Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

“‘Resolution and Independence.’”

“‘We poets in our youth,’” she says, “‘begin in gladness, / But thereof comes…’ Remind me what it is that comes thereof.”

“‘But thereof in the end come despondency and madness’…. Yes, those are the lines everyone remembers, but to me, they’re just the fruit on the low branches of the tree.”

“The low branches…” She gives a languid laugh. “Do you know I found Wordsworth dull at school?”

“I’d rate him over Byron—by a wide margin, too.”

At the challenge, Addie smiles. “This is the poem your father read you.”

“Yes.”

“And if you hated Percival,” she says, “how did that occur?”

A shadow crosses Jarry’s brow. “I’m not sure you’d find it a diverting story.”

“Then tell me an undiverting one….”

Closing his finger in the book, he rests it on his knee and sits back in his chair. “That was the year I ran away with Thomas.”

“Who was he?”

“The smith. He was more a father to me then than Father was.”

“How did you come to leave?”

“I was the scullion,” Jarry says, “the same position Lem holds now. Every morning I hauled sand from the river to the kitchen house and scraped the burned muck from the bottom of the pots. Because I was the master’s son, the people in the quarters had a hard time accepting me, while Father himself had barely ever looked at me, except to bid me fetch him this or that. The only place I felt at home was at the forge. Thomas was forty-two, the same age I am now. He used to tell us stories….” And now, it is as if a ray of sun has touched his brow, and Addie’s face, in its reflection, lightens, too. The door that shut upon the memory of their morning in the swamp swings open, and what has come to seem almost a dream to her is not a dream at all.

“What stories did he tell?”

“Animal tales, mostly. Brother Rabbit and Brother Wolf.”

“Do you mean Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox? Lucius used to tell those stories in my aunt’s yard in Charleston.”

“Up in Cheraw and that way, they tell it with a fox. When my mother was a girl in Cuba, an old Jamaican woman told her the same tales with a spider and a tiger. But the way Thomas always told it, the way it was told here, was with a rabbit and a wolf.”

“And what did Thomas say?”

“‘Well, Brother Wolf and Brother Rabbit, they were neighbors….’”

“No,” she says, “as it was told to you.”

“In Gullah?” There is something sharp in Jarry’s hesitation, before he decides in her favor. “‘Buh Wolf and Buh Rabbit, dem bin lib nabur,’” he begins. “‘De dry drout come. Water scase. Buh Wolf dig one spring fuh him fuh git water. Buh Rabbit, him too lazy and too scheemy fuh wuk fuh isself. ’E pen pon lib off tarrah people.’”

“He…depended upon…?”

“‘Lib off tarrah people.’”

“Living off…other people?”

“That’s it,” he says. “‘Ebry day, wen Buh Wolf yent duh watch um,’e slip to Buh Wolf spring, an ’e full him calabash long water and cah um to ’e house fuh cook long and fuh drink. Buh Wolf see Buh Rabbit track, but ’e couldn ketch um, de tief de water—’”1

“Wait,” she says, sitting up. “This is the tar baby story, isn’t it?”

Jarry smiles. “You’ve heard it.”

“Not this way, though. Go on. Please.”

As Jarry tells the story, Addie thinks about Paul Hayne, who, long ago, used to read to her in French on the upstairs piazza—love poems usually—courting her secretly, as Blanche sat in the music room over her own book, listening through the open window. Jarry, speaking Gullah, is like Paul, but less like him than like the suitor Paul never quite turned out to be, the one whom Addie dreamed about at Mme Togno’s when she read “Evangeline,” who never really came. Yet as likeness is a million miles from being, so Addie is a million miles from the girl who read that poem and dreamed those dreams. She’s grown and married now, and Jarry is, after all, a Negro and could never be her suitor. There’s a period this evening, though, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, when Addie ceases to denominate him in this way—as a “Negro,” a “black man”—any more than she denominates herself as “white” in her own thoughts. The notion of their difference evaporates, and she finds herself listening as she once did to Paul, only Jarry is more beautiful than Paul Hayne ever was. There’s something warmer, more nuanced in his intelligence, and the fatigue that occasionally shows in his expression is exquisite to her, like something painted by a Rembrandt or a Michelangelo. That fatigue has something final in it, that makes her think of how beautiful the world will appear in our last glimpse as we take leave of it. It speaks to a similar fatigue in her that comes from soberly and honestly bearing up the weight of life. Paul, like Harlan, was in flight from that—French poetry, cigars, and Colonel Lay’s rum punch—these were just their chosen stimulants and props. This was the reason, finally, that Addie couldn’t give herself to Paul and hasn’t, now, to Harlan, the way she might, if…

“That’s one of my happiest memories,” Jarry eventually concludes, “sitting at the forge with Thomas. He’d clang some piece of hot iron with the maul, then sip a dipperful of water, and I especially loved the end, when Thomas said, ‘De minnit Buh Rabbit drap in de brier patch,’e cock up ’e tail,’e jump, an holler back to BuhWolf: “Good bye, Budder! Dis de place me mammy fotch me up—dis de place me mammy fotch me up.” An ’e gone befo BuhWolf kin ketch um.’” Thomas would always wink at me and say, ‘An, Buh Jarry, where yuh mammy fotch you up?’ and my part was to answer, ‘Ri’cheer in de swamp, Thomas,’ and he’d say, ‘Me, too, Buddah, ri’cheer, an one day, we gon drap back