He had been in love, or what he would call love, perhaps twice. Both were carried off. One by the fever. The other by a railroad porter who promised her free fares and fancy places. Sex he regarded as an activity between friends, a friendly business transaction, a necessity of life like food or shelter. He thought himself content until he met Dora. Until Dora, he had not contemplated his future.
He saw the way men looked at her. Ungentlemanly talk, though, he would not tolerate. The regulars at Pilar’s who saw him carting her around joked that she was not his usual kinda woman. The stokers and firemen on the Atlantic Limited already had a bet going. As Win bolted for the door, Sullivan cackled, “Win gon get hisself some Red Bone tail tonight.”
Win stopped and held the swinging saloon door. Gracious but firm, he turned and faced his old friend. “We’ll have none of that business,” he told Sullivan. “I’m gon marry that gal. Marriage by the book.”
Sullivan shook his head in dismay and dropped Win’s forgotten loose change into his pocket. “Young gal done got him right by the nose. His luck done run out now. Gon git Bap Tized.”
A stud deal had produced Thomas Winrow. Milk from his mother’s breasts never touched his lips. Upon birth, he was put in the slave nursery with twelve other foundlings. Rocked by the foot in a tray of cradles, he drank from a trough with piglets and chicks. Destined for the fields and a three-hundred-pound cotton sack, he was rescued by a smile—his own. The big dark dimples in each of his plump cheeks and his round black eyes brought him notice. The four-year-old whose job was to chase birds and cart water was sent off to Charleston, to the city house, as a gift to his owner’s daughter. His new job title was shoo-fly. Dressed in powder blue knickers and a ruffled shirt, he fanned the buzzing black pests away from his white folk with a spray of peacock feathers, delighting them on occasion with a jig or shout. He felt like a gift, somethin’ special and pretty. The blue satin looked so beautiful against his black skin he was dazzling even to himself.
The war was at its climax then. Win’s transfer had been a gesture of desperation. Two years into the Union siege of the city, the tidewater family that owned him, like many others, had refused to abandon their way of life. Though the dinner was seven courses, the main dish of horsemeat and plum cakes baked with watermelon juice scratched their throats and soured their stomachs as it went down. The gentlemen were missing limbs and eyes. The mistress bit her lip between chatter. While they braced themselves for the North’s revenge for the assault on Fort Sumter, their faithful slaves one by one stole themselves away each year as the war went on. Those who remained, the old, the young, the addled and unsure, were put on triple shifts. Turning five, Win had added to his tasks shoveling the horse droppings and cleaning the chimneys. “Roo-Roo-Roorey!” he cried when he got to the top, ash up his nose, his face smudged with soot, his pantaloons exchanged for a raggedy homespun shift. By the time he got to the dinner chores, he could barely lift his arms. As he stood beside his mistress, the metallic blue wash of feathers lulled him to sleep and he let the fan drift into her plate. “Son of a bitch!” Startled awake, he steadied himself on the edge of the table. The master’s daughter closed her fist around her fork and plunged it through his hand, pinning his palm to the wood. A red aureole of blood swelled around the wound, the scream still making its way to his consciousness.
The mulatto butler pried his hand loose and rushed him through the kitchen to the outside water pump. The old man knelt over him and directed the water over the gushing wound. The child’s jagged screeches of panic and outrage called forth great, rolling roars of thunder. The sky began to rain fire, the winter night lit up bright as day. “Lawd God Ahmighty!” the butler cried. “It be Jubilation!” The young boy fainted straightaway.
When Win awoke in his bed-tick cot on the pantry floor, he was looking at a swift-moving patchwork of turquoise sky with billows of pink-orange clouds. Just as the preacher had predicted, he thought, the wrath of God had come down on slaves who failed to honor their masters. But if he was dead and this was heaven, why was his hand stiff with pain and bandaged? He rose and called out. The house was empty, Cook, Missus, everybody gone. Half the roof was torn away. The chimney he had so often cleaned was rubble. The walls were cracked and the windows blown out. From over his shoulder a huge shadow fell upon him and stretched across the cratered parquet floor. Framed in the sunlight, a blue black man in blue black clothes, buttons shining, stood before him, three stripes of lightning on each arm, hat cocked to one side, his sword a silver shaft. Momentarily the master of the house, the little boy thought he would be bold. “Is you Lawd God? Cuz if you ain’t, why you come to the front doah, niggah!”
