Lament for Hands and Knees
After Beradina Johnson, a Swedish servant listed in the Samuel T. Colt household in the
1900 Census at Linden Place.
You’re over forty now, and all those chores
you used to finish in a flash, thoughtless
of your knees, the hours on all fours
with rags to scrub until the tiles were spotless
explain the aches that keep you from your dreams.
Your hands are coarser than a horse’s tail,
and often cracked to bleeding, yet it seems
that strong maids keep their jobs, not those who ail.
You curse that bathroom on the second floor,
the first in town, all mirrors, windows, white
and never clean enough, though you’re bone-sore.
You slip away for willow bark one night
to ease the pain, then steep it in your tea –
a different kind of bitterness, but free.
.
Levi DeWolf (1766-1848)
________“…he was suddenly arrested by the Holy Spirit, and…was stricken down with the
________conviction that he was a transgressor against the laws and truth of Christ, and ________converted into an earnest and faithful disciple…” from The Bristol Phoenix, 1870
We want to think that one of them had said
Not me. I won’t, who, pious as they claimed
he was, a loving husband, father, shamed,
they said, by just one voyage where the dead
were legion, and Africans, all underfed
and sick, ill-treated, took its toll – inflamed,
he swore devotion to the Lord and blamed
himself – but records prove we’ve been misled,
and it’s the family lore we cannot trust,
when logs and letters document his trips
from Ghana to Havana, with complaints
that cargo sales were slow and that he must
uphold the brotherhood and captain ships.
Enslaver’s not the portrait family paints.
.
The Chair: A Double Abecedarian*
________“He regretted the loss of a good chair.” Attributed to James DeWolf, Captain of the ________Polly, 1790
Part 1: African Woman Overboard
A chair is a chair is a chair, isn’t it?
Better and more comfortable, perhaps, if padded, upholstered, covered with chintz,
___iron thumbnails holding its elegance together, though not this chair of bare bones,
crafted for strength and utility in oak or mahogany, rigid, a structure to hold firm one body, yet
divided between a ship’s pragmatic beauty and dissolution in a bottomless sea, while you
ensnared and feverish in the bowels of The Polly, one of his 11,000
forced across an ocean in chains, listened as the Captain roared orders you could not fathom, ___his
gestures furnishing few clues to your fate. You could not know the
history of this man, a family man, a business man, and a man who valued a chair more than a ___life, as
inexplicable as the moon steering the tide without thought or malice, relying on the muscle memory
___of past generations to enforce a will he could not comprehend, a past he never questioned,
___a world where
justice for all did not exist.
Kin and kindred will never know your end, and we can only imagine it: first dragged up from ___below, then
left on the open deck for days, despite your illness, bound and gagged. Was the rag running ___through your
mouth clean or fetid? Were your hands tied behind you or in front? And through it all, you – ___without a
name, without a word, without a sound. The crew was silent, too, at first, but they followed
orders. Theirs was a silence of complicity as they watched the Captain
pull the grappling hook to the chair and secure it to the first rung, and with no
qualms or second thoughts, no
reconsideration as you were swung over the bow
sinking lower and lower until the ocean consumes you. More than
two hundred years later, you are still the African woman thrown overboard. There is no
underwater grave to
visit, and there is no way to make amends. How your eyes must have
widened when you finally understood how a Captain
x-aulted everyone and everything above you, but could not stop your eyes from
yelling, from shaking a bound fist, from staring him down as you descended into the sea as the ___next
zephyr blew the ship forward without you.
Part II: Captain James DeWolf (1764 – 1837):
Zephyrs sometimes blew your ships off course, yet
you righted those agonies. Shrewd, they called you, the consummate businessman, creating ___your
Xanadu by opening your own insurance company, bank, distillery, trading in slaves, finding
ways to make losses into wins, training brothers and nephews in the fine art of
villainry: evading laws, circumventing rules, slipping past the oceanic gates, always a Captain
undulating, swerving out of the grasp of those watching, inspecting, suspecting your
trade in the triangle, where your rum bought the enslaved in Ghana, who were then
sold on the next wave of the journey in Havana, and because business is business, you
reward yourself with profit, with quality stone as ballast to build your empire, where the
quest for more never shifts to faith or empathy or the understanding that all
people are people, and not on The Polly, where you bound an African woman to a chair, and
ordered the crew to hoist that chair, swing it over the bow, and lower her into the sea. The
navigated a clear, unspoken no, at first. They knew this was murder, and the Captain’s
mandate that she be thrown overboard because there was too much risk in letting her
live, sick with smallpox, was false. You had already
kept her from food, from water, from family, from comfort for days. How long could she live?
Justice would lift its trident and charge you in Bristol, and you fled,
indignant but unwilling to be captured, and during the four years you lived on the islands,
harboring yourself from the legal storm, inviting your wife and children for a holiday, you
garnered support in the West Indies, and charges there
faded away, shifted as easily as the tide, making your return to Bristol possible, no
evidence of the blood on your hands, not the
downward drive to drowning, not the loss of a good
chair, one you lamented losing more than the life lost with it, a woman replaced
by stone, ballast offsetting the weight of human cargo, because
a chair is a chair is a chair, isn’t it?
*Note: The DeWolf family in Bristol Rhode Island gained their fortune by being heavily invested and a leader in the slave trade.
© Marybeth Rua-Larsen
Marybeth Rua-Larsen’s poems and flash fiction have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, 3Elements Review, Magma, Eclectica Magazine and Crannóg, among others. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland and a Writing Resident at Linden Place in Bristol, RI. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.
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