Camille F. Forbes
Uncle Morris’s Body
I woke with a start, clutching Uncle Morris’s body like to protect it. I hadn’t been outside since the whitemen dragged me into the cave. The cool air blowing in and the blackness at the opening told me that we were in the depths of night.
Whitemen come, Uncle Morris dead, everybody else gone. Been hardly a day.
Wasn’t right to leave Uncle Morris. Lord knew that we had hardness running all through our earthly lives. Saunders, Master John, anybody else at the plantation, they did their best to make it so. I had to try to give Uncle Morris some softness. Even a hard death needed something soft around it. Something that let the spirits know this one wasn’t trouble. This one was good. Just caught, like so many of us.
As first light came nearer, I would step out to the mouth of the cave and look out. Before I took him out, I’d have to see it for myself.
For now, I lay my heavy head back on the cold cave floor.
#
Peering out before daybreak, I knew that we were as tucked away as the whitemen said. The waterfall covered the cave’s mouth, with a drop that landed maybe eight or nine feet below.
Out the cave on either side of the opening, a narrow path stretched out ahead. I took one look at the jaggedness of the path and the cry of the torn flesh of my back woke me up.
Uncle Morris. I had to get him out and down to the pool of water below. I swept my eyes over the whole area, taking everything in. Once I started, I didn’t want anything to pull me away, didn’t want to fret so much that I couldn’t keep my mind on him.
This would be the last chance. The last time to do right by Uncle Morris. He was the only one on McIntyre’s who ever cared for me. And off McIntyre’s, he thought I was strong enough to follow him and the men. To make my way. I would care for him now.
Barely first light. No better time to get out there.
Uncle Morris was long and lean, but that didn’t mean his body was light. I locked my hands around his chest and pulled him out the cave and down to the water, cursing every bump and rock in the path. I could see myself washing him, preparing him, and placing him down, with care. The way it should be. Still, it hurt me to hurt his body.
At the water’s edge, I checked again that I was alone. I bowed my head and put my hand on Uncle Morris’s. “I raise Uncle Morris up to you, spirits, I give him to your world. Please smooth the way.”
Kneeling before the water, I pulled out a piece of cloth I took from Thick-Built’s body. Rank breath. Craggy face. Cold blade skimming my cheek my chin my neck. Memories turned my stomach in on itself, emptying and emptying until my throat got raw from retching.
Gathering myself, I washed my face clean and pushed away everything but Uncle Morris. It was him, not me, who needed care. It was him, not me, who had sacrificed all. Lost all.
Taking the cloth out again, I wetted it, wrung it out, then wetted it again, murmuring as I went. “Make this body clean and bless it,” I said, wiping down his face and working my way down his neck. I would wipe away all the bad, all the unclean. Change it with the water and my words.
When the time came to wash his chest, I took a deep breath. Pulled him up to me with both hands, leaning him against me so I could take up the bottom of the shirt. I was still holding my breath as the rag swept over his back—the scars of McIntyre’s plantation carved deep into him.
I laid him back down, keeping my eyes on his head as I cupped it and put it on the ground, but my eyes found their way down. My hands stopped their moving as I stared at the wound that ruined him. There was no blocking the tears that filled my eyes, no stopping the gulp and sickened cry that escaped me. All but bit my tongue to quiet myself. Shame washed over me, and I looked away.
I was the cause of it. The men did what they did, but Uncle Morris died ’cause of me. What they wanted from me. Right then, it all mixed: shame, guilt, self-pity, fear. How would I make it, like he said I should? Like he promised or swore or ordered me to do?
I had treated my efforts to be among the men like it was a game. To show them I was strong. But I had lost. I was here alone. And Uncle Morris? He’d still be here if it weren’t for me. This was my sin.
I gave it all to the spirits. Maybe that was my way to get them to take Uncle Morris, clean and without blame for that broken body. I wanted to keep him from being dirtied with my shame. The shame my body carried. Those whitemen—.
As I moved my hands over him, I looked at his face, still at peace although his body told different.
Then I took his arm, and stopped. Markings covered the inside of Uncle Morris’s arm. Markings I’d never seen before.
Gently, I turned his arm out, opening the palm and staring at the markings that ran from his wrist to his armpit. At first I thought it was coal or some such. But when I traced the lines with a finger, I knew it was some kind of ink.
I peered down at the markings. Lines and arrows.
A thought, or a picture, pressed into me. Me and Uncle Morris in the shed, writing stick in my hand.
“See here?” He asked, pointing to something on the dirt floor.
“This, that looks like a box?”
“Yep.” He looked hard at me. “Know what that is?”
I didn’t. But I didn’t want to tell him.
