Sired of a cane wench during the Grand March of Dessalines, he was a road bastard born of a marun brought down from the mountains, a Dahomette warrior who had drunk blood to free herself, only to be splayed across the table for the pleasure of the new king of a new nation. “Dessalines!” she cursed and named her bastard after him.
He liked to tell that story to impress, but he knew no more of his ancestry than a dog or cat. He was a harbor rat as a boy, begging for coins, diving for wrecks, singing for the few foreign vessels that still docked at the rotting piers, scorched black wood spires scratching at the sky.
Dessalines could dive deeper than most boys, could hold his breath like a fish. He discovered a world beneath the glimmer of the surface water. The algae-laced wreckage of a lost world—caravels, men-of-war, brigantines, schooners, and clippers—great sailing ships, collapsed like a game of pick-up sticks on the ocean floor. Slavers coming to port, rum dealers leaving, gens de couleur traveling to Europe, French colonists coming to settle stolen lands with stolen people. Soldier fleets of the revolution for liberty, disembarking to battle slaves. Shackles, cane rounds, coffee sacks, cocoa beans, rum barrels, and jugs of molasses—Hayti, the land of mountains, the richest colony in the New World for two centuries, now arched her bare rib cage for schools of fish and curious boys.
Dessalines appeared a week late, and he did not come at two, but at three thirty. “I stopped to pick some apologies,” he said with a bouquet. Flowers picked from the road. Golden jasmine, deep yellow with crimson tips.
“Mr. Dessalines. This is not ’propriate. Your appointment was a week ago.”
“Mais prie, don’t take it out on the flowers.”
She put them in a tin can. “It seem odd, not right, you should gib flowers to someone and you are affianced.”
“Because one picks a rose one cannot admire a garden?”
When he did not appear, she had cried herself to sleep two nights in a row. And here she was, delirious with longing. She determined not to display an inkling of it. “So tell me what did you have in mind about the dress.”
“Well, it would be about your size.”
“I’ll make it so you can adjust when you take it to her. And the style?”
“Whatever you would choose.”
“Forgive me for saying, Mr. Dessalines. I would think a woman would like to pick out her own wedding dress. I think I know that much by now.”
“She is from a respected family, but they have fallen on difficult times. My returning with the dress will indicate respect for their standing and discretion. She herself knows nothing of her own beauty. She is young.”
At all of twenty, the intimation that Dora was not “young” disturbed her. “You say she is about my size?”
“Exactement.”
“Anything I think is best? Perhaps off the shoulder, with a train, scalloped.”
“In two weeks, I shall return to see how the work fares. I sail again tonight.”
An Amsterdam outrigger, last of the clipper ships, making short runs for low-volume goods like Blue Mountain coffee, Indonesian hashish, and Ethiopian red amber, docked in the bay of Gonaïves. As a young boy Dessalines had impressed the Dutch captain with his ability to hold his breath. “I stay under water long time, you take me with you,” he said and progressed quickly from cabin boy to first mate to navigator. The sea had taken him to Paris, The Hague, Liverpool, London, Bordeaux, Cape Verde, Zanzibar, even Cairo. But he had escaped one dying world and entered another. Sailing ships, the three- and four-mast silhouettes that had dominated the seas for three centuries, were disappearing, defeated by diesel and steam. To stay in business sailors sometimes resorted to smuggling.
Winrow knew him to be a scoundrel, a modern-day pirate, with the presumptuous airs of a gens de couleur. Away from Dora’s view, Win caught him by the arm in the street. “You leave her alone. She a decent gal. I hold her mighty high in my book. Don’t wanna see her brought down by no port trash like you.”
Dessalines contemplated which blade he carried. The short poniard, the grooved stiletto, or the kris. “Come at me with a sword, monsieur, you shall get the end of it.”
7
When Dessalines returned, Dora May was in a whirl. Stitches too tight, décolletage too busy, poorly sewn. Since she was making the dress for some other woman, she was trying too hard, thinking too much and not at all. “It is only a basting stitch. I didn’t use the good fabric. Just calico, until the design is right.” His head was tilted to the side, his hand on his chin. “You don’t like it.”
