“Missus Susan come into the kitchen. She don’t want to see you. You stay right here, and you don’t trouble anyone.” Cressy fingered the key.
Kitty said, “Miss Cressy, I promise we won’t stir. Please don’t lock us in.”
“You don’t order me,” Cressy said, and she shut the door and let them hear the key turn in the lock.
Their idleness was worse than hard labor because it was so fraught with worry. What use was an idle slave?
They gleaned what they could in the kitchen, since they were let out of their prison for meals. They learned that Cressy had been with Missus Susan since they were both small, and she was fiercely loyal to her mistress, who had made her missus over all the female slaves. The rest of James Jarvie’s servants adjusted to her as well as they could. Dulcie, who had her own troubles in the kitchen, in conflict with the cook who was already there, stayed out of her way. Lydia, who was biddable, did whatever Cressy asked of her, even though it included the wash she hated. Bel sidled up to her and tried to flatter her.
Like her mistress, Cressy hated idleness, and even though she carried out her mistress’s bidding in keeping Kitty and Caro from any useful task, she loathed Kitty and Caro, who spent their days sitting in their airless room. They had been in the house only for a few days when Cressy announced after breakfast, “Now I know why Missus hate you.” She gestured to Bel. “She tell me. Go on, let them know what you say.”
Bel pointed to Kitty. “She Marse James’s doxy.” And at Caro. “And she his get.”
Caro rose from the table to tower over Bel. Her cheeks flamed with anger. “My father treated my mother as his wife,” she said, her gaze red-hot on Cressy. “And I am my father’s daughter—I still am, even though he’s gone.”
Cressy turned to speak to Caro directly. “Oh, that’s fine,” she said. “That will do you fine, when you stand on the auction block to be some man’s fancy girl.” She addressed Kitty. “Like your mama before you.”
They became more sure that Lawrence would ignore the plea of the will and sell them. Caro’s bad dreams returned, and Kitty woke nightly to comfort her. They tried to reassure each other, but it grew harder to speak words of reassurance. Both knew that the reassurances might be lies.
Caro began to think that if she stayed here much longer, with nothing to do, nothing to read, and no hope of learning her fate, she would go mad. Being sold might be preferable, she thought. Anyone who bought her would put her to work, although she didn’t like to think of what the duties might be.
They had been in their makeshift prison for two weeks when Cressy knocked on their door to say gruffly, “They want you in the house.”
“Who?” Kitty asked.
“Marse Lawrence.”
Her mother turned pale and clutched Caro’s hand. Caro clutched back.
“Go on with you,” Cressy chided.
They followed Cressy down the stairs, into the kitchen, and for the first time since they had arrived at the house, into the yard.
The yard smelled of the midden heap in the corner, but the fragrance of magnolia and camellia drifted from the garden on the other side of the fence. Caro breathed in the scent of flowers, but her chest was so tight with fear that she could barely smell it.
Cressy opened the side door and took them to the study. Caro was too distraught to look at the house or the furniture. It was a blur of white paint and wood floor, where her eyes were fixed.
Cressy said, “Don’t you touch anything with them dirty hands of yours.”
The study smelled of books, leather, and paper, but it also smelled of the flowers that grew in the garden outside the study window. The fragrance was strong in this room. Magnolia was suddenly the smell of fear.
Lawrence Jarvie looked up from the papers on his desk. When he spoke, his voice was clipped and curt, as though talking to them was distasteful and he wanted to finish the task as swiftly as possible. He said, “You can’t stay here.”
He will sell us.
“We’ve decided what to do with you.”
The slave auction. Slave Mart.
“You’ll leave today.”
The auction block.
“My sister, Mary, owns a property on Tradd Street. She spends little time in Charleston, and her housekeeper looks after the place. There’s a little house in the yard,” he said. “She built it for one of her servants. We’ve decided that you can live there.”
It began to dawn on Caro. Not to be sold. But to be sent away, not far, to be out of sight.
