8 The White Snake

I

ON the banks of a bilgy lamahau, the eeliest street-stream in Bordeaux, a row of Negro peasant lodgings warmly slept. It was a vile, backward crescent reeking in brats and fiendish lusts. Cocabe among its inkish rice-growers, extended to gorillas sentenced to the dungeons of Surinam, Portuguese settlers who’d gone black, Chinks pauperized in the Georgetown fire of ’05, and Calcutta coolies mixing rotie at dusk to the chorus of crickets and crapeaux moaning in the black watery gut.

The dawn rose a dewy crimson, and a blood-curdling sound polluted the vapory silences of a Negro lodging.

“Murdah! Police! Warlah! Hole ‘im! Miss Ewin’, tek ‘e arf me.”

Fetid black snorers rolled restively, clawed, dug at bugs or itching veins rising bluely on bare languid bodies, as if to say: don’t worry. It’s nothing. Nothing but some Hindu coolie, after the evening’s rotic debauch, to the roll of goat drums, outside, on the low lamahau earth, severing the head of some jewel-laden, thirteen-year-old mate, the third on a string of murdered conquests.

But die the scream would not.

“Lahd–”

“Wha’ de mattah wit’ yo’, gal? Why yo’ don’ let a po’ body res’?”

“Tek it arf me, no–?”

“Tek wha’ arf yo’, gyrl, yo’ mus’ be crazy. Foolish t’ing! Tek arf yo’ top lip!”

“Wahy–look he crawlin’ up me legs! Quick, tek ‘e arf me!”

“Sahv yo’ right. Tell yo’ yo’ eat too much hole pea soup ‘n cawn meal dumplin’! Go ‘long an’ le’ de mule ride up ‘n down yo’ belly.”

“See ‘im, dey! Dey he is! A white one–see ‘im, Miss Ewin’? A white snake crawlin’ up me foots–tek ‘e ‘way. Quick–o! Miss Ewin’, Ah beg yo’! Help mah!”

“Gyrl, get up! Yo’ only dreamin! It ent no snake fo’ true–get up. It’s mawnin’. An’ go down to de stan’ pipe ‘n bring up de bucket o’ hossah yo’ lef’ out dey las’ night–”

“O! Lahd, Oi wuz frighten so–”

“Yo’ heah ne, ni, Seenie? An’ don’ fuhget to blow de kerosene lamp out befo’ yo’ go.”

The whole thing seemed to follow as a natural sequence. For Jack Captain, a Berbice mulatto, was an energetic wooer.

And then one rosy dawn, a dozen Hindu fires kindling the lamahau, the gold-digging macaume lured from Seenie the seed of her all.

II

Outlawed by the sorrowing blacks of Bordeaux, Seenie, “to exculpate she wickedness,” fled to Waakenam, a sparsely populated isle on the Essequibo Coast. There she took refuge in a hut deep in the Guiana woods. Until a lackey on the constable’s staff had dubiously led her to it, the cabin was deserted, cane trash crowned it like a wreath of callaloo mist. Box square, inside it was dark and cloudy. The peon originally occupying it had evidently had a vivid contempt for the tropical sun or wind. And it was here that Seenie, hardly able to survive the social consequences of lust, felt happy in raising Water Spout.

Inside the hut, by way of a bit of color, Miss Esteena, the niece of the Negro head of the Waakenam constabulary, had given her an old canopied mahogany bed.

Into the boy’s flower-like mouth she pried a spoon with the crusted refuse of the previous day’s stewed cassava.

“Eat um, sah,” she cried, “an’ don’t put on no ‘ears, lik’ yo’ is any man. Eat um, Oi say.”

Upon Water Spout’s glazed tawny body there was not a stitch of clothes. But it was fiendish hot in the cane trash hut, and he needed none. His puny body, which the obeah midwife had despaired of so, had flecks of porridge, and hardened bread swobbed in tea, on it. He had a scrawny neck. It had its base in a hollow-sounding delta. A stack of bluey veins, loosely tied in a clot of skin, connecting a hairless cocoanut to a brown, belegged pumpkin. The navel string, prematurely plucked, hung like a ripe yellow cashew. Bandy, spindling legs jutted out, to either side, from beneath a rigidly upright little body.

