seed will make her black-and-blue. If she feels the seed's pressure under twenty skeins of new silk, over twenty mattresses piled on a box bed, you know she is a true princess.
Princess always born without skin.
When Arrienne was born, she went through many tests, though at the time it was not clear how many, since some tests were wrapped inside other tests and yet others inside those others. Some were immediate and apparent, and others belonged to the future, but their seed was inside the others, the way a fetus is inside its mother or future generations are inside those of the past.
The first test was when Arrienne's father pronounced a verdict: "Is not mine, is jacket."
His relatives came, led by his mother, but not to bring gifts. They came to inspect the baby for proof of false paternity, a posse of ten and every one a witch, eight female and two males. Some of them could not read a book but they could scroll a child like it was a book leaf, and there was no sign written in flesh, no fine vein-print, that they couldn't spell out with a moving finger: the way a baby turned its head, a certain cast in the eyes, the way the toes curled or the fingers made themselves into fists—anything, no matter how minute, they could look at and tell you if the newborn was one of theirs, and whose it was, if it was not. Never mind that the mother could have been forgiven if at the outset she failed to recognize her own offspring among a dozen others, since babies are almost always born nondescript. Fun and joke aside, how many babies have the same old man's wrinkled face, the same funny-looking head, misshapen from being haul-and-pulled-about by nature or forceps or midwife or doctor's hands, or by all of the above, on their hazardous journey to the outside? All of them!
But this Christie clan was a different breed of genealogical detective, massy mi massa, massy mi God. They brought to their private investigations a clairvoyance, a special faculty, that you might call self-righteous but Tumelans call frigging facetyness.
Still, in truth, the princess Arrienne was not a nondescript baby, which meant that she was singularly readable as a newborn. She was of an unusual largeness, weighing in at ten pounds nine ounces, almost killing her mother on her way down the birth canal, and for a long period she continued in this way, growing without let or permission of her aghast elders until she reached the age of eighteen, when she became six feet one inch tall and suddenly stopped growing. Because she was a female, this height appeared more than it really was, and it created a great disturbance because it meant she was unlikely to attract any man in a country of mainly small and average-sized men.
The princess Arrienne was moreover excessively pigmented, her skin even at birth the color of the wettest molasses, with a purple tinge under the surface. This purple had an elusive quality not unlike the blue that people sometimes glimpsed like a halo around the edges of Moshe Fisher's skin.
Later in life this contributed to her extraordinary good looks, as did her large bones and excessively thick hair, which was also very black with a rich purple tinge, and which, years after she stopped combing it, lay on her shoulders like hemp that had been twisted and then unmade and let loose. There was so much of it on the infant—not only was her head covered in the soft curly mass, but her arms and legs were brushed by a purplish down—that she could have been mistaken for a toddler of two-three years, a female King Richard with premature hair instead of teeth.
Nobody in George Christie's family had the skin color that was found on the little princess. The hair was worse, since all the Christies were dry-head. Nor were her bold Maroon face and unaccountably Arawak nose in any way Christie attributes: the Christies were Red Ibo—and I mean well red, ginger red, red-nigger red, with faces that seemed to have been painted on a flat surface, barely present and oddly receding, so one had the impression that the normal protrusions—nose, eyebrow, mouth-lip, eyelids—were disappearing by increments, as if the family had invented its own personal evolutionary process which was moving toward a physiognomy of a different kind.
Well then, the child's byzantine skin (purple-black!) and crude size were living proof, without investigating further, that there was not a Christie bone in her body. The relatives were outraged that the mother had had the effrontery to call George's name, and for a moment it seemed as though the case was going to end in disaster.
"Tell di gal fi go find her pickni rightful puppa and stop call George name."
"I know the mother well black, but no child who have Christie blood ever look like this. No matter what, if it was George child, the blood, the color would dilute."
One of the male seers, embarrassed by the knowledge of his own sexual proclivities, felt compelled to fairness: "It must be true him had dealings with her, for if him never go to school him name couldn't call," adding sheepishly so the others could barely hear him, "but it look to me like shi mistaken."
"Shut yu mouth, Ronald," a sister-witch commanded in righteous wrath. "You don't know nutten. Jus because yu run up an down di countryside widout boots so enny old fowl can call yu name with hinpunity don't mean everybody is di same."
But the grandmother, Mama Mai, was a better pedigree sleuth than all the rest of the family put together. With patient trawling over the baby's skin (that is to say, by dint of haul-an-pulling the woman's child), she discovered two indisputable marks of her son on the princess's immeasurably tender parts.
First, Arrienne all of a sudden began demonstrating a way of screwing her little mouth shut that gave her a very bloody-minded look, the exact mark of George's stubbornness, the scale of which his mother had found ineffable when he was a boy growing up. Mama Mai frequently said her son George was stubborn to stupidness. Now she let out a loud cackle. "Stiffnecked as mule batty, when mule decide fi siddung an don' move, no matter how yu bawl out, Skuya! Skuya!" Stubborn as a mule's arse, no matter how hard you shout or hit its backside. This one will devour her mother and father. Move over, Biswas.
Secondly, on the little naked bottom, so tiny that any eyes except a woman's trained in decades of finding fault with other women's daughters' offspring, would have missed it: the green-and-yellow-striped birthmark looking like a piece of sugarcane that had been cut off at the joint. It was the family mark. Every member of the Christie family had it, and at intervals, like a heraldic flag it flared up an angry tomato red and they could not sit on their buttocks. For this reason, the Christie homes were known for their beautiful embroidered cushions.
Mightily pleased with her own skillfulness, the grandmother emitted another gleeful cackle, rose up, and dusted off her hands, one, two, brisk, brisk. "See it dere! A George pickni. Jus like every one a oonu Christie, gal a-go fart fire when moon rise. Case close. Cetlyn, explain to di mumma seh shi haffi mek di baby sleep pon har belly when moon shine becausen shi cyaan lie down pon har back dem-deh time. Especially inna Augus, when cane crop." Cetlyn, tell the mother to lie her on her stomach when the moon rises, especially in the month of August, cane-crop month, the cruelest month, for twenty silk rolls will not alleviate the pain she will feel from that candy-striped pictogram that blooms on her royal ass. "Oonu come."
The princess was redeemed, the case happily closed, and the witches departed, leaving gifts of money, clothing, and a large plastic dolly baby with blond plastic hair and china-blue eyes. When Arrienne was old enough to play with the doll, she gouged out its eyes so that they hung downward on the string which had been hidden against its belly under its frilly pink crinoline. The string was attached to the eyes by some complicated inner contraption and, when pulled, caused the doll to cry out, "I love you, I love you, I love you," in a high squeaking voice. After the eyes were gouged, the doll never spoke again.
It was the first and the last doll that Arrienne was ever given.
This was because, from her earliest years, her father set out to make her into a boy.
Having proven by relative that the baby was his in spirit and
