What the Clerk Wrote

The record room in Spanish Town is cold, because the machines that keep the paper alive do not care about the people reading it.

Errol had been there four days. He had come with a folder his aunt gave him at the airport, and in the folder was everything his family knew about itself: two death certificates, a marriage certificate from 1931, a photograph of a woman on a verandah in a white dress, and a sheet of ruled paper on which his grandmother had written down what her grandmother told her.

Four generations, in a folder you could hold in one hand.

He had done what the guides tell you to do. He had worked backward, one certificate at a time, never skipping, because the moment you skip you are guessing and the moment you guess you are building a house on somebody else’s foundation. Death gave him birth. Birth gave him a parish. The parish gave him a baptism register, and the baptism register gave him a mother’s name where he had expected a blank.

And on the fourth day, the line ran out.

· · ·

What he had, at the end, was a page of a slave register.

The registers were returns of property. Every three years the owner of an estate had to submit a list of the people he claimed, and the list was ruled into columns, and the columns had headings, and the headings were name, age, color, country, and remarks.

Under Rose Grove Pen, in the column for name, in a clerk’s steady copperplate, was written:

Nancy.

Under age: 14.

Under color: Sambo.

Under country: Creole.

Under remarks: nothing at all.

That was the whole of her. Six letters, two numbers, and two words that were not a description of a person but a description of what somebody had decided a person was worth knowing about.

Errol sat with it for a long time. He had been ready, he thought, for the register. Everyone who does this work knows where the paper stops and why it stops there. What he had not been ready for was how much room was left on the line after her name. The clerk had ruled the column wide, wide enough for three words, four. He had used one.

· · ·

The morning the entry was made, it rained before six and then cleared, and by eight the yard at Rose Grove was steaming.

She was not called Nancy. She was called Nancy by the bookkeeper and by the overseer and by the woman in the kitchen who was afraid of the overseer, and she answered to it the way you answer to a sound that is aimed at you. But her mother had given her a name on the eighth day, the way her mother’s mother had done, and that name was said only twice in her life that she could remember: once when it was given, which she could not remember but had been told about, and once by her mother, low, into the side of her neck, the night before her mother was sold to a property in Vere.

She was nine then. She was fourteen now. She had kept the name the way you keep water in your hands, which is to say she had lost most of it and had never once put it down.

That morning the clerk set his table under the cotton tree with his inkwell and his ledger, and they were brought to him in a line, and the overseer stood at his shoulder and said the names.

“Nancy.”

She stood where she was told to stand. The clerk did not look up. He was a young man with a sunburned neck and a sore hand, and he had four properties to get through before the rains came back, and the ledger was ruled for two hundred lines.

“Age?”

“Fourteen,” the overseer said.

She was fifteen. She knew this because she had been born the year of the big storm, and everybody counted from the storm. She did not say so. You did not speak to the man with the book. The woman ahead of her in line had spoken to the man with the book, three years before, to say that her son’s name was written wrong, and what came of it is that the name stayed wrong and the woman lost a day’s food.

The pen moved. The pen stopped.

“Next.”

That was all of it. It took less time than it takes to draw a bucket. Somewhere behind her a child was crying and being hushed, and the cotton tree moved in the wind that comes before more rain, and a girl who was fifteen and had a name in her mouth that nobody in that yard had ever heard walked back to the second gang and picked up her hoe.

In the remarks column, the clerk considered for a moment whether to write anything. There was a thing he might have written. She had been sick in the spring and had been put in the hothouse for eleven days, and it was the kind of detail that sometimes went in.

He did not write it. The ink was thick and his hand hurt and the column was for the attorney’s convenience, not for history, and there was no history, there was only the next line and the line after that.

He blotted the page and went on.

· · ·

Errol photographed the page with his phone, and then, because the phone felt insufficient to the occasion, he paid for a paper copy at the desk and carried it out into the heat in a cardboard folder.

He had been building the tree in software, the way everyone does now. It asks you for fields. It wants a given name and a surname and a date of birth and a place, and it puts a little gray silhouette where a photograph should be, and if you leave a field empty it marks the entry incomplete and shows you a small orange dot, as though the failure were yours.

He typed Nancy into the given name field.

The surname field sat there blinking. She had not been given one, or she had been given one later, or she had taken one from a man or from a district or from the estate itself, the way so many of them did, and if she had, it had not survived to reach him. He left it empty. The orange dot appeared.

For the date of birth the software wanted a day and a month. He had an age in a column in a year. He typed the calculated year and marked it estimated, and it was wrong by a year, but he would never know that, and it would be copied by his cousins in Florida and by a woman in Birmingham he had never met who was descended from Nancy’s sister, and in forty years it would be in a hundred trees in exactly the form he had entered it.

For place of birth he typed Jamaica, which is a country, and not a place.

Then he sat looking at the screen in the parking lot with the engine running and the air conditioning coming up cold, and he thought about the empty space on the line after her name, the four words the clerk had room for and did not use, and he understood that he was doing the same thing. He had a box for her and she did not fit in it. Nobody had ever built a box that she would fit in. That was the point of the box.

He saved the entry.

On the drive back to Portland he found he was talking to her out loud, which embarrassed him, and which he kept doing anyway. He told her his name, and his mother’s name, and his mother’s mother’s name, all the way down the line to her, so that at least once, somewhere, the whole thing had been said in order.

He got as far as her and stopped, because there was nowhere further to go.

“Nancy,” he said.

It was not her name.

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