She had been a privileged slave, protected and petted by her father. She had become a lucky slave, free by the whim of a master who didn’t care what she did as long as she lived out of his sight. Now she was truly a slave, and she knew what it meant to be imprisoned in body and soul.
No wonder the Vesey uprising had been fomented by men who were half free. Overworked maids were too oppressed even to think of rebellion.
She met Dulcie in the yard’s hiding place behind the shed in the still heat of midafternoon. Dulcie’s pleasant face was creased with worry and wet with sweat. “Sophy come this morning. Your mama come back from the Work House.”
“How is she?”
Dulcie wiped her face with her apron. “Sophy say she ain’t at all well.”
Caro grabbed Dulcie’s arm and forgot to keep her voice low. Wild with worry, she cried, “I’ll go to her, if I have to run away.”
Dulcie remembered to whisper. To remind her, too. “No, Caro. I tell Miss Emily. I have a notion how she help you.”
Emily had returned from the pines a few days ago. On that day, Emily had drifted past her, as pale as in her days of mourning. She didn’t speak or look up. But she touched Caro’s hand, the faintest, ghostly touch, invisible to her stepmother, who watched her as closely as Cressy watched Caro.
That afternoon, Cressy sent her to beat the dust out of the parlor carpet. It was a noxious task, since the dust went into the nose and throat, making her cough. As her mother coughed. Oh, Mama, Caro thought, staring at the pattern in the bright, new Turkish carpet.
“Caro.” It was Emily.
Caro looked up from her task but didn’t let go of the carpet or the carpet beater. “Yes?” she whispered.
“Come with me.” A low, urgent whisper. But not a command.
“If Cressy sees me…”
Emily reached for her hand. “Leave that to me,” she said.
“I’m filthy,” Caro said ruefully.
Emily took her hand. “I don’t care,” she said.
As they walked toward the kitchen, Caro asked, “Is it true you’re engaged now?”
Emily nodded.
“Not to Joshua Aiken.”
“No.”
Caro coughed. “So that’s the prison they found for you,” she said.
They found Cressy sitting in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee. At the sight of Emily, she pushed the cup away and rose. “Yes, Miss Emily? Something the matter?”
Emily took on an imperious tone. “Cressy, I have an errand to run, and I need Caro to go with me.”
Cressy looked at Caro, whose apron was streaked with dust, and aimed her words at Caro, too. “Miss Emily, she busy this afternoon.”
“Surely you can spare her.” She sounded like any young miss, contemptuous of a servant.
Cressy drew herself up. She repeated, “She have her duties.”
Emily’s tone turned icy. “Who is the mistress here?”
Cressy was unperturbed. “Miss Emily, your mama don’t want to hear that Carrie shirk her duties in the house.”
Emily’s voice became even icier. “I’m sure that my mother doesn’t want to hear that you’ve been insolent to me.”
Cressy’s expression changed from surprise to resentment. She looked sullen. With bad grace, she said to Caro, “You go on and do what Miss Emily ask you.”
In the yard, Emily took Caro’s arm and whispered, “Now we’ll go to see your mother.”
It was disturbing to return to Tradd Street. She had missed it so much. But she was too worried for a homecoming.
At the gate, Sophy put her arms around Caro and embraced her for a long time.
Caro asked, “How is she?”
“Bad.”
Caro’s eyes filled with tears, and she blinked them away. She hastened to the shack, trailed by Emily. She pushed open the door, calling, “Mama?”
Kitty struggled to rise from the rope bed. Her eyes had dark circles, and her lips were cracked. Caro ran to her mother and gathered her into her arms. “Mama,” she cried, clinging to Kitty.
Kitty had been thin before her arrest, but now she was so gaunt that Caro could feel every bone in her spine. Kitty drew back to caress Caro’s face. “Caro, beloved,” she said. “You’re so thin. What have they done to you?”
If she hadn’t been so upset, she would have laughed. “Mama, don’t worry about me. We need to take care of you.” Caro laced her fingers through her mother’s. Kitty’s hand was papery skin over bone.
