“Where you comin’ from?” TimTam asked. He chewed the chaffy end of a wheat stalk and spit.
“You ask too many questions,” Ness said. She turned away. It was her turn to receive water from Margaret, the head house slave, but the woman poured only enough to fill a quarter of the glass.
“We ain’t got enough today,” she said, but Ness could see that the buckets of water on the porch behind her were enough to last a week.
Margaret looked at Ness, but Ness got the feeling that she was really looking through her, or rather, that she was looking five minutes into Ness’s past, trying to discern whether or not the conversation Ness had just had with TimTam meant that the man was interested in her.
TimTam cleared his throat. “Now, Margaret,” he said. “That ain’t no kinda way to treat somebody.”
Margaret glared at him and plunged her ladle into the bucket, but Ness didn’t accept the offering. She walked away, leaving the two people to stew. While there may have been a piece of paper declaring that she belonged to Tom Allan Stockham, there was no such paper shackling her to the whims of her fellow slaves.
“You ain’t gotta be so hard on him,” a woman said once Ness resumed her position in the field. The woman seemed older, mid to late thirties, but her back hunched even when she stood up straight. “You new here, so you don’t know. TimTam done lost his woman long while ago, and he been taking care of little Pinky by hisself ever since.”
Ness looked at the woman. She tried to smile, but she had been born during the years of Esi’s unsmiling, and she had never learned how to do it quite right. The corners of her lips always seemed to twitch upward, unwillingly, then fall within milliseconds, as though attached to that sadness that had once anchored her own mother’s heart.
“Ain’t we all done lost someone?” Ness asked.
—
Ness was too pretty to be a field nigger. That’s what Tom Allan said to her the day he’d taken her back to his plantation. He’d bought her on good faith from a friend of his in Jackson, Mississippi, who said she was one of the best field hands he’d ever seen, but to make quite sure to only use her in the field. Seeing her, light-skinned with kinked hair that raced down her back in search of her round shelf of buttocks, Tom Allan thought his friend must have made some kind of mistake. He pulled out the little outfit he liked for his house niggers to wear, a white button-down with a boat neckline and capped sleeves, a long black skirt attached to a little black apron. He’d had Margaret take Ness into the back room so that she could change into it, and Ness had done what she was told. Margaret, seeing Ness all done up, clutched her hand to her heart and told Ness to wait there. Ness had to press her ear to the wall to hear what Margaret said.
“She ain’t fit for da house,” Margaret told Tom Allan.
“Well, let me see her, Margaret. I’m sure I can decide for myself whether or not somebody’s fit to work in my own house, now can’t I?”
“Yessuh,” Margaret said. “I reckon you is, but it ain’t something you gon’ want to see, is what I’m sayin’.”
Tom Allan laughed. His wife, Susan, came into the room and asked what all the fuss was about. “Why, Margaret’s got our new nigger locked up in the back and won’t let us see her. Stop this nonsense now and go fetch her here.”
If Susan was like any of the other masters’ wives, she must have known that her husband’s bringing a new nigger into the house meant she had better pay attention. In this and every other southern county, men’s eyes, and other body parts, had been known to wander. “Yes, Margaret, bring the girl so we can see. Don’t be silly about it.”
Margaret shrugged her shoulders and went back to the room, and Ness pulled her ear from the wall. “Well, you bess come out” was all Margaret said.
And so Ness did. She walked out to her audience of two, her shoulders bared, as well as the bottom halves of her calves, and when Susan Stockham saw her, she fainted outright. It was all Tom Allan could do to catch his wife while shouting at Margaret to go change Ness at once.
Margaret rushed her into the back room, and left in search of field clothes, and Ness stood in the center of that room, running her hands along her body, reveling in her ugly nakedness. She knew it was the intricate scars on her bare shoulders that had alarmed them all, but the scars weren’t just there. No, her scarred skin was like another body in and of itself, shaped like a man hugging her from behind with his arms hanging around her neck. They went up from her breasts, rounded the hills of her shoulders, and traveled the full, proud length of her back. They licked the top of her buttocks before trailing away into nothing. Ness’s skin was no longer skin really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable, physical. She didn’t mind the reminder.
Margaret came back in the room with a head scarf, a brown top that covered the shoulders, a red skirt that went all the way to the floor. She watched Ness put them on. “It a shame, really. For a second, I’s thought you mighta been prettier than me.” She clucked her tongue twice and left the room.
—
And so Ness worked in the field. It was not new to her. In Hell, she’d worked the land too. In Hell, the sun scorched cotton so hot it almost burned the palms of your hands to touch it. Holding those small white puffs almost felt like holding fire, but God forbid you let one drop. The Devil was always watching. Hell was where she had learned to be a good field hand, and the skill had carried her all the way to Tuscumbia.
It was her second month at the Stockham plantation. She lived in one of the women’s cabins, but she had made no friends. Everyone knew her as the woman who had snubbed TimTam, and the ladies, angry when they thought that she was the object of his desire and even angrier when they realized she didn’t want to be that object, treated her as though she were little more than a strong wind, an annoyance that you could still push through.
In the mornings, Ness prepared her pail to take out to the field with her. Cornmeal cakes, a bit of salt pork, and, if she was lucky, some greens. In Hell, she had learned to eat standing up. Picking cotton with her right hand, shoveling food in with her left. It wasn’t something she was required to do here at Tom Allan’s, work while eating, but she didn’t know any other way.
“Look like she think she better den us,” one woman called, just loudly enough so Ness could hear.
“Tom Allan sho gon’ think so,” another said.
“Nuh-uh, Tom Allan ain’t paid her no mind since she got kicked out da big house,” the first one said.
Ness had learned how to tune the voices out. She tried to remember the Twi that Esi used to speak to her. Tried to still her mind until all that was left was the thin, stern line of her mother’s lips, lips that used to usher out words of love in a tongue that Ness could no longer quite grasp. Phrases and words would come to her, mismatched or lopsided, wrong.
She worked all day like this, listening to the sounds of the South. The insistent buzz of mosquitoes, that screech of cicadas, the hum of slave gossip. At night, she would return to her quarters, beat out her pallet until dust billowed from it, wrapping around her like a hug. She would set it back down again and wait for a sleep that rarely came, trying her best to still the harrowing images that danced behind her closed eyelids.
It was on a night like this, just when she had snapped her pallet into the air, that the pounding started, fists beating against the door of the women’s cabin in a steady, urgent rhythm. “Please!” a voice called. “Please, help us.”
A woman named Mavis opened the door. TimTam stood there cradling his daughter, Pinky, in his arms. He pushed into the room, his voice choked though there were no tears in his eyes. “I think she got what her mama had,” he said.
The women cleared a spot for the girl and TimTam set her down before he started to pace. “Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord,” he cried.