As a sort of aftermath to a night of studied rest, Seenie was dizzy, drowsy but she made sure of one eternal thing–Water Spout had to be fed. Feeding him was her one active passion. It was the least, she felt, she could do by him. Her ways may have been bad, her soul in doubtful retrospect, but Water Spout had to eat–hossah, cane licker, green peas, anything. And, by Jove, she had plans for him: later on it was her idea, no matter how austere Miss Esteena was, to let him go down to the river by himself. If she had anything to do with it, Water Spout would some day walk!

“Come, Water Spout, come play wit’ mama!” Somewhere, in the frowsy dark, she had seized a toy, a symbol of Miss Esteena’s charity at Yuletide, and shaking it gave it to him.

Glazed-eyed, he reluctantly took it; he made no effort to wring joy and sound out of it.

As he grew older, she saw to it that he wasn’t left by himself on the bed; not that she minded his wetting it, so that when she came home at night she had to take refuge on the floor, if she wished a dry spot to lie on. But time was slowly proving that there was life awake and raging in his glazed little body, which all along had seemed to her to lack virility. And he would, by the wreckage he’d leave behind, play, dance, and roll–make noise!–in a fury of possession, with some jaunty toy wagon or cart horse she had given him to play with. No, it didn’t pay to leave him up there on the bed. He might fall to the unkempt floor. Then, again, although he refused to cry, no matter how often or how hard he would fall, in some quiet, unobtrusive way, the idea began to enter Seenie’s head that he might not do so well, after all, from all these constant falls and things. His refusal, his failure to cry, started in her queer trains of thought.

At first they excited a more unobservant severity.

“Yo’ too stubborn, sah, yo’ too mannish–look at he dough–he look lik’ something dog no like.”

“Yo’ so little an’ yo’ so ownwayish,” she’d say to him, “yo’ won’t cry, ni, yo’ won’t cry–well, Oi gwine show yo’ somet’ing,” and she’d beat him for fair.

All this, when, turning away his little head, he’d try to shove the spoon with the fluff of corn mash away from him; or after a bowl of cane juice, when, with only the warning of a writhing face, he would unbosom himself, abdominally speaking.

And then Seenie, with the instinct of a heifer, began to argue that after all there must be something wrong with Water Spout, with any child, as lavishly fed as he was, who didn’t stamp and yell and knock things out of one’s hands and dribble at the mouth and lather with spit everything he came in contact with–the little heathen!

“Behave like a good lil’ boy yo’ heah?” she said, a bit penitently, pausing at the door. She shook a chastising finger at him. “Behave yo’self, heah, an’ yo’ mahmie will bring yo’ a sugar plum.”

Clap han’ fuh mahmie
Til pahpie come
Bring sugah cake
An’ giv’ Seenie some!

And she went out, slamming the door behind her.

The world of Seenie’s flight was a terrible green. “Me baby chile,” she murmured, “me own baby chile.” The edge and sweep–wide and far-flung–of leaf and vine, shrub and fruit, flower and sky; the tender flush of the river dawn–brought a barbaric peace to her soul.

Snaky cords tightened in her brain. “Yo’ mek up yo’ bed, now go lay down on it,” Miss Ewing, the Bordeaux sorceress had said to her. And with Captain, with whom the whole thing was a dismal oversight, she had implored on bended knees, to no Christian purpose, for having lost sight of, in a heat of frenzied lust, the fruit of her innocent pride.

III

Coral earth paved the one flake of road in Waakenam. Gathering depth and moss, the water in the gutters beside it was a metallic black. It was a perfumed dawn–the strong odor of fruit and turpentine flavoring it. For it was high up on the Guiana coast, and the wind blew music on the river. Vivid flame it blew on the lips of grape and melon, and ripened, like the lust of a heated love, the udders of spiced mangoes and pears peeping through the luscious grove.

Now and then, by the grace of the rollicking wind, there appeared in the dense forest the sparkle of resin hardening on the bruised trunks of balata. Sometimes, where the water in the gutter streamed, the music on the Essequibo touched fruit and flower and resulted in a flurry of orchids floating on to Calvary.

And in the distance, beyond the violent patches of green, flowing to a reddish upland, smoke–the vapors of boiling syrup–tarnished the white marl-gemmed sky.

On awakening on mornings Seenie indulged in a rite native to the Negroes of the region. She’d slip on a one-piece frock, and go outside to the rain water cask which had a zinc drain pouring off the cabin roof into it. There her toilet was done.

