by Anita Kopacz
They drag me out of the house and throw me on the porch. I can see the illuminated faces of about six other men. They are carrying torches and waiting with their horses nearby. A tall man walks up to me, slaps me with all of his might, slings me over his shoulder, strides down the steps to his dancing horse, and throws me like a sack close to the horse’s neck. It knocks the wind out of me, and I gasp as I feel him wrench my arms behind my back and tie my wrists tightly together.
In spite of the excruciating pain in my ankle, I kick my legs in an attempt to push him away and propel myself off the horse. He catches my legs and binds my ankles together. I hear the other men laughing as the tall man mounts his horse. He holds me against the saddle as we gallop away from Richard’s house. His gang follows closely behind. My body flops against the horse’s back as tree branches whip my face. I’m about to pass out when the men suddenly stop their horses midstride.
They are yelling and cursing. “Holy mother of God!” I hear the tall man gasp as he pulls up his horse, causing my body to slip. He catches my dress and yanks me back over the horse’s neck. I start coughing and gagging. Thick clouds of smoke engulf us, almost blinding us to the horrific scene. I can see bodies lying everywhere, scattered across a lawn. I squint against the smoke and look toward the fire. I can recognize the skeleton of a mighty house completely consumed by flames. African men and women run screaming across the lawn and disappear into the forest. Is Obatala with them? They are far away, and the smoke is too thick for me to make out their faces.
An older white man, bleeding from his chest, startles me as he staggers up to the men on horseback. “Slave uprising,” he stutters as he falls to the ground, blood pouring from his mouth, then he chokes out, “Hang them!”
The men wrench the horses around and kick them hard in the flanks. We take off down the road, and I fear I will never find Obatala. My ankle throbs unmercifully as the horses gain speed. Where are we going? What will become of me?
We gallop into what looks like a small village, with red and brown buildings lining a broad, hard-packed dirt road, dimly lit by tall treelike torches. As the men slow their horses, I notice that the village seems empty. I see no other people. Then I hear noises, music, yelling, laughing, coming from a nearby building. As we trot past the doors, a few white men walk outside and stare at us. They whisper and point when they spot me lying across the horse. We stop in front of a building that seems to be made of stone.
The tall man dismounts, pulls me off the horse, and throws me over his shoulder. He opens the door to the building and ushers the other men, still carrying their torches, toward the entrance. They drop their flaming sticks into buckets of water at the door. Smoke trails in after them. He unlocks a huge cage with thick metal bars separating it from the rest of the room and tosses me inside. As he slams the gate, he demands, “Whose nigger are you?”
I am silent. He growls at me, turns away, and motions for the men to gather around a heavy wooden table in the middle of the main part of the room. He looks at the man sitting at the table and says, “Sheriff.” Then he looks at the men around him and says, “Gentlemen, we have a situation. Our niggers think they can get away with killing good, moral people. We have to travel to the surrounding townships and warn them about the uprising. The slaves will be heading north through Virginia. We have to tell everyone to be on the lookout for escaped slaves. All in favor say aye.”
“Aye!” they all respond.
“Gather as many men as you can. We will leave in an hour,” he proclaims as he slams his fist on the table. The men rush out, leaving me in the cage.
The night is dark, lit only by the thin crescent of the new moon. I unwrap my bandage and observe the swollen mass that once was my leg. As I lean in closer, I see that the tiny weblike hairs are growing out of my injured ankle again. Instead of wiping them away as I did before, I concentrate on the growing threads as they extend before my eyes. They wrap around my calf and foot. Millions of tiny strands secure my injured limb in place.
Mucus-like liquid slowly spews from my pores, and I rub it in around my self-made dressing. The mucus quickly hardens into a cast, and I can feel my bones heal almost instantaneously. I smash the cast on the floor to crack it off. I roll my ankle in a circle and then pull myself upright using the bars of the cage as support. I place my foot on the floor and put weight on it. I’m amazed that it doesn’t hurt. I hold on to the bars of the cage and slowly lower myself to the floor.
Suddenly, thunder booms and lightning cracks across the sky. A torrential rain begins to fall. The window is slightly ajar, and water sprinkles in through the opening. The same strength that I felt at the river returns as the water seeps into my pores.
The door slams open and interrupts my solitude.
“That damn rain!” the man called Sheriff yells as he enters the building with a younger white man. “Light the lantern, it’s too dark in here.” The young man strikes a match and sets fire to the wick, flickering it to life.
Sheriff hollers out to the men on the street, “We’ll set off come morning. By then the rain should cease.”
He slams the door and pulls off his coat. “Damn!”
The other man takes his coat and hangs it on a wooden rack beside the door.
Sheriff turns toward me. “What are you looking at?”
He walks up to the bars and squints at me. “You’re not a slave, are you?”
“No,” I quietly respond.
He hits the bars in frustration, then turns toward his companion and says, “My brother got killed tonight at the plantation. Stabbed.”
“Yes, sir, I know. It’s a shame, a real shame.”
“Someone will pay for this!” Sheriff breathes a deep sigh. “Our niggers are running wild. I need you to stay and watch this one overnight. I’ll be back in the morning.”
“Yes, sir. I just need to fetch a few things from home. Do you want to stay with her while I’m gone?”
“She’ll be fine.” Sheriff laughs. “She ain’t going nowhere.”
They leave the lantern burning as they exit the office, slamming the door shut behind them.
Suddenly, I remember the rock I crushed at the river. “Can I still do that?” I whisper into the night air. I firmly grip the iron bars, pulling them with all my might, but nothing happens. I am baffled. What has changed? The rain outside the window begins to intensify. Drops of water splash upon my skin. I feel renewed again. I grab the bars, and slowly the metal begins to give way. I pull them apart just wide enough to slip through, and I realize that I must be touching water to access my strength. As I step out of the cage, I hear the doorknob rattle. The younger man is back.
I quickly jump inside the cage and close the opening in the iron bars with the last bit of power in my body. My eyelids droop with exhaustion, and as they close over my eyes, I suffer a cruel hallucination. I blink to chase the image away, but Obatala remains in front of me. He caresses my cheek and whispers, “We will be together soon.”
As I close my eyes again, I hear the man’s footsteps approaching my cage. He stands there for a moment, his breathing labored and raspy. He walks away, and then I hear the scrape of a chair across the floor. I peek through one eye and see him sit at the table and pick up a pile of papers. As he sorts through them in the dim flickering lantern light, I close my eyes again and fall into a deep sleep.
I awaken to the rhythm of a herd of horses. I roll over on the dusty wooden floor and look through the bars of my cage. The room seems much bigger in the light of day. I am alone. The noise outside intensifies as men, women, and children begin shouting with angry excitement. Between indecipherable screams and shouts, I can hear them chanting, “Hang them all! Hang them all!”
The bars of my cage now seem like welcome protection. I lie motionless on the floor, trying to stay out of sight. Last night I hadn’t noticed the large windows facing the main road. I am exposed. It would be so easy for someone outside to see me through the glass.
The knob rattles
and the front door of the building flies open. The younger white man who was with me last night walks in. He shuts the door hard and secures it. I’m frozen in terror as he glances in my direction. He hurries to the windows and pulls heavy cloth coverings over them, blocking out the sunlight and the curious gazes of the people outside. I feel momentarily relieved. Maybe this white man will be kind, like Richard.
He sticks his hand in his jacket pocket and walks slowly toward me. He smiles slightly and says, “It took me all night to forge this.”
He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and offers it to me through the bars. I don’t move, so he urges in a gentle voice, “Go ahead, take it.”
I unfold the paper, and as I examine it, he says, “You’re probably wondering why I’d do something like this for someone I don’t even know. Well, let’s just say that you remind me of someone I couldn’t help, someone I cared about.”
I smile at him and look at the paper again. It’s covered in beautiful squiggles that are arranged in ordered rows. I turn it upside down and examine it from all angles. I stare at the paper in my hands in confusion. I can’t imagine why this man has given it to me.
