’m taking my son then.

“It was his first child,” Sarey Rose said. She expected that Flint would burst into the room at any second, but he didn’t, wasn’t around to hear the baby squalling. His black mistress and the man who appeared to be her father came into the room and took the baby from Joe. Ann must have said, Get out, because they left then.

Ann argued with Joe. Joe grabbed her. By the neck. The two past people writhed on the screen, Ann’s legs flailing out from her bedclothes. Sarey Rose wanted to run, but she watched on, aware of the others breathing in a rhythm different from her own shallow breaths. They looked at her once, quick stab of eyes. My white-trash ancestor.

Then the older black man came back, stood in the doorway. Spoke. You’ve done her enough damage.

Joe loosened his hands, said something that seemed like, You gonna tell your owner? Ann lolled back on the bed, gasping.