Baby Lani looked on as her mother smoothed her skirt and gazed down at the worn, checkered pattern. “It’s going to be my work, my time.” She smiled and stepped toward the small table by the window, on which she had set the bushels of tobacco, yards of dyed cotton, beads, and fine hand tools that she hoped to be able to carry with her on the boat, over the ocean, and into the motherland, where they would build their new home. Big George had also managed to steal cheese, sausage, apples, and several bread loaves out from under Old Master Scott’s careful and increasingly greedy eye in the kitchen. All this bounty was assembled on the modest table, and it was more treasure than she had ever seen in one place.
She walked over to Lani, crouched down, and began rocking the cradle. She looked at her chestnut-brown hand resting on the cradle’s edge, and was shot six years back in an instant, when Nolan was inside an ordinary tub that Mrs. Barnes had scavenged for them, and James’s hand was on top of hers, resting easily, and they both knew—she knew that they both knew—that this day would come, the day when they would choose their own destinies, when they alone would be responsible for any act they did or did not engage in, when a black God’s vengeance would trump anything a white could mete out. She had never considered, however, that James might not be here with her now. And then she was shot back into her body just as quickly, and the pain came back, the sharp jab in her chest, the physical presence of his absence, the going on and on and on and on, and she stumbled out of her crouch, onto the floor with a thud. Lani was startled and looked up. The baby opened her eyes wider. Yasmine stared back at her daughter, the last person James had acknowledged before he passed on. She was disturbed and about to cry. Yasmine gathered her weight and regained her balance, then reached out and wrapped Lani’s small fingers around her index finger.
“Barely six more hours before we gone from this place, forever,” she told her. Lani’s clouded eyes instantly began to calm at the sound of her mother’s voice. “All you need to do is sit pretty like you always do and get ready to see some new country. Just so you don’t get to worrying, here’s what we going to do: Little George and Big George is going to leave early for church service, like Old Master always wants us to do on Saturdays. But instead of going to church, they gonna hide in the tree stand up by the creek. Nolan’ll be with Mrs. Barnes in the kitchen, but soon as she goes out to fetch the linens for washing, he run back here and wait for us. Now, you’ll be with Penny in the house, as usual. But soon as I see Mrs. Barnes head out the kitchen toward the backyard for the linen tubs, I grab you and head back here. Soon as we get Nolan and pick up this pouch filled with food and necessaries, we make for the tree stand and Little George and Big George. And then we gone.” She snapped her fingers, and Lani caught her breath. It felt good to speak the plan aloud, all the particulars perfectly aligned. It made the dream seem real.
Yasmine leaned into Lani, so that their faces were almost touching. “Be as if we never was here at all,” she whispered. “Be like we that river used to run beside Old Master’s property, then dried up to a creek, and then just dried up, period.” Lani’s hold on her finger became lax. “Folks might say they remember the taste of that sweet water, be dreamin’ they can almost taste it on their tongues, but they never will taste it again, so they might as well get used to thirst.” She could hear the sharp edge in her voice and felt her back stiffen. She saw his old, withered hand on her breast, and she closed her eyes tightly and pulled her hands away from her daughter. “Go ’way,” she told her mind. “Ain’t got no use for you no more.” Her voice quivered, but the image flew away just as fast as it had come, and she was back in the here and now, reaching toward Lani again, readying her for their own flight, their leaving.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHEN THE SUN WAS just beginning to fall down from its perch, Yasmine placed her last bushels of wheat in the oxcart and nodded to Mrs. Barnes when she passed her in the kitchen. When she walked to the dining room, Penny was already there, sweeping imperceptible dust from the top of the bureau, the bookshelves, and the table. If there was one thing Old Master insisted on, it was a clean house; he could be like a woman in that way.
Lani lay on a small blanket on the floor, sucking on a piece of apple Penny had given her. Yasmine picked her up, hoping that, somehow, being connected to her daughter would remind her of what she had to do.
Penny looked over her shoulder. “Afternoon, Mrs. Yasmine,” she said, a shy grin spreading across her face. Penny was only thirteen, and though her body still resembled a child’s, there was something older in her neck and shoulders. Or perhaps it was her back, the way she held herself—upright, but a little bit fatigued. Like she was already tired of this world and eager to step across whatever pain would last an instant into the gentle oblivion of the next. Lani would never grow up to know that feeling and have that wish. Yasmine would make sure of it.
“Afternoon, Penny,” Yasmine answered back. She walked over to the girl and kissed her on her forehead, just below her head wrap. Yasmine pursed her lips and tasted the bitter saltiness of Penny’s perspiration. She wanted the taste and the sweat itself to be the only things she carried from this place that lasted, save her children.
Penny cocked her head and looked at Yasmine askance. “What you do that for?” She placed her right hand on the same hip. Mirth played at the corners of her mouth.