Kitty began to cough. A wracking cough, that she couldn’t stop. “The cloth—” she gasped, gesturing toward the table. Caro handed it to her. Kitty pressed the cloth to her mouth, and it reddened with blood. Caro watched, speechless, as Kitty wiped her mouth.
She said gently, “Mama, you must rest. Sophy will nurse you and help you get better.” Caro caressed her mother’s cheek. The skin of her face felt papery, too.
Her mother kissed Caro’s palm. “My darling girl,” she whispered.
Caro’s eyes filled. She remembered how her father had said that, calling them both his darling girls.
She turned to see Emily lingering on the threshold, a look of dismay on her face. She pushed past Emily to run into the yard, her worry turned to dread. She caught hold of Sophy and gasped, “She coughs blood now.”
Sophy nodded. “She mighty sick.”
“Sophy, will she die?”
“I don’t know. Only God know.”
Caro buried her face in her hands. Sophy pulled on her arm. She said, “Come into the kitchen to cry so she don’t hear you.”
She didn’t hear Emily close the kitchen door. She didn’t look up as Emily sat down. When Emily put a hand on her arm, she shook it away.
Emily said, “She needs a doctor.”
Caro raised her head. Emily’s face was pinched and waxy, the look of grief that she doffed as easily as a black dress.
“I don’t know how I’ll manage it. My father would know, even before the bill came.”
“Mr. Pereira,” Caro said, her voice choked. “Ask him for help.”
Emily bullied Cressy—there was no other word for it, and Caro delighted to watch it—into letting Caro accompany her on another errand. At Tradd Street, they met Benjamin Pereira and the doctor in the kitchen. The doctor was a very well-dressed young man, used to doctoring planter families. Caro wondered how Pereira had persuaded him to attend an ailing slave.
Sophy showed the way and Pereira followed her. At the sight of her mother, supine on the rope bed, her eyes closed, her hands resting on the coverlet, Pereira cried out, “Oh, Kitty!”
Hearing that plaint, Caro understood that he had always loved her mother as much as he loved her father.
Kitty opened her eyes. “Oh, Ben,” she said.
For a moment Caro recalled the woman who presided over her father’s house and beguiled his best friend at the dinner table.
“Don’t get up,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. He stroked her forehead. “We’ve brought the doctor to see you.”
“As though it would do any good,” she said, stifling a cough.
Pereira touched her cheek. “I’ll let Dr. Cohen be the judge of that,” he said, and he rose.
Dr. Cohen said, “Please, let me examine her.”
“Of course,” Pereira said. Caro saw how his eyes glistened with tears.
The doctor bent over Kitty, looked into her eyes, felt for her pulse, and listened to her cough. It took no effort to bring up blood. He wiped her mouth gently with the cloth and set it on the rickety table. “Please rest,” he said to the sick woman. Glancing at Pereira, he nodded, and when he left, Pereira left with him. Caro followed, and so did Emily and Sophy.
Pereira said, “I must go.” They all knew that he meant, “I can’t bear it.” He said to Dr. Cohen, his voice thick, “Send the bill to me.”
Dr. Cohen inclined his head. After Pereira left, he spoke to the rest of them
. “Where can we talk privately?”
Out of her earshot, he meant. Caro said, “The kitchen.”
He settled uneasily in the pine chair at the great scarred table, not comfortable in the slaves’ domain. Emily asked, “How is she?”
He asked Emily, “Are you her mistress now?”
“She’s my father’s servant.”
“She has consumption. It’s advanced. She’s very ill.”
“What can we do?” Emily asked fiercely.
“Keep her comfortable,” the doctor said.
Sophy said, “I have a tea for the cough.”
“Let her have it. There’s no harm in it.” He clenched his hand into a fist. “Why wasn’t she seen to earlier? I could have helped her.”
Emily said, “She was already ill when my father had her arrested and sent to the Work House.”
“How long was she there?”
“For a month.”