And as sure as the sun rose, there’d be on the dewy ground, on the boughs of mango and pine, lovely, quiescent, a gallant cordon of snakes. Now as she sped forward, the road shone with them. Gorgeously bedecked ones–two inches of blue, two of mauve, two of yellow–two of black. Some, the coral ones, a yard or more in length, lovely crown jewels. Green snakes, black snakes, reaching up to the shady bush and swamp–drowsy on the sandy road.

When she reached the constable’s, a high wooden dwelling in ample view of the stream, Seenie took charge of the pantry. She tied on the ruffled bib, stuck a scornful nose in the larder, sampled skeptically the plantain, stewed in cocoa fat, which she had put aside the previous evening, following a tradition of the tropics, for any starving ghost who might pass along in the night.

“T’row de t’ing ‘way, gal, um ent no good, um sour,” she said, and heaved it through the window.

There were even limits to Water Spout’s gastric feats.

Suddenly a fragrant presence invaded the pantry.

“Good morning, Seenie,” said Miss Esteena.

“Mawnin,’ mum,” replied the girl, sticking a match under the chocolate kettle in the coal pot.

An illuminating contrast; the girl, grating the cassava for the bake the Sergeant liked so well; with her despairing uncomely face, the high cheek bones, the sprawling mouth eternally white at the ends, the tapering chin. On the other hand there was reflected in Miss Esteena’s sullen grace the fruit of a Negro culture as old as the civilization of the Incas. An Albertown belle, she was tall, brown, beautiful. Shimmering in white, the collar of her hand-wrought bodice closed high about her throat after the fashion of the time of Mary Queen of Scots.

“Be sure,” said Miss Esteena, in her sharp, pointed tones, “to season the corass, properly, Seenie. Put plenty of salt and pepper and steam it long and well with the pot half full of water. Until it begins to crack. Then call me.”

“Yes, mum, when Oi get roun’ to it, mum.”

But Miss Esteena was used to help of her own hue, and so had come to shut her ears to the thin veil of obedience in the Bordeaux girl’s voice.

Gathering up the hem of her skirt, she moved austerely from the rice, green in a dish on the vined sill, to the fresh shelled peas, the tray of soaking cashews, the sugary sour sop, under a wire cage away from the flies.

“You know, Seenie,” she said, “when you get time I wish you’d plant some mustard seed over there in the garden. Look!”

“Yessum, Oi see–”

Grating cocoanut was a hazardous task. And it required a constant fluid motion. Grinding it till the skin became thin as a tip of flame, she had got her palm bruised, and blood spots spattered the white juicy nut.

She leaned over the window squeezing it.

“Under that tree,” said Miss Esteena, “see where I mean?”

“Yo’ mean–dey–yassum!”

“And perhaps you could stick in a few knots of cane and some pumpkins on the hedge.”

“Passably some carrots, too, mum. But yo’ won’t want anyt’ing what gwine gaddah too much bush.

Yo’ fomembah wha’ ole Hart say, he say too much grass will bring de snakes.”

“There you go again, you and your snakes. Can’t you think of anything else to be afraid of?”

“Fi’ tell yo’ de troot, mum–”

“Gracious me, are they digging again? Look–there–by the trench–Seenie, what are they digging?”

“Wha’ mum?”

“Can’t you see it, stupid? There! Are you blind?”

“Oh, yassum! Me taught yo’ mean yondah, mum.”

“You always think something contrary!”

“It are a grabe dem a dig, mum.”

“A grave? Mercy! For whom? What sort of a grave is it?”

“Fo’ de baboo wha’ chop arf ‘im wife head, mum,” said Seenie.

“Oh, mercy!”

“Dem gwine hang ‘im up dey an bury ‘im under de scraffold dem a build dey. See it, mum? All dem board yo’ see dem a pile up dey is fo’ de scraffold dem gwine knock togaddah fi’ hang ‘im.”

“Well, well, the idea!” exploded the constable’s niece, pacing the pantry madly. “If it isn’t one thing it is another. Yesterday, it was finding a snake coiled up under my writing table, foaming to strike. Last Tuesday, at the soirée on the Governor’s visit to the colony, it was having a black camoodie secrete itself, the Lord only knows when and how in the chandelier and as soon as Lady Fordyce-Boyce and Captain Burt selected to hold their tête-à-tête underneath it, began to burrow into Lady Fordyce-Boyce’s red hair.

