Та-Нехаси Коутс - The Water Dancer

“No,” she said. “But one day I will and when I do, I will know it with you.”

I felt in that moment something low and beautiful. Something born down here on the Street, and all the Streets of America. Something nurtured and birthed out of the Warrens. It was the warmth of the muck. It was the relief of the low-born. The facing of the facts, the flight from Quality, the gravity and excrement of the true world where we all live.

I turned away to sleep and felt Sophia pulling close to me and slipping her arm underneath mine, until her hand found the warm, soft part of me.

“You know you chaining yourself to something here.”

And for a while the only answer was the soft warm breath on the back of my neck, and then she said, “Ain’t a chain if it is my choosing.”

—

The next day, Thena and I went out on our route, collecting the washing. And then we spent the next hauling up the water and tubs, beating the jackets and trousers and then hanging them in the drying room down in the Warrens. Sophia was not with us, pleading illness on behalf of Caroline. But there was no illness, it was part of our plan, one that was ill-thought, for now, at the end of the day, with our hands worn and our arms exhausted, Thena was ornery at her absence.

“What is wrong with her, Hi?” Thena said. We were walking slowly back down to the Street. The sun had faded long ago and we moved like shadows down the path, past the orchards and through the woods. “I wish you had chosen a girl with more back to her. That Sophia don’t know nothing about work.”

“She work just fine,” I said. “She worked for you while I was gone.”

“If that is what you must call it,” Thena said. “Way I see it, she only start really doing it once you was here. How you gonna make a way with a woman like that, Hi? All that’s put on a man’s life, how you gonna get it done with a woman who only work for show? When I was young, I outworked every man on the home-place, every one, even mine. I was terror in the tobacco fields, and I kept house too. Of course I sometimes wonder what it all got me—cracked over the head and robbed of my little stack of freedom. So maybe that girl know something I do not.”

“I seen Kessiah,” I said. All day I had tried to weave this announcement, somehow, into our conversation. I had failed at discovering some decorous way to accomplish this, and knowing that it had to be done, I elected for the most direct route.

Thena stopped and turned to me. “Who?”

“Your daughter,” I said. “Kessiah. I seen her.”

“Is this you being mad for what I said about that girl?”

“I have seen her,” I said, as firm as I could muster.

“Where?” said Thena.

“North,” I said. “She lives just outside Philadelphia. Was taken to Maryland after she was stripped from you. From there, escaped north. She got a family. A husband who is good to her.”

“Hiram…”

“She want you to join her,” I said. “She want you up there with her. Thena, this ain’t no joke. When I left her I told her I would get you back to her. I promised, and I now mean to honor that promise.”

“Honor? How?”

And there in the forest, as I had done with Sophia, I explained what had happened to me, what I had become.

“So this the Underground?” she asked.

“It is,” I said. “And it ain’t.”

“Well, which is it?”

“It’s me,” I said. “It’s me. And I’m asking if you can hold to that.”

“Kessiah?” she asked of no one in particular. “Last time I seen her she was such a small thing. Willful as hell. She loved her daddy, you know? And he was so very hard. We used to have camellias. It was another time, another time. She would go out back and pick in them until I…”

She paused here and her face took on a look of confusion.

“Kessiah…” she said softly. And then the tears came, slow and silent, and without a cry or wail. She said her daughter’s name again and then she turned to me and asked, “Did you see any of the others?”

I shook my head and said, “I am sorry.”

And that was when the wailing came, and it was low and deep and throaty, and she moaned to herself, “Oh Lord, oh Lord,” and shook her head.

“Why you bring this back to me? Why you do this? You and your Underground? Hell I care. I have settled up with it. Why you bring this to me?”

“Thena, I—”

“Naw, you done spoke, let me speak. Do you know what I done? And you, you should have known. You who I took in, you bring this back to me! You do this to me.

“In this very house where I took you in, when you wasn’t spit, and you come down here and do this to me? Do you know what it took for me to make peace with this?”

She was backing away from me now, backing her way out of the cabin.

“Thena…”

“No, you stay away from me. You and your girl, y’all stay away from me.”

She ran out into the night and I chased after her, tried to take her arm. She shook me off, elbowing, punching, and wrenching her way loose.

“Stay away, I say!” she yelled. “Stay away! How dare you bring me back like this. Stay as far from me as you can, Hiram Walker! You are done to me!”

—

I should not have been surprised. I knew by then how much the past weighs upon us. I knew this more than anyone. I knew men who had held down their own wives to be flogged. I knew children who’d watched those men hold down their mothers. I knew children who rooted through slop with hogs. But worst of all I knew how the memory of such things altered us, how we could never escape it, how it became an awful part of us. And I must have known this in my young years. Why else that one memory, that memory of my mother, taken and shut up in a lockbox.

So who was I, in that moment, watching Thena disappear into the night, to begrudge her desire to forget? Oh, I understood it all. I walked back into that cabin and sat there silent for long hours, knowing how well I understood Thena’s rage. And all night I turned this over, until lying there with Sophia, and young Caroline between us, I knew what must be done. Kessiah would always be a souvenir of what Thena had lost, of what was taken, so that to see her daughter again, Thena must remember. And I knew that I could in no way ask this of her if I were not prepared to do the same myself.

33

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I rose, drew up water for the washing, and cleaned myself. Walking up to the white palace in those small hours, I thought of all the pieces that had been assembled before me, the bread-crumbs along the road. I thought of that old African king, who had flipped it, and danced into the waves, as my grandmother had done, and with the water-goddess’s blessing danced his people back home. And what did it mean that I saw my mother there that night with Maynard, dancing on the bridge, patting juba, dancing over and under the water, flipping it?

Even if Thena came around and decided to go, it would take a powerful memory to move her. So that morning, after serving my father breakfast and taking him out for a survey of the property, while he rested in the parlor, I walked up into his study, where he kept his correspondences, and scrawled a few lines in care of the Philadelphia Underground. I had to be careful, of course. I made use of a local alias and directed my missive to one of our safe-houses on the southern docks of the Delaware, and by code and misdirection let it be known to Harriet what I would now be attempting. I do not know what I then expected. And more, I did not know, even with family in the balance, what side Harriet might take in the struggle. But she had said that should I find myself in need, I was to make it known. And I had done so.

With that done, I went and collected my father and went with him through his various correspondences—almost all of them now originating in the West. His eyes and hands had by then grown much too weak, so I read them aloud, took down his responses, and then prepared them all to be sent out. When that was done, we walked back to his room and I helped him change into a suitable set of work clothes. After this, I went down into the Warrens and changed into my overalls, and met him in the garden out behind the house and together with spade and fork we worked until the sun had just begun its descent. We walked inside, changed again, and then I served my father his afternoon cordial, and, as was his tradition, he soon fell fast asleep. It was now time.