Conjuh

== CONJUH ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
The woman walked the road from Adams Run toward Edisto
Island. It was a long way, but she made it a longer. There was a look of fixed
confusion on her thin face and in her enlarged eyes. Whenever she heard
hoofbeats or footfalls on the road dust she stopped and appeared to brace
herself to await the passer-by with an air of unconcern. But then it was no
use. Swerving pusillanimously, like a sick animal, she broke into the roadside
tangle and made on so for a little way. 
It can be hot in May in the low-country parishes of
South Carolina. Here in the magnolia-towered thickets of beech and bay and
thorn vines it was dead hot. Yet the woman continued to shiver from head to
foot of her slender height, as if it were cold. In the open she walked, but
here where it was no longer easy, perhaps because it was so hard, she tried to
run, tried in her panic to fight it. Once, caught in the cul-de-sac of a bamboo
brake, she brought up and put her palms to her temples sharply. She stared
around her, and as if but just awakened, the whites of her eyes increased. She began to pant heavily. 
"What am I doing here?" Her next words were
in a blurry French. "Quelle bêtise!" 
She started back for the opening in the brake by which
she had entered. After she had taken three steps a spasm of coughing seized her
and shook her light body terribly. She put a handkerchief to her mouth to try
to muffle it. When she took it away and looked at the arterial crimson staining
the fold she had bitten she wheeled, threw herself in renewed panic against the
thick of the bamboos, broke through, and ran on. 
When she had slipped down from the train at the little stop back there, in the maze of a moment of hysteria in which the names of
these almost-forgotten sea islands had seemed an imperious beckoning, the woman
had been well, if quietly, clothed. By the time Bram Tollum saw her, caught
without chance of hiding on the road fill going over to the first of the
islands, mud-plastered to her knees, dress torn by a hundred thorns, and her
hair beginning to look kinky again in its dusty disorder, she made a figure
nearly as ragamuffin as one of the native Gullah girls after a day in the wood
lots. 
Bram Tollum had buried his woman at the Pilkee ground
over near Adams Run, and now he was bringing home the mourners, most of them
females, packed narrowly in the body of the "nigger-house yard"
truck. 
When he passed the cinnamon-skinned stranger perched
nervously on the edge of the fill he shouted the conventional
"Ebenin'!" and would have gone on full-throttle for the rise to the
bridge had it not been that he let his eye drag a little in leaving the shape
of the wayfarer. Then, because he was alive and bereaved, and because the shape
was of a queer, uncommon loveliness, he stopped the truck with a jar that flung
his load about, threw in the reverse, and backed back. 
The woman was caught. Here there was no cover to hide
her from this suddenly leveled curiosity of eleven pairs of eyes. Again, like
one shaken awake, she asked herself what she was doing in this place.
"It's like an awful dream you can't get out of." 
The sense of nightmare increased. Bram's head, twisted
around on its glossy, powerful neck, broad-jowled, narrow-browed, the whites of
the little eyes showing brown around the circumferences— of all the faces in
the truck now this was the only one she could see. But when the mouth in it
opened and spoke, the sense of nightmare went away. 
"Ebenin', sistuh. Where you gwine to, foot in yuh
hand? Mek-so you gwine Appleton Road, gibb you a lift; glad habb yuh
company." 
It was less the meaning than the music of the words,
uttered in that forgotten speech of the Gullahs of the sea islands, that
affected the woman so powerfully. She had parted her lips for a "No—
thanks" quickly, but then, before she could utter it, it was as if the
shape of her mouth had changed. She felt the muscles of her throat flexing like
old rusty springs let go, and heard herself answering in a soft, flat-voweled,
eager rush: 
"T'anky, dat puhzackly where I duh gwine,
brudduh. I gwine Appleton House, in de nigguh-house yard, an' t'anky too much
fuh gibb me a lift." 
Venus Burley, relegated to the truck bed to make room
for the newcomer on the seat, up beside the widower, was furious. 
The big house at the Appleton plantation burned down thirty
years ago, leaving only a pair of chimneys to stand in the live-oak avenue.
Part of the cotton lands have gone back to jungle; those that are left in
tillage, on account of the weevil these times, are planted in corn, spinach,
potatoes, and other truck, each field after the whim of its Negro tenant
cultivator. The only part of the plantation that has kept a color of animation
about it is the row of cabins where these black inheritors live, once the slave
quarters, now the "niggerhouse yard." 
Near sundown the shadows of the cabins, all alike,
stripe the solepacked "street" before them tigerwise, and, going down
over the brambly bank beyond it, ray away longer and longer across the tide
marsh toward the lift of the barrier beach and the pinky-white lace of the
Atlantic combers. Marshward, herons beat their wings in heavy flight; inland
the bullbats are waking. The sea wind, beginning to die, blows strong and salt
one moment and slacks another, and in the instant of its slacking it is pushed
back by the land air, in which are mingled the smoke of piny lightwood from the
decapitated chimneys and the scent of trees in flower— magnolia, rose of Sharon, and sweet bay. 
