His Teeth

Breena Clarke

Bazemore Plantation

Bazemore, Maryland

1781

His gleaming, ivory-colored teeth could have stood in his mouth for another lifetime, but each fell beneath the knife. They bound him to a plank. They dosed him with alcohol to quiet his howling as the horse surgeon pillaged his incisors, his molars, and his bicuspids. They took his teeth because he was a persistent escapee, had run away seven times and bore marks of whipping and brining.

There were no rotted teeth in his mouth, no broken ones, none were misshapen, and not a single one was missing. Very great was the resistance of the teeth to being pulled out. They were moved not at all by the horse surgeon’s pliers. He reconsidered and took up a knife and an awl and cut away the gums until the teeth could hold no longer. Several times the man nearly drowned on the massive amounts of blood in his mouth. Yanked upright, turned over a bucket to spit, salted water flushed into his mouth, more whiskey poured down his throat, the work continued until each tooth was dug out undamaged. Each was cleaned, admired, and carefully placed in a wired device fitted for the master’s mouth.

The enslaved man woke from his stupor with a head that pounded, throbbed, burned, and exploded with a thousand pains, pains in every different area of his mouth. His tongue gave him the story when his head cleared sufficiently. His teeth had all been taken! Each was dug out and had left a hole proceeding to an endless fount of pain in his gouged and ripped flesh. He would have knocked himself senseless with a sledgehammer to end his own sufferings, but having been drained of massive amounts of blood, he hadn’t the strength to raise his arms. Despite surviving many whippings and brining in his past, he died three days after the extraction of his teeth.

Oh, the stench!

The master thrived with his teeth. Hence my completely unforeseen, unimaginable, but very serious problem. His teeth smell. Yes, of course, his teeth must smell, all things must smell of themselves. I am the expert here. But these teeth have a stench of anxiety, nay torture. A foul history.

The human’s inability to appreciate the distinctions between discrete odors, aromas, fragrances, and fetors and the complex dispositions and attitudes that they reflect confounds me. Can you not smell it from my position downwind of his mouth? How can a human take the living teeth of another hound of its kind? Teeth are life and destiny. With them I live. Without them I will die. The set of essentials that My Others, bitches gone before me, have bequeathed to me contain a secret code decipherable only by me, a trail leading to My Others that I travel along in my mouth. Why I sit some time with my mouth open a bit, and the breeze within me and the breeze without of me waft across my palate, my canines, my molars and oh, so many paths along my incisors.

The master adores himself in his new ivory-colored teeth that replaced his poor, painful, brown stumps. He preens before the mirror when he shaves his face. He draws back his lips and grins at his new teeth. Oh, what a revolting rush of air comes from the loathsome contraption holding the purloined teeth. Purloined? Yes, the man was his owned thing as I am also an owned thing of this master. But the teeth were in the mouth of his owned thing. And the enslaved did not abandon his teeth. They did not fall from his jaws. These teeth have a foul provenance, and sadly the master cannot understand how profoundly troubling his bitch dog finds his breath now. I am highly sensitive to malodors in the mouth. I can say where he has been, against what tree he brushed his leg, what gamy sausage he had for his meal, what fears and worries, and when last he mounted his wife all from the winds out of his mouth or his ass. Am I not the one who knew the Widow Langston’s plum pudding would cause him dyspepsia before he’d had a second spoonful? I tried to warn him. I nudged his hand. I have smelled every nuance of his health and vigor these five seasons. I smelled the mephitic air of each one of his teeth that sickened and died and fell from his mouth. Chipped, broken, stinking black each one was. Each one of these small, misbegotten stumps was further encased in pus risen from his pocked, enflamed gums when it fell from his head and, though dead, was alive with its unique toothy odor. I have smelled each of his feasts on his teeth, the meat of cows, pigs, and lambs masticated by these troublesome teeth. Or not. His teeth’s failures have caused most of his stomach’s complaints and I have comforted him when his wholly inadequate incisors throbbed for hours on end causing him to roar with the pain and outrage. Swallowed nearly whole, badly chewed, his dinner often lay noisily on his stomach or was regurgitated onto the floor. Frankness requires me to admit that, on these occasions, I have retrieved this detritus from beneath his feet.

Her nose is a bitch’s great badge. I know what I know through this portal. When he whistles for me, I am unwilling to go to his side now because of the smell. I want to hang back. I do hang back from him a slight bit. I find it hard to lift my head. I do not raise it very far. He is beginning to notice. That, of course, worries me. If he sees that I have changed because he has changed, I fear what may happen. Bitches have been shot for being mad or disobedient. The untenable situation for this bitch is that this man has taken the teeth of his recalcitrant slave, who would not submit to his commands or his punishments, but who had healthy, vital teeth and had them forcibly taken from himself and put to work in his master’s mouth. This, this is the story that his mouth’s foul miasma tells me each time he whistles for me. Oh, what a swamp of wretchedness, blood, brine, and torn gums! I smell it over and over. They pinned his arms, and they tied his head to a board. I cannot lift my face toward his teeth. The smell of him tells his transgression. The smell of his teeth holds a lifetime’s register of barbarity endured, as well as the hauteur, the bombast, the privilege of the one who inflicts these outrages. I am haunted. I am hounded by it. It is a horror!

Perhaps it is the failing in our canine souls that makes us behave as our noses tell us. A bitch is a bitch and a pussy will stalk and trap a mouse. We are compelled. My Others have led me away from the master’s place, his scraps of meat, his fragrant, warm barn. Unlike the enslaved ones, I was free to go. No tether was about my neck. I was born in his barn, and he took me up. I have lived at his side, rested my muzzle on his knee, been caressed by his hand, and have eaten beneath his table every day since I left My Other’s teat. However, I walked away from him very early this morning. I lay beside his bed last night in my accustomed place. His teeth had been put into a porcelain dish. He slept deeply, his body letting go at both its ends. Helpless in his sleep, I could feel sympathies for the pains he’d endured. And then I smelled his teeth’s ignominious, gut-wrenching malodors from where they sat upon his chiffonier. The stench of passage and whipping and brining played again and again in my nose’s brain. I could bear it no longer. Let him believe what he will about me. Perhaps that I slipped out, that I lost my way and that I drank from poisoned water? I can no longer endure the stench of his misdeeds. His teeth! The dreadful, repugnant winds from his teeth make my nostrils burn and my stomach lurch. My Others said, “Go!” I rose quietly, I yawned to the limits of my jaws and padded away softly. I am full of pups now and do not want them to be born in this man’s barn.