Her mother, who looked as though she might faint, said weakly, “How will we manage, sir?”
“That’s not my concern,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“Cressy will take you there.”
Cressy fetched them, but at the side door, Ambrose stopped her. He said, “Let me wish them well.”
“Marse Lawrence tell me to take them now.”
“Just a moment.”
“You don’t order me.”
Ambrose humbled himself. “I know, Miss Cressy. I beg you.”
Cressy said to Kitty and Caro, “I wait for you at the gate. Don’t linger.”
Ambrose made no effort to press their hands. He leaned close. He whispered, “They watch.” In the same low tone, he added, “Take care.”
They walked down the driveway, where Cressy waited. She opened the gate and shoved them into the street. Behind them, the gate clanked shut.
Chapter 4: The Basket Name
Caro had never walked far in her rough shoes. Now she learned that they chafed her feet.
“Why you walk so slow?” Cressy demanded, as Kitty and Caro limped behind her.
The street was full of people of color, all better dressed than they were. Caro felt sick with shame. She dreaded the thought that someone would guess, with sympathy or with scorn, what had happened to them.
But no one looked at them. It was as though no one saw them. The field hand’s dress was a disguise that took away everything that made her Caroline Jarvie, James Jarvie’s daughter. She was a slave without a face and without a name. She might as well have been a ghost.
Blisters began to rise on Caro’s feet, and she ignored them as she followed Cressy. Every step caused more and more pain, and by the time they reached the house, Caro bit her lip against the pain in her feet.
Like the Orange Street house, this one was set sideways and made of brick that had turned dingy with age. The windows that faced the street were dim, as though no one had washed them for weeks, and the foliage around the gate had been left to overgrow.
Caro and Kitty stood at the gate with Cressy, wondering who would greet them. Cressy lifted the knocker and rapped. They waited. No one answered. Cressy rapped again. And they waited.
Someone unlocked the gate from within, and it swung open.
She was a head shorter than any of them, and shades browner. She wore a plain brown dress, darker than her skin, and her head was covered with a clean white scarf.
Cressy greeted her by saying, “You take your time.”
The stranger said, “Busy in the kitchen.” She had the thick accent of the Low Country.
“Empty house! Busy doing what?”
“Ain’t your business,” the stranger said curtly.
“Well, they here,” Cressy said, gesturing at them.
The stranger appraised Kitty and Caro as though she were buying two chickens at the market. “Marse Lawrence let me know.”
“They yours now.” Cressy turned to go.
“Why don’t you say goodbye proper?” the stranger taunted.
As she walked away, Cressy’s voice floated back to them. “Don’t owe you one!”
The stranger said, “She rile me, the way she full of herself.”
Whoever she was, she disliked Cressy. Caro felt a prickle of hope. She asked, “Who are you?”
“Who am I, Miss Sass? My name Sophy.” She looked from Caro to her
mother. “What do you call yourself?”
Kitty said, “I’m Catherine Bennett Jarvie. And this is my daughter, Caroline.”
“Hah! Fine names, like a dress for Sunday best. What do they call you the rest of the week?”
Caro found her voice. “My intimates call me Caro.”
“Intimates! Maybe I just call you Sass. Or do you have a basket name?”
Kitty said, “I’m from Charleston. Born and bred in Charleston. I don’t believe in that Low Country superstition.”
Sophy shrugged. “Sass,” she said. “Come with me, both of you.”
They followed her along the brick walkway into the yard. At the end of the walkway stood the carriage house, built of wood, smaller and more dilapidated than the one on Orange Street. Room for only one carriage, Caro thought, astonished that she would care when her feet and her pride hurt so much.
Next to it was the kitchen house, also built of wood, with a great chimney in the middle. The second story held a row of small windows, lined up like the windows at the prison. Slave quarters, when the house was open.
But Sophy led them past the kitchen into the yard, where garbage had been heaped into a midden. The smell of rotting shrimp shells rose from it. Caro wondered who made so much garbage in an empty house and how a slave got her hands on enough shrimp to cause such a stink.