“Your name Winrow!”
“Yessuh.”
The tall man squatted down and gripped his shoulders. “I am your father.”
Win’s father nursed his hand and talked to him in shards and fragments. “Drew fire at Jacksonville, ‘Kill the Goddamn sons of bitches!’ James Island, Wagner, and Olustee. Warn’t never no colored prisonuh. This cut hyeah ain’t nuthin. I seen a bayonet rip a niggah up the gut to the chin. We Winrows both lucky, I guess. It be our nature.” A runaway, barefoot and near naked “contraband,” the elder Winrow had enlisted, then taken his uniform from the dead. Shoes from one, hat from another, and the prize—a bugle pried from the severed limb of a boy not much older than his son.
He purchased land at auction with his overdue soldier’s wages, built a lean-to, and every evening in the dim campfire light he dealt his son a weathered deck of cards. “I’ma teach yuh to play a game call coon can. It be so hard, only coons can play it.” He laughed with the same baritone staccato Win would later recognize as his own. The card games forced the boy to exercise his hand until the withered muscles became strong, the fingers dexterous, and the eye sharp. Three years later, his father built a cabin and brought a woman home. “This yo Ma.” Chest sunken and belly rounded, she smiled with joyless eyes, revealing the same distinctive dimple that graced her son’s cheeks. She spoke simply of being paired with Win’s father as a favor to a farmer whose wife was coughing up blood. “He was in need of a wet nurse, he say, who could still cook and keep to the fields. Gib my baby way so milk be good fuh his, but,” she chuckled deep in her belly, “it dry up.” She spoke little of the other places and owners, but dictated notices and had them printed by the Freedmen’s Bureau for the children. Winrow was the only one she found. They would not allow the young boy to work at all. “Just set up there and make us some music, Win. Play us sumpin purty.” He would march around with the bugle to his lips, making squawks and notes with his voice. The instrument had no mouthpiece, but from their radiance he thought himself Gabriel.
From his father’s old bugle, Win advanced to a cornet, won off a minstrel sideman with a passion for absinthe and a poor face for poker. The man had called the horn Miss Lizzie, and Win soon knew why. “Miss Lizzie can school you, rule you, and conversate. Miss Lizzie can spit, growl, and cry, patter, pout, and shout.” From reveille to mournful taps, that horn shared stories of almost everywhere she had been. “Second Line?” she wailed. “I was lead cornet at Dr. Buzzard’s wake! I done bust out the workhouse of eighteen states! Wharf dens, whorehouse, street parades. Field gang, tent show, jamborees. I can walk, talk, croon, and cuss, strut, cut, and testify! What you got?” He carried the mouthpiece in the pocket near his heart and polished the silver bell till it had to be hidden from the sun.
He kept the land because his daddy wanted it. “This lan’ belong to you. Was promised and fought fuh,” his father had said. And his mother, “Promise me you won’t be like yo pah n leab me wid no way to fend.” Out of loyalty, Winrow worked off the debt accrued against the land where he had buried them, but like Miss Lizzie, he lived for the night. He liked the city. Even as a child he loved it, the big streets and houses. He didn’t miss shoveling shit or getting soot up his nose, he didn’t miss that. But the sounds, the voices, the music, the people, the night! He never thought to find somethi
ng as fascinating till Dora.
Even when she could afford it, Dora decided not to move from Rose Tree Lane. She knew the neighborhood now. Aunt Sibby’s slow-movin’ ways had become a kind of grace, and the street urchin Deke who lived under the porch at Pilar’s always devoured the plates of food she set out for him. Yum Lee’s laundry was conveniently located a few blocks away. She also realized that Winrow’s attention might not be so easily available if she didn’t live across the street from his city room. She was frugal with her earnings, mindful of every penny. She had her savings and, through her uncle, burial insurance for both herself and Mah Bette. Time enough for big things later. When she did spend, it was with relish. She particularly enjoyed being implacably polite and cold paying her rent and rubbing her relatives’ noses in their original discourtesy to her without ever mentioning it.
