by T. R. Simon
Barely half an hour had passed when there was a knock at the door. Prisca stood stiffly, wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and answered it.
On the other side of the door stood Miss Caroline. She spoke softly. “Prisca, I know it is grief that makes your behavior untoward. But this behavior . . . it makes everything so much harder. Please send Lucia out now and show me that you are still the good, sensible girl I know you to be. Things can easily be made right between us.”
Prisca’s eyes were wild. “Made right? If you take Lucia, I promise you nothing will ever be right between us again!”
Miss Caroline took Prisca’s words like a blow. She stepped aside, revealing the presence of Master George and Mr. Krowse.
There was no more talking. Mr. Krowse pushed past Prisca and came over to me. He reached down and yanked me up by the wrists as if I weighed no more than a little sack of flour. Before I was even fully standing, he dragged me from the room.
Prisca lunged at Mr. Krowse and began to beat him with her fists. Startled, Master George grabbed her from behind. She started to scream, all the while reaching for me and struggling to free herself from Master George’s grip. Mr. Krowse pulled me toward the stairs. “Step lively,” he said, “unless you want to go down headfirst.”
As he continued to yank me along, fear finally took over from shock and I began to struggle.
I was near the bottom of the stairs, while Prisca was still at the top, trying to break free of Master George’s grip. Miss Caroline was nowhere to be seen.
I stopped short to look back at Prisca, which took Mr. Krowse by surprise. His foot missed the next landing and he stumbled, letting go of my hand. I tried to bolt back up the stairs toward Prisca, but he was too quick for me. He recovered his balance, grabbed me, and threw me down the remaining three steps.
I lay on the floor at the foot of the stairs, choking for breath. Then I saw it: his hand reaching for the whip that was always holstered to his belt. The first time I saw it I marveled at how small it was, how unimposing: a slim wooden handle the length of a man’s hand, a skinny cowhide braid the length of an arm, a tiny lozenge of leather at the very end. But I had seen him use it at least a dozen times. I knew the lozenge held a ball of lead, and I had seen the damage that modest object could do.
It arced in the air and then lightning tore across my back. In that instant I flew out of myself, above myself, floated weightlessly above my empty body, watching as he delivered two more punishing lashes. And as I floated over the body that had no self in it, I saw again every whipping I had witnessed at Westin. In all my imaginings, I had underestimated the agony.
Sibby had run the previous summer, and she was gone long enough that we had come to think of her as free — free or dead. Even the paddyrollers — white men who organized themselves into patrols on the lookout for slaves unaccompanied by a master, and who chased runaways for reward money — tired of searching for her.
I remember Master Frederic and Miss Caroline shaking their heads over dinner, wondering aloud how a slow-headed girl of fifteen could possibly run away with no help.
But Mr. Krowse, relentless in his pursuit, thought to question the Seminoles by Lake Apopka. Though he couldn’t bribe them to reveal that a black girl with a burn scar on her arm was among them, he had better luck with a white trader who dealt with them, and her hiding place was revealed. Warned by the Seminoles, she gained a few hours on Mr. Krowse and his hunting party. She ran into the swamps, managing to avoid the noses of the dogs. Three men pursued her for six days before she gave herself up, brought down by hunger and fever. They brought her back to Westin in chains.
Mr. Krowse ordered all the slaves on the farm to watch him whip Sibby. We knew it would be terrible. Twenty lashes? Forty? When Mr. Krowse told us that anyone who interfered would get the same, Leopold, larger than everyone else on the plantation at well over six feet tall, shook his head bitterly and whispered, “Fifty lashes.” Mr. Krowse tied Sibby to the gatepost, but the fever was cresting in her body and she no longer had the strength to stand, so he tied her at the waist against the trunk of a camphor tree to keep her from falling. He then delivered the first lash.
Sibby woke from the delirium of her fever and screamed, her single cry a hundred times more penetrating than a pig’s during slaughter. Then she was silent. By the seventh lash, Sibby fell, unconscious, against the ropes.
