“He don’t think I’ll be big enough for the dances next year, Mama?” Plato asked.
Mama collected herself before speaking. “That silly man don’t know what he’s talkin’ about,” she said with a shaky laugh. “By next year you’ll be big enough to look down at the top o’ that pink head o’ his.” Plato laughed and Mama turned to Lillie and spoke seriously. “I’m takin’ the boy to the Big House. You go straight to them wagons, and I’ll join you there presently. Don’t get in no trouble on the way.”
Lillie nodded and gave Plato a kiss on his forehead, then ran off toward the wagons. When she arrived, she was pleased to see that the children’s wagon was indeed last in line—and that Samuel was at the reins. As the oldest and slowest of the rig-drivers, he was considered the best choice to drive the wagon that wouldn’t need much minding. With his fading eyesight and wandering thinking, Samuel had to pay such close attention to the road that it was unlikely he’d notice her jumping quietly out of the back.
The wagon was mostly full by now, but there was still a spot or two at the back, which was where Lillie needed to be if she was going to hop off with a minimum of fuss. She frowned when she saw that Cal was seated far at the front. She knew that it would not have been a good idea for her to ride directly beside Cal tonight, since she found it hard to imagine that a boy like him could watch her jump down into the road and run off into the darkness without taking it into his head to light out after her just for the sport of the thing. Still, the idea of sitting close to him in the bouncing wagon had been playing in her mind for the past few days.
The last time the young slaves had been taken to a party, she’d indeed sat directly next to Cal and in the middle of the ride, the wagon suddenly hit a rut and jumped. He grabbed her arm to keep her from losing her seat and held it fast till the bouncing stopped, continuing to talk the whole while and never seeming to notice what he was doing. Lillie guessed that was the most mannerly thing a boy had ever done for her. Tonight Cal was sitting with the slave boys Benjy and Cupit, the three of them bunched together, talking low and close, just as they had been when Lillie caught them near the cabins more than a week earlier. She didn’t like the look of that, but with her mind so full of worries of her own, she pushed the thought aside.
Finally, Lillie looked for one more face and found Minervy also seated near the back, though she was wedged between two other girls. That was a problem, but it couldn’t be helped. When Lillie hopped aboard, she squeezed herself next to Minervy, pushing away another girl, who glared at her. Minervy herself seemed pleased that Lillie wanted to sit beside her and shimmied over to make room.
Tonight, Lillie noticed, Minervy looked prettier than she had ever seen her, with green and red bows in her hair and a white cotton dress, hemmed clean and straight with no tatters Lillie could see. The dress was too big for Minervy, which meant her mama had made it only recently and expected it to last her two or three years. What Lillie noticed even more than Minervy’s pretty clothes and hair was her face. There were none of the usual fret lines on her forehead or worry crinkles about her eyes. Her face looked like the face of a child—which is how it ought to look, but almost never did.
“Didn’t eat so much as a nibble tonight,” Minervy said brightly. “My papa said the Bingham Woods slaves make a hog as sweet as cane, and I aim to have some.”
“Fine hog,” Lillie answered, trying to muster something else to say but feeling too jumpy and distracted. She looked about herself nervously, taking the measure of her surroundings—the nearness of the other wagons, the darkness of the night, the height of the jump from her seat to the ground. None of them brought her much comfort.
“My mama said she didn’t want me doin’ no dancin’, least not with boys,” Minervy went on, whispering now and sidling up to Lillie. “What’d your mama say?”
“Same,” Lillie answered. “No boy dancin’.”
“Mamas ain’t watchin’ the whole time, though, is they?” Minervy said, giggling.
Lillie looked at her. “Watchin’ what?” she said. “Who ain’t watchin’?”
“The mamas! Lillie, are you listenin’ to me?”
“Yes,” Lillie said, her mind buzzing. “No. I don’t know.” She shook her head to clear it. “No, Minervy, I ain’t listenin’. I need to talk to you.”
“What’d you do?” Minervy asked immediately. She looked at Lillie anxiously, her smooth face crinkling right back up. “What’d you do wrong?”