Blanche softened, especially after she had seen Dora retool some of her hand-me-downs to look brand-new and better designed, and when inadvertently Roswell Jr., who had so flaunted his fine broadcloth linen suits and his plump soft hands stuffed in kid gloves, brought her some new customers. Dora had stopped by the funeral parlor to pay her weekly rent. Roswell Jr. was propped up behind his desk in the stairwell. His father obviously had about as much respect for him as she did. Dora considered it a ritual of pride to put the money directly into her cousin’s hand, which was softer than her own. She removed her macramed glove with emphasis at each finger. “Cousin, I was thinking, perhaps, I could pay my rent on a monthly basis.”
“And deprive me of an opportunity to see you?” Though the light scent of talc from her body and the swanlike slope of her neck and throat enthralled him, he was inhibited by their familial relation and her lack of standing, the tight kink of hair at the nape of her neck, and her washerwoman’s hands. Someone’s in the kitchen wid Dinah. She could feel his lurid thoughts creepin’ toward her.
“I am sure if you wish to see me more often, Roswell, there are more ’propriate circumstances than a stairwell. Is your father in? I might speak with him.”
“. . . Well, I . . .”
She saw that she had embarrassed him, then chastised herself for enjoying the sensation a bit too much. He cleared his throat and pulled his stomach in. “I’ll see if he’s free.” Young Roswell turned to exit, then, as an afterthought, held the door for her to follow. Dora graced through the portal. Put him in his place I did.
The two ran directly into the bereaved relatives of the late deceased Joseph Marivale. Roswell clasped her hand and introduced her as “a relation from the Low Country, a seamstress.” Taking his tone in stride, she corrected, “I prefer to speak of myself as a modiste, a maker of fine dresses, mantuas, and hats. I do outfits for the bereaved, wedding gowns, and, of course, christening frocks.” The young Mrs. Marivale, her stomach already showing, was immediately taken with the notion.
The gown was to be worn the following Sunday at the Emmanuel A.M.E. Church. Dora was delighted. The Marivales were an important family, the best of Charleston colored society. “Oh, oh, oh, they massuhs was Frinch,” Mah Bette joked. The Marivales were part of the old colored elite, descendants of free people of color, mostly mulattos, with long-standing ties to the wealthy white Charleston families. Their source of pride and economic advantage was one that might have been afforded to Mah Bette, had she not so betrayed her owner by conceiving her third daughter, Juliet, with a saltwater African and aiding a group of swamp niggah runaways with saltmeat lifted from his smokehouse. For decades after the war’s end, the Marivales, De Saussures, Pettigrews, and Hugers socialized and married among themselves. If none of them could technically be called mulatto, that is, one-half white, they all looked that way.
It was a pedigree even the Diggses respected. Although Roswell’s family mingled with this crowd, their claim to standing was tenuously based on his marriage to the first Mrs. Diggs more than his recently acquired personal wealth. Of the three Diggs brothers—Lee tended bar at the Charleston Club, while Hiram marked billiard scores—Roswell Sr. had been the one to strike out on his own. Picking up on the unusual passion the newly freed had for goin’ to heaven in a dignified way, he sold burial insurance. A long-term policy at a penny a week guaranteed a pine box, a lot, and a marker. Flowers were extra. When they paid on time, he buried them proper. When they didn’t, he foreclosed on their worldly goods. “Well, at least he was good for something,” snapped Bette as Dora helped her up the chapel steps to the balcony.
The church had a revolutionary history. It was there that Denmark Vesey, a free man, conspired to liberate Charleston’s slaves. The failed insurrection so panicked slave-owners that all colored churches were outlawed, so that the congregants had to practice their faith in secret until the war’s end. It was there that the new freedmen’s Union Club met to debate the Constitution, governance, and law in the heady days of Reconstruction. It was to their faith that the families retreated when the bloody red shirts of terror tore away the thin raiments of the just-born democracy, replacing it with gunfire, demons, and threats of death. The families of the old colored Charleston society retreated into a world of self-delusion. Like the nobles in King Louis’s court, they fawned and fought for favor in a cloistered world they could control, deriving status from having a pew on the chapel floor, vying for its distance from the back. The Diggses were seated by the middle window, the Marivales in the second pew. Dora leaned over the balcony rail to view the gown she had made for the child. Bette folded her arms and went to sleep.
