“He tried.” Hattie sighed, with a mixture of fatigue and sadness that made Lloyd lighten his touch. “But men are weak. They’re all… slaves.”
This last assertion made Lloyd wince, but he kept rubbing the foot, subconsciously easing it against his erection. This girl was like no one he had ever imagined. Shining machines and flying over rivers and cities did not seem so wondrous as before.
“Papa’s heart was broken when Mama died,” the girl continued, as if she were reconsidering the events as she recounted them.
“He sounds… like a sad man,” Lloyd offered, feeling stupid. He kept imagining her eyes in the dark.
“He was a brave man and a wise man, and a good man,” Hattie insisted. “Let all the niggers read the Bible-and more. Got ’em learning arithmetic-and the stars. The neighbor white folks hated him for that.”
“He must miss you now.”
“He’s dead,” Hattie said, and must have reached in the sack for a hunk of mutton, because Lloyd could hear her jaws click. “Hung hisself.”
“He did?” the boy wheezed, thinking back to his own actions on the deck.
“Died in shame,” the girl continued. “Man named Barlow-plantation owner nearby-challenged him to a duel. Said he was a nigger lover and a traitor to the South! Papa strung himself up the night before. His old wife had her way after that. Her and the overseer.”
Lloyd did not know what to say. It reminded him of the story Mother Tongue had told him. Perhaps the man had not hanged himself. But it was not his place to speak now.
“Give me your hands.”
“What?” Lloyd whispered, feeling his stomach turn.
“Give me your damn hands,” Hattie hissed.
He loosened his grasp of her feet and stretched out his hands. There was a rustle of fabric and then he touched warm skin. Girlish breasts beginning to form. A fragile hint of womanly fullness. And ripeness. His own skin tingled. But her flesh was ridged and welted. The body before him leaned into his grope, filling his fingers with a different kind of darkness. Lloyd could feel the girl’s breath, mutton-scented, on his face, while his intrigued, frightened hands were allowed to roam over her bare skin.
Where there should have been nipples there were lumpy crosses of scars. His fingertips explored small slices and pocks and bumps that reminded him of the Ambassadors’ secret hierograms. The girl’s entire chest and belly rippled with markings that seemed to radiate an angry heat.
“They… did…
“Not all at once, mind,” Hattie whispered. “They took their sweet time. Her and Riddick.”
Lloyd recollected the tone of St. Ives’s voice when he told of his maiming at the hands of the diabolical Rutherford. The odor of the mutton was starting to make him nauseated. Or maybe it was the scarring.
“And that’s not all they did,” Hattie hissed-and Lloyd caught the faintest hint of a sob in her voice. He pulled his hands back.
“I’ll never have chillum-children. And… I’ll never have pleasure. With a man. Understand? I reckon you old enough to know what I mean. That’s what the old hag wanted. Then she sold me off. Up Memphis way. That’s when I run off. First chance I had. Only chance I thought I’d get. ”
Lloyd could think of nothing to say. His hands had retracted from the girl’s wounded skin, and yet had been drawn to the feel of her, as if through some perverse attraction. His stomach growled-still his erection stiffened. The space they were in seemed to contract around them, as if somewhere deep within he retained the memory of what it had been like to be so close to his twin sister, Lodema, back in the mother darkness.
“So.
“What?”
“I see through you. Niggers will. Smart ones, anywise. I knew it the first time I saw you sneakin’ around with the Judas face.”
Lloyd remained still, listening through the coffin-creaking walls.
“You gots woes and worries? You gots scars, too?” Hattie badgered. “Hmm? Let me feel ’em!”
“I killed a man,” he answered at last. “Maybe three. Back in St. Louis.”
“You lie!” Hattie scoffed and jabbed her feet into his belly.
“How a li’l skunk like you do that?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Lloyd replied. “But I did. Just as sure as I’m sitting here.”
“White men? Or niggers?”
“I killed a… slave…” Lloyd answered, not sure what to say about the Ambassadors from Mars.
“Well, then. That ain’t so bad,” Hattie said, sounding younger and blacker again. “Less’n he was somebody else’s. And I reckon he was-way y’all look. I seen your mama slinkin’ round, too. She white, I eat your stinky hat. But she pretty and smart. Plays good.”
This calling attention to his mother’s ancestry, and therefore his own, did not sit well with Lloyd, although he was relieved that she did not seem to know about his father. He had come to believe that the family had overcome or managed to obscure their mixed blood, and that their problems lay on another level. But seen now through the eyes of this blighted creature before him-in the dark, torn between tribes and destinies like two girls separated at birth by a knife and then sewn back up in a single body-he felt again the stirrings of the monstrous within himself. Had not the professor once joked that he was as anomalous as the Martian brothers in his own way? He may not have scars on his skin like this half-educated, half-slave girl, but what if someone were to feel deeper?
His head and heart were inundated-the hosanna-shouting Mule Christian below the courthouse, the chatter of the freakish twins borne away into the sky. Every detail of the infernal incident came rushing back upon him like the rising of the ground. And before he could master himself he burst into tears.
“Boy, stop that!” Hattie demanded. “You gots nuthin’ to cry over. You want me to strike a light and show you what these scars of mine
Lloyd choked on his words. “I… I was done, too,” he gasped. “In St. Louis… this ugly man… in an alley one night.”
The girl paused at this announcement. This sounded to her like a much more believable claim than the murders the boy had mentioned before. But she wanted to be clear before projecting any sympathy.
“He take down your pants?”
“Ripped them down,” Lloyd sobbed. “Then he slammed my head down into a dung cart… and… and… he did me. Hard as he could.”
Hattie LaCroix remained silent and still, waiting for him to catch his breath. She knew there was more to come.
“He said… he said… I felt just like a little… pig!” Lloyd wailed at last, and even though his voice never broke above a whisper, the admission broke him wide open.
Had that horror and humiliation been what had driven him to take to the sky? He had dreamed up the flight before the rape, but there in the dark intimacy of the hold, with this fellow fugitive, it struck him that maybe there was more to the grand design of his disastrous undertaking-the insistence on fulfilling it-than he had seen before. He knew the man had a harelip, but it was the meat-slab hands he remembered. The terrible, grunting skewering- so different from his afternoon with Miss Viola… so different…
More like some hideous revenge… of… Phineas…
The floodgates were open now, and when she saw that she could not command the boy’s tears away she set aside the unlit lantern and moved, so that her legs were twined around him. His body fell against hers, his wet, sputtering face pressing against her still exposed bosom-half boy’s, half girl’s and raked like a battlefield-hot tears soaking her like an Indian-summer rain across shallow graves. His breathing heaved as she clutched him closer, at first to quiet him and then out of some deeper need of her own.
He smelled like other children she had cradled in dirt-floor cabins and dogwood arbors, like the Persian rugs she had helped Sarah beat with a stick broom out on the fine green, rolling lawn. He smelled like her desperate, chicken-stealing tramp-night stowaway antics. He smelled like life-dreadful, sinful, tragic, precious-and she held him and held him. The baby she would never have, the white child she would never be.
“Shush, boy,” she whispered in his ear, embracing him, though the tears soaked her more than him. And still he cried. She suspected that he was not one to cry much-too proud, just like herself. So he would be full of it, like a