Bloom Manigo sat on her doorsill and watched the house
shadows pulling themselves out long and thin across the marsh grass, trying for
another millionth time to grab the yellow beach sand a mile away with their
finger tips before the dusk grabbed them and smothered them in the bigger
shadow. Bloom knew they never could. She knew a great deal. She was a woman who
had had more children than she could easily remember, and so it was a pity, now
she was old, the only one left her was the baby, Sukey, a girl not yet eleven
and of little use in the potato fields. 
Her son Vulcan, her "man chillun," had been
dead eight months now; the last of the year's hog was finished months ago; and
since one can borrow "bittles" for a while but not forever from even
the kindest of neighbors, the pot that little Sukey was rattling in the chimney
inside held no more tonight than a thrice-boiled rind, a handful of cowpeas,
and another of corn hominy. Tomorrow it would hold less; and Bloom was a woman
who had been sleek and fat in her day. So the mumbly song she kept going in her
throat as she rocked over her elbows and watched the shadows reaching for the
golden sands they could never reach this side of death was a sad one. 
". . . Art I look on de road, art de road so
lonesome; Lawd, I gots to walk dat lonesome road. . . ." 
The racket of the truck's arrival with the mourners
from Bram's woman's funeral fell in with the melancholy of the spiritual
without Bloom's being otherwise aware of it. 
"An' I look in de grabe, art de grabe so ivafry;
Lawd, I gots to lay in dat ivafry grabe. . . ." 
But then one woman, Venus Burley, came running, elbows
speared, eyes snapping. 
"Aunty Bloom, here come a punkin-skin woman duh
say 'e yoh chillun. You ain't habb no punkin-skin gal foh chillun, duh
callumself Delia, gwine away N' Yawk when 'e little. 'E a liar, enty?" 
Bloom stopped rocking. "Me habb a chillun duh
call-umself Delia? Le' me see. Foh gal-chillun dey Silbia an' lilly Bloom an'
Promise, an' dey Magnolia an'— an' dey Sukey " 
"Yi-yi-yi! 'E a Gawd liar, a Gawd liar, enty? I
tell um 'e a Gawd liar." 
But now Bloom was looking at the cinnamon-skinned
stranger who had come up behind Venus, and when she saw she was a woman grown,
and so fit for field work, her memory was revivified and she knew her own
child. 
“ Art dey my -own Delia!" Heaving up from the
sill, Bloom spread her arms. Tears sprang from her eyes and tumbled down her
cheeks. Having done its work of prompting, the material consideration was gone
as soon as come, without trace or shame, leaving in the simple old woman's
heart only the power and wonder of pure mother love. "Delia chile, t'ank
de Lawd Maussa! t'ank de Lawd Jedus! You binna gwine away North wid dem n'
Yankee Bukra foh nursemaid, but you done come home to you-own home see yuh
maamy befoh 'e dead." 
Delia Manigo stood still, not vacillating, but as
though her arms were pinioned and her ankles bound. As Bloom studied her the
flood of the mother's tears increased. But now they were lustrous things,
precious as nothing else to the old country Negro's heart. 
"Chile, you dress-up too good. Chile, you gots
sin." Nor was there anything illogical in the ecstasy of the sobbing
outcry with which she finished: "Praise be to de Lawd!" 
"Me, Maamy?" Delia's mouth fell open.
"Me gots sin?" 
Delia looked around her. She looked at the marsh and
the striping shadows, the sandy reef beyond it, the breakers still beyond,
changing from wink to wink, yet in fourteen years not changed. She looked at
the birds moving on the sky, the same great heron, the same fish hawk hung tiny
in solitude, the painted streak of a nonpareil, in and out. 
She looked at the little cabins and saw them growing
big, and the wall of the palmetto tops behind them gigantic. She looked at the
dark half circle of the faces of the curious hemming her in. 
It was as if her eyes, heavy for so long with her
weird, intoxicated dream, were opened clear, and of a sudden she knew them all,
these of her flesh and blood and kind. Of a sudden she knew no one else and
nothing else. 
Had she sin? She could have laughed aloud. Could these
but have envisaged the half, the very hundredth, of her sin's fantastic
magnitude. But in the same instant she herself was stricken by the terror of
it, and tears began to tumble down her face too. 
"Maamy— yessum— I gots it. Maamy, I gots a hebby
sin." 
Bloom caught the flinging body. "Glory Gawd! Yuh
ol' maamy gwine fohgibb you an' tek cyar uh you, an' Jedus sabe yoh soul."
"Maa-a-a-amy! I'ze uh ailin'. Fze agwine
dead." 
"No, no, no; hush yuh cryin', rest yuh trimblin';
you tired, dat all; spang tired out. Come-yere in de house and lay 'pon-top yuh
maamy's bed." 
Delia slept. After a time she was awakened to take
some food, fat hog meat and plenty of hominy with the gravy over it. (Now that
labor had come into the house, old Bloom had been able to fill her pan at
neighbors' doorways without trouble or shame.) Delia tried to eat of these
strange, but less strange than familiar, "bittles," and though she
could swallow nothing, made a drowsy show of smacking her lips. 
Heavy with sleep and with fever, her one desire was to
be let lie unaroused, part and parcel of this tiny, ember-lit room, child and
never anything but child of it— the browning newspapered walls, the mud chimney
with its medicine bottles and broken Staffordshire treasured in niches, and
black pots nesting in the ashes, and Sister Sukey's eyes from the dark of a
corner, white-rimmed with awe, and Maamy's big shadow moving softly, like an
overcurving black wing. 
