by Rita Woods
She prayed, though she no longer believed in God. What sort of God would allow her family to be destroyed because James Hannigan had been such a vain and careless man? What sort of God would allow one group of people to have that much power over another?
Please, don’t be sick, oie.
Because if Vee was sick, there would be nothing she could do. If they were home, Grandmere would know what to do. She would rub Veronique’s chest with turpentine oil or wrap her in a poultice of sage and vinegar. Her grandmother would know how to draw the sickness out of her, how to make her strong again. But in this ugly, gray place of empty spaces, Margot felt alone and helpless. The coughing drifted to her in the darkness, tearing at her heart.
Rest. She just needs to rest. And to get away from those snotty-nosed enfants. It was the strange food. It is that white woman, already half dead. She infected Veronique with something. She would be fine if only she could feel the right kind of sun on her face.
Maybe.
Margot tugged her shawl around her head, trying to shield her face from the biting insects.
Maybe they should go on that railroad to freedom.
She stood and walked back to the shack.
12
It was death that decided for Margot.
The master’s wife was dying. For the past fortnight she’d managed to drag herself from her bed and into the parlor. Most days she spent sitting in a battered rocker in front of the unlit fireplace. Sometimes she sewed. Other times she brushed the youngest girl’s hair or listened as the oldest boy painfully sounded out his letters. Mostly she slept, her chin resting on her skeletal chest, her limp hair hiding her face.
The master seemed to take this small spark of energy as a good sign, the fact that his wife had at least risen from her bed. He smiled often, an expression Margot had rarely seen on his face in the ten months since they’d arrived on his farm. Each day, as Margot stirred oatmeal for the children, the master kissed his wife’s pale, sweaty forehead before going out into his tobacco fields. Most mornings, she could hear him whistling long after he’d passed behind the curing barn.
He thought she was getting well. But Margot knew better. Rot drifted around the dozing woman like smoke from a grease fire. The master’s woman was like a candle, the wick of her life flaring up and burning brightly just before going out forever.
So it was decided.
They had to leave.
They had to leave before the woman’s life flickered out. Margot had no intention of ever again allowing her and her sister’s fate to be decided by the dying breath of a blanc. On a warm fall night, by the light of a full moon, Margot took her sister’s hand and they walked quietly into the night.
* * *
There were five of them: a middle-aged woman and teenaged boy, Margot and her sister, and Ned. Margot had never seen either the woman or the boy before, but through the long night, as they walked in silence, staying in the shadows, it became clear that the boy was Ned’s brother, and that the woman was their mother, both from another plantation down the road.
The runaways said very little to each other. They walked by night. By day, they made makeshift hiding places beneath fallen trees, in shallow ditches, anywhere they could find, and tried to sleep. Veronique’s cough grew stronger, lasted longer. Margot scoured the woods for the herbs she remembered Grandmere using for a cough: marshmallow root, peppermint, but this far from home, everything looked alien and she found nothing she thought might help. As they walked at night, moving farther and farther north, Veronique’s breathing became more labored, though she insisted she was fine.
The warm October night they’d run away had been a tease, and the nights quickly turned frigid. By the third day, their meager supply of food had nearly run out. Still, they pressed on. With whispers and hand signals, Ned led the way. He’d told them they were headed for the Ohio River. There would be someone there, he said, a conductor, to guide them across the water into freedom.
On the fourth night, the ground was softer, wetter. In the darkness it was hard to see. Frost-glazed mud sucked at their clothes. Behind her, Veronique struggled for each breath.
“Allez!” panted Veronique when Margot stopped to wait. “Go on. I will catch up.”
But the next time Margot looked over her shoulder, her sister was no longer there.
“Mon Dieu!” She spun and began to retrace her steps.
“Veronique,” she cried. “Veronique where are you?”
Behind her, Ned hissed for her to shut up. If they were being followed, her shouts would lead the slavers right to them. Margot didn’t care. She had to find her sister.
She thrashed wildly in the marshy forest, falling again and again, tangling herself in half-submerged branches and dangling vines, reckless in her panic. She turned, then turned again, lost.
