She looks at me and then at her hands like she don’t believe what I just say.
Across the room there’s a man they brought in last night who got beat up so bad that all he does is moan. I’m glad that he isn’t calling out like he did before, but a woman who’s having a baby is startin’ some yelling of her own. The big woman goes over to her, and when I see how that baby comes out, I felt like yelling myself. Thing is, after the baby comes, the mama starts to love on it, and that makes me cry. I want my own mama, and I wonder if she and Randall is together yet. And what’s my daddy gonna say? When I get home, he’s gonna whoop me good, but I don’t care. I just want to go home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
1830
Sukey
THEY BRING IN a boy that looks so much like one a mine that I can’t hardly stand to look at him. His head is so cut up I don’t think he’ll make it, but I stitch it and clean it up, all the while trying not to think of my own boys.
For a couple weeks this one don’t move, don’t do nothing, until one day when I’m cleaning his head, his eyes open and he gives me such a pretty smile that it hurts to see it. Then he goes right to sleep again. Next time he wakes up, he stays awake longer. He’s scared and he keeps asking me to come sit with him. But I got my work to do, and besides, I don’t let myself favor no boy like this when I know what’s coming down the road.
Every time I get around him, he asks questions. “Where am I?” he asks, and when he talks, I can tell he has schoolin’, maybe as much as me. I don’t say nothing, but that don’t stop his questions. “They gonna sell me for a slave?” I got to look away because he got those big eyes, and sometimes they still got a smile left in them. But he keeps talking. “I’m no slave. I’m free and I got took from Philadelphia. My daddy was a slave and it was bad for him. He’s gonna whoop me for sure when I get back.” I put my finger up to my mouth to shush him. Everybody I’m caring for in this sick house has big ears. That’s how Thomas keeps everybody in line, paying off the ones with the biggest mouths. Keeps everybody scared of everybody else.
“My head hurts and I want to go home,” the boy says, and then he turns away like he don’t want me to see him cry.
One night he tells me to bring over my can of lard, and when he starts rubbing my hands with the grease, I just sit there staring at him. Where’d he come up with that idea? I want to ask, and no sooner do I think it than he tells me how his sick mama liked to have her hands rubbed. He is some kinda chil’!
“Are you a slave?” he asks.
I nod.
“My daddy was born a slave. You born a slave?”
I don’t say nothing and he don’t ask again, just keeps rubbing my hands. I close my eyes and think about how, for the first years of my life, that word didn’t mean nothing to me.
I WAS BORN at a tobacco farm in Virginia where the mistress, Miss Lavinia, raised me from a baby and was like my own mother. We’d go out riding together, me dressed smart as her. She had me reading some and writing, and I had my own bed in her room. That’s how close we was, with me living up at the big house right there with her. She always kept me away when Master Marshall was around because he had no feel for slaves, but then he was mean as a snake with everybody, even her, and he was her husband. That last day when he come in all fired up, in all my thirteen years, I never see him mad like this. I was sure he was settin’ to kill her.
The first time he slap her, she stays sitting up. The next time she goes down. When he goes for her again, I jump him. He tries to shake me off, but I get ahold of his arm with my mouth and hang on. After he works me loose, he sends me flying against the wall. When Master Marshall comes at me again, Miss Lavinia starts crying for him not to hurt me. “She is only a child! She did nothing wrong,” she say.
“Your nigra bites me and she did nothing wrong?”
When she get to her knees in front of him, he look down at her so ugly that I think he gonna kill her.
“Marshall, I’m pleading with you not to harm her,” she say.
“Get this nigra out of here!” He pushes me at Papa George, his best slave, who runs things down at the barns. “Get her down to the quarters!”
“Please, Marshall,” I hear her say, “she’s like my own child.”
“Like your own child!” he yell. “The titles you give these nigras! You talk like she’s kin to you!”
When Papa George takes me down to the quarters to stay with Ida, all the while he talks to me. “You do what Ida say and you get along jus’ fine. In time Masta Marshall forget you down there and they bring you back up. And don’ go cryin’ and carryin’ on, so’s you don’t have Rankin payin’ attention to you.”
Hearing Rankin’s name make the hair on my neck rise up. The only man on that farm that I’s more scared of than Master Marshall is Rankin.
When Papa George hands me over to Ida, I get scared and start calling out to him, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me!” Two times he turns ’round like he’s comin’ back, and when Ida waves him on, I only yell for him louder. Ida hits me hard and tells me to hush up! That quiets me. Nobody never hit me before.
Ida’s a tall woman but skinny like a post. Even for a slave, she got a hard look about her, and I wonder if it’s because all she ever raised was boys. She sure don’t give off no warm feelings to me.
“You want Rankin in here?” she asks. Her eyes show worry when she says that, and I wonder how she can be scared of him when she had all those babies with him.
Two days pass and still no one from the kitchen house or the big house comes down to see me. I don’t have none of my nice clothes and I got only one pair of shoes and no combs for my hair. Still I keep thinking that any day Miss Lavinia will send Papa George down for me.
Everything at Ida’s is different from up at the big house. She lives in one room, and at night I got to sleep beside her on a dirty floor pallet. Then two of her boys come in and sleep across the room from us. One looks about my age and the other is older. In the days I’s there, they don’t say one word to me but watch me when they think I don’t see. I got on a pretty green dress of Miss Lavinia’s that was cut down to fit, but what they most keep looking at is the soft leather shoes on my feet. They don’t have none.
I do my best to help Ida out. It’s winter, so she don’t work out in the field. Instead she spins wool. She good about showing me how to card the fiber by pulling the wool through long nails. Even if it’s not a hard job, my arms and shoulders get tired real quick. But Ida don’t let me stop. She keep me going, saying, “You never know when Rankin’s gonna show up, and we better be working.”
One afternoon I ask about her children. “I only got boys. My older two was sold,” she says, not looking in my eyes. “Rankin say they was troublemakers, but”—she whisper—“it just that Masta Marshall needin’ the money. Now I got the two you see at night. My other one, Jake, he workin’ with Rankin and live with him at the overseer’s house.”
“Why does Jake stay with him and not with you?” I ask.
“Jake’s the only one almos’ as white as his daddy. He was just a little one when he sees his big brothers get sold. When he see them go, he don’ stop carryin’ on until Rankin tells him if he don’t shut up, he’s the next one. After that, Jake change. He don’t call me Mama no more, and one day he says, ‘Ida, you’ll never see me get sold. If I do anythin’, I’ll do the sellin’. Then he goes to live with his daddy in the overseer’s house, and after that he do everything he see his daddy do.”
“Would they ever sell you?” I ask.
She stops the spinning wheel and works the wool in her hands. “Maybe so,” she say real quiet.