Mr. Krowse cursed her. He kicked her limp body. He spat on the ground and threatened us with worse if we ever tried to run. Finally he turned and walked away. Leopold and Samuel undid the ropes that held Sibby’s fevered body, and Samuel carried her to the shack she had once shared with Abeline. Samuel was Rebecca’s younger brother, and although he was shy, we all knew he had been sweet on Sibby for a good long time. His arms were trembling as he laid her down on the straw pallet. I put my hand on his back to steady him. Sibby was still breathing, but it came from her in broken gasps. Rebecca, who had silently entered behind me, shook her head, her eyes locked on Samuel’s grieving face.
I sat with Sibby that night, bathing her forehead with cool water and waving a burlap sack to keep the flies away. When she took her last breath, I stopped and placed my hand on her still chest and felt the fever subside under my hand. I recalled Sibby laughing, dancing with Samuel while Abeline sang a song about the devil and beauty. I recalled her face the last day I saw her before she ran and how it revealed nothing about her plans, how not even Samuel knew. And I recalled the death of Mama Sezelle’s brother, how she had covered him with cloth and lit a candle at his head and feet, how the old women gathered to release his soul. Who would release Sibby’s soul?
I gathered what I could find: a sheet, with almost as many holes as patches, and a small stub of a candle. I lit the candle and I spoke what I could remember of Mama Sezelle’s words. Three years without hearing the cadence of our island talk, the words no longer came easily, but I tried. I tried to set Sibby free.
When Rebecca entered the cabin she caught her breath to see Sibby laid out, and she sat down heavily beside me. She spoke, but it was more to herself than to me. “Travel in any direction, you’re still nowhere. This land is so wild, and we’re so, so far from anything: you escape, they catch you. Our lives ain’t nothing but a hunt to them. If I tell Samuel to run, this is how he’ll come back to me.”
I took her hand and held it tight. The secret we all shared, the one every white person wanted to beat out of us, was the burning desire to run. Freedom.
The next day Prisca had asked me what I knew about the slave who ran, so I told her Sibby’s story. Horrified by the details, Prisca had cried, “If only she hadn’t run. If she hadn’t run, she would still be alive!” Then she closed herself in the library.
A wave of rage had crashed over me. Prisca was a girl whom Mama Sezelle had cared for with tender hands, who had lain under lime trees with me and counted eggs in the nests of bobo birds. That same girl had put away the pain of Sibby’s death by simply closing a door, and when she did, my heart broke.
But this time was different. This time the girl they were whipping belonged to Prisca. She was running down the steps toward me and screaming, “Stop it! Stop it! George, make him stop! Please, George! For the love of God!”
Master George yelled down the stairs, “Krowse! Do not reduce her value!”
Prisca began cursing in our island language. She cursed Master George and Krowse.
I wondered how she could cry when I felt numb, but when she knelt on the floor and took me into her arms, my body woke up and the iron-hot burn of the lashes made me whimper.
Rebecca appeared in the doorway, her neck beading perspiration, her eyes bright with fear. Master George looked at her and pointed to me. “Take her to the cabins.”
Rebecca walked toward us steadily. When she reached us, I pushed Prisca away and grabbed Rebecca with all my strength, desperate to escape the pain in my body.
Prisca looked hurt as I clung to Rebecca. Then she turned on Master George, hissing like a
barn cat. “I hate you!”
Master George retorted, “Oh, no, Prisca. Oh, no. Don’t pretend this is my handiwork. You have yourself to thank. Treating her like an equal, acting like she’s one of us, carrying on like a spoiled child when we treat her like what she is, almost ruining her for good use. Slaves are not people, Prisca, and they are not pets. They are property, and not your property. They do not belong to you. They are the property of this plantation.”
Prisca glared at him. “If you are my people, then I am no longer one of you.”