“Didn’t do nothin’,” Lillie whispered as low as she could. “But I’m gonna do somethin’, and you gotta know ’cause you gotta help.”
“What are you on about?”
“I’m gonna jump, girl. Soonest we get to the fork in the road, I’m gonna slip off, go take care o’ some business, and come back. No one gots to know, ’specially no white folks nor grown slaves.”
“Lillie!” Minervy hissed. “You’re thinkin’ wild.”
“I’m thinkin’ straight. Straight as I ever thought.”
“You’ll get caught for sure!”
“I won’t get caught.”
“Can’t no slave travel roads like this at night, least of all a child slave.”
“I can.”
“How?”
“Never mind. I got ways.”
“But what for? Ain’t no business worth gettin’ caught, flogged and sold off.”
“Mine is,” Lillie said. “And I’m gonna go do it.” She looked at Minervy hard and straight, her tone flat. “I’m doin’ this and ain’t nothin’ gonna tell me otherwise. But I still need your help, else I won’t get away.”
Minervy studied Lillie’s face. Lillie thought she’d turn away, but Minervy didn’t. The girl had a keen sense for how to avoid trouble, and along the way had taught herself to manage it when it came anyway. There was no doubt in Minervy’s mind that Lillie meant what she said about jumping. That would lead either to terrible things or not so terrible things—depending on whether Lillie got caught. And it was Minervy who could make the difference.
“What can I do?” she asked simply.
Lillie leaned into her. “You got a way about you, girl. I see it when you talk to the little ones. I tell ’em to shush, they don’t shush. You tell ’em—with that voice and that face and that no-foolin’ way—they shush.” She gestured to the other children in the wagon. “When I jump, you got to do the same with them.”
“These ain’t babies, Lillie. Some of ’em’s older’n me.”
“Don’t matter. They still ain’t grown, which means they got children’s ways. You, girl, you got a mama’s ways.”
Minervy started to protest, but stopped herself. Lillie was right, and they both knew it.
“But what about Samuel?” Minervy asked. “He ain’t a child.”
“He also can’t hardly hear nor see. The whole lot of us could jump out ’fore he’d notice.”
Minervy, despite herself, laughed. Then she took Lillie’s hand and squeezed it hard. “I’ll do what you need,” she said at last. “I don’t like it, but I will. You just come back.”
Lillie said nothing and looked away, her heart starting to pound. At that moment, she saw Mama, without Plato, hurrying toward the wagons. Lillie raised her hand and smiled to show she was where she was supposed to be. Mama waved back, then climbed aboard the women’s wagon. Lillie was seized with the terrible fear that she’d just waved good-bye to her mama forever. Before she could go further with that dark thought, all three wagons jerked into motion.
As the grand evening at last began, all the slaves began talking happily. And at almost the same moment, a rhythmic clapping began in the second wagon. The slaves fell silent as quickly as they’d started speaking and turned to the sound in delight and surprise. It was the juba patters— four of them, seated in the middle of the wagon—practicing their music before the party began.
Patting juba was a skill the slaves had been passing down to one another for generations, from the moment they were captured in Africa a
nd brought to America. The masters forbade most slaves to have musical instruments, fearing that drums could be used to pass coded signals from plantation to plantation, and other kinds of music-making were simply not in keeping with the hard work that always needed to get done. In recent decades, most masters had relaxed these rules, but by then many of the slaves didn’t care, having long since taught themselves to make music with the only instruments nobody could take away from them—their hands and feet—clapping, stomping and patting their thighs, bellies, chests and cheeks. Four or five good juba players could turn out as much fine music as a whole parlor full of instruments.
The juba players in the second wagon began their patting slowly this evening, with a light slapping of thighs and clapping of hands, while the horses plodded off the plantation and onto the shadowy, tree-canopied roads. As the road darkened and the horses quickened, the players quickened too, adding their toes, then their heels, then the whole hard flat of their feet against the floorboards of the wagons. The rhythm picked up and the drumming grew louder, the players striking their broad barrel chests with the flats of their hands and letting out the occasional deep whoop. The men played for a long while, and the music they produced seemed to swirl around the slaves, rising up, rustling the very leaves of the overhanging trees, and pouring back down. The horses’ hooves and the rattling wheels themselves fell into the rhythm, driven by the fast-flying hands and rat-a-tat feet of the four juba men.
Lillie closed her eyes and began to feel enveloped by the music, almost as if she were being gathered up and held aloft. Minervy looked at her, noticing her face and her pose and the distant look in her eyes, then turned back toward the rest of the wagon. Whatever was going to happen, she reckoned, was going to happen now.
“Pssst!” Minervy hissed, in a sound that caused all the children to turn. “Psst!” she repeated. She fixed the children with the same strong eyes and stern face she used on the squawling babies, and to her surprise, the children did just what the babies did: They looked back, grew still and kept their own eyes directly on her.
Somewhere, as if from a distance, Minervy’s hiss reached Lillie too. And at that moment, Lillie became aware of one more thing beyond the silence of the children and the drumming of the juba and the pounding of her own anxious heart: It was the smell of baking—Bett’s baking, the rich scent of a cake mixed by Lillie’s own hand and sweetened by her baby brother’s sugar spit. Without thinking, she drew a breath and let herself go slack. Then she rolled as if drunk from the back of the wagon, down to the hard and rutted road below.
A tumble like that at the speed the horses were moving could have been the end of Lillie, but she fell in a way she’d never fallen before—less like a girl than like a cat, spinning in the air and finding her feet, then landing on them as light and sure as if she’d hopped out of bed. She heard a skid that she reckoned was her heels finding their purchase in the dirt, but she didn’t feel it. Instead, she felt light, almost dreamy, and more than anything else, quick.
Standing in the road, she watched, untroubled, as the wagon pulled away from her and she saw it swerve left on the fork to Bingham Woods. That meant Orchard Hill lay to the right. Without needing to think, she began running, first straight and then a sharp right turn. Lillie could still smell the baking, stronger than ever in fact, and more remarkably, she could still hear the juba drumming, the music growing louder even as the wagon carrying the players retreated farther behind her. She ran down the road lightly, effortlessly, her legs pounding, almost whirling, along with the music. Her heartbeat was strong and steady, and her breath came deep and calm. It was not at all the urgent breathing and trip-hammer heart that ought to come with running, but it was all she felt she needed.
A near full moon hung in the sky, which cast a helpful shimmer of light, and the more Lillie’s eyes grew adjusted to the night, the better she could see. She glanced around at a world that looked oddly different from any she’d seen before. As the juba grew louder and quicker and she moved faster and faster, everything else appeared to go slower and slower. The leaves in the trees seemed not so much to be rustling in the wind as waving, swinging, with a gentle, liquid motion. She glanced down and saw that the spray of dust her feet were kicking up rose like slow smoke; the pebbles that flew along with it floated up and settled back down like slips of paper on the wind. She looked ahead and, to her surprise, saw a tiny, dark-eyed tree bat flying toward her. Ordinarily, she’d drop and scream when one of the hateful things approached. Now she simply sidestepped it, having more than enough time to avoid the little beast, which slowly flapped its way into the night behind her.
Distantly, Lillie heard what sounded like voices—white men’s voices. She turned toward the sound and in the woods saw the light of two torches. These were the night patrols, men who walked the boundaries of the plantations, looking for runaways and other slaves who weren’t where they ought to be. The sight of the men should have been many times more terrifying than the sight of the bat, but again, Lillie felt no fear. The night patrollers, instead, were likely fearing her. They could not see her, she was certain of that, and they could not hear the juba either. If anything, they would have heard a windy, whooshing sound in the road, turned toward it and seen only a shadow flitting by. Perhaps it was a wolf, perhaps it was a ghost—whatever it was, it was a creature of the night, one that they feared could do them much more harm than they could do it. Lillie was a night creature now, and when she thought of the fright she was causing the men, she felt only strength.
The baking smell, the juba music and Lillie’s own fleet feet carried her along for a good distance more, until she at last saw cabin lights and a clearing ahead. Beyond them, she saw the warm, golden windows of a plantation Big House. She had arrived at Orchard Hill, at the edge of the thick stand of trees and brush that opened onto the slave cabins. This was where the very family she’d come to visit surely lived. At the sight of that, Lillie’s feet began to slow and her heart and breath began to calm. The smell of the baking and sound of the juba music at last began to fade, depositing her here like the hand of a giant placing her gently down.
Chapter Sixteen
THE GRASS AROUND the slave cabins at Orchard Hill was surprisingly thick and surprisingly damp. It seemed that a drizzle had fallen here but not at Greenfog, an idea that was new to Lillie since she had rarely traveled far enough to think about where weather started and where it stopped. She was tempted to pull her shoes off and walk through the grass barefoot, since now that the charm had quit, her feet were just ordinary feet again, and with the kind of running she’d just done, they felt like they’d been worn to nubs. She kept her shoes on, however, in case she had to make a quick escape.
The lush grass around the cabins was a sign of a prosperous plantation—a rare thing lately—since most masters would buy just enough grass seed for the grounds around the Big House and no more. Only those who didn’t have to worry about the expense would buy so much seed they could scatter some to their slaves. Lillie also noticed the fragrance of freshly cut wood—another sign of wealth. A smell like that in the vicinity of the slave cabins likely meant that new cabins had recently been built. That either meant that new slaves had recently been bought or that the Master had allowed the ones he owned already to rebuild their little homes. Either way, there’d been no such money spent at Greenfog in a long while.
Lillie stood as still as she could, twenty or so yards from the closest cabin. She could hear voices coming softly from some of them and could see lantern light in the windows of most. It was not quite time for the children to go to sleep and not nearly bedtime for the grown-ups. That was good, since had she gotten here any later, most of the parents would have come outside, where they could smoke and talk in quiet tones to allow the children inside to fall asleep. A stranger like Lillie bursting out of the woods would have surely caused screams.
Stepping through the grass, she scanned the cabins, wondering how she could figure out which one was home to Henry�
��s wife and son without knocking on all the doors and creating a disturbance that might fetch the Orchard Hill overseer. She hadn’t considered that problem until this very moment, but now, confronted with cabin after cabin, all of which looked more or less the same, she wished she’d remembered to ask Henry for some way to pick his family’s home from all the others. She scanned the cabins anxiously, aware that time was once again passing at its ordinary, uncharmed pace and she’d have to make the run back to Bingham Woods at her ordinary, uncharmed speed. She took another quiet step when suddenly she heard a voice.
“Here!” it whispered loudly from off to Lillie’s left. “Over here!”
Lillie’s breath stopped cold in her chest, and a fear so big ran through her that she felt she’d swoon. She managed to keep her head and stay on her feet, and the voice spoke again.
“No,” it said in a louder whisper. “Here! Here!”
The voice sounded like it belonged to a girl, one who was older than Lillie but not by much. The girl’s call was answered not by another voice, but by the sound of running footsteps, and now Lillie reckoned she was caught for certain. This time she dared not simply stay where she was and instead took a few bounding leaps toward the closest tree, hoping that the sound of the other footsteps would mask her own. She ducked behind the tree’s thick trunk, banging her elbow hard against it and feeling the rough bark scrape away a portion of skin. She sealed her lips to prevent herself from crying out.
In the weak lamplight spilling from the window of one of the cabins, Lillie could now see a boy, perhaps seventeen years old, running lightly in the direction of the girl’s voice. He was tall and lean like many boys his age, but with the beginnings of muscles that said he’d already spent a season in the fields. He stopped and flattened himself against the wall of the cabin, and from around the side a girl emerged. Even from a distance, Lillie could see how pretty she was, and even from here she could see that the girl had taken the trouble to comb out her hair and put on a dress that was too fine for wearing around the cabins just before bedtime.
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