But once recollection passed like a knife through Delia's brain. She sat bolt up. 
"They're after me. Ohhh! They've found out by
now; they're after me." 
Sukey's eyes grew whiter. Maamy's big brown mouth fell
open. 
"Where you learn talk Bukra talk lukkah dat,
chile? Dat too swongah." Here were dimensions of sin of a sudden beyond
the old Gullah woman's powers to deal with, even perhaps beyond her stern
"God's" and her kindly "Jedus's." She let misgiving shake
her for a moment. 
"Who-all duh aftuh you? Chile, wha'— wha'— wha'
kinda sin you binna dare fuh do?" 
Everything was twisted and magnified by Delia's fever.
Fumbling in her bosom with distracted fingers, she brought to the firelight a
pouch made of some soft skin, hung by a ribbon around her neck. Before she
could do more her mother had wheeled on Sukey, crying: "Git outa yere; git
out t'rough dat door an' shut-um behine you an' shut yuh mout' same-time an'
keep-um shut!" Not till the scared child had obeyed did Bloom move, and
then it was quickly, her thick fingers pulling open the mouth of the bag. When
she saw that it was full of the sparkle of diamonds and things she began to
shiver and groan. 
"Gawd habb pity! Dat whuffoh you so trimbly; you
duh t'ief, duh t'ief, duh t'ief." 
"No, no!" Appalled, bewildered, Delia scrambled back for refuge into the island speech. "I nebbuh t'ief-um; I
nebbuh, I sway-to-Gawd. 
Dey my my-own. Um gibb-um to me, ebery las' one,
Maamy. Maa-a-a-my! " 
Bloom's mirth came out of her fright, cackling. She
caught a bight of necklace out of the pouch. "Who duh gibb you dat
t'ing?" Shrill sarcasm. "Huh— huh— huh! Must be a stingy nigguh tek a
wench to de crossroads store fuh buy-um sucha poor lilly present no more-na dat
t'ing." Poking, she chose a bauble of platinum, a six-pointed star with
one great brilliant. "Chile, tell yuh maamy, ivho gwine gibb a nigguhgal
dat t'ing?" 
"A king, Maamy— he gibb-um." 
"A king! Hi-hi! Whuff oh? Wha' kind uh
king?" 
"Fuh a dec'ration, he gibb-um, Maamy. A
honest-to-Jedus whitefolks' king." 
Bloom strained for words fit for her ultimate sarcasm, her cheeks swollen with her breath, eyeballs pressed out against their lids.
But Delia, staring around her in panic, cowed not by her mother's incredulity,
but by the sudden onsweep now of her own, buried her face in her hands. "I
guess I mussuh-t'ief-um. I yent but a poor lilly nigguh-gal, fuh work in de
potato-field 'pon-top uh Edisto; I done mussuh t'ief-um, an' dat so." 
The cough that was always waiting to catch her when
her guard was down caught her and shook her to pieces. At sight of the cruelty, everything else was swept clear away out of Bloom, leaving nothing but the
mother of mothers. She put her arms around the bucking body, held it fiercely
against the large, soft warmth of her breast, moaning, crooning. 
"Don' you bodduh, my baby. Yuh maamy gots you in
'e arm, an' 'egwine tek cyar uh you. Gi' me dat skin-bag, an' don' you t'ink no
more. Tonight I gwine hide-um unduh de loose board in-unduh de bed; tomorruh I
gwine t'row-um in de marsh, where no-Gawd-body alibe ebbuh duh find-urn. Stop
yuh twistin' an' twinin' now; hush yuh cryin'; listen de wind duh blow in de
chinaberry-leaf out dey, so sof ', so kind. You want yuh rest; you want yuh
sleepy, sleepy, sleep, safe where nobody cyan touch you in yuh maamy arm."
Delia slept. For hours it was the black sleep,
untroubled. But toward the gray of morning she dreamed. 
She walked rapidly, then she began to run, across the shiny
floor of her apartment toward the escape of the tall glass doors. But no matter
how skitteringly her feet fled, the soft fall of pliant shoe soles behind her
she could not shake off. And when she had slipped out upon the iron balcony and
would have pulled the door shut behind her, one of those soles was intruded in
the aperture, the silky pendant of his whisker making his face seem even
longer, his brown eyes nearly black with imploration and concern. 
"Mademoiselle, je repete " 
There she turned on him, all-let-go, her blurred
French blurrier than ever with the ecstasy of her revolt. "You repeat, you
repeat, you repeat. I'm to stop all working, go away from Paris, eat this,
drink that, sleep so and so. Or else I will to be grave sick and die. But can you
not hear me when / repeat, that it is equal to me, and that, the devil, what do
I care? The devil! who is there that cares?" 
"But your world, Mademoiselle Manigault! Your
art, your public, your Paris!" 
But now she twisted quickly from him. 
"Look, Doctor! No, down there! There, where I
point. It goes there. There, where I point. It goes there." 