“Yes, but . . . something is lacking. Get dressed quickly. I will show you.”
“But I am dressed.”
“Not for sailing.”
Dora ran behind the curtain and changed three times. She had gone on a ferry to Fort Sumter for the church picnic. She had ridden pirogues on the islands, fished in a rowboat, but she had no idea what “dressed for sailing” meant. She put on her Missy’s shoes, then changed back into her sturdy browns. Then ran back for her hat, ripping off the dry brown flowers from the party. She wore it plain, but still forward on her forehead.
Triangle sails dotted the cobalt sea as they walked along the pier. It had been a long time since she had seen the sea. Though she walked along the Charleston harbor market district weekly, her eyes were focused on the future, rarely on the sights around her. They stopped at a Baltimore, a trim twenty-foot sloop named L’Heureux. She watched herself take his hand. You are making a mistake. You will lose sight of your ambitions. The boat was much bigger than the hauling pirogue Lijah-Lah used to maneuver around St. Simon’s canals and waterways, but it was sleek and new. Unlike the mosquito fleet of rowboats, flat-tops, skiffs, and tugs that daily supplied Charleston’s fish markets, this one was built for racing. It cut fast through the waves, shifting the winds on her cheeks and around the curves of her neck and through the winding coils of her hair. It stole her breath, the rhythm on her chest a whispered heartbeat. Her hat flew away and cakewalked on the waves, a high-steppin’ reel. The winds parted her fingers as she held her arms out to them. The salt air tasted of freedom. Erzulie risen, she leaned on the stern laughing as the waves kissed her feet. “What kind of man can go sailing in the middle of the week? What is it you do, Monsieur Dessalines?”
“But please, call me Yves.”
“Yes, I remember, as in temptation! What is your trade? What business you have with Mah Bette?”
“None I think that needs concern you.” He had said the wrong thing. She frowned. Her chin buckled like a chicken’s. She turned away, mumbling to herself under the wind. He laughed and mimicked her, put his arms astride, leaned against her and, in the heave of the bow, just graced her lips. “I am a sailor, by trade.”
“Mah Bette says you are a captain.”
“Of my fate, yes.”
“No, of a boat.”
“A ship. I am first mate of Les Marassa, and being first, I am more essential than a captain. This is her deck sloop. I take it out when we come to port.” She felt the sweet warmth of his breath, then caught her wits again. He backed away from her. “But that is a secret between us, my being first mate. In Charleston, I must declare myself a cook or spend my land time in the brig, for by law no ‘colored’ may hold such a position. Alas, that makes me an outlaw. A pirate. Born of a cane wench during the Grand March of Dessalines’s black Jacobeans through the mountains.”
They buoyed on one of the temporary island sandbars the autumn storms would bring, a miniature dune, a few shrubs, an oasis in the sea.
As he spoke of his youth, his chestnut eyes drew her into another world. Recounting the history of his people in an afternoon, he strutted about as the stocky Napoleon, outraged that a band of blacks could outwit his Sons of Revolution. He mimicked the languid Southern drawl of the American slaveholder statesman, offering the young new republic, instead of celebration, the stranglehold of embargo and intrigue. He staggered, embodying a colony intoxicated by liberty and exhausted from batt
le, feeding upon itself. “As whites had upon blacks, blacks and colored upon each other.” As she sat beside him on the cool sand, Dessalines spoke of his mother, caught in the maelstrom. “Danced in a palace, then swung from the gallows, garroted, and hung from her heels . . . I don’t know why I tell you this. I am not accustomed to revealing so much of myself.”
“It is the water. The setting perhaps. The sound of the ocean. You cannot look upon it, listen to it, and deceive. It pulls the truth out of you.”
“What is your truth? A beautiful woman like you, laboring away over gowns for others far less fair.”
“It is an honest living, upon which I can depend.”
“But what do you dream, Dora?”
“I don’t much bother with that. I just do. Don’t have time for dreamin’.”
“If you did, what would it be?”
“Well, I don’t much know. I dreamed of gettin’ my own sewing machine. Already done that . . . Of course, I dream of family. Havin’ a home. Bein’ an honorable free woman of color with respect, I reckon.”
