Wandeka Gayle
The Silk Cotton Tree
An excerpt from the novel-in-progress My Name Is Sweet Thing
The hem of my night dress brushed against the wet sprigs of grass and dirt as I moved. The sun would be up soon, and I wanted to reach the tree before anyone would miss me. It had rained, so the garden was soggy and glistening in the weak light. I would need to wash my nightdress myself before Blossom asked why it had flecks of mud on it, I thought, stepping around puddles barefoot.
My heart raced a little. All night I had thought about Blossom’s story.
“No living soul must cut down a silk cotton tree. People say silk cotton tree can give healing. That it better than going obeah man. People say the slave that runaway from this plantation with her lover, Abah, was a maroon name Mama Sena. She and he and other runaways get string up in this tree by the master of this great house, the master that give her all those children.
“People say when you go there and ask the tree, her spirit jump into dat person asking advice and talk through dem and tell what wrong with the sick person and how to fix dem. That’s why I don’t play with none of it.”
The thought of souls in a tree filled me with more wonder than dread. It seemed farther away than before but when I got to it, breathing heavily, I put out my hands. I touched the bark with my palms flush against the trunk, careful not to touch the thorns like brass teats. I closed my eyes and tried to envision her, a figure in a plain weave cotton dress, her hair unruly, her eyes full of vengeance against the master who tried to dominate her year after year.
“Mama Sena,” I whispered. “Please let dis baby pass from me.”
I opened my eyes and looked up at the tree. There was a rustle, and I held my breath. A nocturnal bird flew out of it.
I sighed but stood there in place.
“Mama Sena,” I said a little louder. “Please.”
I stood waiting for the possession, something that would make it clear what I could do.
Perhaps it was my mind, but a wind gently blew through the trees, becoming more ardent, but then it stopped as soon as it started.
I sank to the base of the tree, and I put my head in my hands. I couldn’t carry this baby, not now after everything had changed. Now, I could have a life. I could go back to school and become something more than Aunt Winnie ever envisioned for me, something better than what my father was now, sitting in prison all these years for killing mama.
I lifted my head up and looked between my toes. My feet had nearly crushed a plant, illuminated in the weak light, standing out against the weeds and uneven grass. It raised its head to me, it must have—its lilac flowers looking sweet and dewy. Had it grown over night? Had it been there all along?
Perhaps it would be something like this I had to do to expel the baby, something from nature—something provided by Sena’s guidance.
I didn’t question the impulse when I reached for it. In one motion, I plucked it and popped it into my mouth without a thought in my head and had chewed it and swallowed it—flowers and all—before sense could re-enter my brain, and I would start to regret what I had done.
I sat there like that for what seemed an eternity. I allowed my thoughts to turn to what I had asked of the tree, and I couldn’t help feeling foolish. The whole event would be funny if it didn’t make me so sad—me thinking a tree could banish an unborn child.
Then, I heard rustling in the bushes nearby.
I rose to my feet, thinking that if I ran now, I could stand a chance, rather than staying and meeting the blade of a machete. I would get to the back steps before the intruders gave chase, but the sight I saw before me held me paralyzed.
When the face came out of the shadows, I rubbed my eyes to make sure.
“Solomon?”
My knees buckled, but I don’t remember hitting the ground. I felt his arms raise me up again. His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a barrel. He was telling me he had missed me. He smelled of earth and citrus like always but something else I couldn’t place. He even called me his Sweet Thing like those times we had rolled around fornicating in pastureland. He was touching my face. He was shaking me. I couldn’t focus on his face after a while. I held on to his voice. His mouth was on mine. Then, he was saying he had told everyone he would come to take care of me and the baby.
“I’m sorry about our baby,” is all I could manage, before his voice slipped away, and I found myself in a dark cocoon.
*
When I opened my eyes, I was submerged under water. I could still feel Solomon’s hand in mine, but I could no longer see or hear him. I heard another voice, like Bernice’s.
“Bernie?” I called, but no sound came. I don’t think the word reached my lips, but it echoed in my mind.
Someone was shaking out a large, white sheet. I opened my eyes to see it fluttering there in the depths, brilliant, almost blue under the pale light. Hands were hanging the sheet along with the other cotton dresses and shirts. A woman in the simple cotton weave fabric was dancing and twirling, faster and faster. The resistance of the water made her hair move as in slow motion, but watching her movements made me dizzy. People had gathered around her, clapping but their hands, too, did not make a sound. Then she stepped out of her skin, and everything glowed.
I touched my head. It throbbed. I put both hands around my abdomen and shuddered. I looked back at the woman. She was made of light—bright, yellow, pulsating. A warm feeling enveloped me, but it made my head swim to look at her. Something was swirling in my abdomen. It was rushing up my throat and out of my mouth.
