“Lydia!” Lizzy sprang into the kitchen swooning. Several blond tendrils fell from the chignon at the top of her head as she spun around the sunlit room in a yellow gown of satin. She bumped into Lydia and wrapped her arms around her neck, giggling. “I love it.”
“Oh, Lizzy, you know I’m not finished.” Lydia swiped her hands across her apron and shook her head, but smiled. “I still need to add several buttons to the back.”
“I know. I just couldn’t wait.” She twirled, draping the fabric out around her like a fan. “What do you think, Cora? You like it?”
Cora smiled and nodded.
The three girls turned when Mrs. Kelly entered the room. Her thin face and frame were nothing more than a withered Lizzy. Her sunken cheeks, lined neck, and hands, spotted brown, aged her more than her husband, though he was several years her senior.
“Lydia and Cora, I’m waiting. Is breakfast ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, get a move on, please. I’m starved.” Her eyes shot over the length of her daughter. “Elizabeth, what are you doing in your dress?”
“Just excited, Mother.”
“Out of it at once before it’s soiled.”
“May I take it to Richmond?”
“That’s nearly three months away. We’ll see if you’re even as fond of it by summer’s end.”
“I will be.” Lizzy smoothed her cotton-white hands over the fabric. “I’m going to love it just as much.”
“Is my gown finished, Lydia?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is. I just have a little more work on your shawls and Lizzy’s—Elizabeth’s buttons left.”
Mrs. Kelly stared at her. A most indifferent woman. Although she often spoke words of concern, the weight of them carried no emotion, as if they lay dead deep inside, buried like Beatrice. She nodded and returned to the dining room.
Lydia and Cora whipped around Lizzy, setting each dish of grits, eggs, ham, and biscuits on a silver platter.
“Fix your scarf.” Cora tapped her own yellow handkerchief and pointed at her head just before she stepped out of the room.
Lydia smiled her thanks, ran her hand over the single braid down her back, and adjusted the faded brown gingham over her scar. She hated that thing. That awful, ugly keepsake of a lost dream. It teased her endlessly, peeking out from its cover unashamed, reminding her of her state in the world. Grabbing the tray off the counter, she walked into the dining room, set the food on the cherrywood table, and drew the drapes.
Sun rays spilled onto a stew of pink and yellow as Mrs. Kelly mashed her ham and eggs together and drummed her fork between small breaths that caved her chest, rounded her shoulders.
When the missus dismissed Lizzy, Lydia cleared the half moon of bread her friend left and waited. Minutes later, Mrs. Kelly frowned and tossed a rumpled napkin over her full plate and screeched it away, across the table, until it clanked against her husband’s breakfast. The congealed grits jiggled, untouched.
“You may go and see to the field.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Out on the front porch, Lydia squinted against the sunlight and waddled out to the field workers under the weight of a bucket she held against the slightest curve of her hip.
She searched the rows of tobacco for the one she wanted to serve first. She smiled when she saw him, his back to her, his overalls torn on the back left pocket. She would mend them when she had the chance. Her father turned when she grabbed his arm. He squeezed her with his gloved hand into his shoulder, reeking of nicotine and tar, and kissed the top of her head.
“Good to see you out here. On your feet again.”
She looked up at the tall shadow of a man. His right-sided grin usually made her smile, but today it pierced. Sadness crinkled his eyes. He was thinking of how she had been.
“I’m all right, Daddy. Doing fine now. Here.” She offered him the gourd. “You thirsty?”
He stooped over the bucket and drank for several seconds. “You almost done out here? I want you to hurry up and get on back inside. Don’t want the sun making you weak.”
Lydia laughed. She hadn’t seen the sun for nearly a month. Couldn’t make her weak if it tried.
She watched him work, breaking the flowers off the top of the plant, gleaning tiny shoots from the leaves. His drenched skin, high yellow like the white corn she shucked for dinner most nights, blazed against the other men and women on his row. All the shades of her people. The beauty of butter cream to the darkest shade of midnight.