“Veronique!” she screamed.
“Mar?”
The voice came to her from the shadows. It took many long, disorienting minutes, but finally she found her. Veronique lay crumbled near the roots of an upended tree. Dark water covered her to the waist, her breath coming hard and uneven.
Margot fell to her knees and cradled her sister’s head. “What are you doing, goose?”
“All this water,” panted Veronique. “I thought I should bathe.”
She was shivering, hard. “I am so cold, Margot.”
“I know, bébé. I know,” whispered Margot. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ned and his family crouching in the shadows. She tried to stand but her sister’s arm snaked around her waist.
“Don’t leave,” she whimpered. “Don’t leave me, Mar.”
Margot tasted bile in her throat. “I am not going anywhere, Vee, except to get something to make a fire.” She struggled to keep her tone light. “Since you insist on bathing.”
She lifted her sister out of the water to the driest place she could find. It was like moving paper, her sister’s weight barely there.
“We gotta go.”
Margot cried out. Ned had appeared silently at her side.
“Can’t stay here no longer,” he said. “Gotta get goin’. Them peoples at the river ain’t gonna wait forever.”
“Then go,” snapped Margot, using her hands to search the cracks and crevices of the fallen trees. “Take your family and go. My sister must rest.”
But he made no move to leave. He watched in silence as she collected a fistful of moss and a small bundle of the driest wood she could find. She rooted in the pocket of her skirt for the flint she’d stolen from the barn on the day they’d fled. On the second try, the fire caught and Margot inhaled deeply, grateful for the small circle of light.
“You will be better after you rest awhile,” she said, squatting next to her sister. She bit her lip to keep from crying. Veronique’s face was the color of day-old fish. Her eyes had sunk deep into her thin face. Blood had dried at the corner of her mouth.
“Oui,” she said smiling weakly. “I will be better.”
“They gon’ see that fire,” said Ned, quietly. “They gon’ see and they gon’ come.”
Margot felt something break inside her. “Allez,” she shrieked. “Just go. Leave us alone. If they come, they come, but my sister must rest.”
Ned looked at her sadly.
“Go,” screeched Margot.
Ned turned and melted into the shadows with his family. Margot pulled Veronique closer to the fire.
Except for the harsh sound of her breathing, the girl was silent, still. Margot stroked her sister’s face, her mind flooded with barely coherent thoughts.
“Vee?”
Veronique’s eyes fluttered open. She stared up at Margot blankly and then she smiled. “Ce qui?”
“This is the most terrible birthday gift you have ever given me.”
“Désole,” said Veronique. Her laugh quickly dissolved into another fit of coughing. As it wracked her body, Margot could feel her sister’s lungs tearing themselves apart. Bloody foam dribbled from Veronique’s mout
h; her body stiffened as her eyes rolled up in her head.
“No,” screamed Margot. “No, no, no. Breathe, oie. Do you hear me? Breathe.”
She hugged her sister’s tiny body against her chest and bent her forward, pounding hard on her back, tasting the thing in her lungs go from blue to black, then break up. A little. Veronique’s coughing eased, then stopped. She sagged against Margot, her breathing ragged but regular.
Margot clung to her, rocking, sobbing, and humming softly. Something splashed in the woods and she fell silent, every muscle tense. She glanced at the fire, but there was no point in dousing it now. Surely whoever was out there had already seen it. She heard voices and her heart pounded. What would they do to her when they took her back? Beat her? Sell her away? She glanced at her sister sleeping fitfully in her arms. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe they would take pity on Vee and find some way to nurse her back to health. Or maybe she would grind apple seeds to a powder. She and Veronique would drink it in a tea and be free forever.
Something moved in the shadows and Margot cried out in fear. Ned’s mother stepped into the small circle of light and knelt in front of the sisters. She opened the small handkerchief she had tied to her waist with string and pulled out a shriveled sweet potato and the remains of a roasted rat.
“Wish I had more to give but…” She shrugged.
