––––––––
Life got far worse than it had ever been on the plantation. Many thought that the tide would turn after some months went by, but months turned into years really fast, and the Marksmans could never produce another baby. It was one thing about the Marksmans’ plantation you could count on, and everyone around knew it. Mr. Marksman didn’t rape women. He would cut a Negro woman dead, but he was one of the white men around that had never laid a harsh and tormenting sexual finger on one... until the day he bought Misty.
Mr. Marksman’s best field hands were dead, killed less than twenty-four hours after the death of his children which also led to the crumbling of his already tumultuous marriage. It had been many years since that day, and there was added sorrow when the stress and anxiety of their loss seemed to cause the barreness of his wife’s womb. She was nearly fifty and Mr. Marksman was going on seventy years old. He had no one to lean on or leave his plantation, and it was the whispers of the slaves that ripped through his soul every night as they spoke of a curse.
Each week, the fields could hear him call out for Shelone to stop. Sarah would holler out for nights on end as if someone was inside the room with them on full attack while it was other times Mr. Marksman had to rush and grab her from throwing herself out of the large window after what she thought was baby Joseph falling again and again. She wanted to die, and she wasn’t afraid to tell it. What took her heart another route was the day she caught him with another woman.
**
“Line up,” he ordered them in a drunken stupor to check them before he let them go for the day. He was still a wealthy plantation owner, but he’d added to that the alcohol addiction. It was the only thing that kept him from feeling sorrow long enough to get the crop in like he should to keep a steady flow of money. Even though he had less mouths to feed, he tried three times as hard to get his slaves to move larger loads. Each time he stared at them eye to eye, he felt confused for the first times in his life, like he didn’t know what was behind their skin and the subservient nature that he either beat into them or that they purposely showed him. They became a big puzzle to him, everyone except Misty.
She’d grown up to see the age of about nineteen when Mr. Marksman brought her into the line-up. There she stood with the rest of them. She was the fairest skinned of all the Negroes that he’d ever owned on his plantation, and he loved to look at her. For as a matter of fact, it was Misty who he felt became kind to his eyes ever since the bloodbath his memories tortured him with and the wife he felt he failed continuously.
Before, he felt he had to try so hard for Sarah, but when he couldn’t ease her pain or make her happy ever again, it was Misty who had no choice but to help him. At least that was what he thought in his own mind. She was his property, and he would take full advantage.
The young Negro female found out all too quickly that she was a favorite to the white men although she couldn’t stand them, for it was with every second that went by it seemed they were pulling and touching on her since she could remember. Her first touches came at the age of ten when she was sold off to another plantation. It was there she felt the hand of a white man on her naked body, and it was at that same time she saw him get killed and a Negro man hang for it. She was then classified as the white man’s slave whore, and it wasn’t until she met a young Negro man did she ever feel the touch of love. He never even wanted anything but her love back, but she was sold away from her happiness with him. Because the former slave master looked at her with disdain after a while, jealous of her satisfaction from another man, a Negro man, his selling her off was done purposely, in order for her to lose the one thing she ever needed but lost at a young age – love.
“Misty, Misty!” Mr. Marksman hollered in her direction as she knelt down to pull the crops up from the side of her hut. Most of the single women didn’t live alone but shared quarters with other single female slaves. That all changed when Misty got on the plantation. She’d worked the fields, and after the fields were finished, she would watch as the other field hands traveled further away from the massah’s house, but she would stay in close proximity. She wouldn’t remain by choice, but it was her hut that was closest to the house. That was where Mr. Marksman decided the first day he bought that he wanted her to stay, far enough from his wife but close enough to him each night.
Instead of going toward him, feeling ashamed of what all the other field hands knew was happening, she rushed inside the private walls of her hut. Then, she walked toward a beaded bracelet made from fancy rocks and thin wood and rope tied together. She squeezed it tightly in her hand, closed her eyes, and nodded before shoving it into a large crack in between the small wooden table. That was when Mr. Marksman busted through her cabin door.
“You run from me now? As much as I do for you, and you run? So what!” he shouted, as he turned back to the open door revealing the cotton fields and his own home. “It doesn’t matter who is out there,” he slurred as he slammed the door shut. “When I call you, you come.” Then, he stood up straight, and called her name once again. “Misty.”
