Camille T. Dungy

Author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award and the Library of Virginia 2007 Literary Award, Camille T. Dungy has received fellowships from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf. Assistant editor of Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Dungy is associate professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

The progress of civilization, in every country inhabited by
savages, depends much on the local situation; in its capability of
carrying on a commercial intercourse with enlightened nations,
who have it in their power to introduce amongst its inhabitants
the arts of civilized life.

—Captain John Adams

Her mother sings warning of the new world

You will know the place

when the children run paler and their mother’s breasts

are high with quelled milk.

Do not let yourself love

the man who says he planted each blade of the sod

you admire. The grass is from England, and each steer

it markets is worth more than the life of hands

whose work is to bury then raise what this Englishman takes

for his own.

He will feed you well. In the high sun you will taste

the juice of sapodilla and crushed cherries.

For this quenching

women will forgo sleep while you dream—netted

and cool—on the white yield he allots to your body.

The Development of the Scientific Mind

The bones of the runagate, Ben, whom the Doctor ordered hung

then buried, were in due time dug up and delivered to him.

And the Doctor, on receiving Ben, scrambled, then ordered,

then hung him again. When Molly came with the draught

into the study, Ben’s legs quaked. But he’d stopped running off.

Curious, Molly drowned a cat. With silver cutlery she returned before dawn,

she separated fat from viscera, seeking the blood source that compels a beast to run.

She allowed herself one page each time she dusted the Doctor’s books, new volumes

ordered from England and the Continent. The books proved women distinct from men,

though nothing pictured explained why she was held apart.

Decoding each drawing with the keys she had gathered, she traced in dust

maps her rag would soon erase: the musculature of men, the dark, nested organs.

Molly could touch flesh and force change, but she was just the Doctor’s girl.

Lila in the quarter did the herbs and birthing for the place. Few trusted Molly,

who kept close to Ben’s bones all day when the Doctor went away.

After ‘Dolphus caught her slicing into Marlo’s roll-eyed, slavered, Good Lord

still panting pup, no one but the Doctor let Molly hold her quick hands near them anymore.

The New Hand on the Place Sets His Sights on Molly

Now they noticed

her body had wandered

into breasts and hips,

and through her sack cloth dress

they could sense the possibilities.

But before the other men had a chance to hold her body

in the dark circles of their eyes,

before they could lie down with the thought of her

against the contours of their minds,

before they could begin to figure how a week or a life

or whatever time chance and the woman granted

would redeem the sleep

they’d lose loving her,

Molly had become Shad’s girl.

Dinah in the Bedroom

Dinah kept as still as she could, so as not to wake Jennings , while she considered

how she might rid herself of him. Last week, the girl who kept the kitchen disappeared.

Jennings had been in his cups the night before and didn’t wake till nearly three that afternoon.

Dinah served him the bread and onion he prefers when his stomach’s raw from brandy,

so it was the next day before Jennings called for Hepsie and nobody came. Not that girl

nor either of the kitchen girls he’d called Hephzibah before her. Jennings had no help now

but Dinah. She tried to pull away to use the slop jar, but Jennings , possessive even in sleep, gripped her

all the more fast around the waist. She didn’t dare wake him with tonight’s dose of amber fire

still burning in his belly. If she could trust herself to keep still she would cry,

but so long as Jennings kept her in his bed Dinah feared even her water

would be unable to escape.

Conditions of the Sale

Jennings’ belly was a brandy barrel rolling over Dinah. She really must be Lena ’s child.

She remembers the haunt kiss of her mother’s cool lips, that ghost

of a girl who had added four babies to the Jackson stock—the three boys were sold

for a neat profit—and was still no less pale nor any more firm of flesh

when her fifth pregnancy went wrong in some way that made her useless

to Jackson but all the more subject to Miss Amy. The cooper never built a barrel

so brutal as the one that Lena died in, nails jutting toward the core to test her corporeality.

What crime had Jackson attributed to her mother that day he gathered all the hands

to witness the breathing, beating-hearted Lena packed into the studded barrel

and rolled an acre down a hill? Dinah didn’t know. But she did know

less than a week later Jackson started seeing Lena walking all around

the property. Miss Amy saw her too. She understood the haunting was Lena

finally finding a body to possess. While Dinah served the table, her skin looking delicious

as morning cream, or while she was bent to sweep the floor in Jackson ’s rooms, Lena was busy

crowding the father’s features out of the daughter’s face. The buzzards weren’t done

circling Lena’s grave before Miss Amy had Dinah sold far off the Jackson place.