“Can’t you read?” the man asks with some annoyance. Then I see a smile form at the corners of his mouth. “It’s your Certificate of Freedom.” He reaches in and takes it from me. “Here, see? Let me read it for you.”
He clears his throat, takes a breath, and continues with an air of seriousness: “ ‘This is to certify to whomever it may concern that…’ ” He stops.
The young man hurries to his desk and retrieves a large feather. “What is your name?”
“Yemaya,” I answer.
He dips the stiff end of the feather in a pot of thick black liquid, holds it over the paper, and mutters, “ ‘To whomever it may concern.’ ”
He scratches the paper with the feather. “Yemaya,” he says. He ceases the scratching and resumes muttering, “ ‘A person of color, about seventeen years of age at five-feet-eight-inches high and of dark complexion, is a free person of color. I, T. M. William Brown’ ”—he stops muttering, looks at me, and winks—“ ‘have signed my name and affixed the seal of the court on this eleventh day of August in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred, and forty-nine.’ ”
I am silent.
He frowns slightly and says, “Did you hear what I said?”
I nod and smile hesitantly, then whisper, “Thank you. Does this mean I can leave now?”
The man folds the paper and hands it to me. “Soon. Keep this document on your body. Anyone can ask you to prove your freedom. If you don’t have it, you’ll become a slave.”
BANG!
The man slams into the bars. I jump backward and trip hard onto the floor. My ears ring for a moment, and then I go deaf as he collapses to the ground. His feet kick involuntarily. Blood pools beneath his body and seeps under the bars. I pull my feet in and quickly stuff my freedom paper into the pocket of my nightdress.
I can’t hear the men break down the front door, but I can see their enraged purple faces and contorted lips yelling as they rush in and surround the dead man. They kick him and spit on him. Slowly, my hearing begins to return, and the sounds of them yelling, “Traitor!” echo throughout the room.
The dead man’s blood slowly reaches my bare feet.
The men open my cage and two of them pull me up from where I’m crouching in the corner. We slip in the blood and slide across the floor. One of them hits his head on the bars and yells at me as he grabs me by my hair. The other one rummages through my pockets until he finds my freedom paper. He attempts to remove my nightdress, but I kick him with all my might. He flies back and slams into the bars. His fingers twitch as he slides to the floor. There is still breath in his lungs, but he looks dead.
The one gripping my hair stares at his companion in disbelief. After a moment of hesitation, he releases my locks and scurries out of the cage. The rest of the men are infuriated. They charge into the cage and tackle me to the floor. I feel the sharpness of their kicks and the bluntness of their blows until a cloud of thick white nothingness knocks me out.
7
UNLIKELY ALLY
I slowly wake up as I feel a warm, wet cloth cleansing the wounds on my face. I hesitate to open my eyes. The gentle strokes lead me to believe that I am safe.
“You don’t need to open your eyes, but I can tell that you’re awake,” a soft female voice murmurs. I can hear her clearly, and I can even hear the warm water dripping into a basin as she wrings out the cloth. I’m relieved that my sense of hearing has returned, but the darkness around me makes me think I might now be blind. My eyelids lift to mere slits before the pain hits. I immediately close them again.
“You were beaten pretty badly. I convinced my uncle to leave you with me. Don’t know what he and the other men would have done to you if I hadn’t intervened.”
Suddenly I remember: My freedom paper! I frantically begin to search for it. My eyes stay sealed shut as I toss about, feeling for it in each pocket of my nightdress.
“It’s not there,” she says. “The boys gave it to my uncle when he bought you. I’m not sure where he put it. Knowing him, it’s probably long gone by now.”
I throw my head back and immediately regret doing so. My pain worsens. Where am I? Who is this woman taking care of me?
She covers my body with a silken blanket and says, “I’m truly sorry about what they’ve done to you. The best thing for you right now is to get some sleep. I’ll give you a change of clothes tomorrow. It’s late. I must leave you for now, but I’m close by, in the room across the hall.”