“You keep thinking and take another look.”
Next to the box he made a line that sort of curved, then more boxes, all in a row. Another line, and a big box.
Bit by bit, something rose in me. When he started making lines almost laying right next to each other, I knew: “That’s here. It’s McIntyre’s.”
He looked downright tickled. “That’s right, Callie-girl. When you can know a place by sight like this, it could help you when time comes to get from one place to another.”
He squinted. “Think on this. Say somebody came here, to McIntyre’s, and they had to find you. What could you do to help them get to you?”
Before I knew the words to say, I saw myself standing at the back of the big house looking at the quarters, the cookhouse, the smokehouse, the path to the cure bushes, and the field. “If I could make it like they could see what I see when I stand at the back stairs of the big house, they could know where things are.”
“That’s it, Callie-girl,” Uncle Morris smiled, “You call that a map. If you make it right, you could give it to just about anybody that know how to use it, and they can figure out not just places they know, but places they never been.”
I was as pleased with myself as Uncle Morris, though I couldn’t imagine when I’d ever need a map.
Now I closed my eyes, opened them, and looked down at the markings on Uncle Morris’s arm. Nothing. As the time passed, anger and worry washed over me. It all came to feel like far too much. Words inside me bubbled up to my lips.
“How am I s’posed to do this? How much more will I have to do on my own? I can’t. Not gone make it, Uncle Morris. Help me.”
The tears flowed.
#
Time came that I had to clean and cover Uncle Morris. I had to decide if I would wrap him in the shift that hung from my body in pieces or put him to rest as he was.
“Take him with you,” a voice inside me said. Perplexed, I rested silent and still. “Take him with you.”
Uncle Morris’s long-shirt lay beside me on the ground. I pulled it to my chest and lay it across him before removing his pants. Standing up, I stepped into the pants, pulling them up over my narrow hips and to my waist. Although I was shorter than him, they fit good enough.
My heart pounded with fear or sureness, maybe both, about what I was doing. Making a choice. This choice to go forward, though I wasn’t anywhere yet.
Whipping the shift over my head, I lay it on Uncle Morris, then I put his long-shirt on. Smoothing it down, I kept my mind on the thought of him alive, like he was when he wore it. He felt close to me then. Decided, I ripped the front of the shift so that it was one long piece of cloth and I covered Uncle Morris with it. When I finished, I tucked in the end.
Just then did it come to me: the river, the big cave open to the sky. They were on that map.
I pulled down the winding sheet to look at Uncle Morris’s arm and saw even the waterfall where I now sat alongside him. And what was beyond? No telling how far, but what looked like a mountainside. I closed my eyes to hold the sight of it inside me.
Beyond that was a thing that looked like Uncle Morris’s shed back on McIntyre’s. The place where I’d find the folks he’d called friends. Was it a cabin? Whatever it was, it was the thing at the end of the map. The place where we’d been headed before those whitemen—.
“I hope I got this right. Lord, I hope it’s right,” I whispered into the cool morning air.
#
I dug until I felt that the dirt I removed would be enough to place Uncle Morris down right. Bone tired and grimy, I sat, willing myself to move.
Though I wore Uncle Morris’s clothes, though I’d wrapped him in the winding sheet and prayed over him, I still didn’t want to think of goodbye. I ran my hand over his face. The life in him was long gone now, and that pierced me like a knife.
Now I ran my hands down the length of him. I murmured again my heart’s wish for him: safe, not alone. I clutched him for a time. “Uncle Morris, you were mine. You gave me a place. I’ll keep you with me always, so I can find my way.”
But as if someone peeled my hands from him, I finally let go. Put him down, and tears streaming, flattened the dirt atop him.
With Uncle Morris’s pants and long shirt covering me, I felt a little more ready. I knew what I had to do. And right then, I knew that I was leaving behind more than Uncle Morris and my old things. I was leaving behind the Callie I had been. I was taking a new path.
If I’d figured out the map right, I could get to places I’d never been. The map would take me on the path that Uncle Morris wanted us all to be on, the right path. I would watch for signs of it. If Uncle Morris said there would be friends at the end of the map, it had to be true. If I did this right, I could do right by Uncle Morris.
Camille F. Forbes
Camille F. Forbes is a storyteller and historian whose fiction has been featured in Obsidian and Callaloo, among other journals, and supported by Hambidge and Write On Door County residencies. Her current projects include historical novels Minding the Territory and Shadowy Redemption. Dr. Forbes holds a doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University. Her nonfiction work includes Introducing Bert Williams: Blackface, Burnt Cork, and the Story of America’s First Black Star, a critical biography. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego.