Sukey gives out a loud grunt at the same time the runner lets out a yell that makes all of us jump. The two men tell the runner to shut up, but he keeps callin’ out for Jesus Lawd to help him with his pain. Sukey’s standing beside his bed and waves at me to bring the medicine for his back. I take over the jar while the two men start walking away.
The one missing his teeth looks back at me. “I’ll talk to Thomas about selling him off. Trader’s coming through. Least we’ll get a little somethin’ for him that way.”
Soon as they go, the runner stops callin’ out, but Sukey gives me a look that says I done wrong. “What did I do?” I ask her. She pokes the runner’s hand and he speaks for her. “You got to learn to shut up, boy,” he says, sounding mad as Sukey looks.
My head is hurting and I go to my bed to lay down. I didn’t do nothing wrong. I was just talking up for myself. And now what? They were talking ’bout sellin’ me off? What if they do it before Mr. Burton gets here? Then how will he find me? When nobody’s looking, I start to cry.
THAT NIGHT WHEN the cook brings in the food, the grits look like they always do. I set down the wood bowl ’cause I don’t feel like eating. I lay back on my bed, wondering how I can get myself out of here before they sell me for a slave. I’m crying when Sukey comes over with the can of grease. After she sits, she surprises me and grabs hold a my hand and starts rubbing it down. Least she isn’t mad at me no more, but I still can’t stop crying. I want to go home! I want to see my daddy. And where is Mr. Burton? Don’t he know I’m waitin’ on him?
She keeps rubbin’ away until I settle down some, and then I figure out that she scratchin’ out words in my hand. I’m a good speller, but it takes a while for me to figure out what she’s saying. Why don’t she just talk like everybody else?
“You got to be strong like my boys,” she writes.
Soon as I figure out what she’s writing, I sit up! She got boys! I wonder where they is. When she sees I’m going to talk, quick she holds her finger to her mouth. “You got boys?” I whisper.
She nods and squeezes her eyes tight before she looks at me again. I look around, and even though everybody’s sleeping, I whisper: “Are they here?”
She shakes her head.
“Are they slaves?” I ask. She nods again, but then she looks away and her chin starts wobbling like she’s gonna cry. Before I can say something, she gets up and goes to her room and shuts the door, and then I think I hear her crying.
All night I wonder where her boys is at and what’s going to happen to me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
1830
Sukey
PAN KEEPS ASKING if he’s gonna be a slave. What he don’t know is that he already is one. Now they’re saying that he’ll get sold. How’s he gonna make it through that? I wonder.
He asks me about my boys, but I don’t talk about them. It’s hard enough to think back to the good times when I met their daddy at the preacher’s farm.
AFTER JENNY DIES and they sell me away, the preacher’s nephew buys me and tells me he’s bringing me to an old couple because they need the help. They have a small place and don’t have no slaves but me, so I do all the cooking, and cleaning, and working in the garden.
The first while I don’t say much, but I watch how they are with each other. All that old man does is try to make his woman happy, running around, trying to please, but nothing he can do is good enough. One day I ask her why she don’t show him some kindness.
“You think that he was showing me kindness when he got that last girl—who you happen to be replacing—with a child?” she asks.
I don’t know what to say to her, so I just stand there looking at her.
“That’s right! That old fool!” she says. “We were never able to have children of our own, but he lays down with a servant one time, and when he gets up, she’s with a child.”
Again I stare. The longer I’m quiet, the more she keeps talking. “He said he was with the girl only one time.” She snorted with disgust. “One time! Who would believe that?”
My face gets hot.
“Don’t you worry,” she says, like she knows what I’m thinking. “I’ve told him that if he lays down with another woman, he’d best enjoy it, because the next time he’ll burn up in his bed.”
Her eyes blaze with the thought, and I decide then not to tell her that her husband has already taken a liking to my bottom. He pinches at it whenever he thinks he has me alone, and I learn to move fast when I see him coming. In time, though, I learn to beat the old man at his game. As long as I let him have a pinch now and then, at night he lets me sit by the fire when he reads the Bible to his old woman. She always falls asleep, but he keeps reading until his eyes get tired. One night just when the reading was good, he starts falling asleep himself.
“You want me to read?” I ask, taking a chance.
“Sure thing,” he says, and hands me the book like he don’t know any better. I start to read then, and every night after he hands me what he calls the Good Book. I read till they both drop off, and then I just keep going as long as I want.
I don’t know how, but seven years pass this way, each year the two of them moving slower, him trying to please her while pinching at me, and her happy with nothing he does.
One morning the nephew shows up and sees how slow the old man is getting and that the farmwork isn’t getting done. He tells his uncle that he’s going to buy him a Negro man to help with the farmwork. The two old ones go along with whatever the nephew wants, so the next day the nephew brings over the man he calls Nate. When I go to the well to pull up water, that Nate man is already at work fixing a plough. The old man and his nephew are in the house, and when Nate sees me pulling on the rope, heaving the water up, he comes over to help lift out the bucket. I see his arm muscles working that rope, and from then on all I know is I want that man for my own. I could say it was his laugh that got to me, sweet and deep, but that isn’t the truth. After I saw his working arms, what got to me was his eyes. He looked into mine and there was no way out.
AFTER I TELL the preacher’s wife that I’m carrying Nate’s baby, she tells her husband that it’s only right that we marry, so there we are, September 1815, when I’m already twenty-three, standing in front of that old preacher, who reads from his Bible before telling us we’re married.
I wear a blue calico dress that I sewed up from some new fabric that the old woman gave me. I made sure to cut it big so I could wear it right up until the baby comes. At least that’s what I planned, but as time goes on, my stomach pushes out so far that Nate laughs every time I try to make that dress fit. When two babies show up, I get worried that the old man and woman will think there’s too many to feed, but sometimes we don’t know nothing. When the old woman holds first one, then the other, you’d a thought they was hers. She looks up at me and says they was the prettiest babies she’s ever seen, and I have to say that she’s right.
We had two boys, and they both looked just like Nate. I won’t say too much more about that time except that we had five years where I forgot everything except how to be happy. The old woman and even the old man cared about our babies almost as much as Nate and me. They each had a favorite, and my boys knew which one to go to when they wanted something extra.
Nate and me ran the place, and we was good to those two old ones. The old man still pinched me if he could, but I never told my Nate, ’cause I was afraid he might do some pinching of his own. The nephew came every few months, but as long as things were moving along, he didn’t have no complaints. Fact is, Nate had the place running better than I ever seen it, and the nephew saw it, too.
When the day came that the old woman dies, we were all standing ’round her bed, one crying louder than the next. Not one month later, the old man goes down too. All along he was telling us that he was gonna give us our freedom, but when the nephew came, he said he didn’t know nothing about that and sold Nate and me to two different farms.
My Nate, a proud man, started cryin’ and asked the nephew not to do it, but that nephew didn’t care that we was a family. It takes two men to tie up my Nate and get him onto the wagon. That’s all I’s saying about that.