I was curled in a ball on the packed-earth floor of Rebecca’s cabin, shivering. My teeth were chattering so hard I might have bit off my tongue. Rebecca spoke slowly and quietly to me, as if I were a small child. My body felt like a cold metal shell, and I was rattling around inside, bumping up against its walls. Rebecca kept talking quietly. Finally, her words broke through. “Come, child, let me tend to the wounds. Shh, child. Come, it’s OK now.”
Finally I got my mouth to work, and I said “No” as loudly as I could, as long as I could, until I grew weary. Then I just breathed, jagged breaths. I could feel Rebecca’s hand stroking my head, her words falling softly on my hair.
Then Rebecca was helping me to sit upright. She was gently undoing the top of my smock, her words still falling softly around me.
“Angry snakes,” she said, kneeling behind me, examining my back. “That’s what you got. Three angry snakes.”
I could feel two of them writhing in fire on my back. One stretched from my back all the way around to my chest and under my heart, searing me like a hot coal. Rebecca dabbed it with a cool, wet cloth.
“You ain’t ’customed to the lash. But for so few, they won’t let you lie in.” She spoke low. “I’ll let the wounds cool tonight and bandage you up tight in the morning.”
I nodded. The measurement of fitness to work against the damage of the lash was so common that they had a formula for it, a special calculus.
I moaned, and mumbled, “I saw Leopold take fifteen and work the field the next day.” A wave of anger at my own weakness washed over me.
Rebecca shook her head. “The lash hits everyone different. Take three of you to make Leopold, another lifetime of hard work to do what he do.”
“They’re going to sell me!” I spit. The accent of my island tongue thickened my words. Then my rage fled as fast as it came, leaving a voice so small I could hardly hear it. “They’re going to sell me,” I whispered.
Rebecca grunted. She pulled me to her, my head in her lap, and stroked my hair again. “You hold tight to yourself. A lot of us been sold away, and we’re still alive.”
The door hinge groaned and we both looked up. Horatio stepped into the cabin, his brow creased with worry. He sat down beside us and took my hand.
Rebecca nodded to him. “They gonna sell her,” she said.
His grip on my hand tightened, and after several minutes he spoke. “My first master, he sold me away from my mama when I was five. Sometimes I wake up and see Mama. I see her running after that trader’s cart, calling my name. My new master, he hauled wood, but I was so small I couldn’t pull the loads. He lost me in a card game. The man that won me, he tied me to the wall of his barn and burned his mark into my back with a glowing poker. He sold me five months later. Six masters owned me by the time Miss Caroline’s first husband bought me. I learned that if I could keep my body alive I could live through most anything.” He searched my eyes, trying to see how his words had landed inside me.
“I hate them,” I answered. “I hate them all.”
He caressed my hand. “These white folks pay for what they do. They just don’t know it. They pay with a little bit of their soul every time they put their boot on us. Ain’t no man nor woman can bring another soul low without losing they own soul. They may not think they lost, but they are.”
His patient words only angered me more. “I know their souls are already dead. But their bodies still sleep in soft beds in big houses, wear fine clothes, and eat good food. Their fine boots still get to kick us down and kick us again while we’re down. They still sell us like barnyard animals, breaking our hearts as if we had none, when it’s they who have no hearts. I hate them!”
“You can do that,” he said. “You can hate, but hate too hard and it’ll steal the memory of what you love. Hate long enough, and you won’t feel nothing for no one.”
I wept to hear his words because they held my truth. My hate felt like a poison in me, and it altered nothing about our lives.
Hot tears of frustration ran down my face. Horatio leaned close to me. “No matter where they take you, you will always live in my mind, just like the words you taught me to read.”
I bawled to hear those words, and Rebecca wept, too, as she stroked my hair, saying over and over, “It’s gonna be all right. You gonna live through this pain. You gonna survive.”
Some while later Horatio left, and Rebecca, after easing me, facedown, onto my pallet, extinguished the one candle with a sharp exhale.
The next morning I opened my eyes to see Rebecca already up. She had boiled rags the night before, and now she gently laid them, cool with the morning dew, on my wounds, then carefully wound a broad strip of muslin around my torso. We didn’t say a word.
