Nila could not believe her husband had dared to compare her to a slave. Her heart filled with red anger—the inheritance of Coromantee-Panther—and air whistled though the space in her front teeth. Nila poked her finger in Dylan’s chest and told him the obscurities of her mind, and then her husband struck her.
She touched her cheek in shock, but her heart was still red. “I would sleep very lightly, if I were you, Dylan Cornell. For I am going to burn your manhood with coals. And I would be careful about eating as well. I will treat you like a sturgeon and poison you.”
Yet Nila did not keep her word. She did not burn or kill or poison her husband, for he sidled next to her and begged her forgiveness. He stroked her kinky hair and told her he did not know what had come over him, and Nila’s red anger paled, and she consented to lie with him. It would be like this every time Dylan struck her on his visits to the west. He would fool Nila into believing that his nature had changed and she would believe him until the moment he struck her again and called her names that began with “black.” Dylan told her she was a “black wench” or she was a “black devil.” He told her she looked like a slave.
Yet in those early days Nila still held out hope, and when she became pregnant Dylan was tender with her. Their child was born in an interval between Dylan’s visits. When he returned, Nila allowed Dylan to rename the baby “Jonathan,” though she had called the boy “Micco.” Moons after the baby’s birth there were two more visits where no striking occurred and Nila reasoned that time had changed her husband. However, on the subsequent visit once the baby was walking, Dylan began to strike Nila again and it was worse than before.
Nila did not dare tell anyone about how she suffered with her Scottish husband, especially Bushy Hair, who was protective of his twin sister as he had been the baby to emerge first on the day that they were born. Her arrogance kept her from admitting that she had been foolish not to listen to her mother’s dream. She kept her shame inside, for she didn’t want her family to be ridiculed in the village, for the people to marvel that the extraordinary daughter of Coromantee-Panther and Woman-of-the-Wind had thrown herself away on a white man who beat her.
Nila learned to raise her arms to catch the blows so that her bruises would not show on her face. She learned to hope that Dylan’s visits every three moons would end, but he continued to visit. Sometimes she was lucky and sitting in the moon house when his visits occurred, for Dylan did not know how to count the days to avoid her womanly seclusions. Yet other times, she was not fortunate, and she tolerated his embraces, for Dylan would force himself on her. Nila drank a tisane made from wild carrot seeds to keep from being with his child. On the rare times that didn’t work, Nila would brew another tisane of wild ginger root, drinking this to expel the contents of her womb, or, as a last resort, boil the berries of the pokeweed.
The Incident of the Cracker
Nila’s only son would grow to be tall, but Micco looked neither Negro nor Creek nor Scottish. His hair was dark, but it was not kinky; it crisped into tight waves. After his fourth year, his skin darkened to a brown that was the color of pecans. He had picked up selfishness from Dylan Cornell, whose visits had slowed to every six moons. The Creek had not learned yet about locks or being selfish with food and goods—that would come much later—but Dylan inculcated a love of property to his son. Whenever other children picked up something belonging to Micco in his hut, he would snatch it back.
“Mine! Mine!” the boy would scream.
Micco soon became a very lonely child, for other children began to avoid him, and, because he was a boy, when he reached the age of four or five it was frowned upon for him to hover around his mother and the women of the village. Though he ardently looked forward to his white father’s visits, Micco didn’t receive much attention from his father, either, except when his father insisted that he learn how to read so he could know the most important words to the white men besides their laws: the book that Dylan called the Bible. These lessons were so important to the lonely little boy that when his father hit his mother Micco turned his head and tried to ignore his mother’s weeping. He would lie at the foot of the spot where his parents slept and pretend not to hear Dylan forcing himself on Nila, her sad begging for Dylan to please stop, because Micco lived for the mornings when his father would roughly nudge him with a foot and say, “Good morning, boy.” This wasn’t much, but Micco grabbed at these bits of affection, as children crave the love of their parents.