And now, in the queer way of dreams, it seemed that
for a long while she had been doing nothing but point at a thing below her in
the current of the Champs Elysees that she could see, yet dared not see. Like
one of those liver spots that race out of the corner of vision and return to
re-escape and are never done with it, time after time this dread spot in her
dream ran past beneath her and away up the river of holiday cars bound out
toward the races, the woods, and all the trysting places of happiness. 
"Look where I'm pointing, Foster!" (For, by a dream-trick, it was no longer the doctor's face beside her, but somehow the
face of Foster Lake, the manager.) 
"Look, for heaven's sake, Jacques!" (It was somehow Jacques Monck of Le Matin.) 
Her voice rose to a thready scream: "Look,
Edouard!" 
For now it was Edouard Lebrun himself, there at her
shoulder, an unwonted flush on his olive cheeks, his eyes queer, his full mouth
tightened and oddly twisted. But when she would have grasped his arm with one
hand to make him see where the other was pointing, she grasped at nothing but a
thing that dissolved and left emptiness and sudden mockery. 
And as suddenly, as if her pursuing finger had been
given power, the thing that fled was pinned down, and she saw it. An open car
(for the day was sunny), mahogany and nickel and crimson leather, and Edouard
Lebrun there in it, his face averted from this building, and by his side, snow
and gold and happy, Olga Pedesen, the Norse girl, of the Folies Bergeres. 
Delia laid hold of the curly iron of the balustrade to
twist it and shiver it. But that too dissolved under her touch, and so did the
floor of the balcony, and the floor of Paris, and where she fell in a heap she
lay and gnawed at her lips and sobbed. And sobbing, she awoke, and saw darkness
bending over her, with grayness around its edges. 
"Dey, dey, dey, chile; dey, dey, dey, my
baby." 
Reality. The land air was still blowing, heavy with
tangled fragrances—myrtle and bay, honeysuckle and dogwood, cows and pigs,
raccoon and deer, woodsmoke and harness sweat and axle grease. Bird song ran
around the cabin chinks like the shadow of a baton across invisible reeds and
violins. There were other stirrings, husky laughter, pad of bare soles.
Reality, generations fixed. After the phantasm of a moment's sleep. 
Bloom left the bedside and went to the door; around
her the gray light warmed. 
"Dayclean," she said. "Time de man duhgit on de crop, befoh de crow duh git on-um. Mawnin', Haklus. I do lubb see you
wid a hoe 'pon-top yoh shoulder. Mawnin', Madlun." At sound of Delia
squeaking up and dropping her feet to the floor, the material and the maternal
in Bloom closed in momentary struggle. But the mother conquered. "You lay
quiet, Delia, chile. Tomorruh you feel more bettuh; mebby we find some work in
de crop foh you work. But you ain' had yuh rest yet. Lay quiet 'pon-top yuh
back today." 
Delia started to cry, "No, I'm all right; I had all the rest I want — "; then, startled by the anomaly of that speech in
this place, she did as she had done yesterday and slid back into the Gullah in
haste. "I wanta gwine out, work in de crop, dis bery mawnin'." 
"We ain't habb no crop uh we-own dis summuh, Delia,
neiduh-so no mule, neiduh-so no cow foh work. But ef you do do wanta work I
binna habb a compersation with Bram Tollum las' night, an' Bram he gots a hebby
potato field dis summuh, an' he lubb habb a help." 
"I don' cyare who-wid I gwine, Maamy, I duh
gwine, an' I duh gwine now." 
If there seemed reality inside, there seemed a deeper
and more vivid reality out between sky and land. This illusion of reality held Delia prisoner. As she walked behind Bram's broad back along the cart track,
through the light of morning, through the myrtle thickets, through the little
pinewoods, it seemed that weariness and fright of death had been stripped from
her like the winding sheet left in the tomb in the garden, never to be put on
again. It was less a feeling at all— resurrection morning, her sins forgiven
and her soul set free. 
Nothing weighed. She felt only a kind of Elysian
levity when Bram, turning suddenly in the half-light of the pinewoods, asked
her to give him a kiss. 
"Me gibb you a kiss!" She stood and tittered.
"A oagly black 'rangatang luk you!" She hadn't to search for them;
immemorial epithets fit for such dealings ran off her tongue. "You stand
too-much lukkuk elephunt an' a alligatuh an' a 'rangatang, all t'ree, an' I is
a puhticulah lady, nigguh, an' you cyan't specify." 
But when, come to the foot of his field, heavy with
her taunts and his three-day widowhood, he renewed his suit, his face contorted
and the huge wedges of his chest muscles tensed with his vehemence, Delia felt
a chill of misgiving and a thrill of rage. 
"What I come here foh, hoe weed an' crabgrass, or
listen to fieldnigguh sweetmout' all mawnin'?" 
"I ain't talk sweetmout'. My todduh woman, 'e
dead; I lubb habb you fuh my woman." 
Delia's lips curled back. "Va-t'-en!" There
was spittle in it. She threatened him with her heavy hoe, then, wheeling,
walked out into the potato field and began, at hazard, to knock out the roots
of Jimson weed with its dull blade. 
All around Bram's patch the woods made a wall. Heat
poured into it as the sun mounted, like fluid into a bowl. Delia's hoe lagged.