All day I could feel the cloth scraping my back like a sea of razors. In the cookhouse I would arch my back, the cloth pulling at every turn, but I clenched my teeth, not willing to give them the satisfaction of having bowed me, and I worked as I always had.
When I served breakfast, Master George barely glanced my way. I had been dealt with and no longer merited a thought. Prisca could not bring herself to look at me at all, but her cheeks flamed red.
Afternoon brought more neighbors from farther afield to condole. For two of the families who came, it was a journey of at least four hours on rough roads. One family came from the area they called Fort Maitland, although the fort was long gone. Their barn had burned down eight months before, and Master Frederic had loaned them Jeremiah and Leopold, able carpenters both, to help them rebuild it. During the rebuilding and after, Prisca struck up a friendship with their son, Jude. Given that Jude would inherit his father’s lumber mill, it was a friendship that did not go unremarked upon by Miss Alice.
As the afternoon wore on, Rebecca sent me to fetch buttermilk from the root cellar, and on my way back I saw Prisca walking quickly toward the porch. Behind her by at least twenty feet was Jude. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and he kicked at high grass. He called her name and she stopped. He ran to her and took her hands, speaking urgently. She shook her head, pried her hands from his, and ran back to the house. Master Jude watched her go but did not follow.
The guests had an early supper. Miss Caroline had used her best china, and Rebecca and I then washed and dried every single piece of fragile porcelain. A broken cup would be met with a smack or worse.
Outside I gazed up at the bright stars and thought about everything I had lost and would lose. I thought of Mama Sezelle. Was she looking at the same stars now? Were we truly bound by her words over a small wooden bowl so long ago? I had begun to doubt the power of the island women. If their magic was real, why could it not save me now?
As I neared the barn, someone reached out and clasped my shoulder from behind. I almost screamed with fright, but it was only Prisca, pale and trembling in her mourning dress.
She pulled me behind a cypress tree and spoke intensely. “I spoke with Jude this afternoon, but it is useless.”
I brushed her hand from my arm. “Prisca, I am too tired to understand what you are saying.” All I wanted was to lie down on my pallet in Rebecca’s cabin.
She took a deep breath. “I had thought Jude might rescue us. I offered him my hand in marriage.”
I gasped. I could not help it. “You want to marry . . . ?”
“Yes, and he says he wants to marry me but not until he gets his inheritance, which is years from now — three years — and we cannot wait.”
�
��You have plenty of time to marry.”
“Not me and Jude. Me and you. Do you think I don’t understand what coming here has meant? Had he married me, I could have bought you! I could have moved us both from this place. Don’t you see?”
Slowly I did.
I helped Zora and Sarah put dinner on the table. Since Zora hadn’t brought back the nails until late in the day, Lucy Hurston had let John escape to his favorite fishing hole after all. And we were now about to feast on the bigmouth bass he caught. There were buttermilk biscuits and swamp cabbage and glasses of cool molasses water. Everything looked and smelled as good as food could, but I didn’t have much appetite. We all sat down and joined hands, and Mr. Hurston gave the blessing.
“Precious Lord, for these gifts, we thank you. Amen.” Then he sat down and bit into a biscuit. We gaped at each other, stunned at the speed and brevity of the muttered words. We ventured our tentative “Amens.”
Normally he presided over dinner the way he did over his pulpit, with a booming mini-sermon, then holding forth on the day’s events, reviewing his children’s deeds and misdeeds, and proclaiming how the world should work. His God-given power of speech seemed to have failed him this evening. There was only the sound of forks against plates, small slurping noises from Everett, and the rustling of hands reaching. Everyone was uneasy. I felt the way I do when the chickens hide and my mama lifts her head and says she smells a hurricane coming. His quiet muted even Zora.
Zora was watching her mama, who was watching Mr. Hurston, the food on her plate untouched.
It was Sarah who spoke first. “Daddy, you think this storm’s gonna break soon?”