Yasmine walked past her to the bureau. She pulled out the polished maple case that contained all the silver, which was given to Old Master’s father, who was the first Quaker to start a plantation in Virginia. Old Master had told them the story so many times—usually when he was handing out their measly pittance of a salary every month. “He was a man before his time, my father,” Old Master would say, his palsied left hand pointing at them and shaking with his madness. “All the other white men wouldn’t even call their workers ‘workers.’ They called them slaves—because they were slaves! They didn’t pay them anything for their labor, whipped them, mutilated them, even killed some. But my father would have none of that. He insisted on a more humane manner of dealing with his fellow men. He insisted that they have decent quarters, be fed properly, never be whipped or physically harmed in any way, even if they flagrantly disobeyed orders—and he even paid them! Can you imagine what it meant forty years ago, to have coloreds in your possession in the state of Virginia, and to insist upon their humanity?”
At this point, Old Master would invariably set an invasive stare on whoever was unfortunate enough to be next in line for payment, and they would flinch and look away. But Yasmine never did. She just stood there, and met him where he was. Once, when she was fifteen years old, in the middle of the story—the part about the things that the other white men did to their coloreds—she had interrupted him. “They rape their colored women too?” she asked evenly. His eyes screamed, and his left hand stopped shaking for an instant. Behind her, in the full line of hot, sweaty coloreds, someone coughed. Someone else shuffled their shoes, but mostly what she heard was the collective quiet of held breaths. He grunted some kind of affirmation finally and then handed her a small pouch of coins.
“What? I can’t give my niece a kiss from time to time?” Yasmine asked now, lifting three spoons from their velvet casings and blinking away the memory. She didn’t want to take them either.
Lani cooed in her arms, grabbing at specks of dust in the air illuminated by sunlight.
“No, that ain’t it,” Penny said, turning to face her. “You know I ’preciate anything you got to give me in the way of love. It’s just that you ain’t exactly a whole bundle of affection, usually.”
Yasmine snickered. It was so easy to be with Penny—she would miss that. “Well, I ain’t exactly got a lot to be affectionate about, usually.” She shifted Lani to her hip and scrubbed at the first spoon with the coarse rag vigorously. The silver caught a ray of sunlight and reflected it back in her eye, and her pupil smarted. Although it could sometimes hurt like this, she loved the
sun and couldn’t wait to get out in it, moving with her boys and Lani, day in and day out.
Penny sucked her teeth. “You better watch your language, missus. You know God don’t like ugly.” She moved her dustrag onto the gold-flecked frame that contained a painting of Old Master’s father, enthroned in his study, Bible in hand.
Yasmine snickered again and raised an arm toward the picture. “See now, that’s you all’s problem—you think that’s God.”
Penny turned around and faced her, presumably to study her and see if she was being serious.
Yasmine picked up the next spoon and let its coldness ripple up her spine. “That ain’t God. In fact, neither that man nor his son ever had a conversation with God or his son. But yet, they got every colored up in this place thinking that they the very incarnation of all that’s holy.” She shook her head. “It’s a shame. It’s a shame what they done to us.” She put down the last spoon and peered out the window. The light was beginning to fade; she had better finish up in here, quick.
Penny looked at her aunt, befuddled. “There be plenty of worse places to make a home,” she said. “And you ain’t even have to go that far to find them, neither.” Penny shook her head. “You heard what Master Kennedy tell Old Master Scott last spring, right?”
Yasmine knew, but she turned her attention to the last few utensils at the bottom of the case.
“He tell Master he whip any of us what wander to his place, even if we family relations. He tell him he don’t want to see his coloreds getting any strange ideas in they heads about how they should be getting paid, how they should be having nicer quarters and better food. He say every time one of them come back from visiting us, the whole plantation be agitated for weeks—field hands, house help—complaining ’bout unfair treatment and the like. He tell Old Master were it up to him, he like to round up all the Scott people and shoot them. Say they tampering with nature, the way he running things.”
Yasmine set Lani down and then pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. She walked over to Penny and enclosed her in her arms. The intensity of the gesture surprised them both.
“Good night,” Yasmine said, stepping away from her. She wished she could know, know for sure, that Penny would leave one day. She wished she could ask her to come along, but she knew better.
Penny’s eyes were wet, and she searched Yasmine’s. “Why you so . . . different tonight?” She took her aunt’s hand. “Feel like you got something you keeping tight, right here.” She brought her fist to her chest. “Like something got caught there, or caught you.”
Yasmine only smiled, scooped up Lani, stepped into the doorway, and with a last look, tried to memorize the way Penny’s spine curved deeply when she stretched toward items that were out of reach. The sharp point of her nose in profile, the jut of her upper lip, which sometimes made her look stern, when she wasn’t at all. Who would she end up being? Who could she end up being? Yasmine’s eyes smarted, and she walked out of the doorway, into the living room, and out the front door, Lani ever watchful in her arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IT WAS TOO COLD. The first frost had come a few weeks before, but icicles hung down from tree branches in the night, and when they melted in the morning they made puddles that Yasmine and her children sloshed through during the day, leaving a kind of coldness that seeped into their skin. There was simply no way to get dry. Yasmine was thankful that it was only a five-day journey to Norfolk, and that once they were there, they would have lodging at the home of one of the men she had met at the meeting last month.
“Ouch!”