Lydia froze.
Midnight. That space when all the world was still and she felt alone with the thoughts she wouldn’t dare think in the day. Those same thoughts came the first time she saw him.
John was as beautiful as midnight.
“Water?” she asked, bending a tobacco leaf from her view. When he saw her staring, his dark face lit with the kindest smile and the deepest dimples. She lowered her gaze.
“Sure.”
Gently, he clutched the gourd, his fingertips grazing hers. She watched him. His eyes close. His lips part. He was not a boy. Three or four years her elder, she reckoned. This was a man. When he opened his eyes, she blushed. His gaze met hers then traveled higher to her brows, her forehead. Lydia’s stomach flipped when her fingers found her scar uncovered. She tugged her scarf over it and looked away.
“I’m glad you’re better. Your father speaks of you often.”
How much did he know? “But you’re new here, right?”
“Somewhat. Yes.” He wiped the water from his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
Lydia watched the sweat gather across his forehead and sweep down his temple, his cheek, the square of his jaw. A hard worker. She glanced at the other men and women in the field. She supposed they were all hard at work. She was just close enough to see him dripping, hear him breathing, sipping.
“More?”
He nodded.
Lydia dipped the gourd into the wooden bucket and handed it to him.
“Lydia right?”
“Yes…” He knew her name.
“I’m sorry. I’m John.”
John. John. How many times would that name play in her head tonight? More than she could count.
CHAPTER TWO
Lydia slipped through death’s door.
Inside, orange rays shone through the cracks of the tiny log house and bronzed the smooth chocolate cheek of the old woman at the loom.
“Baby, is that you?” Ruth turned her head toward the door when it shut but her eyes stared ahead.
“It’s me.” Lydia smiled at the couple sitting in the center of the room waist-deep in a colorful sea of fabric.
Spun cuts of cotton draped over the low three-legged table in the corner like clouds over a rainbow of material in lavender, gold, crimson, slate. Colors Lydia had only seen on the petals of roses and in the deepest of dreams, and yet sadness prevailed in the mosquito-ridden cabin. The three knew as well as she, this was it for them. They would not leave this place. Life as they knew it would soon be over. Their cooling board prepared. Their cloth, their winding sheets.
She moved toward the table and allowed her fingers to touch the yarn of the spinning wheel and wealth of cloth surrounding her, showering them. She ran her hands down the length of rough wool and let them slide over a small patch of slippery silver. Bolts of cloth lay in each corner of the room, like barricades, like borders.
Abram leaned against the hunched shoulder of his wife and held a cloudy silver spoon of stew to his lips. Lydia stared at the scar in the middle of his palm, the back of his hand, his arm ashen brown and dull, as shriveled as dry wood. He paused when he saw her and nodded his smooth head. The corners of his white moustache and half-moon beard curved around the slightest of smiles.
Lydia acknowledged the wise one with a bowed head and a reverent utterance of his name. Old Abram. A chief, a sage, a spiritual warrior among her people, her father had shared. Respected and sought after for his wisdom and his knowledge of the G
reat One and His ways, he was father of the young and the old. For years, ailing children were sent to his side, draped in his arms, laid in his lap. Word had it, Abram would mumble, sometimes for minutes, at others near an hour, until his lids fluttered, his palms trembled, and power soared through him to little limp bodies that would rise, their eyes opening and blinking wide and round at the gathered worshippers on their knees. When the praise turned to him, he was quick to correct, “It is God who heals.” And heal He did through him countless times, but only for the young. For the older folk, there was no hope. The moment a boy’s voice deepened or a girl’s body curved, Abram was helpless to aid, as impotent as the rest. Too much time away from the source of life, too many tainted, tired years, he reasoned. For them, all he could offer were words that healed on the inside, and these verbal morsels men and women savored eagerly, sitting silently at his feet to listen to words deep in tone and nature, hoping to glean guidance that could carry them one step farther down the road of life.