She sounds different from the other people I’ve met. I’m tempted to look at her, but the immense throbbing of my injuries stops me from trying to open my eyes again. The light in the room dims. I can tell because the shadows moving across my eyelids fade to black. I hear the woman pad softly away, the squeak of the door opening and closing, the rattle of the doorknob latching… and then the sickening sound of a lock clicking into place. Why am I locked in? Where does she think I’ll go? Am I her prisoner now?
I can feel open gashes on my back sticking to my nightdress as I settle more deeply into the bed. In spite of my pain, I fall asleep almost immediately.
The morning sunlight hits my eyelids. I turn away from the light and open my eyes slowly, waiting for the agony to strike again. But the throbbing is gone! I reach for my face and feel the silken webs gently fall away. This time they are all over my body. I slip out of the bed and pull my crusty, bloodstained nightdress and underthings off. I examine my body as I wipe away the remaining webs. I reach around and feel the smooth, soft skin on my back. No gashes. I look at my arms, chest, and legs—no cuts or bruises. I feel my face and trace the familiar contours with my fingertips. No pain, no swelling.
The lock clicks and the door swings open before I can cover myself with the blanket.
“Oh my, good Lord!” the young lady cries as she slams the door shut. She stumbles toward me and dumps black boots, white cotton underclothes, stockings, and a plain black-and-brown housedress in a heap on the bed. I jump up and back into a corner of the room, trying in vain to cover myself with my hands.
“This is a miracle,” she whispers as she stares openly at my naked body. Her face reddens, and she turns away from me. “I’m sorry,” she says as she grabs the dress and underclothes from the bed. She throws them in my direction and says, “Put these on. Quickly. No one can see that you are completely healed. How am I going to explain this?”
I pull on the clothing but am still fumbling with the buttons on the front of the dress when the young woman turns back toward me. At that moment I notice her delicate beauty. Her fine straw-colored hair, pulled back from her small face, reflects the sunlight streaming into the room, making her look as though she’s glowing from within. She seems to be only a little older than me.
“Unbelievable,” she says, walking cautiously toward me. “My God—how
did you do this? Who are you?”
She peers tentatively into my face, then reaches up to stroke my cheek. I pull back, and she jerks her hand away. “I’m sorry.”
She stands up straight, her posture becoming rigid. Her voice takes on a tone of authority. “We must not let them find you like this. They will think you’re a witch.” She hurries to the door and locks it, then motions to the boots, which are still on the bed. “Put those on.”
I sit on the bed and pull the heavy boots over my thick stockings. The clothing feels oppressive and cumbersome, not like the soft, light shift Cora had given me.
“What is a witch?” My voice cracks and I realize these are the first words I’ve spoken to this young woman.
“A witch is a woman with magical powers. A sorceress.” She moves closer to me and whispers, “Any woman who looks to nature for answers instead of our almighty Lord.”
“A medicine woman?” I ask.
“Something like that.”
Perhaps I am a witch.
“Your wounds, how did you…” She stops abruptly and laughs to herself. “Oh gosh, where are my manners? I’m always going on about something. You must be hungry. I will fetch you some food, and we can speak over breakfast.”
She leaves the room without saying another word, and—as she did last night—she locks the door behind her. My stomach churns with the sound of the key turning in the lock, and again I wonder if I am her prisoner, or perhaps her slave.
The room, my new cage, looks like the bedroom in Richard’s house. I stand and walk to the window, hoping that I might be able to climb out and run away before the young woman returns. I must find Obatala before he goes too far away. Where am I? Where is he? Will I ever see him again?
I hear a key unlocking the door, so I leap away from the window and am caught awkwardly lurching toward the bed when the young woman enters with a light-skinned African woman carrying my food. She reminds me of Sara, though she is older, and I wonder whether she will betray me as Sara did. I flinch slightly. She looks at me briefly before walking toward a small table perched next to a large, light blue chair by the bed. As the woman sets the tray of food down, she looks at the rumpled, bloodstained bedsheets, then up at my smooth, unmarked face, and murmurs, “Oh my!”