Beulah

Wide as two women, Beulah—now Be Auntie—had the space to dream when everyone else on Empty knew better. The smile on her face wasn’t permanent and it wasn’t an indication that she was witless. Rather, it was a kind of armament against the sorrow that bending over in the cotton field, and in other places, rubbed into the skin. It wasn’t a perfume, and yet it had its own scent. Smelled like something buried for a long time and then dug up. Now exposed to the sun, the thing didn’t begin to resurrect itself, but it did unfurl its stench—old, rotting, sharp—inspiring gagging and heaving, but also telling you something about itself, about whoever put it there, and about who uncovered it.

She felt like she was that buried thing. Covered up against her will. For so long forgotten. Left to decay. Discovered too late, but still useful to thieves who fancied themselves explorers. All of this left her in a very delicate condition. The forbidden dreams that had once been the source for the jubilation of she didn’t know how many people, singing in a key that made her feel fine, had begun to fracture such that they sat side by side with some other discordant thing that likewise doubled her. Not just her body, though, but also her mind, heart, and, she would like to believe, soul (she had one—two!—despite toubab telling her she had none). What choice did she have but to burn every slight until it shined like a comfort?

She didn’t mean to give herself to Amos, not at first. Essie was with child and they still had her out in the field. Essie couldn’t sing to keep everyone on rhythm; it was just too much. Be Auntie told a rhyming story to make up for it. Something about a town down in a valley and how the people were going to prepare a banquet even when they knew a storm was a-coming. Not only that, but Be Auntie (or maybe it was Beulah) picked her share of cotton and half of Essie’s too so that Essie would avoid the lash. Yes, ma’am, they would even whup a girl plump with child, which made no practical sense. If the goal was to magnify your glory, why would you take your blessings out two at a time?

“You still trying to climb on top of her, after what she been through?” she was bold enough to ask Amos after the horn sounded and the sun mellowed.

“She my woman. I do anything for her. Trying to make her forget. Trying to make her know tain’t a ounce missing of her beauty.”

“And you doing that by going to her instead of letting her come to you?”

Be Auntie knew it was futile by the confusion on Amos’s face. She knew men, ones in heat or ones who had something to prove, were senseless. They would rearrange land and sea to get them both to lead to satisfaction when one was enough already. Afterward, when their minds returned to them, the kind ones experienced regret, the cruel ones sought more cruelty, and the two were indistinguishable to her. It didn’t have to be some grand act. All they had to do was look at her like they were disgusted by her for the act they just committed. They get on up from the pallet and walk out of the shack without so much as a “thank you” or “evening,” not even a “beg your pardon.” She thought they could at least act like they were forced to sometimes and give her the redress she was rightly due. Instead, they left her to lie there in her own stink and theirs like doing so was the gift she was waiting on. And so often, she was just there crying on the outside and hoping that what they left inside her didn’t catch, and if the blood came, then mercy somewhere had heard her.

What was most insidious about it all was what the repetition did to her. At some point, in spite of herself, she started to enjoy the rhythm. The sly smile. The cool words. The giddy sway. The pressing down. The steady pump. The last thrust. The slap. The kick. The punch. The forgotten gratitude. The lost good night. She found herself molded into the shape that best fit what they carved her into. Water done wore away at her stone, and the next thing she knew, she was a damn river when she could have sworn she was a mountain.

Mountain to river was a place. More than a place, it was a person. Beulah was a mountain. Be Auntie was a river. In between, fertile or arid land, depending on the location. The others judged her harshly, she knew, for being the first of them to go from up high to down low. But she was just the first, and her sacrifice, one of them anyway, was this: she made it so that there would be more grace waiting for them when they, too, made the descent.

And it wasn’t like she climbed down all of her own volition, carefully navigating the peaks and slopes, securing her footing so that she didn’t slip on any smooth and icy crevices. Nah. She was pushed. It mattered not whether she smiled or screamed as she plummeted. Some tumbles were worthy of pity regardless.

Because look what had become of her in the bottom-bottom: she was men’s rest stop and peace of mind; she was their cookhouse, flophouse, and outhouse; she bore them children for whom they could bear no attachment and collected the children not of her blood to replace the ones snatched away on a whim or a bill come due.

She knew she could spare Essie (not stop, but slow her fall) because womens had to look after womens—particularly when refusal meant death. Yes, she opened her arms wide to Amos, legs too; let him not only laugh, talk, rock, bump, grind, hit, and fail to say sweet dreams or farewell, but she also let him do it over and over and over again until it felt like something divine—if just for the ritual of it.

Another thing defined her worship. See, Maggie was wrong: if you get them early enough, they won’t be corrupted. You might just could turn boys’ natures such that when they see a woman, their first instinct ain’t to tame her, but to leave her be. You could coat them in enough salve that when they started preferring the outdoors, to be around the older men—who didn’t have the benefit of what they call “womanly things” precisely because they wanted the right to be reckless and pilfering; if they had embraced their whole mind instead of half of it—the error of their ways would be revealed to them, and they knew they couldn’t see that and survive intact.

Be Auntie (not Beulah) doted over every boy-child—especially the ones whose color had been meddled with. Every girl-child, particularly the ones whose skin was raven, she lorded over or left to fend for herself (as Beulah wept). Womens had to look after womens, yes. But first there had to be trial and she refused to interfere with that sacred passage for any woman, young or old.

