Little Nothing

Introduction

I began Bess and Jonnie’s story in 2019, a Camp NaNoWriMo project that spun out of a short piece whose chief charms were atmospheric. Inside that short piece, it seemed, were characters longing for more life, worthy of closer study: two girls who might elucidate what I loved most about my troubled home state, Florida; two girls who might exorcise some of the demons attendant to growing toward queerness in Florida.

In 2023, Florida life is even more fraught—rife with attacks on higher education, book challenges, and transphobic legislation—and its environment even more fragile than when I was a child. My hometown lies at sea level; it seems likely to change dramatically, perhaps even disappear, in my lifetime. Florida’s waterways, the heart of its unique character bubbling out through limestone veins, are at highest risk. Its ocean and Gulf, its vast St. Johns River and vaster Lake Okeechobee, its cold springs, its vital mingling of salt and fresh in marshes and wetlands: its vital mingling of salt and fresh in marshes and wetlands: its easiest sell, in tourist terms, comes cheapest for lawmakers and corporations alike. The devil’s main temptation these days is to give in to despair.

Yet since I was young, first reading The Yearling and then Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Made for Love, Milk Blood Heat, books by Sarah Gerard and Lauren Groff and Erin Slaughter and Joe Fletcher and Linda Buckmaster, I believed my state was worthy of art and representation on the page. I write frantically against its demise by climate change or political destruction, general apathy or targeted, venomous mockery. I write most specifically in hopes of capturing the magic in its water, the texture and sorrow of its history, of fracturing the neon façade. Bess and Jonnie’s story is an old one, maybe not one readers expect to find in the swampy wilds—beauty and devotion on the frontier, Black horsewomen and spellbinding seamstresses, sapphic love in a time of utmost human cruelty, joy found in strange beasts and the oft-othered self. It’s never been difficult for me to believe magic lives in the Florida landscape. I’ve always hoped to convince others of the possibility the state holds—for restitution, for progress—even on its current path.

The best salve for the deepest wounds is to love openly.

Dee Holloway

April 2023

Schenectady, New York

Chapter One

It was market day, and Jonnie had bled through her best shirt.

She hissed as I drew the shirt over her head, turning slightly so that I could see the gash running cockeyed over her ribs. There was a bandage on it, but whoever had put it on had done a poor job. She swore when I touched the edge, where blood welled beneath the cloth.

Well, if you’d just let me do it in the first place— My fingers were gentler than my words. I unwound the stained cotton from her side and dropped it on the hay scattered in the back of the wagon. Who tied this up, Keke? Somebody else with hooves instead of hands?

Bess, she said, almost a whine. I kissed her cheek to keep her distracted while I swabbed the wound with water from a flask Ma passed me. Lord a’mercy, this couldn’t have waited?

Waited ‘til what? You fainted right off the cart here? You already ruined your nice shirt. I folded the aforementioned shirt twice and pressed it to her side, so that part of it covered her chest and part of it the gash. Here. Hold this. Press it down hard.

I know how to dress a wound, she muttered, but she did what I said. I heard Pa snicker above our wagon horse’s hoofbeats. What am I supposed to wear then, Miss Fix-It?

I didn’t have an answer for that, though we’d need to come up with something and right quick. The market town that served Sawgrass was but fifteen miles north and we were nearly there. She couldn’t go sauntering through the stalls and tip her hat to the church ladies with her bosoms out to the world. I was the only lucky soul who got to admire those bosoms. But we had more urgent matters just then, because if the bite in her side wasn’t seen to, she wouldn’t be sauntering anywhere at all.

Not to mention Jonnie’d think it a poor display of her expertise if word went around the limerunners she trained up so nice were still liable to bite—her or anyone else.

Who gave you this anyway? The sound of my voice would act as an anchor, and the question would force her mind to focus. I glanced at the boy trotting behind the wagon on his placid marsh-tackie, mounted to the side of the six limerunners following us in a string to market. The solid ponies were better at herding half-broke limeys than any dog. That nasty blue-eyed one there? I’ll bet it was him.

Not him, Bess! Aaron, Pa’s horse-boy, piped from my left. He winked his own blue eyes, one and then the other, and lifted his hat toward the limey my joke had been aimed at. A single icy eye glared out of a white blaze scarring the colt’s otherwise inky coat. She was out ‘fore light in Sanctus River to catch a few more.

Is that right, I said, not at all a question, and tugged the linen strip in my hand just a little tighter than necessary. It wound around Jonnie’s ribs once and again, tucked beneath itself at intervals to form a basic plait. Her heart thudded under my palm, too fast and fluttering. And how’d that go for you, Jonnie?

She didn’t answer, just pressed her lips together and stared hard at the clear sky above us.