“Now by Jove, it is to wake up and find them erecting under my very window a scaffold to wring the neck of some wife-killing Hindu. I have never heard the like of it in all my days.”

“Dat a fac’, mum,” meekly murmured Seenie.

The missus strode out, raving. She was going herself to the Sergeant and ask to be shipped back to Georgetown at once.

“Cho,” said Seenie, “she mek a fuss ovah nutton.”

IV

The wind, alternately hissing and snarling, brought to Seenie’s ears the roar of the Essequibo belching cargo on the wooded shores of Waakenam. O! placid, godless wind! It brought heroic tales of Georgetown muck on a briny dash to the gold fields.

Gold, Pataro gold
O! de rich man
An’ de po’ man.

O! intimate, loquacious wind! It told epic tales of black men, the salt of adventure seasoning the marrow in their bones, in bateaux (the flat-bottomed curses) speeding, nugget laden, down the tacabah--paved river–suddenly becoming songless!

Ovah danger, danger, danger
Danger, danger, danger, danger
Rocks an’ Fall–!

You Mistah Tacabah! A sea lion, a sea cow, a shark? No! Great big slices of timber fastened, growing in the river! Deep-rooted, they were animals–groveling in the bowels of the unsettled stream. And Tacabah, the perpendicular beast, had eyes and ears, feet and heads. And tacabah could butt. On a starless night, he, the master of the river’s fate, the hairy prowler of its incalculable depths, usually got on the war path. How easy it was for him! All a headlong bateau, oared by a lot of drunken gold diggers, need do was touch it–it was hardly necessary to jam it–and tacabah’d get the laugh on bateau! Over it’d go–at tacerbah’s jerky butt–heading for the eely monster’s bowels, planted deep in the roots of eternity.

Ovah danger, danger, danger,
Danger, danger, danger, danger,
Rocks an’ Fall!–

The moon, rambling about in the torrid sky, now and then gleamed on something Seenie carried on her head. It was a skillet filled with soup. Dozens of Cayenne peppers, hot as the water blazing in an equatorial sea, had gone into its making. Only throats of the purest steel were able to give passage to it. It was ghastly stuff. Eating it at night, Seenie’d bring heat to bear on heat. After a draught she’d light the kerosene lamp, discard the chimney, and open her mouth over the flames till her throat cooled. It was a rite rivaling the starkest brujerial act. In the skillet of red terra cotta, was Water Spout’s portion of the flaming broth.

All the thwarted sounds of creation rose to a mighty murmur in the obscuring night. Deep in the thicket four-legged beasts stalked. There was baying. Sheep, torn by a species of wolf hounds on the Coast, remained silent. But the dogs were less cultivated, and there was deadlier tearing done.

Along the road iguana, the sparkle in their eyes jeweling the tropic night, pursued shy, petty quests. And from the hedge came the silken slither of snakes about to lather with foam and strike some legless sheep or ox left by the mutinous pack.

The words of a song sung by the peasants of the East Coast rose on Seenie’s melodious lips:

Minnie, Minnie, come yah!
Salam-bo come yah!
Salam-Matanja, come yah!
Le’ Quackah-Tanyah, ‘tan’ dey!

Abruptly she left the coral road and unerringly stopped, in spite of the branching of leaf, at the cabin rising a little ways in.

“Water Spout!” she shouted, entering.

A wave of heat flew up at her. It was cane trash, hot hut heat. Heat smelted in a furnace untouched by a gust of fresh wind.

She called, but only a stream of hot mist, making for the door, answered her. “Oh berry well,” she cried, “‘im sleep, po’ fellah.”

She went to the table on the lower side of the hut and drawing a match lit the lamp. Darts of light flitted to the dark corners of it. Once able to distinguish things, she turned, and spied him on the bed.

She went to him, candied words on her mouth. He was in a deep, moist spot. A hole, really, bored into the rotting mattress. Gently she lifted him up, and the light fell on his sleeping face.

She took him to the table, and forced some of the soup into his mouth. But seized by a sudden spasm of energy, he refused, and spat it up, with a gurgling accompaniment. Then he curled back to her, fumbling for the avenue to her breasts. But she laid him back on the bed, consoled that he’d wake up in the night, demanding to be nursed.

“Lahd, me tiad, sah,” she cried, yawning and undressing.