Misty stared him in his disturbed eyes, took a deep breath and then walked over to him slowly, monitoring him closely as well as herself. She knew how they liked her to be. All of them were the same toward her – wanting her to pretend to be their wives, especially in the dark of night where she would appear even lighter than what she really was. She could see he was severely lacking sleep, and she fabricated her ignorance as to why he’d not slept for many nights. The fact was that he’d left the comforts of the bed he shared with his wife to come to her hay bed at night, each night when all was quiet, for four nights straight. He wouldn’t leave until he felt like a man again by making her feel like less than even being a slave woman by turning her into his whore.
She calmed her nerves and imagined that she was back with her love at the former plantation. When she looked beyond him while touching his shoulders and rubbing the back of his head, he became disturbed. It always disturbed him as to why she wouldn’t look him in his eyes. As she stroked his head, she used her other hand to remove the alcohol from his grasp. Unfortunately, that was the wrong move, and he slapped her to the ground.
“You don’t tell me what to do! You do as I say...” Then he yelled her hand again, louder than he did earlier. “Misty!”
Immediately, she rose from the ground to stand before him once again with a small amount of blood at the corner of her mouth. Once he spotted it, he tossed his alcohol to the ground and grabbed her cheeks, causing a little more blood to ooze from the wound. With his thumb, he wiped the blood from her face and started to laugh.
“Nigger blood. Ain’t it funny? Nigger blood,” he sighed, slumping backwards onto the weak wall as he allowed her head to fall from his hands. “Look at you. There ain’t a white woman I ever seen look like you, not even my wife. And you’re a nigger. A good for nothin’ nigger.” He started laughing so hard, like he couldn’t believe he was infatuated with a woman that he hardly classified as a human being. Feeling like he was in love was the part that he hated the most about Misty, while it was the same thing that he needed. Since the day his children were murdered, things were never the same between he and Sarah. The imperfections of their relationship became amplified through the blood of the dead, and with each year, it worsened.
Suddenly, his demeanor changed as he inspected her. “I’m sorry...how am I supposed to...”
“Don’t be sorry because I’m not.” She stood there in her place because his words didn’t affect her at all. “I knows who I am, suh. I let you say what you say I am, and I believe what I know that I am. That way, you ain’t never got to be sorry for nothing you say to me.” The tone of her voice was low, but the power behind what she stated tore him apart. The fact that she stood prouder than even he could, even with all his wealth and huge mansion and acres of land, made him feel less than an old stray dog. He even smelled himself, and the odor radiating from his skin was of a person who hadn’t washed in days. There wasn’t a Negro on the plantation that smelled like he did, and when he recognized himself through her words, he stared down at his bottle of alcohol and began to cry.
“We ain’t never found her body. We couldn’t find her.” He fell to the floor, on his knees he wept in agony with his hands covering his face. Misty simply stood there, glaring at the top of his head with no empathy. She finally took her own hand and wiped the blood from her mouth and then rubbed it on her dress.
“The lady. The one who killed my children. They all saw it, but they won’t tell where she went. They won’t tell.” He slung his arm around wildly behind him in reference to the slaves that he owned and continued, “So many I got to replace,” he whined in agony. “And it seems like every time I look at one of ‘em in the face they grin back at me,” he stated, rolling his eyes up at her like a child as he curled up around her legs. “Like they keep hiding where she is on purpose, but I know the new ones can’t know can they...where they’re hiding Shelone...because they weren’t there. It’s been so long back, it’s not possible that they know, huh? Tell me, Misty. You know, don’tcha?”
Misty only stood there. Whether or not she knew where the woman was that killed his children didn’t matter. She knew that. His only concern as he grabbed hold of her legs was to find his way up her thighs and place his sorrows on top of her. She knew it had become her job. Just like it was the job of the other Negroes to make him wealthy off their backs, it was her job to keep him happy on her back. She’d done it too many times, and he was no different than her last massah or the men before him. The only difference between the first and the last was the amount of troubles from one field of cotton to the next, and Misty already knew that she’d run into ongoing troubles.
As she stood there, his hand moved up her light brown thighs as he began to kiss her from her ankle on up towards his hand. Misty just stood there looking straight ahead at the cabin door as if she felt nothing at all. Her hands were at her side and her neck was a stiff as a dead woman’s while her breathing remained steady. There was nothing that she liked about his touch nor was there anything that she hated about it. She was numb to it because it had happened too much. Her heart didn’t flutter from fear or happiness. It just pumped blood, and her surroundings became so quiet to her until she could even hear the vibrations of her own life flowing inside her body.