Swiftly the illusion of well-being was dissipated. The flame of the sun, added
to the flame of the fever, burned her. The field and the green wall around it
swam with the swimming of her eyes. Her knees bent double and let her down on
the earth between the potato rows. 
This was the end, she thought. But now she considered
it without terror, only dully. Bram was nowhere about. He had gone back toward
the "yard," for a drink of liquor perhaps. But it would not have
mattered one way or the other; Delia had forgotten about Bram. 
She lay on an elbow in the furrow, her head hanging,
her eyes blank on the earth. In her fingers alone was there activity. They
crept in, wriggled, dug in under the powdery crust, blind as worms or as roots,
nosing down through the dead part to where the earth was damp and alive, to try
to get a grip of it. 
Soil and sun and a low veil of leaves. 
A potato leaf, cut by some gnawer, fell down to the
dust before Delia's eyes. It lay there green on white. Fever played with it,
and of a sudden it was white on green, white of newsprint on the green of a
table in a restaurant in the Bois de Vincennes. 
A clipping from a paper. Le Matin. Jacques Monck's column. Jacques Monck's words: 
. . . Strauss, Stravinsky, Honegger, yea, giants,
molding and naming for yourselves a musical age. Agreed. One stands before you
with bowed head. I mean it, reverently. 
But what of you others, concerning whom there is no
question of reverence, but only of laughter, pulse, diablerie? A new beating of
old drums in the antique dark. What of you, Johnnie Bell, with your
jungle-remembering banjo; what of you two, Blaise Watterson of Harlem, Honey
boy *Lipp in London, with your witch-doctor batons and your evolving
"blues"; what of you, Delia Manigault y who, nightly, on the stage of
Paris, with the infinitely subtle gaucherie of your dark limbs and the
intricate and simple incitement of your jeweled, whispering feet, create and
continually recreate the measure of the morrow 's dancing of a hundred million
feet? ' What of you others, I say! Would it not be a thing of irony, then, if
looking back one day upon this minute double decade, the historians, not alone
of music, but of letters, of sociology, of politics and religion, should find
the names of you others, you children of the jungle, of the slave-market? 
Soil and sun and a low veil of leaves. And a Gullah
girl, come out from the cabin in the "nigger-house yard" to till the
earth in her generation, lying there, hoe lost, tilling it with nothing but her
fingers now. 
A shadow, come and gone. Was that Bram? No, it was
more fearful than the shadow of Bram; it was like the shadow of the wing of the
angel of a dark, remonstrant God. 
"Impious nigger-girl! Presumptuous, temerarious,
fantastical! Rub your forehead in the master dust there; cast out the maggots
of dreaming from your brain, and repent!" 
That shadow again, and another with it. Now there were
two buzzards, circling. 
When Delia knew that, she scrambled up somehow and ran
along the furrow toward the human being, Bram. Bram had had his drink. Corn
liquor does things that not even prayer can do. Bram had to laugh aloud with
the power of his exultant wonder at sight of this lissome "yalluh
woman," but a half hour ago so "no-mannersable," flying to him
with wild hands out. He had to laugh at her weight, at her cry: "Oh, fuh
Jedus, tek cyare uh me!" 
Delia felt herself being carried, and that was enough;
she neither knew nor cared that it was toward the farther woods. She knew
nothing of it when Bram, sensing a change in the heft of his burden, stopped to
study it, swore, scowled, vacillated, shivered a little, muttered: "What I
duh do, mek-so de woman gwine dead?" and, turning back on his tracks,
started in haste for the "yard." 
Through the heat of noon and through the long
afternoon Delia lay on her mother's bed in the cabin and knew nothing of it,
nothing when she twisted, nothing when she coughed. The sun declined. Men and
women and children came back from the fields. The banked fires were awakened
with slivers of fat lightwood, and the smell of bacon and corn hominy was blown
about with the smoke. Once again the shadows of the cabins in file set out
across the mile-wide marsh in their losing race with dusk, the destroyer. Once
again old Bloom sat on her doorsill and watched them, rocking to the measure of
her mournful song: 
". . . An' I look on de mountain, an* de mountain
so high; Laivd, I gots to climb dat mountain high. . . ." 
Fatalist, that the child who had been given back to
her bosom yesterday should today be lying there in chance of being snatched
away again, was all of a piece with the "lonesome road" which one is
born but to follow, whistling, laughing, pranking as gaily as one can. There
was no use in running about, wringing hands, pestering fate. How ill Delia was
she had no way of knowing: either she would grow better or she would grow
worse; Bloom had done all she could, for now. 
After' dark it would be another matter; there was
perhaps another thing she could do. But she was a good member of the "
'Vangelical Baptiss' " at the Three Crossroads, and it was hardly dusk
yet, the tips of the shadows still left to reach for the distant sand. So there
was nothing to do but sit and wait, rock and croon. 
"All I wanta know, am my sir? fohgibbun; All I
ivanta know, am my soul set free? . . ." 
Now the shadows were gone. Gradually for a few
minutes, then swiftly, the black coast night made. Supper was out of the way in
all the cabins, but it was Saturday, and no work tomorrow, so no one was going
to bed. Shades passed up the "street," some with monosyllabic queries
thrown to the old woman swaying on the sill. Others kept up a soft pad-pad of
soles along the rear way, behind the cabins. 
Sukey, the "baby," penned indoors by her
mother's bulk, stood on one foot and then on the other; she too wanted to be up
there at the top of the yard, where, on the beaten earth under the solitary,
sway-limbed live oak, the premonitory board-thumpings, stringpickings, and
can-poundings of the dance were already beginning to be heard. 
Sensing the child's restiveness, Bloom turned on her
with a guarded vehemence. 
"No-suh, you can't duh gwine out dis ebenin'. You
stay here; tek cyare yuh sistuh." Bloom arose, dusting her broad skirts.
"Yuh maamy 'e gots a errund. Anybody ask you a answer where yuh maamy am,
tell-um I gwine be back-here foh-fibe minute." 
Now that it was pitch dark out behind the cabin row
and everybody with eyes departed, Bloom could walk boldly on her errand to
Gran' Liz's, whose cabin stood inshore a little way, in a palmetto grove. If
there was any vacillation, it was not in Bloom's feet, but in her mind, nor was
the doubt there of the conjurewoman's power to help if she would; it was
precisely whether she would. A conjure bag, specific against fevers, is a
precious and perishable thing, and Bloom came with empty hands. 
As the old woman entered the skirts of the grove the
upper fronds of the trees were reddening with the rays of the fires the dancers
had lighted on the marsh bank a hundred yards away, and the clattering throb of
the orchestra began to run in the air. 
Behind, at the cabin, Sukey hung in the door for a
little while, hearkening. She hung on the step a little while. Then she too was
Delia could not have said when it was that she began
to feel the beat of the music. Its first effect was to translate into a
definite dismay all the nameless bodily discomforts of which she had been
conscious in her unconsciousness— the heat, the binding of her limbs, and the
weight on her heart. Now it was explained in terms of confusion and dismay. 
Why had she not been given the call— even the first
call? Where was that call woman? Sneaked out to a buvette to steal a glass with
her lover, the second electrician? In that case, where were all the others, the
dressing maid, aghast, the stage manager in a tumult, if Manigault had missed
her entrance? 
For surely she had. Surely it belonged to no act but
hers, that rhythm that came jarring, tuneless with distance, repeated and
repeated. Appalled, she could see big Sam Pira, his neck craned, his baton
agonizing, hoping through another bar and another, and then for yet another
time flipping his clarinets and fiddles, his big bull fiddles and his traps and
saxophones, back into the opening. 
She could see the waxing consternation of her support,
the twenty of them already on-stage and at it, their prancing more and more
galvanic with each rebuilding of her entrance, their panicky eyes cornering at
the high darkness in the wing where her shadow should long since have come
within their sight, snaking along the great moss-hung limb that swayed down, as from a live oak, across the stage. 
Now the thing took on that quality peculiar to
nightmare. It was not alone that she was tardy; it was that she was not
dressed, not even zmdressed to dress, not even thinking about beginning; half
like a cataleptic she lay here on the divan in her dressing room and did
nothing. 
She conquered this inaction. She began to tear
haphazard at her clothing, plucking it in ribbons; ineptitude still kept half a grip on her. She couldn't find things. Where was her costume, her circlet of
trunks, her few bright rags of crepe? Where were her jewels, her flashing
things? They weren't in the case, and there wasn't any case. They weren't in
the lock drawer, and there wasn't any drawer. Panic added to panic now. 
If one who knew the fumbling of her thoughts had been
watching Delia's movements in the dark of the cabin, he would have been
surprised by their precision, the pulling aside first of the rickety bed, the
search on hands and knees, the marking of a board that was loose, its lifting,
the quick sweep of an arm beneath it, the sigh of relief, the bag. 
Delia had never realized that the runway from her
dressing room to the wings could be so dark, so empty, and so long. Where was everybody?
Where, tonight, were all the faces she was used to glimpsing at the turnings of
the walls— the black-eyed Arab poet, the little bank clerk, Boracque, with his
savage shyness and his flowers, the loafing stagehands, the worshipful maids?
But where now, when it came to that, were the walls themselves? How had wind
and stars got into this swollen corridor? 
Was it a prank of punishment for her tardiness, one
wide conspiracy? Was that why, without warning her, they had shifted all the
mechanics of the wings and then cleared out, leaving her to fumble for strange
handholds, clamber unhelped and unguided up incomprehensible distances,
abrading her tender skin on new corners as rough as bark, and catching her hair
and rags on unremembered twigs that were like living twigs of a tree? 
Victor Jimms and his son Hercules pounded on a plank, their shoulders jerking to the time. Jube Appleton picked on an enormous guitar
that had but two strings left. Bram Tollum beat on a drum contrived of a
ten-gallon keg, with a cowhide over the end. Three or four boys clapped with
the flats of their palms on dried gourds. 
Men, women, girls, and boys, all ages, they danced,
each one solo, sufficient to himself. To see them, flinging their elbows, cracking the heads back on their necks, knocking their knees together, each
seeming to follow nothing but the pattern of his own mercurial impulse—and to
hear the perverse and incoherent melee of their outcries—it would have been
hard to realize that under the surface complexity there lay a simplicity of
movement as prescriptive as any prison step, as formalistic as any ritual, as
old as the antique tree that sent its bearded bough down over them to catch the
refractions of the bonfires' light; older, even; as old perhaps as the light of
bonfires in the night. 
Boom-boom-boom . . . "Hi! Crack my foot!" 
Boom-boom-boom . . . "Bressed Jedus!
Nyam-uh-gunjuh! Laydown-die!" 
When Delia dropped from among the reddened leaves
overhead and landed with a pelvic pirouette, light as a feather in a wind eddy
on dust, the dancers shied, yelled, and scattered, some of them never stopping
in flight till they had reached the protecting lee of the first of the cabins.
The lads in the orchestra dropped their gourds and retreated somersaulting into
the wild-oat cover on the marsh bank behind them. 
This woman, this strange "chillun" of Aunty
Bloom's, come out yesterday out of nowhere, she must have died after all, as
folks had said she would. "Sick-to-dead," she couldn't have been
flying around in that treetop while no one knew it: "done-dead," she
might. Of all the music makers, Bram was the only one to hold his ground. Eyes
swollen, mouth wide, legs gathered for jumping, after the first startled hiatus
he let his cudgel fall on the cowhide and got hold of the running beat again. 
Now how he did beat! He beat with a violence
compounded of terror and fascination. 
"Mek-so de woman done-dead, mek-so 'e am a
spirit, I don' cyare! Lawd, my Lawd Gawd!" Boom-boom-boom-boom . . . 
Half seen, half veiled in the streaming chiffons her
garments were, uncomprehended jewels weaving living fires around her— in his
dreams Bram had never dreamed of flesh of woman like this. 
"Mek-so 'e a hag-woman, I don' cyare!"
Booth. "Debbil gwine grafT me; let-um!" 
A flame of hysterical passion burned him. 
"What a woman fuh lubb! What a woman fuh dance " 
Now it was no longer Bram that beat the drum. Cudgel,
arm, body, and mind, now they were all one instrument, pounding willynilly. Now
it was Delia that beat the drum. 
At first Delia danced simply because it was the hour
to dance. Here was the stage, the music, the support, all the familiar
preparation. The whirlwind vanishing of her chorus and the stoppage of the
orchestra shook her, leaving her for a moment "all in the air." 
But she was trained in a hard tradition. With the
re-emergence of the dance beat, insecure at first but growing in power, she
could throw off the panic that had so nearly laid hold of her, and dance, and
wonder. 
Near memories ran in with her puzzlement and her
deepening suspicion. The want of a call, the deserted corridors, the sly
tamperings with the mechanics of her entrance, every familiar move of hers made unfamiliar and difficult. Why? Had she been right; was there premeditation in
it? Malice? Now this emptying of the stage by tacit treachery, leaving her to
carry on, impossibly, alone. This stripping of the music. This conspiracy of
silence out there in the enormous house — 
And now— what an enormous house! Nightmare must be
playing tricks again. Almost as enormous, it seemed to be growing, as the whole
of outdoors, the whole black bowl of the towering night, myriad-packed, shadows
ringed above shadows till their cigarettes and lighting matches became as high
and tiny and many as the stars. All watching concentrically. All waiting
unmoved. As dumb as the dead. 
Here was something Delia Manigault had never had to
know before; it came out of that house against her, as speaking as a wind one
can neither see nor hear: 
"Well, nigger-girl?" 
To her bewilderment was added the beginning of dismay.
She cried, panting, while she continued to fling her body, pivot, and bend her
limbs: "What do you want, you-all? You know me; you know what I can do.
Why all this? How do you get this way?" 
"Well, nigger-girl?" 
She cried in fury: "What do you think? This is no
tryout! " But then, touched by the misgiving that lies forever in the
favorite's heart, she wondered if it was. That second tryout, the irrevocable
and pitiless one — If it was, it was monstrous for them to have asked it so,
without warning, without prop or help, against their silence. 
"Well, nigger-girl?" She seemed to hear a
fleering, "Is that your stuff?" 
"How can you expect anybody to do her best stuff
like this?" She turned coward, the supplicant. "Yes! Wait! Watch me
now. Now I'm going good. I'm going better now." 
But she wasn't going better; she was going worse. She
punished herself, but it was of no use; a heaviness began to envelope her
limbs. In despair she flung into another figure, more sophisticated and more
intricate. This was what they wanted; the other was too naive and looked too
easy. Calling on all her store of virtuosity, she added complication to
complication. 
Now they would have to leap up, acclaim, applaud. The
heat around her head would burst it. The drumbeat was getting ahead of her; she
had to whip her failing muscles with her tiring nerves to keep up. The thin, hot sweat that ran down into her eyes would blind them, unless she could
"get the house," and do it very, very soon. 
Now it seemed as though there must be a spotlight
searching at random over the tiers of that black immensity out front. Here it
hovered, bringing alive for an instant a remembered face; there it ran and
stopped again. Petey Pitcher, the almost-white boy, fiddler, St. Louis. How
many years was it since he had killed his career so that Delia Manigo's might
live? And now there; only shoulders and the top of a head, the face hidden in
the hands; that was Monck of Le Matin. Disappointed? Fed up? Or asleep? 