Tears welled in Margot’s eyes as she gazed at the pitiful offering, everything this woman had.
“I…” She couldn’t go on.
Ned’s mother smiled and touched Veronique’s cheek. And then she vanished into the darkness.
“Merci,” murmured Margot to her disappearing shadow.
“Mar?”
Margot looked down into her sister’s eyes.
“I want to go home. I want to go home to Grandmere.”
“Me too, oie. Me too.” She tossed the last of the moss onto the fire and pulled Veronique close, trying to warm her with her body heat. After a time, she dropped into a restless sleep.
It was the silence that woke her. Sometime in the middle of the night Veronique had stopped coughing.
Margot blinked. The sun was coming up over the trees, the sky the color of fresh melon. She tried to sit up and Veronique shifted oddly in her arms.
“Vee?”
There was no answer. The little girl’s eyes stared, unseeing, toward the dawn sky.
Margot screamed. She grabbed her sister, heavier in death than she had ever been in life, and began to stagger from the swampy woodland, the only thought in her mind that she had to get to Grandmere. If she could just get home, if she could just get Veronique to their grandmother, then everything would be alright. She would wake up in her bed on Prytania Street, this whole past year a terrible nightmare.
Margot tripped, dropping her sister’s body. She tried to get up, tried to pick Veronique up and keep running, but her arms, her legs refused to obey. She lay there in the cold mud, staring into her sister’s eyes, and began to howl. She howled until her voice gave out and her mind went dark.
When she opened her eyes again, the sun was at the top of the sky, giving light but little warmth. She was soaked through and ached with cold. For a moment she lay blinking, confused, her lids sliding painfully over the grit in her eyes.
“Vee?” she croaked, her voice hoarse.
And then recognition crashed into her, knocking the breath from her lungs. With a sob, she rolled on her side. Veronique lay next to her, and Margot clutched at her, pulling her close. Her sister’s body was as cold and rubbery as a leg of mutton in the smokehouse, but she held on, humming a tuneless lullaby.
“C’est bien, oie,” she murmured. “Everything is going to be alright.”
She drifted, oblivious to the day growing later, not cold, not afraid, humming and humming.
“Allez!”
Margot jerked.
“Vee? Veronique?”
She’d heard her sister’s voice, felt her warm breath against her neck, and she pushed herself upright with a groan. Veronique still lay on the ground, eyes closed, clothes mud-caked, face gray, waxy.
And yet …
Margot scanned the trees. Was this one of Grandmere’s spirits? Was her sister’s spirit here with her now? Watching her?
“Veronique?” she whispered.
“Allez.” The word was soft but clear, carried on the wind, rustling from the dry underbrush. “Go. Now.”
The hair stood up on her arms and she bent to touch her sister’s face. But Veronique was gone. She was completely alone.
Margot found a hollowed log. It wasn’t quite big enough, but it would protect her sister in some small way from the animals and the elements, at least for a while. Gently, she tucked pine boughs around her sister’s body. Veronique had always liked the smell of fresh pine. Then, bending, she swapped the lockets Grandmere had given them, hers for Veronique’s. They were identical, but she would always know this one had belonged to her sister.
In the end, she simply walked away—no more words, no more tears—because there was nothing else to do.
Abigail
1791
Révolte!
Monsieur Quennelle, the pig, had been right after all.
For months, the rumors had drifted in the slave quarter like ghosts, roiling through the coffee groves, gaining strength by the day, whispered from slave to slave, managing to penetrate even Abigail’s fog of grief.
There was a man, they said, a priest, who had spoken to the spirits. And this man had declared war on the blancs. He meant to drive them—every man, woman, and child—into the sea.
Every night, they said, plantations burned and the blancs were killed in their beds. The warrior maroons carried as their standard, not a flag, but the head of a white baby on a pike.
And, they said, when it was over, this war, when the last blanc had been driven from the last cliff, there would not be a single slave left in Saint-Domingue, only free black men and women. And every day the cocoa fields and coffee groves grew emptier as the slaves melted into the mountains to join the fight.
