Sapphire's Grave by Hilda Gurley Highgate Read Free Book Online Page A

image never lain to rest.
    The daughters had not cried. This was what was recalled of them, ages later, when they were dead and deeply buried, the memory of them hazy, their names unrecorded, their faces indistinct in the collective and deliberate amnesia of a people too ashamed to recall. Their words did not become wisdom. Their deeds were neither folklored nor memorialized in song. No glasses were raised in oblation, no altars erected in tribute. The three girls had not cried, and this the people could not forgive.
    Finished. Done, or so they thought. Forgotten, except to say that they had not cried.
    Their names were Ndevu. Eshe. Zoe. Collectively, their name was Life. This was what their mother had intended for them, in the days before her broken baby, in the days before she understood. They would go by other names, as would their progeny: Hagar. Sister. Sojourner. Diaspora, as they took their leave of one another. Other places, other circumstance would claim them. But they would remain just one. Many lives. Just one.
    The first one—Ndevu—the brown one, gave up. She would not live in this place. Not here. Not like this. Her sisters stared at her, but understood. The people stared, too, reproach on their faces, and in the set of their mouths as she passed. Sapphire’s daughter, as surely as she was born. The smell of whiskey and honey on her voice, she laughed as wanton women laugh when carried to the gallows of popular disapproval.
I
will not live as you say. I will not do as you say.
She lay supine in the fields, her arms spread, awaiting their wrath. Praying for it. Surrender was her name. Triumph was her name. The tether came down on her chest, her belly.
I will not do as you say.
She smiled drunkenly, or perhaps insanely, doing instead what they had come to expect, and bearing the scourge they had come to enjoy. Her mouth worked silently in a tongue no one understood.
    Only her sisters heard.
    I am my mother’s daughter, and the daughter of her mother.
    With the power of her mind, she had discovered, she could cross the waters, become royalty, warrior. Zhenga. Amira. Nzingha. But she would never become theirs. She would not live in this place. Not on their terms.
    Neither would she flee this place, as cowards flee their captors. They branded her nevertheless. The green eyes laughed, defiant. Bloodhounds sank their teeth into her flesh, and when this did not move her, they used lye to turn her back to Hades, home of the dead. Her flesh swelled, exuded pus and contagion, her back a welcome sign for Death.
    The daughter of her mother.
    No one knew what else to do with her.
    They hanged her by her apron strings. Brown, melting flesh dripped like whiskey and honey when they set it aflame. The hair long and straight as sugarcane curled as it burned. The people sniffed the air. Her spirit far away, she never flinched.
    The daughter of her mother’s mother.
    Zoe: the secret revealed. Sarah had seen it in the yellow eyes. This child would not soon die. Patient, Zoe bided her time, did as she was told. Yassuh. Yes, Ma’am. The yellow eyes were lowered so they could not read them. But Sarah saw the Evil. Zoe glanced up at her, knowing, wondering if Sarah knew, shadow of a smile dancing at the corners of her mouth, the eyes grim. They were not the eyes of a child, a girl. They were the eyes of death, the grave, and infernal places, of memory aged as soil and vengeful as the sea. They were eyes that held the knowledge of death, and therefore of life.
    When they came to her at night, she turned the burning yellow gaze of death upon them.
    They never came to her at night again.
    Zoe had no children.
    They would kill her if they could not subdue her, make hell of her flesh if she laughed. She had seen this, the dark one, Eshe, daughter of her mother, sister of Ndevu. Disconnected from Godness, she lacked her grandmother’s power. She lacked Zoe’s knowing superiority, Ndevu’s resolve. She learned to adapt. The daughter of