Dr. Cohen’s face darkened. He said, “Damn the man for a brute. Doesn’t he know any better than to abuse a servant like that?”
After the doctor left, Caro and Emily returned to the shack. Kitty lay back on the bed, her shadowed eyes opening at the sound of their footsteps. Caro sat on the edge of the bed to take her hands.
Kitty said, “Don’t lie to me, either of you. I know it’s consumption.” She coughed. “I know how bad it is.”
Caro implored, “Mama, we’ll nurse you. You’ll get better.”
Kitty turned to Caro to say, “I’m so sorry, Caro.”
“Mama, there’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“Once I’m gone, who will take care of you?”
“Don’t worry about that now, Mama.” Caro pushed away the thought of being a slave who was also an orphan. She rose. “I’ll come again tomorrow, Mama.”
Kitty tried to speak, but she began to cough. Caro waited until the spasm passed, then she smoothed her mother’s forehead.
Kitty shook her head. “Caro, there’s something I want you to have.”
“What is it?”
“It’s under the bed, wrapped in a cloth.”
Caro started to rise, but Emily said, “I’ll look for it.” She knelt on the dirt of the floor to search under the bed. She scrabbled a little to pull out a small bundle of black silk.
Kitty said, “Give it to me.” She unwrapped it, and the ivory gleamed in the shack’s dim light. She pressed it to her cheek and handed it to Caro.
In the portrait her father smiled at her, and the sight of his face, forever young, forever sunny, brought back all the grief of his death. “Mama, I can’t take this from you.”
“I won’t need it anymore. I want you to have it.”
“Please, Mama. Not yet.”
“It’s for you now,” Kitty said, and she closed her eyes.
On the way back to the house on King Street, Emily said to Caro, “Let me take the portrait. For safekeeping.”
“No,” Caro said, feeling the weight of the little portrait in her pocket.
“I don’t want anyone to think you took it. That’s why I offer. Not because I want to wrest it from you.”
“No.”
Caro had always suspected that Bel rifled her room, and now she knew for sure. Bel found the portrait and tattled to Cressy, and Cressy grabbed her by the arm to pull her into the study, where the tribunal of master and mistress awaited her.
They looked alike in their anger, their eyes bright, their cheeks flushed. Their fear of rebellion was a kind of fever, and she had roused it in them.
Susan held the portrait between her fingers as though it had been dipped in filth. She said to Caro, “You stole this.”
Caro kept her head down and her voice low. “No, Missus.”
Lawrence said, “Don’t compound the theft with a lie. We know that you stole it.”
She shook her head. “No, Massa,” she whispered.
“Why else would it be in your hands?”
A low voice came from the doorway. “Because I gave it to her!” Emily marched into the room. “Leave Caro alone, Papa, Mother.”
“Why are you here? This has nothing to do with you.” Her father’s voice shook with anger.
“Yes, it does. I took it,” Emily said.
“Why would you lie to protect her?”
“It’s not a lie. I took it, and I gave it to her.”
“For God’s sake, Emily!” her stepmother cried. “Why?”
“I thought she might want something to remember her father by,” Emily said. “After Robert died…”
“Don’t lie to me, Emily. I know she stole it.” That was Susan.
“You yourself gave it to me. I thought it was mine to use as I wished. I gave it to Caro. Did I steal it?”
Her father said, “Don’t defend her. I know why you speak for her. It’s the influence of that Joshua Aiken, a man who has betrayed everything you should hold dear. Are you lying for him, too?”
“Papa, you know that I wrote to him to break it off and that he no longer writes to me.”
“I wonder, since you have such a talent for duplicity.”
“Not in this.”
He said to Caro. “I can send you to the Work House, as I sent your mother.”
Caro flinched. Emily said, “Catherine’s stint in the Work House made her very ill, Papa.”
Her father ’s expression of anger was suddenly suffused with shame. Did he regret mistreating a servant so? He sharpened his tone. “I’ve told you before, Emily. It’s not my concern or yours. Keeping the servants and this house in order are my concern.” He glowered at Emily. “Take the portrait and keep it out of her hands. Her thieving hands.”
