“You bes’ get those two in line before they put them out in the fields!” Hester tells me. She only has one girl, a little one, Clora, who is easygoing, so Hester don’t know what I’m up against. I tell her maybe she don’t know how hard it is to raise up those two on my own.
“Don’t you go gettin’ on me!” she says. “I’m just tryin’ to do right by you. Those boys a yours need shapin’ up, and you don’ want the overseers on this place doin’ the job for you.”
I know she’s right, but I don’t know what to do. I talk to them again, but they cry and say that they want their daddy back and they want me to go find him. I get mad and say they can’t talk about him no more. He gone, and that’s the way it is! They get quiet and stay that way because they never do see me cry before.
I’m glad to go to work in the morning, because when I’m working hard, I have no time to think. I like to cook, but I miss working outside in the gardens like I did at the preacher’s house. Here the vegetable gardens are the biggest and best I ever seen, but Hester warns me against going in. She tells me that Emma is in charge of the gardens, and nobody crosses Emma. She says on a good day Emma isn’t friendly, but on a bad day even the overseers watch out for her.
“Truth is,” Hester says, “Emma don’t have no scare left in her. She even takes on the mens that are beatin’ on their woman. She goes right on up to them. ‘You wanna fight?’ she says. Then she lands a good one. Everybody says she’s crazy, takin’ on the mens like that.”
The day Hester spilled a pot of stew on her foot, she screamed so loud that I didn’t wait but took off running, pulling her with me, down to the slave sickhouse. There old Tony, who runs the place as good as any white doctor, came to help us right quick. After he got a good look, he called across the room to a big woman who was standing next to a shelf of glass jars. “Emma, bring the med’cine in the blue jar,” he calls. When the woman came over, old Tony points her toward Hester. “Put some a that on that burn,” he says, then goes to help out a woman a few beds down who’s having a hard time with bringing in a baby.
Emma sits down, big and heavy as a stone, and I try not to stare. The woman was ugly-looking, there’s no other way to put it, with her eyes bulging out and no eyelashes and no eyebrows. With hands as big as a man’s and nail beds twice the size of normal, she spread the herb grease over Hester’s burn, and when she’s done, I help her wrap a clean rag around the foot. Hester feels a whole lot better with the grease and cloth taking the air off the burn.
A couple of weeks after Hester’s burn is cleared up, Emma comes up to the kitchen house, looking to talk to me. “They tell me to take somebody from up here to help out ol’ Tony in the sickhouse, and when he don’t need you, you can help me out in the gardens. You was good with Hester, so I’m takin’ you.”
“You sure you got to have her?” Hester asked. “She’s working out here with the cookin’ real good.”
“They told me to get somebody from up here, and I’m pickin’ her,” Emma says, then leaves the kitchen house with me standing there.
“You best go,” Hester says. “Emma gets what she wants. Jus’ stay out of her way and do what she says.”
So that’s how I start working with Emma. Some days we work the garden, some days I work with old Tony, it just depends on who needs what the most. I move my things down to a room off of Emma’s hut, and the boys come there to sleep at night, but they don’t like it ’cause they was just getting used to sleeping at the kitchen house.
The man that lives with Emma comes in and out, but I don’t ever hear them saying two words to each other. I’m guessing he’s the daddy of the baby she has. Right from the start, I don’t like Emma for the way she don’t take care of it. The only thing I see her do is give it her milk. Seems like that baby cries all day. I’m not there two days when I can’t take it no more. I don’t care what Emma’s goin’ to say, I go pick up that baby and clean him up good, and after that I take it on myself to see that he stays clean. I get some grease from old Tony and put it on that baby boy’s sore bottom, and after that he don’t cry as much.
“Why you do that?” she asks when she sees me cleaning his bottom. “He jus’ dirty hisself again.” But I remember what it feels like to have that dried on you and to have it stinging sore. It ain’t right to let babies feel that, and I tell her so.
The first time I sing to that child of hers, Emma look at me like she gonna grab that baby away. Instead she goes stomping off, but she don’t stop me. I never know a mama like this who don’t have no feelings for her own baby.
One day when Emma and me is sitting beside the house and shelling beans, real careful, I ask her why she don’t care nothing about her baby. She turns her head at me, her eyes half closed, and shoots me a mean look. I don’t look back at her, I just keep shelling.
“They gonna get them anyway,” she say. “?’Sides, I don’t like babies. The only baby I ever care for was my first one. She was four years when they took her. She was nothin’ like me. She was little and never did nothin’ but laugh. Four years old and she talked like she was a growed woman. When they took her, I was working the fields. When I come back, she was gone. Nothin’ I could do about it ’cept have the one I was carrying. Now don’t ask me no more.”
I don’t ask her no more, but I still take care of her baby. In time I start to notice that she stops leaving him by himself and brings him along in his basket to wherever I’m working, so when he fusses, I’ll go to him.
Then one day, after she’s talking to some others down in the quarters, she comes stomping over to me. “I’s hearin’ that your boys is trouble. You best watch out. They send them off if you don’t get hold a them.”
First I think to tell her that my boys is none of her business, but I think better of it and keep quiet. That night I sit them down and try to talk to them; when they start sassin’ back, I know that I got to paddle them. When the moon comes up, all three of us are crying ourselves to sleep.
In the morning both of those boys is curled up next to me. I kiss their baby hands that still got some fat on them. I know about the God in the old preacher’s Bible, but I’m thinking maybe He only looks out for white folks. I talk to Him anyway and ask for His help.
The boys are seven years old the summer they are put to work bringing water to those in the fields. A couple of weeks in, I don’t know what went wrong, maybe one got to sassin’ and the other one stood up for him, but that night they both come back with a beating. Monday afternoon of the next week, Emma comes running up from the quarters to tell me they are sold and the cart is heading out.
I run, but when I get there, they are gone and dust is all I see. I run down the road, and when I think I hear them calling for me, I start screaming for them. One of the overseers gets ahold of me—“Stop your screamin’!” he say, but I can’t. Two overseers got ahold of me, pulling me back, but that don’t stop me. Some of the workers from the fields stop their work and are walking over, carrying their hoes. Then a couple of the women start calling out for them to let go of me.
One of the overseers shoots his gun up in the air and tells them to get back to the field. I’s still yelling for my boys, and they pull me back behind the quarters, where one of the men knocks me down, stands over me, and tells me to shut up, shut up! When the other one starts kicking me, it’s like he’s lighting a fire, and something lets loose in me. I jump up. I go after the first one, catch hold of his hand, and bite down, his blood tasting good in my mouth. He gets loose and I grab hold of a stick. Then I go after the other one. I run at his face, and before he can stop me, I get it into his eye. All the while I’m calling out for Nate! Nate! Nate!