Та-Нехаси Коутс - The Water Dancer

“Well?” she asked sardonically, looking up at me.

“So that’s it, is it?” I said.

“Seem like it.”

“All right,” I said, and walked down to the Street. But the next day when I came up for my dealings with my father, she was waiting there just before the secret staircase that led out of the Warrens into the upper house. I could see by the lantern-light that she had been crying. When she saw me, she shook her head and wiped her cheeks.

“It is a lot to put on anyone, Hi. It is a weight. A whole other Task.”

“I know,” I said. “I have seen it all now, remember it all now, and I know.”

“Do you?” she said. “Because I do not think you do. I think you know your end of it, which is the end of the child stripped from the bosom. But do you know the other side of things? Do you know how hard it was for me to love you as I did, Hiram? To be in that space again, after what had been done to my Silas, my Claire, my Aram, my Alice, and my Kessiah. It was so very hard. But I seen you up in that loft, looking down, and I knew that mines was never coming back, and yours was never coming back, and if we had nothing between us, at least we had that.

“And I did love you, Hi. I did go back into that room. And when you left me there, when you run off with your girl, I cried myself to sleep every night for a month. I was so very afraid for what they would do to you. I could hardly believe it. I had lost another one—but not even to the Task. And so it must be me. Something in me that push everything I love away. It tore me up, something awful. Then you come back, except you do not come back alone. You come back with stories, stories from that room where I was violated and trespassed upon. And now you are telling me that I have to go back.

“What will I say to her, Hi? What will I be? What will I do when I look at her and all I can see are my lost ones?”

Her head was in her hand and she was weeping softly and quietly. I pulled her to me and put her head in my chest and we held each other there, and so began the countdown of our last hours at Lockless.

—

We could have in no way remained, not at Lockless as it was, nor at Lockless as we believed it to be becoming. Sophia had protections now, the protections of Corrine, who for whatever her demerits had always been true to her word. But for Thena, the advance of age and the assault upon her propelled matters forward in my mind. My father was by then so much in the dealing and trading of his people, doing all that he could imagine to stay afloat and dodge the debtors that seemed to swarm all around him. He could not continue as such, and he would not, though I did not know that then. But even if I had, there was a promise I had made to Kessiah and I was determined then to make it good.

I waited two weeks for some reply from Harriet. But receiving none, I deduced that I could expect no assistance, a fact to which I could muster no rage nor disquiet. I had been with the Underground only a year, and knowing the intensity of the work, I understood the need to preserve allegiances. I was on my own then, an Underground station all to myself. I had done it in the smallest way on the banks of the Goose, but to conduct as the old African king, as Santi Bess, as Moses, seemed fantastic. I had my memories, though. All of them. And I had the object by which I hoped to focus the energies of those lost-found years.

Our last night all together was the coldest of that season. It was a Saturday, so picked because it would give a day for me to recover myself and be back at my duties on Monday, arousing no suspicion. We gathered together what we would then have considered a feast—ash-cake, fish, salt pork, and collards. We ate quietly together and then sat in the cabin, where Thena had returned. And now Thena amused Sophia with stories of her own youth, and much laughter passed on this account. And then the hour came upon us. There was a hurried goodbye. I told Sophia to wait for me back at the quarters, and were I not back by dawn for her to look for me down by the riverbanks.

Outside the cabin, I looked up into the night, which was big and clear, the moon bright as a goddess, the stars all her progeny, all her fates and dryads and nymphs, spread out across the cosmos. Then I held Thena’s hand and walked with her out from the cabin, through back-paths of the woods, the earth snapping and crunching beneath us, until we were at the banks of the river Goose. I had not told Thena what to expect. I did not know how I could. All she knew was that I had found the route of Santi Bess and that Sophia had testified to its truth. So it was understandable that right here Thena, holding tight to my hand, stopped in her tracks, and when I turned to her, I saw that she was looking up, and when I followed her stunned gaze, I saw that the night sky that had, moments before, been so big and bright, was now obscured by clouds. Wisps of white fog were now coming up off the river, which was only evidenced by the sound it made gently washing up against the shore. The necklace of shells was warm against me.

And on we walked, taking a southern route along the banks, until the wisps rising gently off the river began to congeal into a stew of fog, and over top of it all, we saw, looming in the darkness, the bridge that had carried so many of us Natchez-way. We had gone the back way to avoid Ryland, which, even in its diminished and infiltrated capacity, still haunted the county. Now we circled around, until we were at the bridge’s approach, and looking out, I saw that the fog had thickened so that it seemed the clouds had fallen and enveloped everything. But not everything, for in the distance rising up from where the water must have been, or where the water used to be, I could see the blue glow of halos all around, ringing out like memory, and I now felt the necklace burning underneath my shirt, burning bright as the North Star. I pulled the thing out so that it was over my shirt.

It was time.

“For my mother,” I said. “For all the so many mothers taken over this bridge from which there can be no return.”

And then I looked at Thena, and I saw now she was softly illuminated in blue light emanating from the necklace of shells.

“For all the mothers who have remained,” I said, with one hand clasping hers and the other on her cheek. “Who carry on in the name of those who do not return.”

I turned back to the bridge now and began to walk, and as I did saw the tendrils of fog lapping over the bridge and the blue lights dancing softly in the distance on what would have been the far end, though I knew that night that no such end would be our destination.

“Thena,” I said. “My dear Thena. I have told you much about me, but I have never revealed the essence of all that has guided me, for all of it has been for so long tucked away, hidden in a fog as thick as what surrounds us. It had to be as such, for I was too young to bear what happened, too young to survive with the memory.

“You know that my mother is Rose. And my father is Howell Walker. I was the product of their outrageous union. I was not alone. My brother, Maynard, was born two years before me, to the lady of Lockless, and it was believed that his blood carried all that was good and noble of the old place and he should someday make for a wise and careful heir, for the blood was magic, science, and destiny. But I defied the blood, and so defied destiny, and I think now, knowing all I know, that it was my lost mother who made it so.

“For so long I could not see, could not remember, but I see it all now. Her bright joyous eyes, her smile, her dark-red skin. And I remember her stories of the world that was, stories brought across from water, stories she would share only at night, before bed, if I had been a good boy that day. I remember how the stories glowed in my mind, how they filled our nights with colors. I remember Cuffee, who tucked the drum into his bones. And Mami Wata, who lived in that paradise under the sea, where we would all arrive, after our Task, and find our reward.”