Révolte!
Abigail moaned. She lay curled into a fetal position, hidden among the rigging and other ship’s stores that cluttered the aft deck. They’d been at sea … three days? Five? Since the night the mountains surrounding Far Water had finally exploded and what was left of her world had gone up in flames. She struggled to focus, but her memories of that night were broken, jumbled.
Monsieur Rousse appearing at her door, no waistcoat, blouse pulled free of his breeches, reeking of stale sweat, ordering her to the main house.
Angry white men with guns, crowding the halls, Monsieur Rousse’s study, watching her as she walked by, hatred and fear naked on their pale faces.
Ninette Rousse, her mistress, in the center of the drawing room, wringing her hands, her red hair matted and tangled, her yellow dress bright in the gloom.
Révolte!
They were leaving. Taking the last ship from Port-de-Paix to someplace called Cuba, then on to New Orleans. They were leaving, before the maroons reached Far Water. But “they” did not include Thierry Rousse. He would stay, stand with the other planters and defend his holdings. He had been good to his slaves and they would stand by him. He was sure of this. And “they” did not include her sons, Claude and Henri. There was no space for them on the ship, no accommodations for them in New Orleans, but Abigail was needed, to look after the mistress and baby Julian.
Abigail moaned and pulled her knees tighter to her chest. She had a vague memory of blocking her master’s exit from the drawing room, of screaming “No!” into his startled face. She remembered falling, the taste of blood in her mouth. Had he struck her? She couldn’t remember. She was stuck, frozen in the last moments with her boys, her enfants. Bending over their sleeping forms, inhaling their musty, little-boy scent, touching her nose to theirs. She clawed at her face. Ama had been the brave one. She should have kissed their beloved faces then slit their throats, so they would never again
know fear or sadness. Not have to wait and hope for the freedom promised by the maroons, for they would already have the one, true freedom. But she had been a coward. She let herself believe the master’s promise that he would send them to his smaller estate in the South where it was safer, that she would see them again.
The deck pitched and Abigail pulled herself up, back in the present, leaning over the splintered railing to retch. She’d been sick nearly from the moment she’d boarded. They were on a two-hundred-ton French merchant ship, designed for cargo, but the only cargo it now carried were several dozen terrified whites and their handful of slaves. The whites, mostly women and children, huddled in small groups on the decks, the blacks, for the most part, confined to the hold.
All except for Abigail.
On that first morning, after their fevered race down the mountain, a deckhand had tried to force her into the hold with the other slaves. The opening yawned before her like a great black mouth, and her nostrils suddenly filled with the memory of rotting flesh, shit, and blood. As she backed away, she thought she heard Ama laughing at her from the shadows below.
“Nigger,” snarled the deckhand as he tried to push her forward. “Chienne.”
She smelled the stink of rum on his breath as she planted her feet, digging her nails into the wood framing the hold. Something hard struck her between the shoulders, but she was a big woman, and strong, and she would not be moved.
“Get your ass down there, now. Entendez-vous?”
Abigail whirled and threw herself at the sailor. He would have to kill her to get her into that hole. Or she would kill him. She no longer cared which. Only the intervention of her mistress had prevented either outcome. Now they left her alone. And she tried to be invisible.
She opened her eyes. She tasted metal and her head hurt, the pain slowly worsening until she was seeing double. But no, not double, not exactly. Abigail ran a hand over her face and squinted. She was seeing a double image, but the images were not precise mirror images of each other. She squinted. There was the deck, a dark-haired boy of seven or eight squatting near the railing, rolling a green marble between his hands, a woman sobbing quietly near the bow, a sailor, his legs deeply bowed, cursing as he threw the contents of a slop bucket into the sea. But the other image … the other image was different. There was the deck, but it was empty save for a lone gull standing on the railing. She could hear the crack of the sails as the wind whipped them, feel the salt spray on her skin. The pain in her head was a clanging hammer. She squeezed her eyes tight, and when she reopened them, there was only the deck with the little boy and the sobbing woman.