“Respect? How do you think to get this?”
“Are you my schoolmaster, now?”
“You are a free woman. You should have no master but yourself.”
“How you vex me! Monsieur Dessalines—I—”
“Ah, I have been demoted. Yves.”
“Yves . . .” Her knees drawn to her chest, she watched him build a small fire, then produce a handful of wild yams from the sack slung over his shoulder. He delicately maneuvered them into the embers with a piece of driftwood, all the while humming a soft tenor merengue that blended with the chords of salt air, his voice merging with the sea in serenade.
“Oh, I had a girl in Puerto Prince,
I loved her so and was convinced,
She was the only girl for me,
And I gave that girl a golden ring,
I promised her ’most everything,
But then I heard your melody,
And sitting here beside you now,
This to you I vow,
Whenever, wherever, forever,
I am your,
Mon amour, je t’adore,
Toujours, tu as mon coeur . . .
He the Devil meant to steer you off yo’ course, she cautioned herself. What sort of man have no home but the sea?
As he poked at the edges of the flame, he turned, laughing. “Your shoes. They are quite formidable.”
“Yes, I bought them myself. From the Sears Roebuck catalogue. My work shoes, for work.”
“Perhaps you should give them some air, non?”
Fussing with herself, she roughly unlaced her shoes and placed them upright beside her, then struggled to remove her cotton stockings without raising her dress. The fine sand drizzled between her toes. “Mons—Yves, you bring me out here to explain something about the dress?”
He took her feet by the ankles and held them by the arches, beheld them. “Is there no part of you that is not beautiful?”
“Just what is it you want of me?”
“I wanted to spend time alone with you.”
“What of your affianced? The one that you would marry?”
“She is a long way away and I do not believe that I will see her again. I have written her a letter declaring that I have found the woman of my dreams.”
“But you hardly know me.” She pulled her feet back and, brushing off the sand, tucked her knees under her dress.
“Aha, I have not yet mailed the letter.”
He sat beside her. The cup of his hand drew her mouth to his. “I am not the sort of man you get involved with, but when I look at you I don’t care. From the moment I saw you gazing at the world, I knew. I want you to come away with me, Dora.”
“What?”
“Tell me where you would like to go, anywhere in the world. Command me and I will take you there.”
“I think I would like to go back to Charleston.”
“A free woman of color, free to choose any place in the world, and you choose Charleston? Before we have even had our feast?”
“We must go, please.” Her heart raced. She fought like a swimmer in undertow.
“You should sing again with me.”
“What’d make you say such a thing? I cannot, I do not sing. I would frighten the sunlight.”
“Nonsense, I heard you singing on the boat. ‘I gave that girl a golden ring and promised her ’most everything, but sitting here beside you now, this to you I vow . . .’ The dress you make for my bride, you make for yourself.”
“Folks be talkin’.”
“Why, whatever could you think, Winrow! What is it of your business? Monsieur Dessalines was trying to show me something of the dress he wants for his affianced.”
“Some . . . thing?”
“What can I tell you, Tom? He wanted me to get a sense of the dress, so it would feel like sailing. And since when do I have to explain myself to you?” She sat back on her buttocks and rocked to and fro, self-content. She had done nothing improper and would not act so. “I am making a dress.”
“Folks be talkin’ is all I’m sayin’,” Tom said softly, his teeth clenched.
If there is no leaving, there is no coming back, Yves had said. She had allowed him to caress her, he had declared himself, and yet now he had sailed again. What was she to make of this? It had stormed the night long, the thunder rousing her from sleep, her dreams punishing her with doubt. On her way to the Bonneaus’ when she was sitting beside Win, the buckboard passed a tree shorn clean of bark. It had been struck naked by lightning. Someone should gather that bark, make good kindling, she thought as she walked into the Bonneau mansion.
Miss Tildie greeted her at the door. “We have very important visitors coming, an important connection for my fiancé’s fathuh. Regular gal took sick again. Mama says you will stand in as the servin’ maid.” Before Dora could respond, Tildie turned her back and moved up the stairs, gesturing dismissal with her hand over her shoulder. “Go on in the kitchen. Cook’ll tell you what to do. We’ll finish up the fittin’ tomorruh.”