Lydia had never witnessed any of it. Abram was old when she was born and set aside by the time she was of age. She wanted to, needed to believe in the power that raised spirits, that lifted heads, but all she knew was the shriveled man who nodded and offered few of the many words he had once spoken.
Even the greatest withered away.
It hurt. This ending to his life. Nothing could be easy about losing awe, the admiration of ones who believed in a life set apart only to discover that it would dry out as deeply as it had flourished. When the healing faded, it burned, but when the seekers ceased to come and he was thrown away in The Room to die, it seared. A leader reduced to a weaver of cloth like all who could no longer serve in the fields. It was the fate of the old, the disabled, and it had fallen just as surely in Abram’s lap as it had the rest.
It hurt. Lydia knew. She saw it in his misty eyes quick to turn away when they met hers. She heard it in the quiver of her father’s voice when the elder’s name was spoken. She felt it in her heart when she tried to catch her breath within the walls of her people’s purgatory.
“Lydia…” His wife Odessa nodded her crown of gray hair. Her fingers intertwined with Abram’s free hand like knotted tree limbs. Of the three, she was the one who looked the oldest, who spoke the slowest, who broke the easiest. Often tears slid down the sandy-brown grooves etched around her eyes, down her cheeks, beside her mouth like every treacherous road she had traveled, like tracks through a hard ground that couldn’t bring forth life if it wanted to.
A nervousness moved through her, darted her eyes like flies in a web of wrinkles, quivered her lip, nodded her head even when she said no. But “no” was rare, hardly ever spoken by the oppressed, even less by the time he or she entered The Room.
Lydia walked to Ruth and squeezed her shoulder.
“How’s our girl today?”
“Fine. Just fine.” Grazing the back of her mentor, Lydia watched the miracle of weaving hands, the gathering and threading of slivers that would create a world as soft and warm as the arms of love. She stood for several minutes before sitting next to the leader of the loom, the blind woman with blue eyes.
The first time she saw Ruth, she ran.
Lydia had been a girl, not quite as old as Cora, charged by Beatrice to carry food to the loomers. It was a big task for a young one to deliver anything, so she did it proudly, happy to have been asked.
With her fingers gripping the handle of the woven straw basket, she held the rations with taut arms as she tiptoed across the cornfield, sweat slipping down the front of her stifling burlap dress.
It was scary even then. The Room. It was fuller in those days. A room of eight or nine old folk she had never seen before. Foreign faces of life long past, gaping at her, staring through her. Bony wrists grabbing for the cobs of corn she had no idea how they would chew with empty, wide mouths beneath sunken cheeks. And it smelled, not of chamber pots, for the children of the aged prided themselves in keeping them emptied and clean. No, this stench was a humming still, dry musk like the clawed dead that hung from the ceilings in the smokehouse.
There was only one in the corner Lydia hadn’t served, a woman sitting on a bench at the loom. Even from behind, she was different from the others. Her back straight, her body agile with only thin slivers of shiny silver through dark locks bound by the bandanna tied at the back of her head, stretched against the top of her ears.
“Ma’am, would you like something?”
When she turned, Lydia gasped. Still blue skies captured in the face of the darkest night. She dropped the basket of food and stumbled over bare feet, bent knees, and wounded legs struggling to move out of her path, the sound of cracking joints and her apologies ringing in her ear as she ran out.
It took several weeks before the patience of the eldest house slave ran dry and Lydia gained the courage to return. In time, she sat under Ruth, a profound teacher without sight who taught her to see designs as intricate as they were beautiful before they were ever formed at her fingertips.
“You ready, baby?” Ruth asked, removing her foot from the pedal and sliding off the bench to a wooden chair she felt her way into.
“I am.”
Lydia sat inside the loom with her stomach pressed against the front beam. She stretched out her legs until her foot reached the heavy pedal of gourd and pressed down, flexing and pointing her toe. Two pairs of shafts, she decided. When she threaded the white weave pattern 1-1-1-1-2-2-2-2 with four threads in each heddle, she smiled. The black she threaded in a plain weave with single threads, passing each one through both pairs of heddles, creating an equal amount of warp and weft—a balanced weave.