“Your house here,” Sophy said.
It was also wooden, the size of a shed, built so hastily that no one had bothered with glass windows. Oiled paper sufficed.
Sophy said, “This is the house Betsey live in, when she get so bad with the cough no one sleep well in the kitchen house. Her daughter stay with her and take care of her.”
Caro asked, “What happened to her?”
“She old,” Sophy said. “She die.” She turned the doorknob—this building had no lock—and pushed open the door.
They stepped inside. The air was still and damp, so dense that it was hard to take a breath. The smell of the midden seeped through the oiled paper, and the light was like the smell, decayed and oily. The floor was packed dirt.
Against the far wall stood two little rope beds, bare of any sheet, coverlet, or pillow. In the middle of the room was a small pine table, clearly a cast-off from the kitchen because the top was scarred and burned. Two rickety chairs of the roughest pine were arranged around it, and on it sat two dented tin plates, two worn tin cups, and a battered tin pitcher.
It was a house to match the dresses and the shoes: a slave’s house.
Caro turned to her mother. She gazed around the room, and she fought off the urge to sob. She said, “Papa would turn in his grave to see this.”
“Hush,” her mother said. Her face was ashen, but she said lightly, “So this is now our home.”
“Better than some,” Sophy replied. “Is you hungry?”
Since her arrival in Charleston, Caro had been too wrought up to eat. Suddenly she was enormously hungry. “Yes,” she said fiercely.
Kitty put a hand on Caro’s arm. “We’d be glad of something to eat,” she said, her tone polite.
Sophy snorted. “Ain’t no ladies here,” she said. “You hungry. Come eat.”
They walked through the yard.
The air outside was hot and still, and they walked past the midden toward the kitchen house, where the fragrance of the garden wafted into the yard. Caro couldn’t see the garden, which was separated from the yard by a wooden fence, but she was glad for its mingled perfume of roses and azalea. The garden’s fence had no gate, since no one in the yard was meant to spend time in the garden. The yardman, if the place ever saw one, would be admitted to the garden through the entrance meant for servants.
Near the kitchen house, a flock of chickens pecked at the ground, eating the bran from unpolished rice.
“Unhusked rice?” Kitty asked, as though she were the mistress here.
Sophy shrugged. “Save Marse Lawrence some money.”
Kitty frowned. “It puts you to the trouble of unhusking it.”
“Marse Lawrence help out Miss Mary and they both appreciate that I act frugal.”
Kitty’s eyebrows rose. “Is he”—she used the genteel phrase—“embarrassed?”
“My, you talk fancy,” Sophy said. “He always been careful with his money. Since he expect to run for the Assembly, and that cost money.”
Something woke in Caro, the connection to the bigger world that her father had instilled in her. “He’s in politics?” Caro asked.
“Why would you care, Miss Sass?”
“My father insisted that I read about history. And politics.”
Sophy looked at her as though she were addled, but she explained, “Oh, he have ambition, and so do Missus Susan. He want to be a judge someday, like his daddy was, and the Assembly help him get there. Now he mad, I hear. Can’t run this time because the estate take up his time and attention. Don’t know about debt, you busybodies, but I hear that Marse James leave behind a proper mess on the Colleton place.” She gave Kitty a knowing look. “Thought you might know about it.”
Kitty blazed, “And why would you?”
“Oh, I hear things,” Sophy said.
“Then you should keep them to yourself.”
“Things good to know,” Sophy said, unfazed.
Near the kitchen steps, a calico cat watched the birds eat their breakfast. Caro bent to extend her hand to the cat, which was sleek and plump, and it sniffed her hand as though hoping for something good to eat.
They paused before the kitchen, which still struck Caro as shabby after the substantial brick building at her father’s house. At the thought of her father’s house—no longer his, no longer hers—her eyes stung. They walked slowly up the wooden steps, which creaked under their shoes, and pushed open the wooden door that could be secured at night with a bolt.