He ordered Caro, “Go back to the kitchen.”
Caro murmured, “Yes, Massa,” as she backed from the room.
Lawrence turned his ire on Emily. “The sooner you’re married to Ellison, the better,” he said. “Have you fixed on a date yet?”
“Not yet.” Emily swallowed hard. “Papa, Jane Aiken had a year to assemble her trousseau and plan her wedding party. Give me the courtesy of a long engagement, too.”
“I never heard a report of Jane Aiken defying her family. It doesn’t take a year to sew some bedsheets and a dress or plan a wedding breakfast. Stop dawdling, Emily.”
Cressy took Caro her room above the kitchen and locked her in. In her prison, she had nothing to do. No floor to sweep, no carpet to beat, no silver to polish, no petticoat to wash. Without taking off her shoes, she lay on the bed, curled into a ball, and slept.
The sound of the key in the lock woke her. It was late in the afternoon, still light, still hot. Cressy said, “Well, they decide what to do with you.”
Caro said nothing.
“You stand up and show me respect when I talk to you.”
Caro rose.
“I don’t know why they don’t sell you. You lucky. They leave you to me. So I put you under Bel, and you do anything she ask you.”
Caro dropped her eyes, as she would for Missus Susan.
“You don’t wear that good dress anymore. You do rough work, you wear a rough dress.”
The ragged dress and the coarse shoes again.
“You do it now.” She tossed the ragged bundle onto the floor and waited.
Caro said wearily, “Cressy, please, leave me to dress in private.”
Cressy slapped her cheek. “No sass,” she said. As Caro reached for the buttons on the gray livery she had always hated, she thought of Sophy’s affectionate tease in her nickname, and she steeled herself not to cry.
Bel delighted in giving her the dirtiest and smelliest jobs—cleaning the ashes, emptying and washing the chamber pots, blacking the stove. She often came to watch as Caro worked, her arms crossed, her mouth set in a smirk, mimicking Cressy’s stance and expression. The work exhausted her, and her worry for her mother kept her awake at night. Caro started from sleep every hour, in terror that her mother had died in the n
ight and that she had not been there to hold her hand and say goodbye to her.
Today Caro knelt on the kitchen floor and poured sand into the big iron pot that was crusted with the remains of dinner’s gumbo. She felt dizzy. She had been too wrought up to eat, and she had slept fitfully in her stifling room. She sat back on her heels to steady herself. She thought of the days when she had willingly helped Sophy, sharing in the cooking and the scouring, and had never minded it. Now, forced into the kitchen’s worst task by a gloating Bel, she bent her head, lowered her hand into the pot, and scrubbed.
Bel came to inspect the pot. “That ain’t clean,” she said.
“I know. I’m not finished yet.”
“You clean it good,” Bel said.
“I know.”
Bel reached for her shoulder and dug her hand into it. “Don’t you sass me,” she said.
Caro thought of the day that Kitty had chastised Bel for her insolence. She rose.
Bel’s hand flew out for a slap. Caro stepped aside to dodge it. “I’ll tell Cressy. She’ll tell Missus,” Bel panted. “She punish you.”
Dulcie, who had been kneading bread on the kitchen table, left the dough. She grabbed Bel by the hand. “You leave her alone.”
“Cressy tell me to keep an eye on her.”
“No, you leave her be.”
“She lazy. Don’t do her work right.” Bel added, “Look sullen all the time, too.”
“Her mama dying!” Dulcie grabbed Bel by the arm. “How would you feel, if your mama was dying?”
Caro looked up to see a peculiar expression on Bel’s face. It was very like pain. “I was sold away from my mama when I was a little thing,” she said, her voice sullen. “My mama might be dying right now. I wouldn’t know.” She shook off Dulcie’s grip and clomped away.
Dulcie said, “You look a sight, sugar. You want something to eat?”
Caro shook her head. “I don’t feel like eating,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Dulcie, what if she dies, and I don’t know?”
Charleston's Daughter Page 26