I returned home from time spent mostly at sea with tales to tell and some strange need to tell them. Whatever poor powers I might possess were unknown except for those within the forgiving fireglow of friends and family. Many of whom, Hector and Justine among them, told fascinating stories with finesse and flair, unfolding them in unexpected ways that held me, and indeed even a room of unfamiliar guests, rapt as a child. I doubt anyone else will ever emulate this.
When they grew up, where they grew up, telling tales was still important and made up much of the entertainment they knew. Captain Henry, Hector's father, told stories from a life on the seas and tales that his own father had told. Hector in turn retold them, knowing them perfectly having heard them so many times, mastering their nuances and mutations then adding a few flourishes and enlargements (I guess we'll call it) of his own.
Justine's mother spun stories of the prairie, which was still very much wild when she was growing up, along side legends of Pawnee heroes, warriors, gods and spirits. Some of these were thousands of years old, but when Justine passed them on to us it sounded as if they happened to and around her when she was a girl. And maybe they did. We saw with our own eyes that our parents were people strange and interesting things happened to.
Perhaps theirs is the last generation this will be true of. Their children were born into the television age which pretty much seized people's imaginative lives and then the Web stole the imagination of their kids. Now we face flat screens rather than flickering fires to consume manufactured tales that come from places where 'there is no there there', with only the slimmest relation to reality and sanity, often pointless and mean-spirited violent fantasies. Then we wonder, "why do kids today run around shooting up their schools?" The only wonder is that they don't do it more often under this continual onslaught of virtual child abuse.
Clotel's cabin became my writing retreat, at a sufficient remove from the demands of my new life on land as an innkeeper. Here I spin and apprentice in the ancient art of weaving.
I renovated the cabin just as Hector restored his rescued sailboats, to much the way it must have been when built, adding nothing modern. For heat there is the fieldstone fireplace, for light oil lamps, which would then have burned whale oil back in her days, with a sweet scent and soft glow rather than the sharp smell and harsh light cast by kerosene.
There's a shallow well close by and an outhouse at some remove. No phone, Wifi, radio, TV or in fact anything electrical except a lightning rod on the roof.
It's amazing how comfortable and peaceful a place without electricity is, the atmosphere is totally different from a space that's electrified. Why that should be or if it's merely my imagination I don't know. I've never seen any science on the subject. But it is, or so it seems to me. As if it's slipped lost through the interstices of temporality, been bypassed by the tyranny of time.
If Clotel somehow suddenly stepped out of the past she'd recognize everything in sight - except, I forgot to mention I do use a laptop, an essential electrical anachronism, my nod to modernity which it would be senseless to do without. And sometimes I feel she might, maybe even does visit. The sense of the past is so strong here and she springs to mind so often, the founding mother of our dark family, the height of whose growing children remains inscribed on the front door casing.
I never leave it here. It seems she only returns when I'm not present and peace has returned for an interval when there are no more words to be said, in stillness and silence. She drops hints, leaves traces. Things will be subtly rearranged on my worktable, the ashes from yesterday's fire stirred in a swirling pattern, curtains closed that I left parted, the door ajar, a hawks feather athwart the worn threshold that carries the impression of her passing. I don't believe in ghosts exactly, but then again I don't not ... very inexactly.
Also I suspect that somehow in her confusion or curiosity she might create mischief. Perhaps alter these tales to create a truer version of herself or perhaps a fictional self, a falser one. She might write herself out of history altogether. Such being the ways of ghosts.
The living have no monopoly on history, the dead change it all the time. Embellish and enlarge or shrink and diminish at their whim, depending on which end of the telescope they're using at any one time.
The cabin, a one room saltbox cottage really, sits at the top of a hill overlooking the Sound, Plum Island and ocean out to the horizon, the apple orchard behind and on both sides. The Inn is downhill and out of sight, beyond a hayfield and below a stand of chestnuts. Clotel would have seen this very view, as a sketch of the property in back of one of Purslane''s account books confirms.
The wind over the fields and through the trees blows as it ever did carrying the sound of surf on the barrier island and the sea scents of fog and salt. Applewood burning on the hearth still smells like the most subtle and satisfying of incenses, one of those infinitely intelligent smells like cow barns with haylofts or artists' oil paints on linen canvas. The sense of scent is the most direct route into the past, bypassing all rational barriers, all lost time.