I woke with the force of it, the seasick feeling worse than any morning sickness I had ever experienced.
Only when I looked up, breathing heavily, did I register that it was Cousin Eloise’s hand at my back rubbing it in circular motions, Miss May and a weeping Blossom close by. The sun was high in the sky, and I was no longer wearing the damp nightdress but a clean white dress cloaked me from neck to ankle.
I lay back into the pillow and looked up at Eloise. Her hand had been soft and reassuring, but she wore a frown, her eyes hard and disapproving. Then, I watched her take the basin to the adjoining bathroom and heard the flush of the toilet and the running tap. Then all was quiet again. She emerged wiping her hands on a towel. Then, she went to the window and looked out—I’m sure at that tree. She asked Miss May and Blossom to step outside for a moment.
I pressed my hand to my stomach. Had I done it? Was it gone from me? Perhaps I just didn’t remember feeling it pass from me. I realized for the first time that this thought filled me with misery.
I looked back at Eloise and found she was staring at me, the muscles straining around her mouth.
“Clarissa, who is…Solomon?” she asked.
*
My mind raced. Had he really been there with me? Where was he now?
“You kept saying his name,” she clarified. “Is he the father?”
I remained silent. She nodded slowly to herself, taking my silence as confirmation.
“So you weren’t… attacked, then by your aunt’s man-friend?” She came over to sit in the armchair, pulled up closer to the bed.
I turned my head away from her probing stare. The memory of Aunt Winnie’s man, Leviticus pounding me into the earth under the June plum tree flashed through me and I closed my eyes. I couldn’t tell her the whole story then, even if I wanted to. Where would I begin?
“Yes. I was…attacked…by Leviticus, like I say,” I said. My throat felt raw around the words I spoke, and I wished she would just leave me to recover in peace, now that it was becoming clearer what my cruel mind had conjured. “Solomon is … not important.”
Eloise was quiet for a while. I lay there awaiting the onslaught of rebukes for what I had tried to do, what I may have done. I thought of Solomon’s letter again—that solitary ruled page: Those last two lines held a truth that made me raw with anger and disappointment. What had I expected? I wouldn’t let myself answer that. I thought of each word again—Is it really mine—perfectly formed and full of the doubt I never anticipated.
I opened my eyes and stared up at Eloise.
“Is this what you ingested?” she said, she held up the plant that smelled like mint with tiny lilac flowers.
I nodded. She relaxed her shoulders.
“I used to eat these all the time as a teenager. You are lucky it wasn’t something else. The most it does it makes you lightheaded.”
She was shaking her head, bemused but I could tell she was frustrated.
“I did check to see if it could harm the baby. Dr. L said if you brought it back up, you should be okay but to take you to the emergency room if you get worse.”
I tried to sit up in bed, but slid back down, the quick movement made my stomach contract again.
“You’ll have stomachache is all,” she said. “Be thankful that’s all it will do.”
I looked at her. I kept thinking that it had to be more than just a bad reaction to a plant. She seemed to be looking through me.
“I blame myself,” she said, with a sigh. “When your mother died, I didn’t speak up. It wasn’t her fault what your father did but this family could not abide a scandal.”
She paused for while.
Eloise got up and went to the window.
“That blasted tree kept everyone in this family dishonest for a long long time, afraid of blame, afraid of shame, and it all come same-same way,” she said, more to herself than to me.
She turned back to me, came over, and sat on the bed.
“Promise me that you will birth this child, Clarissa,” she said, pausing for a moment. “Then, give it to me to raise.”
I lay there looking at her for a few minutes, slowly registering what she had said.
“It’s clear you do not want this baby,” she continued. “Let me raise it. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
I looked at Eloise. Her eyes were full and shining.
“I think this is why you found your way here, so I can help you like this,” she said.
I thought of what Blossom had said about the death of little baby Emily that nearly drove Eloise insane. Yet here, Eloise had spoken in a calm, measured voice, and rubbed my back as I vomited. Eloise had offered a solution. My child would have a better life than I could provide it.
I pushed down the disappointment rising at the thought of giving up the child I thought I did not want.
“Think about it,” she said. “Get some rest.”
I turned on my side and gazed out at the tree again. Before I realized it, my face was wet at what I knew I would have to do.
Wandeka Gayle
Wandeka Gayle is a Jamaican writer, a visual artist, and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Spelman College. She earned her PhD in English with a Creative Writing (Fiction) concentration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is the author of Motherland and Other Stories (Peepal Tree Press 2020). Other writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Interviewing the Caribbean, and other journals and magazines. Gayle’s writing and research has been supported by fellowships from the UNCF/Mellon Foundation, Hedgebrook, Kimbilio Fiction, The Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She also became an inaugural fellow for the Adisa Ancestry Artist Residency in her native Jamaica, where she continued work on her first novel, My Name is Sweet Thing.