So they came, so they went, faces, faces, faces. All
of them the same size, distinct but distant, so many masks, emotionless. Now
there were three together, three in a box, black coats, braided, and ribbons
across their breasts. And Delia remembered the three, the messengers of a king.
Greed and fright and bitterness. Had they come back to
take it away from her, their "decoration"? With one hand she pawed
among the streaming rags at her bosom for the touch of the great six-pointed
star, then more wildly still, with both hands. But already the light had passed
and the three were gone and no star could she find; all that her fingers had
caught was a necklace, a tiny thread of pearls. At that a cry went out of her
mouth, "Edouard!" 
The roving nimbus of the spotlight was arrested, as if
an unseen manipulator had heard. There was Edouard Lebrun, as if incalculably
far off, but large and vivid, watching her as a stranger might, his face quite
immobile, his eyes as dead as glass. 
That dance was done. For an instant Delia stood,
keeping her balance on her wabbly legs. Holding the necklace high away from her
throat, aglimmer in the red light for the glazed eyes to see, she cried with
all her might and all her fright: 
"Souviens-toi! 
It went only a little way and fell; it couldn't cross
that distance. "Remember!" It couldn't touch Edouard Lebrun. In the
widening nimbus he turned to the girl beside him, the white-and-golden Norse
girl who sang at the Folies, Olga Pedesen. He smiled, and she smiled in answer.
And under the thrust of Delia's hooked thumb the necklace parted. Where it went
then she did not know; she had a vivid illusion of baubles turned bubbles and
bubbles broken in the air. 
She commenced to fall. But a sob caught her and lifted
her straight up again. 
"Boom!" A simple drum note.
"Boom!" Imperious, powerful. 
"Nigguh-gal, you-all t'rough? Cyan't you dance no
mo'?" 
Another sob took Delia's body and twisted it, flinging
the pelvis one way, the shoulders the other. But her feet were tied to the ground.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!" 
The measure of the beat increased, and with it the
measure of the sobs that flung her. But now, what difference, what did she
care? She gave them rein. The moment she had done that a queer thing happened.
There were no longer sobs, but laughter, Gullah laughter. 
"Cyan't I dance! Lookuh de nigguh-gal. Dance?
Yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!" 
"Gibb-um debbil! T'row yoh elbow! Crack yoh
knee'!" 
"I gibb-um debbil! I shake-um down!" 
The beginning of marvels. Amazement. Exultation. Why
had she ever forgotten the power that was in her when she no longer worried or
cared or thought of herself as an artist or of dancing as dancing— when, very simply, she could give herself up body and soul to the hollering drum? 
"Nigguh-gal," she fleered and gloried,
" 'e duh shake de Bukra out uhhebben!" 
True it was, she was shaking and shivering them, the
tiers of that enormous "house" against the sky. Her laughter rang
higher and higher, flouting and fleering. "Nigguh-gal, 'e crack 'e
backbone, t'row 'e shoulduh, shake de Gawd-a-mighty white folks down!" 
Wizening shadows, like rags of wind-struck cloud she
saw them tumbling. The loopings and bendings of her flesh had got beyond her
now; she had no feeling of them. Faster, faster, wilder, wilder. And of a
sudden they reached the fullness of simplicity, and stopped. 
That was done. The floor of the old marsh she saw
empty, wound by the channels of the tide; the bowl of the sky she saw hollow,
wiped clean of all but the glitter of the Sea Island stars. Her paean was hardly
louder than the rustling of the wind: "Done shake-um down!" 
The fires were going to embers and their light warmed
the earth. Delia was down on her buckled knees on the earth, and she had hold
of it with her hands. To have safe hold of the earth is to be part of it, and
to be part of the earth is to be imperishable. 
Now everything around Delia was part of it. The little
cabins, they were not like things built. The slowly tossing wild oats, the
trees, the ember-lit watchers ringed in distance, and Bram, nearer,
broadbottomed on the beaten ground, his great spent wrists hanging over the
head of his cowhide tom-tom and the sweat of heaven trickling down them as red
as blood— they were all parcel with Delia Manigo, but the earth where it moved
and breathed and desired. And so was Maamy now, of a sudden, between her two
big soft wings of shadows. 
"What you duh do dey, chile? Whuf-foh you duh lay
'pon-top de groun'?" 
Delia was so heavy-close to the ground now that she
heard a breathing. That was the ocean on the barrier beaches miles away. But
she thought it was the beginning of the beating of another drum.
Boom-boom-boom! The oldest drum of all. And Delia thought she was dancing to
it. She thought she was a child on the marsh bank in the cool of
"dayclean," with the smoke of breakfast fires blowing down around her
seaward, and the stamp and clank of hitching mules and the chitter of rushing
birds brittle in the air. Dancing, vagrant as a feather. 
Somebody was speaking far off, as far off as the other
end of Edisto. 
"Look up yoh maamy, Delia. I gots a conjuh from
de conjuh woman. Now you gwine be all-well." 
Dancing, lighter, lighter, lighter than any feather,
laughing, caroling. 
"Conjuh, Maamy? Whuffoh conjuh? I gots a conjuh.
I yiz allwell.
Category:Published
Category:Steele