Gone With The Dust

Gone with the Dust

By Craig Laurance Gidney

Auction Block:

They line the shelves and stare at you with their dead eyes, in frozen poses. The flashes of the digital camera animate them; it’s discomforting. The comical, inhuman stances, the dark fabric to represent skin, the tufts of wool to represent hair. They watch you as you walk in the room, the floorboards creak beneath you. These dark dolls and Negro memorabilia were someone’s prized possession. Your job is to catalog and appraise them, and maybe put them up for sale on an online auction site, where they’ll go for good prices.

You try to ignore them, but their silent faces tell you stories anyway. By stitch and by kiln, the tales are burned and sewn into you.

Her Eyes Scratched Out:

The mammy jar is cracked and faded. Her eyes are scratched out. She’s been glued together so many times that the black glaze of her skin has white spots, as if she has vitiligo. Her wide lips are scraped, lending her smile a sinister aspect. You can lift the lid of her head, and there’s an empty space where brains should be. Looking into it, you can hear a faint voice of ceramic shards breaking:

“My name was Betsy. But they never knew my name, all those years I worked for the Fitzwilliams’. I was just ‘Mammy.’ I washed their sheets and soiled underwear, scrubbed their toilets, raised their children. I knew their dirty secrets—that Mr. Fitzwilliams had a mistress, that Mrs. Fitzwilliams drank half the day away, and slept it off the rest of the day so she would appear like one of those perfect housewives you see in those magazines. But I was just Mammy.

“Saul and me saved enough money between the two of us to go visit his cousin in Paris a couple of times. Oh, those were good times. Cafes, walking up the Champs Des Elysees and seeing L’Arc De Triomphe… Mrs. Fitzwilliams just assumed we went to visit some sick relative in a shack. Only the little girl, Hester, knew that I spoke French. I think she almost had a heart attack when I offered to help her with her French homework!

“I had to move in with the Fitzwilliams’ after Saul passed; I couldn’t afford to live alone on what they paid me. They stuck me in the basement, next to the furnace, in a room just barely big enough. It was sweltering. It burned my brown skin black. My heart was broken into a thousand pieces—watching Saul die like that. It cracked like a vase. I didn’t care where they put me. In the basement, on a shelf. Cleaning dust or collecting dust. It didn’t matter. I was never Betsy to them. Just a mammy, broken into a thousand pieces.”

The Blackest Imp:

This doll looks like a Raggedy Andy dipped in tar. The hair is rough and prickly, and the lips are the color of watermelon and take over half its face, while the eyes were wide saucers. The doll mingles the horrific and humorous simultaneously.

These are golliwogs, British versions of pickaninnies, and they are highly coveted. Its story unfolds before your eyes:

The blackest imp spends most of his time in the corner of the blackest cave. Of course, it's a mess. It's filthy and musty, full of brown moss, the carcasses of crickets, old fish bones and porn magazines full of naked fairy girls. The cave goes half a league underground. Tubers and the frayed threads of roots glow in the light of his fiery eyes. A few baubles and treasures are strewn here and there: a half read book, a dusty kaleidoscope, a bit of cobalt glass. He never has time to clean or organize his treasures. Who does he hate the most? The eternally young elves; his mother and father, who gave him life and the cursed genes; and the fairyland that wishes that he would hide away.

He hears a group of giggling fairies and young elf bucks talking outside of his cave.

One of the males says, “I hear that he’s horrible looking.”

A fairy princess replies: “I’ve heard the same thing. But I still feel sorry for it.”

“You shouldn’t,” says the alpa-elf. “There’s a natural order to things, Buttercup. If he were out here, he would hurt you, without remorse. Those golliwogs are savages.”

Malevolence stirs in the desiccated prune of his heart. His gaze turns all into cinders. He longs to punch the elf, and rend him. He wants to rip the filigree wings off the stupid fairy princess. Let them talk that way about him then!

He just stews in his hatred in the back of the cave. Soon, he will make his move. Then, he will have a heart as black as his skin.

Hybrid

The lawn jockey is in great disrepair. The flesh, what’s left of it, is covered in rust that looks like age spots. The lantern is missing, leaving an extended hand holding nothing. How much would this go on EBay? You vacillate between wanting restore the thing, and give it a new coat of paint, or throwing it on the junk heap.

You take a picture of it anyway; photos of things rotting is very chic. But in between the flash and image captured on the small screen, a ghost image detonates in your brain. Your brain becomes the screen for a movie:

Brady looked at the finished product. It was awesome! It was size of that black midget actor with the famous catchphrase. The paint job was fresh, metallic. His little vest shone, the same color as his blood-red lips, and his cap was white and clean, like his pants. The eyes fluttered, and there was the whir of animatronics as the circuitry settled.

Brady pressed the remote control, and it stood up. There was an oversized clock around its neck, like that rapper who was in a reality dating show. He giggled. He’d sampled the rapper’s famous catchphrase, so when the robot won the battle, it would “Yeah, boyeee!” The arm that held the lantern was retrofitted with a buzz saw that could cut the metal of the other robots. The other arm had a gleaming blade of surgical steel his dad had made him. Both blade and buzz saw had been tested on abandoned car parts and cutlery that his friends bought him.

“Jez, that’s cool.” Hunter had walked up behind him. Brady hadn’t heard him come in. “What’re you going call him?”

“I dunno. I was thinking RoboGansta.”

Hunter laughed. “How about L’il Killah.”

“Or Fo’ Shizzle.”

“Word.”

Both boys burst out laughing, and flashed gang symbols to each other.

When they recovered, Brady said, “L’il Killah will make the other robots its bitch.”

“You wanna test it out on something? Mom’s got an old vacuum cleaner in the garage that’s going to the junk heap.”

Brady responded by pressing a couple of buttons on the remote control. The buzz saw spun, and L’il Killah said, “Yeah, boyeee!”

Junk

You close the door to room, and walk to the kitchen. A drink of water, to chase down the pill you’ve just popped. It will be about fifteen minutes before it starts working.

“You find any more treasures?” Bruce sneaks up on you like a cat. You flinch, and he says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare ya.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” you reassure him. “I just have a headache. All that dust. There’s some good stuff—a couple of antiques. I marked them for you. But most of it is junk.”

“You sure?” Bruce always likes to second guess you. But you are the expert appraiser. It’s time to play that card:

“Absolutely.”