Yasmine turned to see Little George clutching his left foot. She wiped the sweat from her brow and walked over to him. “Let me see,” she said, bending down. “What happened?”
“Don’t know,” he said, pursing his lips. “Feel like I stepped on something—something with nettles.”
Yasmine felt Lani stir on her back and hoped that they hadn’t woken her.
Little George wiggled his foot out of a worn-out boot, sucking his teeth. He shivered as the wind bellowed around them.
Yasmine sighed. His big toe was punctured, probably by a stinging nettle. There was an awful lot of blood for a wound so small, which told her that it must have gone deep. She wished they were someplace where they could stop, but it would be two more nights before they reached Norfolk and their lodging. He would have to hold on until then. Yasmine pressed the wound firmly with her thumbs.
Little George flinched at her touch. “Your hands freezing,” he said, warming his hands in his armpits.
She ripped a small piece of cloth off from her head wrap and tied the scrap around the cut, tight enough so that it would stop the blood. “We can’t stop,” she told him. “We got nowhere to stop at.”
Little George didn’t meet her eyes. He pulled his boot back on without a sound. “I know.”
The wind kicked up sharply again, cutting at the tips of their ears. From his place beside Big George, Nolan whimpered and dove under the long brown wool of his oldest brother’s overcoat, which hung down to his feet. It had been James’s gift to Big George on his fifteenth birthday.
Yasmine stood up and got her bearings. They needed to head northeast for the rest of the day. Lani was moving on her back now, crying loudly. Like Nolan, she had no tolerance for the cold. Yasmine picked up her pack and stepped forward. “You shush now,” she told her daughter. “We ain’t got no time for such carrying on.” This made Lani cry even harder. Yasmine felt her kicking her tiny feet into her back. That child could be so willful! Yasmine took another step. The harder Lani cried, the faster she walked.
* * *
—
The next morning, about a half hour after they set out, Yasmine noticed that she didn’t hear the familiar sound of a trio of footfalls behind her. She turned around and saw no one—not Big George, not Little George, not Nolan. Her breath caught in her windpipe. They had them, they finally had them! The last thing she would ever see before she left this earth would be their faces. She tried to remember them: Big George’s nascent triceps, his deliberate yet easy gait; Little George’s intense stare, the way he could almost run you down with it; and Nolan’s blubbery baby cheeks. Yasmine laughed in spite of herself. She picked up her skirts and began to run back the way she had come, boots snapping twigs beneath her as she went. White oak and beech trees blurred in her vision as she sped, and the hard shell of acorns pierced her soles. The sun was beginning to rise above everything, its rays slowly melting the frost that had come the night before. Yasmine could see her breath as she ran, heard Lani’s faint cries on her back.
The fear that had shadowed their leaving the Scott plantation had been a shapeless thing for the most part. The Wrights weren’t truly runaways, and Master Scott wasn’t technically their master. In theory, she should have been able to walk to Norfolk without a second thought. In practice, though, Yasmine was sure the formless “they” of her nightmares would solidify and snatch her children.
Suddenly, the boys appeared, gathered around a big rock. Nolan was sitting on it and pressing his palms into his eyes. There were streaks of tears all the way down his face, and his nose was running. Big George stood beside him, taller than she ever remembered him, his right hand on his little brother’s shoulder. Big George’s expression was stern, and as he looked up to see her, Yasmine thought she saw something akin to disdain in his eyes, but it disappeared as quickly as she thought it. Off to the right was Little George. He was not facing either of them, but rather, looked out into the deep darkness of the brush. He did not turn around to acknowledge Yasmine’s approach.
She felt her heart slow as she came nearer to them, and her breath became more regular. “Boys!” she said. Only Big George met her eyes. “What the hell you doing?”
The top of a pine tree sawed near the sky, as the sky’s air made it moan. Lani gurgled on her back, but the boys said nothing.
She reached out and grabbed Big George’s forearm, and he flinched. “I asked you all a question, dammit! Now you best answer me. Here I was, thinking you all was with me, and then when I turn ’round and look, what do I see?” She pressed her face into Big George’s, and he backed up unconsciously. Nolan looked up at both of them, crying.
“What you think I see?” The pitch of her voice was rising. If James were here, he would tell her to step away for a moment to breathe, that he would handle it first, and then she could make her appeal, as long as she did it calmly. She had always hated that conversation with him, especially because she saw how much better the boys responded to his voice, his discipline, than hers.
Big George was staring at the ground. Tears kept streaming out of Nolan’s baby eyes. Little George still hadn’t turned around to even let her know that he was listening or even cared.
Yasmine strode over to him, fastened her hand to his shoulder, and spun him around. “You look at me when I’m talking to you, boy!”
His face was blank, completely empty. It was like the night sky before the stars came out, but more blank, somehow. Slowly he focused his eyes on her face. She tried to see what he was keeping in them, what it was that had drawn them here, so far away from her, and not fearful of this distance at all, but there was still nothing. This enraged her further somehow, and before she knew what she was doing, she had slapped him across the face. Behind her, Big George and Nolan gasped, and the pine tree above kept on sawing back and forth, back and forth.
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