She felt her body being lifted up as she stared at the cabin door, and soon she was on the bed. The cabin door didn’t move as Mr. Marksman undressed himself until there was nothing but his flesh showing from top to bottom. Then, he lifted her dress up to her midsection, and began to kiss her stomach, pressing on it with his fingers as if there was somehow more of it there that he couldn’t reach. Finally, as she stared into the distance and Mr. Marksman went inside her, the cabin door moved slightly. Something slid underneath the drafty opening at the bottom of the wooden frame, and it was then that she took her eyes from the door, and stared upward at the makeshift ceiling as he raped her. When it was all over, he shamefully removed himself from what he felt were the comforts of her Negro skin, dressed, and walked out of the cabin. The sun had just begun to set.
Misty remained on the bed for a multitude of minutes as she normally did in order to gather herself. She placed her hands atop her stomach and began to tremble as her emotions returned. That was when she removed herself from the bed. There was already a bucket of water that she’d learned to keep somewhere near and a washcloth. It was the first place she went to clean herself as best she could. After she was done, she walked toward the door and picked up the letter she’d been expecting since she was sold to Mr. Marksman. Word was that it was going to arrive as soon as the cotton picking was over. That would have been when the overseers normally wouldn’t be around, however, Mr. Marksman spoiled a clean letter transfer. Instead, whoever delivered the letter had to look through the crack to see whenever Mr. Marksman got on top of her. That was when it was safest to slide the note underneath the door. No one would have been willing to keep the letter in their possession for too long, so it was deliver it then or not at all, and Misty knew it.
The letter was tied up really tightly to a flattened stick and straw doll that some of the Negro children would play with at times. It was common to see them around on the ground, close to the huts, so it wasn’t a mystery why Mr. Marksman was blinded to the fact of it being there. Besides that, he was too intoxicated on alcohol and drunk on Misty that he wouldn’t have seen it anyway if it was right in front of him.
When Misty opened the letter, it was from her love who lived on a plantation very near to her last one. The plantations were so close that they could see one another easily and love each other whenever they could until she was sold away. They were never allowed to marry, however, they both decided that their love could never be stopped.
The man she’d fallen in love with was a very intelligent man, so intelligent that he was able to teach her how to read just like he knew how. He would write the words in the dirt, and Misty would memorize them. It was always preparation for when they would be sold apart from each other. He knew it would happen because of the way they were forbidden from marriage, and he was right. Therefore, he prepared. He was a man that prepared for everything, and that was one of the things that Misty loved about him because she knew it was that preparation that would get them both free one day.
She read silently as she laid her body up against the cabin’s door, placing the letter between her thighs, flat against the ground so that if someone peeped through, they wouldn’t see her reading. Instead, they would assume she was just looking down at her legs. The letter read,
My dear,
We have been separated before physically, but nothing can split us from one another in spirit and mind. I am coming for you as I promised, and it will be right before the second boat. I love you. Destroy this letter in deep ground from within your hut. I will be there soon, and you will know. My friend is watching.
The friend he wrote of was the one who delivered the letter. Of course, the letter wasn’t too detailed because of the possibility of it being lost. There were no names on it nor any specific times or dates. Only the person who sent and received knew the details that were insinuated in the lines. Therefore, Misty did exactly what the letter stated and began digging right where she sat. It wasn’t long before there was a hole big enough and deep enough to place the letter and doll inside because they were both very small. Immediately afterwards, she covered the hole up with the same dirt she dug up, and she then laid her body down at the door and cried tears of joy. The letter stated the words “the second boat”, and that meant that she would see him in two days. The sun is the boat in the waters of the sky. The second boat was interpreted as the sun going across the sky twice.
––––––––
The next day started like any other day for Misty on any plantation. There was work to be done in the cotton, therefore, at the crack of dawn, she started preparing herself to leave her cabin. After Mr. Marksman left her hut, she didn’t leave back outside. Sometimes, the shame of being the sex slave for a massah was unbearable. People looked at Misty differently on each plantation than they looked at other women. Most of the men didn’t want anything to do with Misty, not that they thought she was nasty, but because they didn’t want the hassle of loving someone that they had to die defending. It would have been a strain to the relationship, and more than likely, there would be a terrible end.
The man she fell in love with was the only one who didn’t care about all that. He was willing to chance falling in love with her, despite her being run through by white men. He just wanted it to stop before it ruined her.
They’d met when they were only children. Neither one of them had parents any longer, having been sold off. Both of them used to run off into the woods on their own, and it was on one of those times, they met each other – two children from side by side plantations. As they grew with one another, it was when they became teenagers that they knew they loved each other, at least Misty knew she’d fallen in love with him. She found out that he loved her after he sat her down at the brook.
He was soft spoken, always just loud enough for the person who sat close to him to hear. There was a calmness as well as a gentleness to him that no other man had ever shown her, and he knew that. He told her that he wanted to be the one to show her the real side of what he felt for her, and it had nothing to do with causing her to hurt. Before she could think twice about the implications of their relationship, he thought about it for them. He just didn’t care. They kissed as they sat on the grass right in front of the brook. He promised that nothing but death would keep them apart, even if it was death that would bring them together.
“How dare you! How dare you, you filthy beast!”
Misty’s face flew to the right as it took a hard slap from out of nowhere as she walked toward the cotton. Everyone stared her way, and she immediately covered her stomach believing that the next hit would have been at her body. However, when she looked up at who hit her, she saw that it was Mrs. Sarah. Suddenly, Misty began to weep, knowing full well that she’d found out.
“Ma’am, ma’am,” she called, sorely saddened by being forced to sleep with her husband. Her hand shielded her face as she cowered down to the ground, kneeling as far as she could, unwilling to defend her husband’s frolicking with her. She hated it just as much as his wife did, probably more.
“You...” she cried, yet adoring and despising Misty’s beauty at the same time. “You...you have no right! You have no right! I saw him come out of here yesterday. I can’t do this anymore...” she cried, running off back into the house like a helpless being, as if she was the one being raped each night. As far as Misty, she just stood back up, felt the side of her face, and followed where her eyesight led – toward the cotton and beyond the watchers.
“Hey, there. Hey there now. Lemme see that,” a lady called as she ran over to her with a cloth in her hand. “Name is Jane. I see y’all done met, you and Mrs. Sarah,” she smiled in an attempt to lighten the sour mood. “She crazy.”
Misty only looked back at her inquisitively. Impressed that Jane was the only one to come check on her, she found herself very comfortable around her quickly, so she responded as such. “I’m Misty. I figured she was. I’ve heard.”
“Heard how?”
“I’ve just heard is all. How long you been here?”
“For ‘bout five years now, and I can’t wait to leave.”
“That bad?”
“I been to worse, but like I say...they be the craziest massah’s I ever seen. Ghosts live here in this here cotton. At night time, some even say they can see ‘em. I keeps my eyes closed at night. Even in the day time though, down ‘round ‘bout yonder,” she explained, pointing towards the field, “There be a lady that don’t belong here, just standing there and sometimes searchin’ for something that she can’t find. I hear it’s the same lady that drove Mrs. Sarah there crazy, take her children life. Her name’s Shelone.”
At the mention of the name Shelone, Misty quickly stopped walking and stared at Jane so hard that even Jane felt like something went terribly wrong. Just as fast as Misty glanced at Jane, however, she snapped out of her shock and continued walking, this time faster while inspecting the cotton that grew before her.
“Looks like we got to get to work,” Misty stated quietly because she just wanted to change the subject.
Jane noticed everything about the way Misty stood there and looked at her, believing it was something other than a pause. “You done already heard? It’s scary, ain’t it? It’s a curse,” she rushed behind Misty stating. She was a jittery type young lady, and the more she spoke, the more she began to pry, making Misty lose her comfort with her and gain paranoia. “We call it the curse out here in these fields. Heard about bloodshed so bad out ‘yere that even the dead felt the drops. It was blood of both the whites and the Negroes...but where’s you from?”
“If you don’t mind,” she stopped to adjust her cotton sack across her shoulder. “I got to get to pickin’, same as you. Thank you for comin’ to see ‘bout me, but I been hit harder than what Mrs. Sarah did to me plenty times.” Misty then continued to walk, leaving Jane behind her pondering everything about the woman she ran to check on, wondering if what some of the slaves said was true.
“Nobody else was gonna come. There’s some word about you...”
Misty turned back around angrily, believing that she knew what Jane was already about to say. “You don’t worry about me and who come in my hut after me. You think I ask for that? Huh? Well, do you? I don’t!” she shouted. “I live through it...everything...just like everybody else. The way I look ain’t never made me work less. It just made me work more, just with my naked body!”
Jane’s hand went across her mouth as she stared back at a wild-eyed Misty who fumed with every single breath she took. Jane watched as Misty stood there, engaged for a fight, but within seconds, Misty turned back around to head for the fields. Her only concern was picking enough cotton to not be whipped and waiting on the sun to go across the sky. The faster she started picking would be the faster a day would go by. The only thing on her mind was getting through the days to see her one true love. He’d become her fresh air in a world of poison, and she needed to breathe before she suffocated underneath it all.