“Sometime in the next couple of weeks.”
“Good. Looks like Sukey put him to work. We’ll keep him in here till then. Sukey,” he calls across the room. “You got enough work to keep this one busy for another couple of weeks?”
Sukey gives a nod but looks away again, like she don’t have no time for me.
After the men go, I walk around all day wondering what to do. What if they take me from this place before Mr. Burton gets here? And why don’t he come? I know my daddy don’t come ’cause they’d take him for a slave, but why don’t Mr. Burton come? After a while I get so worked up that I can’t eat and I got to go lay on my bed.
That night Sukey already got on her nightdress when she comes out of her room and waves at me. I follow her into her room, wondering what’s going on, because she never does this before. She grabs down the slate board hooked to the wall and then points for me to sit on the edge of her bed. After she puts the lantern on the table, she grabs a small rag from her desk and sits beside me. “We getting you out,” she writes, and soon as I read it, she spits on the rag and wipes it off the slate.
“What do you mean?” I get so excited I stand up. She puts her finger up to her lips and waves me down again. She stands up and goes to the door to look out. When she sees that everything is quiet, she comes back with her finger at her mouth.
“What do you mean?” I whisper. “That you gonna get me home?” She nods. It feels like the sun come up inside of me. “How? How will you do that?” I ask.
“Some runners coming through and you go with them.” She spits again and wipes the words away.
Chicken skin comes up all over my arms and on the back of my neck. “Runners?” I whisper.
She looks at me deep and then nods.
“Do you know them?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “We just know that they need our help.” She writes so fast that I hardly have time to read before she erases.
“Does that mean I’ll be a runner?” I ask. She nods. I can’t help it. I stare up at her. “What happens if they catch us?” I ask.
She nods to the other room and I know what she means. By now I understand what they do to runners.
“They’re gonna sell me away if I stay here, right?” I ask.
She nods again.
“Then I want to go,” I whisper, but I’m so scared I got to pee.
“You got to do what they say.”
“I will,” I agree.
“They catch you, you can’t say nothing about who help you.”
I don’t need to be told that if I am caught and they find out Sukey helped me, they would hurt her bad as me. I shake my head. “I’d never tell on you.” She does something she never done before—puts her hand ’round my shoulders and gives a squeeze. It feels good. Now I just got to ask. “Sukey?” I say.
“Uhh?” she grunts, real quiet.
“Can’t you talk?” I ask her.
She shakes her head.
“Didn’t your mama teach you how to talk?” She looks at me like she wants to say something, but instead she opens her mouth big and points inside. It takes me a while to figure out that her tongue is gone. My stomach flops over when I think about her having no tongue. Where’d it go? I look around the room, trying to think of something to say; then it comes to me. “Why don’t you come, too?” I ask.
She takes my hand and holds it on her big belly. Quick, though, I pull back when I feel something in there bump at my hand.
“It’s moving!” I say, and even though I’m still thinking about her tongue, I can’t help but smile at her stomach. I touch it again. “You got a baby in there!” I whisper, but then I see she’s crying. I wait for a while before I ask, “Don’t you want this baby?”
She shakes her head.
I look up at her because I wonder what kind of mama don’t want her baby. Then I’m thinking that she won’t need to spit no more to clean the slate because of how wet she’s getting the rag by wiping at her face.
“Why not? Don’t you like babies?” I finally say when she stops.
“They sell them,” she writes, crying at the same time.
I don’t know what to do because I never see her like this. “Don’t cry, Sukey,” I say, and put my arm up around her shoulders as far as I can reach. “After I get to Mr. Burton’s, we’ll come back for you and this baby.”
She sends me back to bed then and closes the door to her room. In the morning her eyes is all puffed out. I feel bad for talking about her babies and making her cry, but mostly, I’m too scared to worry about her. During the night I remembered that sometimes they shoot the runners.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
1830
Sukey
WE HEAR THERE’S a strong runner coming up from Georgia. He’s been through before and didn’t make it, but those that try again got a better chance ’cause they know more of the places to find help. I’m sending Pan off with him ’cause that trader’s coming through, and who knows what’ll happen to him then.
I’m making the boy carry out slop pails and work his legs whenever I got the chance, and I see he’s getting stronger, but we don’t have much time left. Pan reminds me of my own boys, maybe ’cause he’s so full of questions, like my own used to be. “Mama, why this? Mama, why that?” He’s sweet, too, like my boys was. Trouble is, worrying about what going to happen to Pan makes me wonder where my own boys got to.
AFTER THE OLD couple die and they take Nate away, they sell me and my boys to a new place. It looks like the farm I grew up at, but this one is easy five times the size of Miss Lavinia’s home. Here there is also a mistress in the big house, but I never see her. Her three children are all away at school, and from what I know, she is most often away herself.
They put me in with Hester, a woman who is head of the kitchen house. Three overseers run the place, and from what Hester tells me, I got to be careful of them because they don’t stop at nothing. They live down by the quarters and don’t bother with the big house or the kitchen house unless there is a problem they have to work out.
At this farm they grow cotton, but for the fieldworkers it’s all the same. Cotton or tobacco, hard work is hard work, and nobody here gets finished without knowing there is plenty more behind it.
The master of this place I see only two times. The first time I’m working in the kitchen house, putting up peas with Hester, when he stops by with an overseer to look at me. He asks me if I have any questions and if I know the rules. “Yes, sir,” is all I say, and that seems enough for him. The second time I see him is after they take my boys.
THEY WAS GOOD boys, but they was only five years old when they took us from the preacher’s place. After a couple of months living at the new place, they start fussing at me to take them back home to find their daddy. I can’t keep watch over them ’cause I’m working in the kitchen house, and during the day they are looked after down in the quarters. At night they come back to me, but then they keep pestering me, where is their daddy and why don’t I take them home. They even cry for the old woman and the preacher man. They tell me they don’t like staying down at the quarters. The other boys fight rough, they say, and if I don’t take them to find their daddy, they’re going to go without me. I get scared and tell them about the patrollers out there and what they do to small colored boys if they find them out on the road. I don’t hold back and I scare them enough so they stay put, but soon after, they start getting into trouble. With another boy, they break in to the springhouse and help themselves to milk and a whole kettle of pudding. They’s lucky that Hester is the one who finds them, even though she paddles them hard.