The gown hung nearly to the ground in a gentle scalloped train of Alsace lace with a ribboned bonnet to match. The priest with long white fingers dabbed holy water on the baby’s forehead. The baby winced and fussed in her mother’s arms. At the start of the squall, Bette opened one eye momentarily. “Piscopals. Even too rarified fuh she.”
At the conclusion of the services, Dora was lost among the swell of well-wishers and relatives and promptly forgotten. She stood awkwardly in the cloying heat of the mid-July day, the threat of her own sweat challenging her hair’s Creole masquerade. Church members whispered among themselves that the odd-looking girl was Blanche Diggs’s niece and, indeed, a Mayfield.
Old Bette raised her eyes to the sky in gratitude as they descended the church steps, for there was Tom Winrow, silently waiting, his buckboard in tow. She poked Dora in her rib. “Come on, gal, let’s get us some real spirit. Need some Revival!”
Didn’t tell me he were gon be here. Dora didn’t really want to be seen boarding such a low-class carriage, but Bette had grabbed her by the arm, and she followed dutifully.
“And it shall come to pass, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” The itinerant preacher held the Bible as a weapon or talisman in his outstretched hand, the leather binding curled around the feathered pages. His eyes closed, his face raised to heaven, his voice, at once growling and clarion, traveled to the far ends of the meadow in a great rolling wave of sound.
To this sloping field of marsh grass and wildflowers rimmed by white oak they were still coming, drawn to his call. Being a Gullah-talkin’ Geechee anyway, Mah Bette found this gathering more to her liking than her granddaughter’s high yellow High Episcopalians. “Church of the Living God! Hallelujah!” Bette threw her hands above her head and ran toward the white-frocked throng of ebony faces, one hundred voices singing, one hundred tongues speaking at once. An old man muttered and chanted a prayer. A woman spat a plosive percussive rambling text that forced her head back with its power. Another fell to her knees and crawled upon them weeping, her body wracked with invisible currents. The Revival’s practice of “talking in tongues” shielded the much older tradition of the hijacked saltwater Africans who called upon the forbidden gods who could not be controlled, who danced beyond the grasp of their captors. A high-stepping young man, his arms darting and distending out, up, and behind as he bellowed commands, the dark of his eyes rolle
d up to his soul, transformed pain into rapture, the long-sought gift of freedom discovered in surrender.
Dora stood aloof as the preacher railed, “And also upon the servants and the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke!” She resisted the voice meandering through the strange, spontaneous harmonies of the growing congregation, the shouts, hands clappin’, feet stompin’, bodies rockin’ to and fro, the sound like a great ship cracking under gale winds, at once whole and separated into siren voices. She scowled and tugged at her bodice. This ain’t eben Christian! Ring shouts and work songs were to her the signs of lingering barbarism that needed to be replaced with good old New England rectitude. The sisters had often said at Sabbath school catechism, “To hear that still small voice, one must be still.” But here, the people danced their faith and hollered hosannas, shaking with fervor and fainting straight away.
“The Sun shall be turned into darkness and the Moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come! Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered!” One by one, initiates placed their head in the cradle of the preacher’s palm and were thrust backwards into the trembling waters, made fierce by those dancing on the river’s ten thousand points of light. She was drawn in as one standing on an unfamiliar shore finds her knees enveloped by the tide. “Hallelujah!”
In the shade under a tree, Tom played his cornet with a fellow on guitar and another on drum. He tried to look casual, draining the instrument of spittle, as Dora approached. “I didn’t figure you for the holy-rollin’ kind, Miss Dora May.”
“You figured right bout that.” She fussed about her skirt and attempted to wring out the hem. “Didn’t figure no trumpet playin’ was neither.”