She was always ready for the loom. A time to sit at the massive wooden machine of posts and beams that filled most of the space of the small shack was her pleasure. It was peaceful, a journeying away, a chance to dream. Often she sat for hours, unaware of the time passing or the light sounds of sleep from the three nearby. All she heard, all she saw, all she felt was the newness. A new creation, a new design that would thread a new experience that could fashion a new life. She weaved a world of possibility each week until her lashes tapped against her lower lids and her head bobbed, her foot stopping and starting against the pedal.
By nightfall, she completed the shawls. When she released her foot, her pulse raced. One more task. Just one more and she could escape to another world.
As secret as it was kept, Lydia was a lady.
In her quarters, she glanced at the gown Lizzy had worn at breakfast, ruffled on top of her bed. Her gown.
From the light of the kerosene lamp, she was surrounded by the shadows of her bed covered in old linens, a cedar stool, a rough-hewn chair, a wobbly, three-legged wooden table much like the one in The Room, and a large mirror, a treasured gift from Lizzy.
She moved to the stool with the satin dress in hand, her lips jiggling a stick pin in the corner of her mouth. Fastening the yellow knob buttons in place, she threaded the needle and whipped it in and out of the fabric with skill until twenty buttons, one on top of the other, adorned the gown she spread across her lap. It was ready.
She was ready. Lydia looked around, felt her heart thump as it did each time. Now, all these years later, she couldn’t remember the first time she had done it. All she knew was she couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t.
She let her fingers dance over the slippery fabric of yellow and caressed it against her cheek. She thought of Lizzy dancing in the gown, spinning and twirling carefree in the kitchen. And tomorrow night with a gentleman. The sweet dance of love. What it would be like to spin and twirl in a gown like this for John.
Tonight she would dance for him.
Each article of clothing she made for Lizzy and the missus she wore first. Every dress, every chemise, every shawl, every cloak first slipped over her shoulders, slid against her thighs. She saw herself in each piece first. So though it seemed she obtained their old attire, they in fact acquired hers. She was the first lady of the house, even if only in her min
d or in the few minutes she stood before the antique mirror.
Lydia rose and dragged the stool behind her. Quickly, she looked out the door and, when she saw no one, creaked it shut, pushing the seat against the wooden frame.
She and Lizzy were the same size, both thin, petite girls, though her friend was slightly taller.
She shrugged out of her worn slip of a dress and stepped into the gown. As she brought the satin up over her knees, her thighs, she lifted the bodice over her breasts and slipped her arms through. Holding the back of the neckline together, she inched to the mirror.
Though she had tried it on before, she was now certain this one was better on Lizzy. If it were hers, she’d need to raise the hemline and tighten the waist some. She tugged the dress down over her shoulder and glanced up at her reflection. She closed her eyes. Darkness and dimples.
She was a lady.
CHAPTER THREE
Oh, Lizzy. It’s perfect.” Outside on the steps of the Kelly manor, Lydia studied her friend from head to toe.
She was sunshine in darkness. Her blond hair, the pearls against her throat, and the yellow dress shined, but they were no match for the joy that made her face glow in the moonlight.
“Thank you, Lydia,” she gushed, grazing the strand of pearls. “I sure wish you could come.”
Why’d she say such things? Why? Lydia looked down. Her faded blue dress trimmed in thick white lace was still pretty though she wore it often. Not pretty enough for a ball. But it was more than a dress that would keep her away. “It’s all right, Lizzy. I’m going to see my daddy tonight.”
“Elizabeth!” Mrs. Kelly called from the carriage. “Come now.”
“Bye, Lydia.” Lizzy paused before she smiled, squeezed her hand, and walked down the steps to her mother, wrapping her shawl around her.
Lydia rubbed her arms against the breeze. A shawl would do her good tonight. She would grab it quickly and head to the slave quarters. Though the days of late summer were warm, the nights were still cool enough for covering.
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