“You’re two,” said Sally, trying to poke at him with her foot.
“No, I’m not.” Marshall laughed. “I’m eleven.”
“No, you’re two,” teased Sally, enjoying a familiar game.
Suddenly, I was swooped up in Belle’s arms. “Come back in,” she said sharply, “you stay with me.”
Inside the kitchen house, Belle set me on a corner pallet opposite a dark brown woman who was suckling a baby. I stared, hungry at the intimacy. The mother looked at me and although her face was young, she had deep lines around her eyes.
“What your name?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, she continued, “This be my baby, Henry,” she said, “and I his mama, Dory.”
The baby suddenly pulled back from her breast and gave a high shrill cry. I jammed my thumb into my mouth and shrank back.
NOT KNOWING WHAT WAS EXPECTED of me, I stayed put on a pallet in the kitchen. In those first days, I studied Belle’s every move. I had no appetite, and when she insisted that I eat, my stomach emptied violently. Each time I was sick, it meant another cleaning. As Belle’s frustration with me grew, so did my fear of upsetting her. At night I slept on a pallet in a corner of Belle’s upstairs room. On the second night, unable to sleep, I went to stand at Belle’s bedside, comforted by the sound of her soft night breathing.
I must have frightened her, for when she woke, she shouted at me to get back to my own bed. I scurried back, more afraid than ever.
The dark haunted me, and with each passing night I sank further into loss. My head throbbed with the struggle of trying to remember something of myself. Thankfully, relief from my sorrow came just before sunup, when the roosters and the horn called everyone to rise. Then another woman, Mama Mae, joined Belle in the kitchen. The two women worked easily together, but I soon sensed that, though Belle was in charge of the kitchen, Mama Mae was in charge of Belle. Mama Mae was a woman of size, although nothing about her was soft. She was a sober woman who moved like a current, and her quickness made it plain that she did not suffer idleness. She gripped a corncob pipe between her tobacco-stained teeth. It was seldom lit, though she chewed the stem, and after time I decided that it served the same purpose to her that my thumb did to me. I might have been more frightened of her had she not given me an early benediction of her smile. Then her dark brown face, her flat features, and her black eyes wrinkled into kindness.
In the days that followed, I no longer tried to eat, and slept most of the time. On the morning Mama Mae examined me, Belle watched from across the room. “She’s just being stubborn. When I get her to eat, she just brings it up, so now I’m only giving her water. She’ll get hungry soon enough,” Belle said.
Mama held my face in her strong hand. “Belle!” she said sharply. “This chil’ not fightin’ you. She too sick. You got to get her to eat, or you gonna lose her.”
“I don’t know why the cap’n give her to me. I got enough work.”
“Belle, you ever think maybe when I first find out they movin’ you to the kitchen house, I think that way ’bout you?”
“Well, I sure wasn’t making a mess, throwing up all over you.”
“No, but you was ’bout the same age, maybe six, seven years at the time. And you was born and raised here, and you still carried on,” Mama Mae scolded.
Belle was silent, but following that, she was less brusque with me.
Later that day, Mama Mae killed a chicken. She made a broth for me, and for the first time my stomach tolerated something other than water. After some days of this healing liquid, I began to eat and then to retain solid food. When I became more alert again, Belle began to quiz me. Finally, summoning all of my courage, I managed to convey that I had no memory. Whether it was my foreign accent or Belle’s surprise at my information, I do not know, but she stared at me, disbelieving. To my enormous relief, she didn’t question me further. Then, just as things began to settle, Belle and I were called to the big house.
Belle was nervous. She fussed at me with a comb until, in frustration, she finally wrapped my head in a scarf to cover the chopped mess that was my hair. I was dressed in a fresh brown shirt that fell below my knees, over which Belle tied a white apron that she had stitched hastily from a kitchen cloth.
“Don’t suck your thumb.” Belle pulled my swollen finger from my mouth. She stooped down to my level and forced me to meet her eyes. “When she ask you anything, you say, ‘yes, ma’am.’ That’s all you say: ‘yes, ma’am.’ Do you understand?”
I understood little of what was expected, but I nodded, eager to still Belle’s anxiety.
I FOLLOWED CLOSELY BEHIND BELLE on the brick path that led us up to the back porch. Uncle Jacob nodded solemnly while holding open the door. “Clean those feet,” he said.
I stopped to brush fine dirt and sand from my bare feet, then felt the smoothness of the highly polished wood as I stepped across the threshold. Far ahead, the front door was open, and a light breeze swept down the long hallway, past me, and out the open back door. That first morning I did not note the mahogany highboy standing sentry in the hall; nor did I see the tall blue and white tulipier, displayed proudly as the latest expense from across the sea. I remember very clearly, though, the terror I felt as I was led to the dining room.
“Well! Here they are!” the captain’s voice boomed.
At the sight of me, little Sally squealed, “Look, Marshall! It’s that girl from the kitchen. Can I play with her, Mama?”
“You stay away from her,” the woman said, “she looks sick. James! Whatever …”
“Steady, Martha. I had no choice. The parents died, and they owed me passage. Either she came with me, or I had to indenture her out. She was sick. I would have got nothing for her.”
“Was she alone?”
“No, she had a brother, but he was easy enough to place.”
“Why’d you put her in the kitchen house?” Marshall asked.
“What else could I do?” his father replied. “She has to be trained for some use.”
“But why with her!” Marshall nodded toward Belle.
“That’s enough, son,” the captain said, waving me forward. “Come here, come here.” Though now clean-shaven and dressed as a gentleman, I recognized him as the one who had lifted me from the wagon. He was not a tall man, but his overall size and his loud voice put forth a large presence. His gray hair was tied in the back, and his deep blue eyes peered at us over spectacles.
The captain looked past me. “How are you, Belle?” he asked.
“Fine, Cap’n,” she replied softly.
“You look fine,” he said, and his eyes smiled at her.
“Of course she’s fine, James, why wouldn’t she be fine? Look at her. Such a beautiful girl. She wants for nothing, head of a kitchen at her young age, and practically owning her own fine house. You have your pick of beaus, don’t you, Belle?” The woman spoke quickly in a high voice, leaning her elbow on the table as she pulled repeatedly at an escaped strand of her red hair. “Don’t you, Belle? Don’t they come and go?” she asked insistently.
“Yes, ma’am.” Belle’s voice was strained.
“Come, come,” the captain interrupted, and again waved me forward. Closer to him, I focused on the deep lines that creased his weathered face when he smiled. “Are you helping in the kitchen?” he asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I croaked, anxious to follow Belle’s instruction.
The room exploded in laughter, though I saw that the boy, Marshall, did not laugh.
“She said ‘yes, ma’am’ to you, Daddy.” Sally giggled.
The captain chuckled. “Do I look like a ‘ma’am’ to you?”
Uncertain of my answer, for I did not understand this unfamiliar form of address, I anxiously nodded. Again there was laughter.