An ancient gray man, Scot or Irish, rhythmic and oracular in his talk, called her Magdalene and cursed her to Hades where her husband would one day achieve his highest ambition and reign supreme. The man swayed and swept his hands in complicated gestures to make his dark dream come true. His long beard and his dingy black swallowtail coat moved with the rhythm of whatever dirge slogged inside his head.
V floated on to the market. A crowd gathered, bidders and window-shoppers. A young woman up on the sale platform saw her and screamed her name. Screamed Mistress V three times like a fairy spell until her breath gave out.
V settled in her walking, a leaf caught in an eddy. She stopped and turned toward the stage.
Everybody looked at the woman there in her loose muslin shift. A slight woman, perhaps seventeen, her dark hair wild and her skin coppery. She went barefoot, her ankles and calves wiry. Her face broke wide open at the eyes and mouth. She stood exposed at an extreme of existence not ever shared by the audience.
The woman called again, Mistress V.
Not a scream this time. Tired and pleading, her arms down, palms open to V alone, making an offering of herself.
The audience turned to V. An ominous swivel of necks and shoulders and backbones to aim hundreds of eyes through the veil into her two. She believed she heard the faint mechanical sound of those thousands of vertebrae shifting, clicking, grinding as the audience pivoted her way.
The woman onstage gathered herself. She drew a long breath and held her arms straight from her shoulders, hands open and fingers spread. She screamed again.
—I know who you are. I know you. You’re a good woman. Buy me. You have a daughter. Little boys. I’ll take care of them till I die. Buy me.
The sun broke a crack in the overcast, lighting the mute colors of red dirt and dirty cotton and muddy shoes, the black suits and dirty buff linen suits of the bidders. And V stood like a shard of midnight moonlight, ebony and silver, suddenly fixed in place and exposed to the day.
A mumble rippled the crowd. Who is she?
Some of them meant the woman on the platform and some meant V.
—She’s a whore.
—She’s the goddamn president’s woman.
—They both are.
Behind the chatter of the crowd, the woman on the platform kept screaming. Her face torqued by the extremity of the moment and by a gleam of hope focused on a pretty woman in a startling black dress drifting by the stage where the enslaved woman’s life reached a pinnacle of desperation.
A man in a Panama hat too new to be dirty even at the dimples where his thumb and forefingers pinched to lift it an inch in respect said, Mrs. Davis, please pay no attention. Her mind’s not sound. Look away.
* * *
—What I’m beginning to believe, V says to James, is that when I first saw you, that girl was in my memory. Maybe I did what I did more for myself than for you.
—A second chance? Atonement?
—I had never thought of it that way, but it’s possible. Those chances don’t come around too often.
—Is that what the man in the Panama said, look away?
—I think so.
—The refrain from “Dixie”?
—I doubt that was in his mind.
—That line in the song, Old times there are not forgotten. I could argue that maybe they’re not worth remembering.
—I’ve never forgotten that girl, and I wouldn’t want to. Remembering doesn’t change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won’t erase it either.
Fortress Monroe1865–1867
THE WILLIAM P. CLYDE ANCHORED OFF OLD POINT COMFORT in that convolution of water and scraps of land where the Atlantic becomes the Chesapeake, and the Bay becomes Hampton Roads, where three rivers empty. Fortress Monroe squatted huge and bristling with black cannons just past the shoreline, among them the Lincoln gun, largest in the world. A fort had stood on that strategic spot since Pocahontas convinced her father not to bash John Smith’s brains out with a big wooden mallet. The first fort would have been a small enclosure of earth berms and log palings, but the current one was an enormous, brutal piece of masonry architecture surrounded by a moat. Its final stages of construction had been supervised by Robert E. Lee when he was a young U.S. Army engineer. Also, Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619. History loves irony, V thought.
She stood on the deck of the Clyde, studying the view and making an effort to believe that ten minutes of sunshine and salt air in fine spring weather might stop her trembling. She breathed and tried not to imagine how her life would go even a few hours into the future, not to wonder what the next loss might be. Directly in front of her, the brutal Fortress. Off to the side, across the mouth of the Bay, Cape Henry and Cape Charles, and beyond those two points of land, the Atlantic Ocean began and the whole world unfolded. She tried to picture a globe. A straight line across the Atlantic from where she stood would make landfall in France or Spain.
ALL THE WAY UP THE COAST and for a day after they arrived, the children hardly left their bunks, so terrorized that Jimmie had been taken and