The kitchen was surprisingly bright, with windows on three sides—glass here because the kitchen mattered more than old Betsey’s hut—but it was even hotter than in the yard. In the middle of the room, at the hearth with its big chimney, a pot simmered on the old-fashioned trivet that served as a burner in a modern wood stove. A savory smell rose from the pot, rice and peas and greens and bacon together, a richer meal than those Cressy dished out.
On the big table, its top marked by kitchen use but its construction solid, Sophy had laid three places. The white plates were green-rimmed and thick—common china but china. The tumblers were heavy, but they were glass. Beside each dish lay a cloth napkin and a spoon that that glinted where the silver plating had worn off.
Sophy told them to sit, then dished the food into bowls and handed them out. “Mind, it’s hot,” she said. She served herself. Caro picked up her spoon, and Sophy shot her an admonitory look. “Wait,” she said. “We bless it first.” She said, “Thank you, Lord, for this food,” and picked up her spoon. She looked at Kitty, still sharp. “Didn’t you raise your girl to say grace?”
My papa raised me to read Latin and Greek, Caro thought.
Kitty said gently, “She’s very hungry, Miss Sophy.”
Caro interjected. “Mama! We were never pious at home.”
Sophy shook her head. “No church! Don’t know what to do with you.” She sighed, the sympathy surprising Caro. “Eat. Both of you. You so pale you look like ghosts.”
Caro had been raised to eat like a lady, but she was much too hungry. She finished her bowl and asked, “May I have some more?”
Sophy gestured toward the pot. “You take all you want,” she said.
As Caro helped herself from a pot that held enough for a dozen people, Kitty asked Sophy, “That’s a lot of food for one person. Does someone else stay here?”
Sophy said, “Cook once, eat more than once. That all.”
“Do you live here all alone?”
“Not that it’s your business, but I do. Miss Mary don’t care for Charleston since her husband die, and she spend her time with her people in the countryside. I
stay here to look after the place.”
“She trusts you?”
“Marse Lawrence do. I keep his house in Colleton County, and he trust me with all of it. The claret, the silver, the china. When Miss Mary need someone to watch over her house, he send me to Charleston.”
So Sophy owed her unusual position to Lawrence Jarvie, just as Cressy owed her power in the house to Missus Susan. He had decided to like Sophy, as he liked Ambrose. Caro asked, “Why does he hate us so?”
Sophy said, “What do you think, Miss Sass? That he happy his brother treat a slave like a wife and give him blood kin like you? Of course he don’t like you.”
Her mother blanched. “Is that one of those things that’s good to know?” Kitty asked.
Sophy nodded.
“How? Who told you?”
Sophy laughed, and her merry face gave her the look of a much younger woman. “People do talk,” she said. “Every week at the meetinghouse. Although you wouldn’t know, would you? Living godless like you used to.”
Caro didn’t care to be needled for not being well-brought enough for a slave from the Low Country. She remembered her manners and asked, “May I be excused?”
“Was you brought up too genteel to help with the dishes?” Sophy asked.
Caro looked from Sophy’s knowing face to her mother’s pale, drawn one. “Mama, was I?” she asked.
“Sass,” Sophy said.
Kitty and Caro returned to the shack and stared into its dark, shabby interior. They had been freed from Cressy’s heavy hand in Lawrence Jarvie’s house, but this place was a different kind of slavery. The air inside the little windowless house was chokingly hot. Caro breathed in the stink from the kitchen midden and felt too restless to go inside.
Her mother laid a hand on her arm. She looked pale and ill. Full of consternation, Caro followed her inside.
Her mother sat heavily in the rickety chair. “I believe I’ll rest for a bit,” she said.
“Should I ask Sophy for a blanket? Or a pillow?”
Her mother smiled a little. “Ask her for a silk coverlet,” she said. “And a lace pillowcase.”
Caro crossed her arms over her chest. “Mama, how can you talk like that? Look at this! Look at us!”
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