Presently she blew out the light and crawled in the bed beside him.

V

O! sleep, soundless sleep!

The night gathered heat. The straw crackled and pricked. Once a board slipped to the floor.

But sleep!–endowed, concentrated!

Cycles of the day sped through Seenie’s head. There was a fugitive line between them and the half-realized happenings in a dream. It was a work cycle; not one of song. Cooking, washing, ironing. Peccadilloes. Scraps for Water Spout. Reining herself in, and not exploding at the golden rancor of Miss Esteena. Ready at any time to do for the Sergeant, a grave, white-templed man, who rose at dawn and retired at midnight. Saying but a word which kept his niece in talk for a week. Men drowning like rats on the Essequibo. The river a tacabah nest. The Sergeant’s men, dying by the dozens, of fever–worms breeding in the unemptied casks set to catch rain water–bringing in hossah, corass, for her to scale and stew–and bring home to stuff in Water Spouts hardening belly! Ah, the pepper soup did that. It had, about a barrel of it, straightened his legs; but at the expense of his gums and his belly which were hard as rock.

Suddenly–a flash back to reality.

Water Spout had begun to cry. About time. Had she been dozing long? There was no one to tell. And he was hungry, and he cried.

“Come,” she said, awaking, “come to mahmie, son.” And she put out a hand in the dark for him. Ah–there–there he was. Crying. Cockling. She seized him by the neck, frontwards. It was moist, swobbled. A bit cold. She drew him to her, forcing the tip of a breast in his mouth.

From her a luxuriant warmth flowed out to him. And she dozed back again.

Dream horses riding her. The Cayenne soup no doubt; whereas usually she would be dead, dead to the fires of the earthiest hell.

Nibbling at her breast.

Gently tugging.

Sensation sweet–pumping milk in a black child’s mouth!

Letting him pump it himself.

Doze. Dozing. Dreams–

Bordeaux. All the old figures resurrected to a distant reality. Old, shaky, fire-eating Miss Ewing. Captain; Berbice hermaphrodite. Macaume! Blacks, girls in particular, on the banks of the lamahau, at night talking about her. The baboos, behind pots of rotie and callaloo, beating on the back of a frying pan–

Hack ba la la
Hack ba la la
Mahaica is comin’ down!

The Hindu settlers begging for rain. Wouldn’t the water in the lamahau do?

Staring at her, the very coolies. Wildly.

Miss Ewing, at last, late one night, getting a midwife to finger her. This way, then that. Sometimes she refused. And Miss Ewing, heartless, lavished boxes and clouts. Thumpings. And then free of one ordeal, another ensued. Urchins in the lamahau dusk slinging paining words at her. Swell belly Seenie. Swell belly–

Jahn Belly, Quackah Belly,
Swell like a cocoa

Her own swollen in time like a ripe jelly cocoanut. Aiming at the stars.

Soft tugging–

No? He was crying again.

Nonsense.

“Nevah min’, son, com’ to yo’ mahmie.” She was loving and awake. No, it couldn’t be–something was wrong–he wasn’t crying. Was she still dreaming? No! She was nursing the brat! Here–his cold head pegging at her armpit–here–tugging away at her very gizzard.

She began to feel for him. A soft, cool, flat something met her hand. His forehead, most likely. Sweat–was it that hot–or was he sick–the ague–fever–the rain water–crying–

Still he managed to be on the floor yelling. How was that? Was he a dual being?

Here he was at her breast, gnawing away at it. And there he was down on the floor, howling.

Absurd!

Again the exploring hand went out. Why, here he was, of course, the dual rascal, nursing! (Pity it was so blamed dark!) Certainly he was nursing. And she proceeded to make sure for the last time.

But suddenly the head receded, slipped down into the gut in the straw. And on the other side of the room Water Spout gave a loud unmistakable yell.

Jumping up, Seenie flew to the child and snatched him to her bosom, tight.

“Oh, me Gawd, me Gawd,” she screamed, bursting through the door into the silence of the Guiana night.

. . . . . . .

It was barren sky. Frosts of dew, flakes of sunlight, fell upon the earth, fell likewise on the black gleaming uniform of one of the Sergeant’s men, unhurriedly making for the hut.

Some six hours later he returned, dragging on the coral road to the sea the fresh dead body of a bloaty milk-fed snake the sheen of a moon in May.