When we bake an apple pie, sweat, turn earth, set a fire, muck out cow stalls, sniff fresh flowers, fuck, or are lost in a fog at low tide, no matter where and when, we smell the same scents our ancestors did and are carried into their past.
Now I don't pretend to be able to penetrate the perversity of the Puritan soul. Or few modern ones for that matter, some of whom this past scene might stimulate rather than sicken. So I won't speculate.
But such was the brutal start of their long shadowy affair, this portrait in black and white shot through with scarlet stains limned on bed linen. It was a most unusual marriage, or if we deny dignifying it as so, rape or carnal coupling, surviving for some years. But the power dynamic quickly changed soon after the wedding, or merely bedding, night.
Clotel was willful, wild and by no means broken, but with her young years and lack of sexual experience she didn't know how to manipulate her situation, to master her master if you will.
Soon after her rape, as the gray days of November settled in for a stay, Purslane sent the girl to Newburyport to purchase supplies for the kitchen pantry. Saltmarsh Farm produced most of the provender for the Inn, as it was able to in season, but inevitably there were imported staples and out of season items to be bought from merchants. Her long list included: nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, Demera sugar, tea of several sorts, coffees, chocolate, cocoa, herbs and medicinal elixirs.
Her favorite purveyor was Madame Molineaux who had a small shop tucked snugly away between Frothingham's Salt and Smoke Cod, ripe with preserved fish smells and Cribb's Chandlery, redolent of tar, hemp and canvas. It stood just off Market Square at the head of Central Wharf marked by a swinging carved sign lettered 'Herbes' bordered by sprigs of parsley, lavender,dill, valerian and thyme.
The sleigh bells hanging in a belt on the back of the door rang as she entered and Madame appeared from her tiny retiring room behind the counter at the back of the shop.
"My dear, so good to see you." And indeed she was as the inn was among her best custom. "And looking so ...," her voice faltered and faded. Lines of deep sorrow and distress had replaced the usual merry and carefree visage of the girl. "Dear me, there's a tale to be told here, and the telling won't be long. The sorrow of all slaves, I suppose."
Mme Molineaux had been a slave herself. Slaves in the Caribbean were fed by the incredible bounty of fish found in the upwelling nutrient-rich North Atlantic. Salted and smoked cod and other firm-fleshed white fish in effect sustained the whole slave system. Frothingham's was a chief exporter and enabler. Also, their lowest quality products fed slaves on the Middle Passage and the premium grades were sold in markets around the Mediterranean to the most finicky Catholic fish lovers.
After curing the cod were stiff as boards and stacked compact as cordwood in a ship's hold. The return cargoes consisted of molasses, sugar, tropical hardwoods, spices and salt - to cure more fish - and perhaps a slave or two.
Captain Frothingham spotted Molly, as her sellers called her, in a slave market on Hispaniola and purchased her as a family servant for forty Spanish dollars, the solid silver which formed the favored currency of both of the Caribbean and American colonies for years.
Madame was more than a mere slave, she became an essential and cherished member of the flourishing Frothinghams. She enjoyed her employment and even began to amass a modest nest egg out of her meager wages, most necessities of life being provided for by the family, while her other wants and wishes were few. But she was never for a minute deceived, she was still a slave, and might always be so.
Some years into her tenure, Captain Frothingham returned from a voyage to Jamaica prostrate with an acute ague, symptomatic of various pernicious tropical maladies, perhaps malaria or maybe even witchcraft. He soon descended into a fevered catatonic state.
Every doctor in town examined him, prescribing toxic tinctures, bleeding and other arcane treatments. Ministers were summoned and performed exorcisms to drive out demons. All of these, unsurprisingly, to no effect. He was sinking fast and in his hallucinations he saw the angel of death smiling in one corner of the room and Satan standing in wait in the opposite.
After all doctors and divines had thrown up their hands in despair, Madame gained the temerity to approach the death bed and whisper in his ear.