We’d planned to ride to market with six half-broke limeys, and so we’d proceeded, which meant that she hadn’t managed to catch any extra. Keke, the trained beast trotting in her own string, belonged to Jonnie and would never be sold. Six were what she and Pa had agreed on with a few people looking to buy, and so why she’d needed to go out and try to haul in a couple more…

I pictured it: Jonnie in the shallows of the river, water to her hips and stock-still in the gray dawn. No one knew why dawn and dusk were the best time for catching limeys, no more than we knew why the fish bit during a downpour. Folk understood little better how their lives went—the mysterious way they spawned in Florida’s brackish wetlands like tadpoles, then clambered to land like frogs. They could swim like gators and trot like any old pony. They were hard to track on dirt, near-impossible in the water. All their lives the water called to them, seeped from them, turned their gaits fluid and their eyes cloudy. Their hides retained a slickness, their snake-necks a glimmer of gills no longer quite used for breath. Their bones lay close to their skins like the limestone from which they rose. The strangeness of them prompted most folk to call them the devil’s own steeds, and lured a few, like Jonnie, close enough to—

Well, to bite.

I’d seen her rope the vicious water horses and drag them ashore, and I’d seen them bolt for deep water or the dense undergrowth of mangroves and marsh before she could lay hands on them. I’d seen a human body and a limey collide more times than I cared to.

Her arms grappling with the horse’s head, and its predator’s teeth sinking into her ribs. Limeys didn’t have much mane to cling to; they were wily as eels and twice as mean, and every bit of them was a weapon.

I sighed and knotted the linen at the back, above the smooth dip of Jonnie’s waist. Anyone else would’ve just tucked the ends in snug, but I left a torn strip loose, long enough to tie a particular way. Sun for day and moon for night, bind this wound nice and tight. It was a little nothing Jonnie’s mother Maria had taught me, one of the litany of blessings and curses that lived in me far more deeply than anything I’d learned in church. Some of them had come down the peninsula with Maria after she’d escaped a Carolina plantation, from the western shores of Africa before that; some were French-Carib chants from the Maroons along the Lake of Spirits; some I believed Maria had woven herself, singing them to me and Jonnie as she braided our hair. Maria wouldn’t be surprised when we got home and she heard I’d had cause to use it on her daughter.

My mother’s voice rose above the hoofbeats. I’m meaning to carry some of your old things to the church ladies, Bess. For the orphans. But they can spare a shirt, I’m sure, to another soul in need.

Ma’s eyes creased with stifled laughter as Jonnie gingerly tugged the shirt over her head. I pulled the hem of her trousers up to the shirt’s tail while she twitched her shoulders.

Quite fine, Ma said, all serious, and this time Pa laughed outright. Ma shook her head, one hand clasping her hat in place. Why didn’t you tell us earlier, Jonnie?

I figured it’d be all right. She glanced at me, her dark eyes rolling. I been bit before.

If that wasn’t the truth.

Well, I said, you’re washing that shirt yourself. I bet you can’t get the bloodstains out.

What do you bet?

Five cents’ worth of candy from Mr. Lawrence’s store.

Or something sweeter, Jonnie said, a bit of smile touching her lips. She kissed my cheek, exactly where I’d kissed hers a few moments before, and heat wriggled in my belly. Aaron laughed at us from his pony, but I didn’t care. The sun was out with no sign of summer storms, and the market lay just ahead, a scrawl of bright tents and wagons and the wood-shingled roofs of stores in town. We had wares to sell and money to spend and warmth had come back into Jonnie’s face. Her cheeks filled up with their usual golden-brown hue instead of the ashen tone of pain and blood loss. The morning was good again.

Thank you for taking care of me, Bess. Her hand curled into mine and she placed both of them on her knee, her brown fingers knobby and long and mine paler, dimpled. Good thing you did, else I wouldn’t have been fit to ride later.

I snorted. Like I could’ve stopped you one way or the other.

Races were always the most popular feature of any market day. There was even a little ring between Sawgrass and the market town of Sawyer, a dirt oval pounded by horses’ hooves, warmbloods and limeys alike. Grudges were settled on the track, and breeders’ prides tested, but mostly people came to see the limeys run, to drink and bet whether blood would be spilled on the dirt that afternoon—and whether that blood would be human.

I sent up a quick prayer that Jonnie would come out of the races whole. She’d already sacrificed a pint of blood to limeys today.

The wagon drew up in our usual spot far to the back of the livestock tents where the limeys would be corralled and prevented from savaging people who came to gawk. Every market in our parts had a special round barn dug with ditches inside for the limeys to wallow; it kept their coats slick and seemed to sweeten their temperaments. While Ma unhitched our horse, Pa came around to help Jonnie and Aaron herd the water horses into their temporary home.