Grimfaced, Dora quickly decided that she had no choice but to put up with the indignity. She had forgone other clients to work on this wedding, and she had purchased some of the special elements—pearl buttons, décolletage—from her own pocket. These gowns gotta look like they come from France, high class, high society. The Bonneaus had excellent social standing, but—holes in the carpet, hens in the house, crazy old man think the war still on—they were holding on to that, it seemed, by Dora’s needle and thread. She knew the only reason she had been hired was so that the Bonneaus could save cost. She couldn’t tell with these white folks what their reaction would be to her refusing their request to “help out.” She cringed at the thought of Dessalines seeing her ambition so compromised. I will own me a house with a privy and a front door that goes to the street. I will run a respectable business with my name on it, and people will call me Miss. The refrain ran in her head like a mantra as she wove between the seats, efficiently removing soup bowls and replenishing dinner rolls with silver tongs it had taken her twenty minutes to polish. More than ever she needed to prove that she could succeed at her design, that she could make her way on her own. You will not succumb to this man, this man who offers faraway worlds and song and sweet yams. He doesn’t offer you freedom. He mocks you, toys with you. His was a freedom she didn’t dare fathom. Hers she held firmly in her hands. Yet here she was, clearing the table for the next course, doing something she swore she would never do—wait on white folk. She ground her teeth with every pass.
The intimate dinner of twenty was a motley assemblage: Tildie and her bourbon-swooned beau, pink-cheeked at noon; his father, Woodson Sr., a portly stiff New Yorker stuffed into his waistcoat, and his Delaware-bred mother with crinolined hair, the railroad baron and his gilded wife; two of Tildie’s bridesmaids and their beaus; her poet brother, her Confederate grandfather in his mildewed dress grays, and her mother with the constant downturned
smile and arched eyebrow, Charlestonian aristocracy, the heart of a fallen empire—first to secede, first to fire, first to fall. The constellation was rounded out by an empty chair, opposite a talking mouth full of food, bits and flecks of it in its mustache, teeth dribbled with tobacco, the governor of their fair state, a small farm husbandman from the Cumberland piney woods who went by the name of Pitchfork. Ben Tillman had come to get support for his new registration law. He had journeyed to the city of Charleston to arrange a sit-down, a political union between the old-time gentry, represented by the empty chair, Northern capital, represented by Tildie’s affianced, and himself and his kind. He longed to bring these arrogant tidewater bastards with their crusted power and influence to their knees, but first he needed them. He intended to be the new senator from South Carolina, to reclaim the state not for its former masters, but for the new ones.
“We have got the Negro down, we are going to keep him down.”
“But Governor Tillman, we have already initiated the eight-box, gerrymandered all colored voters into one district, and reduced representation of the Low Country by a third—they have only two delegates left—Miller and Whipper. For all intents and purposes, the Negro has already been stripped of power, what more can you ask?”
“Perhaps that we not discuss politics at the table,” snapped the household’s dour matriarch.
He wasn’t askin’. He didn’t have to. Talkin’ bout the colored as if I ain’t even here! Like the chair got ears and I don’t. He look juss like the Devil. Poll tax, eight-box, gerrymander. She didn’t understand any of it. Democrat, Republican. Be the dickens gettin’ home at this hour.
Tillman turned toward Woodie. “The North misunderstands us. We want investment from industry, diversification of our crops, modernization of agriculture, increased trade. We welcome competitive bidding so that we are no longer hostage to the usury of a few Charleston bankers and merchants and dreamers who owe their power to the past, not the present.” Tillman suppressed his ire that the guest of honor still had not shown up. Julius Mayfield, Son, was deliberately keeping him waiting. Tillman had never been invited to the home of one of the old families before. Though he had amassed two thousand acres of his own up-country, his holdings still did not compare to the wealth of the islanders or the stranglehold they still had over the politics of his state. He took the absence as a snub, deliberate and personal. An unusually long nose, thick wild eyebrows, one shiny eye, the other a sunken hollow, Tillman watched Dora wordlessly circle around the table. Mongrel bitch. Her ears prickled.