Marked

The guide led the small group of tourists through the grand foyer of the Powell Hall plantation house.  Madison shambled far behind the others, eight months pregnant and exhausted by the Georgia heat.  

 As she and Justin stood in the parlor listening to the docent yammer about the Powell family fortunes, the floodwaters of anxiety rose. In her last trimester, her senses had gone feral: she could sense the cruelty that still permeated the big house. It was in the brocade drapes that kept the interior shrouded in darkness. It was woven into the lace doilies crocheted by gnarled Black hands. It was in the pewter punchbowl gleaming from the sideboard, waiting for the South to rise again.

Her knees buckled. She needed air.

“You OK?” Justin asked, pulling her close.

“I’m fine,” Madison said. “I just need to step out a minute.”

 The couple had planned this trip more than a year ago, after the second miscarriage, after Madison’s struggle with depression. Her mother and grandmother now long gone, Madison consoled herself with documenting the family stories that they’d passed down—and unearthing the stories they hadn’t. Genealogy became her obsession. If she was never going to be the conduit of her family’s mitochondria, she thought sadly, at least she could be the vessel of its history.

After several months of research, she had made good headway: DNA tests, online research, connections to cousins she never knew she had. But the road to the past hit a dead end in Georgia’s Sea Islands. She had talked Justin into a road trip from their home in Philly down the Atlantic Coast. They could sight see, gorge on seafood, and snooze on beaches. Once in Georgia, Justin could golf while Madison scoured area plantations, rummaged through courthouse records, wandered among tombstones in old churchyards. Her excitement about the trip began to replace the emptiness of infertility. With time, Madison was able to gaze in the mirror, see her grandmother’s gray eyes, and not buckle with grief.

But there came a day when she saw something new in the contours of her face.  

“Look!” she’d said one morning, pouncing on the bed where Justin was still asleep. In her hands, she held a pregnancy test.

Justin had opened his sleepy eyes and gazed dreamily. Then the alarm: “Is that a Covid test?”

“I’m pregnant, sleepyhead,” she laughed.

He yelped with relief, then pulled her into a bear hug, planting kisses everywhere. They’d lounged in bed that morning, missing work, trying to figure out when the miracle had happened.

Suddenly, Justin grew somber. “We’re not going to Georgia this summer, then,” he’d said. “We’re not taking any risks.”

But already, the new life had cemented her connection to the past.   

“We’re going,” she said firmly. “I have to do this now more than ever.”

 Madison fled to the portico and down the front steps of Powell Hall. Heaving, she slumped against a 200-year-old live oak. But even in outside, she couldn’t escape the gravity of the plantation house and its proud horrors. 

 Escaping past the garden, she found herself among a row of small, brick cabins—the homes of the Igbo people who had been kidnapped, enslaved, and forced to toil in the suffocating heat sowing and harvesting rice. She approached one of the cabins and gingerly peered inside. It was a single room, half the size of her high rise living room back home. A packed dirt floor, a crumbling hearth. Sharp anguish pierced the air. Madison protectively cradled her taut stomach.     

The sweetgrass weaver in town had told her the story. How a handful of enslaved Igbo had tried to escape through the surrounding marshes. Beneath a new moon, they could not find their way out. When the choice was between the baying hounds or water snakes, some had decided to clutch their children tightly and drag them down into the depths. At least in death, their spirits would be able to fly home.

A slight breeze moaned. Grief floated on the sunlight like dust. Madison’s blood pounded hot, her head a cyclone of voices, her skin prickling cold. Her body shriveled against a crowding presence. The room was too small; not enough space for her, her unborn child, and the ghosts who still lived there.

The fetus began to scutter. Lunging for the cabin door, Madison spilled onto the ground. Screams clotted her throat. There she writhed in the windless sun, the child laboring to get free, the mother lolling in the grass, drowning.  

The labor had been sudden, three weeks early, and unusually fast for a first child. The baby arrived thin and lethargic, skin tinged indigo.  

It wasn’t until the baby was allowed to leave the hospital that Madison and Justin dared to give her a name. They had picked out “Bella” after Madison’s mother, Isabel. But when Madison held the child who had narrowly missed being born on a Georgia plantation, she insisted on “Kambili,” Igbo for “Let me live.”  

They brought Kambie home to Philadelphia and nestled her into the nursery of seafoam and sunshine. Madison went through those first hours in a haze of shock and gratitude: she was finally a mother.

But the longed-for child was five pounds of rage. For days on end, Madison offered the newborn her engorged breast, her pinky finger, a bottle. But the tiny thing would lock her jaws and throw her head from side to side, refusing succor.

“She’ll eat when she’s hungry,” the lactation coach promised. “The best thing you can do is keep calm. This is a tough period for a lot of new moms.”

Madison couldn’t stop sobbing. She should have been flooded with oxytocin, the hormone of motherly bliss. And she should have been feeling complete, now that she and Justin were finally parents. But the magic of it all was swept away by the baby’s cruel rejection.

“I can’t understand what I did to her,” Madison wept as Justin tried to comfort both mother and child.

“You kicked her out of her snug, little womb,” he said, kissing the top of his wife’s head. “It’s going to take some time for Kambie to recover from being evicted.”

Madison tried to believe that the baby was just sensitive or colicky. But something was wrong. Night after night, the frail infant would startle awake, her arms thrown open wide, her body wired with terror. When Madison tried to soothe her, Kambie howled as if she were bruising beneath her mother’s touch. When Madison tried to calm her with a warm bath, the baby flailed as if fighting for her life.

For two sleepless weeks, mother and daughter struggled. Kambie only quieted with her father, or sometimes beneath the hug of a weighted blanket. Madison couldn’t find her footing, her eyes ringed dark with doubt, her hair as brittle as her patience. The pediatrician begged her to relax, assuring her that every birth—even miraculous ones—had its challenges.   

But Madison was consumed with anger and shame; what kind of mother couldn’t satisfy the basic needs of her baby? What kind of newborn hated her own mother? 

When Justin hinted that he needed to make an appearance at an evening work function, Madison offered a brave smile.

“Go, we’ll be fine,” she said, hoping that Kambie, now six weeks old, would sleep the whole time he was away.    

As soon as he left, Madison heard Kambie on the monitor, squirming. At the first whimper, she rushed to the nursery. Gently lifting the baby, Madison pressed Kambie to her breast, trying to foreclose the inevitable storm. But the whimper hurricaned into shrieks. Madison paced the room, bouncing the child in her arms. She cradled her in the rocking chair, terrified that Kambie would stop breathing if she didn’t calm down.

 Please, Madison whispered. Please, help me.

This she prayed to her long-dead mother, or maybe it was to her grandmother. Or maybe it was to her great-great-grandmother, the enslaved woman who had stood in the cabin doorway smothering the cries of the infant in her arms, trying to decide where the child would suffer the least—on the blood-soaked plantation soil, or beneath the liberating waters of the dark swamp.

From the closed window wafted the scent of magnolias. The sea lapped the stiles of the rocking chair. Hounds bayed in the city darkness. Madison clutched her baby tighter, as the child’s eyes mooned in fear. Up from the murky water, the spirits had come to take Kambili home.  

“No!” Madison wept angrily. “We’re not going under.”

The humid sadness whisked out of the room. The baby exhaled deeply, then her body relaxed. Gingerly, Madison put the child to her breast. Now calm, Kambie bobbed her head and nursed.

“It’s OK, little one, you’re safe here with me,” Madison whispered. “Remember, we are the ones who lived.”