"Captain, such sickness as afflicts thee, the handiwork of malefic spirits, did'st I oft espy on Hispaniola. My father, a powerful sevite of Vodun on the island, tutored me in a sovereign remedy to administer and solemn ritual to perform for driving out this deadly ailment. Allow me to compound this cure and enact these rites in thy name." The captain, lingering in his last delirium, nodded agreement.
Mme Molineaux foraged the woods and fields ranging town for the requisite herbs, fungi, roots and fruits, then purchased some small vials of potent extracts secreted by Amazonian adders and sub-tropical tree toads plus a sticky lump of opium from an apothecary.
She carefully decocted and compounded these to form a ripely aromatic paste, then dissolved it in overproof rum. This will dissolve and disinfect anything put in its path, often including the drinker.
Summoning his last strength, the captain quaffed this reeking elixir. But a slight grin flickered across his face, "Ah, rum. Now that's the stuff to ease a man into his grave," he responded, his cheeks reddening. So maybe there was yet hope.
The next morning she dosed him again at dawn. "Rum, I feel rum," was all he said. Then she repeated the treatment at midday and dusk. He slept like a downy baby with the sweetest of dreams, as you might well imagine.
Before cock crow, he leapt from his former death bed demanding, "Damn your eyes madame, where be my victuals. I have'st hunger would'st fain devour raw slabs of salt cod." Well, he was back in the land of the living, cured, bigger than life and profane as always.
His appetite satisfied, he proceeded to praise Madame to the skies, as he would for the rest of his life, and in gratitude granted her freedom from enslavement plus consideration of any reasonable boon that she might request.
Dwelling on this offer while drifting in and out of sleep that night, vague phantoms formed into a possible dream.
"Captain," she approached him the next morning, "I wish a small shop in which to sell sundry culinary and medicinal herbs, teas, and compounded elixirs such as I cured thee with."
Frothingham happened to have an unused store on the wharf, shoehorned between his warehouse and the chandlery. It was a reasonable request, his Christian beneficence would cost him nothing and in time might return rent. So, in short order Madame acquired her shop.
"Clotel, please rest on the settee and allow me to make us a soothing cup of chamomille. Then we might'st chat ere fulfilling business."
A comforting fire burned on the compact hearth, frugally stoked with scavenged driftwood and scraps gleaned from the shipyards along the Merrimack. Firelight glinted off the glass jars and bottles of herbs, spices, roots and liquids lining the shop walls. Bunches of drying herbs hung from the rafters their fragrances mingling with the scent of wood smoke and the sea surging below the wharf.
"There my dear, do drink. My best, a Russian variety, with a touch of comfrey, lemon and honey." They sat in silence for awhile sipping and staring into the flames as the shades of afternoon fell. Clouds were gathering, tears began trickling down Clotel's cheeks and soon a storm of sobs broke out. Madame let the squall run its course, then said, "My child, tell me all that hath transpired since I last saw thee."
"The brute, the lecher," she hissed below her breath.
"Do you wish to end this insect's life? For I can'st compound an undetectable deadly potion to drag him down to hell faster than swatting a dung fly."
"Madame, as a Christian I cannot wish such for any of God's creatures. Moreover, suspicion would fast fall upon my person and my own death sentence swiftly ensue."
"Then flee, fly!"
"I would'st be hunted down by his hounds in a trice and flogged to death. Such hath he made abundantly clear."
Madame rose, locked the shop door, drew the curtains, refreshed their cups, stirred the fire, then settled in for a long siege.
"My dear, since you can'st master the situation, you must master the monster. Always remember, women rule the world. It was ever thus and always shall be. Women make men, not men women, they exist entirely at our sufferance. Eve herself, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Mary, mother of our savior, Lady Macbeth, Good Queen Bess. Women rule and so shall you, becoming the queen you already are if you but knew."
Their talk concluded as dusk descended and the fire ebbed. "Clotel, I'm going'st to compound a potion for you. Poisonous? No, but powerful, 'twill render him as putty in your palms, susceptible to your newly founded powers."
Madame stepped behind the counter, lit the lamp, pulverized various dried herbs, roots and mushrooms in a marble mortar and sifted them into a bottle of over-proof rum where they dissolved without a trace. They then proceeded to fulfill Purslane's list of wants after which Clotel caught the day's last stage down the coast with many tearful expressions of gratitude.
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