She got Puah after the mother and father were both sold off. Puah wasn’t even walking yet and still in need of milk, which Be Auntie gave to her only sparingly, supplementing it with pieces of bread and hog parts she knew the baby to be too young to be eating. When Puah’s stomach pained her all night and her cries wouldn’t cease, Be Auntie blamed the child for her own condition and just let her scream until her throat was raw, after which she would just whine gently. It’s a wonder the child had any voice at all.

The baby was too young for grown-up food and also too young to have sown such resentment in Be Auntie, but there both of those things were, sitting uncomfortably in one tiny little body, futile but resolute.

What Be Auntie did know was that one day, Puah would be of use. It would either be as a sword or it would be as a shield, possibly both, but whatever the form, it was inevitable. Maggie wasn’t the only one who knew of the deep and hidden things.

One sticky night, Be Auntie was lying with Amos. He had come into her shack in a huff, complaining about how he tried to be reasonable with Isaiah and Samuel, but they just wouldn’t submit.

“Submit to what?” Be Auntie asked rather innocently.

Amos looked at her as though she had cursed. “A nature grander than they own! You ain’t been listening to what I been trying to tell you?” he said loudly before lowering his head to allow his voice to reach that level. He sighed. “Some folk will never understand that the part ain’t more important than the whole,” he said to her darkly. “But you hear me, Be. Huh?”

Amos’s eyes were kind. He had an open face. His tones were not unlike a story being told around a fire at night. You had to lean in, and not even biting mosquitoes could distract you once you were there. She had that, too, the voice for story, but people only wanted to hear hers as comfort, not as inspiration. But Amos also had a breezy touch. He brought himself down with her, down the mountain and into the stream. He touched the water. He slid his hand right between her thighs and she didn’t flinch at all. She knew he cared about her pleasure, but that her pleasure wasn’t the point. Still, she squirmed a little at what he had tickled. They were close together, him smiling, her with drowsy eyes.

“You need me to do what?” she whispered.

Amos sat up and looked over to the side of the shack where the children lay, piled together like refuse somebody had swept up (and perhaps someone did), and he looked at a trying-to-sleep Puah.

“How old Puah is now?” Amos scratched his chin. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Just about.”

“And you manage to keep her still locked up in here with you? Massa or nobody don’t come ’round to mess with her?”

Be Auntie looked at Puah with an envious eye. What guts this girl had to first survive whatever Be Auntie put in her belly and then to live on Empty still full. Nah, maybe that wasn’t as much guts as luck. Luck that had escaped everyone else on the plantation except Puah, it seemed. Lucky people were of no use to anyone but themselves. (Sarah was another story, but Be Auntie didn’t have that much fight, or yearning turned ’round to face itself, in her to do it Sarah’s way.)

“Hm,” Be Auntie said. “What you asking about her for?”

“I need her. For them.”

The twinge of pain she felt in her temples was for her, not Puah, she told herself.

“What for?”

“You know what for.”

Be Auntie knew Samuel and Isaiah as not-hers. They were two children who she was never able to incorporate into her tribe—one, in particular, for good reason. They weren’t raised by anyone but looked after by everyone, vagabonds of a sort, but beloved ones. They were the ones who were in the barn and had to have had good natures because they took care of the animals, of life, didn’t just plant it, pick it, and put it in a sack. But one of them was also the one with the ax. Sometimes, she heard a pig squealing. Pigs somehow always knew what was coming. They fidgeted on the day of. They would try to run, but Samuel’s hands were firm. There was no expression on his face before or during. But after, when he was down at the river, washing the blood from his hands, his bottom lip would droop, and his drool splashed into the water’s rush. Boy not boy, she thought. Boy now man.

Amos kissed Be Auntie deeply. He brought his lips down to her neck. He looked at her and rubbed his nose against her.

“Let me see what I can put in her head,” she said. “I gotta be careful about it. That girl always do the opposite of what I tell her.”

It pierced Be Auntie’s heart that despite her disobedience, Puah walked through Empty relatively unscathed, as though she had taken all of the advice and cues Be Auntie offered, rather than tossing them to the ground and kicking them away. It meant that perhaps Be Auntie had erred and that Puah’s scorn and her hope, rather than the advised split then submission, could be a way, too. Oh, well. It didn’t make much difference anymore. Here it was, and Be Auntie knew it would come sooner or later: the time for Puah to know the grace that none of the others had the foresight to show Beulah, which was Be Auntie’s dawn. Don’t matter who do or don’t like it. At least I got to choose my own name.

“I think she sweet on that there Samuel. That’s the bigger one name, ain’t it? The purple one, not the black one?”

“The one that keep his mouth open, yeah.”

“Hm. All right then.”

Be Auntie pulled on Amos. Puah and the other children all huddled even though it was too hot to do that, but they seemed as though they didn’t want to take up too much space, which was wise because shrinking down kept you out of the minds of toubab, and if you weren’t sturdy enough to withstand what their minds could do (who was?), then it was best that you just be smaller than you had ever been before.

She looked at Amos. “Come on.”

He had interrupted the beat of their song. They couldn’t do their dance if the music stopped.

“Let me.”

She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her plush into his.

“Can I tell you ’bout the thunder?”

She wasn’t the singer Essie was, but she could tell one hell of a story to keep time.