“I wish it.”
We stopped at the office where Daniel had worked, though he rarely came in, calling himself retired. A clerk handed me a form of freedom, a transport, an identification document, and said that if I would fill it all out, he would record it then and there. I turned to the girl. “What would you have me put down as your name?”
“Tassie is a slave name. You give me a name, Mistress. I be happy with that.”
“When I was a girl, my best friend’s name was Allsy.”
“That be good, Mistress.”
I started to write Allsy on the line given for the name of “person” and stopped. “Allsy is a slave name, too. Are you sure you want that?”
“Give me a white woman’s name, Mistress. Give me something so white that it feels like snow on glass.”
My eyes opened wider in surprise. “If I change Allsy to Alice? Does that sound good to you?”
“Alice. Alice. It’s the sound of snow.” She smiled, then turned her face from me.
I thought a moment. “It is indeed.”
She nodded, whispering, “Alice.”
I wrote “Alice” on the line. “Do you know how old you are?”
“Maybe thirty. Twenty-nine maybe. I was twelve when Master took me. I—I do not know how to count.”
I wrote on the paper. I handed it to the clerk, and he wrote again upon another form, passed it to me, and said, “That will be five shillings for filing, and one pound more for the stamp tax, madam.”
I reached into my pocket. I had nothing left in it but one of the gold Spanish doubloons I had carried to take to the Reveres’ next time I passed by. “You will have to take this,” I said.
He disappeared for several minutes. Alice held her Free Status paper as if it were a butterfly that might vanish in her hands. After a while, the man returned and counted out a few pennies into my hand, which I returned to my pocket.
Outside the door, I turned to her. “Alice? I am not cruel enough to say to you that I have done all I can for you and drive away, leaving you on these cobbles, your fate to the winds. You do not have to do anything today. You do not even have to choose what you will do in the future, today. You are free to go, free to come. I need a girl at my house. I will not own a slave, and I do not own you now. You are not bound to come home with me. If you wish to, you may. I am sorry but you may not come as a guest. You would have to work and help me, but I will pay you four pence a day, and I will not ask you to do anything that I do not do also. I have plenty of work. I have a husband, a daughter still at home, and a business weaving and spinning. You could come now, and then decide to leave, and that will be all right. You may want to leave this very moment, and that is all right, too. So I ask you, will you come home with me for a time? Come and see if you wish to stay?”
“Mistress, I want to go home to Jamaica.”
How those words twisted my very fibers. “I know. Do you have family there?”
“Maybe. Maybe they’s alive. I wish it, Mistress.”
“How long since you have seen them?”
“Seventeen years, I t’ink. If I come with you, I can go home tomorrow?”
“Yes. That paper there assures everyone you meet that you are a free woman of color. You keep that sacred as a duppy charm.”
She smiled. She was quite comely. I shuddered, thinking of why Wallace had kept her in the house. Thinking of that day he believed that because I had been kept a slave I had been used so. Alice said, “I come with you, then, tonight. Tomorrow I go home to Jamaica.”
“Tomorrow.”
Alice did not leave the next day. She spent a tentative week, terrified of Cullah, terrified of Roland, even afraid of Benjamin when he visited, and Brendan, too. She scurried about, cleaning, baking breads, sweeping, and washing clothes. She asked me about how she could get passage home to Jamaica. I told her what I knew, and how to find out more later on, should she decide to leave, about what the fare was, and where the boats landed. She was so frightened that it made Cullah troublesome.
He asked me one morning after she left the kitchen with a basket to collect eggs, “What does she think I am? A goat?”
“She thinks you are like Wallace Spencer.”
“I don’t want to have a woman that foolish in the house.”
“She is not foolish. She has been a slave a long time. I told her she is free. If you want her to leave, we are free, too, to send her away.”
He gave a great sigh. “Every other time I come home you have brought in some poor soul. Are we to be an inn for the desperate from now on?”
I thought a long moment. At length I said, “Yes.” He smiled.
After two weeks, I came in from hanging linen outside to dry, to find the kitchen empty and the front door wide open.