Glory over Everything: Beyond The Kitchen House(128)

“Of course she’s fine, James, why wouldn’t she be fine? Look at her. Such a beautiful girl. She wants for nothing, head of a kitchen at her young age, and practically owning her own fine house. You have your pick of beaus, don’t you, Belle?” The woman spoke quickly in a high voice, leaning her elbow on the table as she pulled repeatedly at an escaped strand of her red hair. “Don’t you, Belle? Don’t they come and go?” she asked insistently.

“Yes, ma’am.” Belle’s voice was strained.

“Come, come,” the captain interrupted, and again waved me forward. Closer to him, I focused on the deep lines that creased his weathered face when he smiled. “Are you helping in the kitchen?” he asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I croaked, anxious to follow Belle’s instruction.

The room exploded in laughter, though I saw that the boy, Marshall, did not laugh.

“She said ‘yes, ma’am’ to you, Daddy.” Sally giggled.

The captain chuckled. “Do I look like a ‘ma’am’ to you?”

Uncertain of my answer, for I did not understand this unfamiliar form of address, I anxiously nodded. Again there was laughter.

Suddenly, the captain turned, and his voice boomed. “Fanny! Beattie! Slow down, you’ll blow us out of the room.”

It was then I noticed the two small dark-skinned girls and remembered them from the first day when they had been seated on the steps of the cabin. Through kitchen conversation, I had learned that they were Mama Mae’s six-year-old twins. Now they stood on the other side of the table, each pulling a cord. The cords were attached to a large fan suspended from the ceiling that, when pulled, flapped over the dining room table like the wing of a gigantic butterfly, thereby creating a draft. With the excitement of the laughter, their enthusiasm was overventilating the room, but after the shout from the captain, their dark eyes grew solemn and their pulling slowed.

The captain turned back. “Belle,” he said, “you’ve done well. You’ve kept her alive.” He glanced down at some papers before him and spoke directly to me after skimming a page. “Let’s see. You’ll soon be seven years old. Is that right?”

I didn’t know.

In the silence, Sally chirped up, “I’m four years old.”

“That will do, Sally,” Martha said. She sighed, and the captain winked at his wife. When he removed his spectacles to better study me, I felt faint under his scrutiny. “Don’t you know your age? Your father was a schoolteacher, didn’t he teach you numbers?”

My father? I thought. I have a father?

“When you feel stronger, I want you to work in the kitchen,” he said. “Can you do that?”

My chest ached, and I was finding it difficult to breathe, but I nodded.

“Good,” he said, “then we’ll keep you here until you’ve grown.” He paused. “Do you have any questions?”

My need to know surpassed my terror. I leaned closer to him. “My name?” I managed to whisper.

“What? What do you mean, your name?” he asked.

Belle spoke quickly. “She don’t know her name.”

The captain looked at Belle as though for an explanation. When none was forthcoming, he looked down again at the papers before him. He coughed before he answered. “It says here your name is Lavinia. Lavinia McCarten.”

I clung to the information as though it were a life raft. I don’t remember leaving the room, but I surfaced on a pallet in the kitchen to overhear Uncle and Belle discussing the captain. He was leaving again in the morning, Belle said, and she was expecting a visit from him that evening.

“You gonna ask for those papers?” Uncle Jacob questioned.

Belle didn’t answer.

“You tell him that you needs them now. Miss Martha got her eye on you. The cap’n know she take the black drops, but he don’t know that she drink the peach liquor with it. You gettin’ more pretty by the day, and after all that drinkin’, when Miss Martha pick up that mirror, she see that she lookin’ more than her thirty years. She out to get you, and time goes on, it only get worse.”

Belle’s usual determined voice was subdued. “But Uncle, I don’t want to go. This place my home. You all my family.”

“Belle, you know you got to go,” he said.

Their conversation ended when Uncle Jacob saw my open eyes. “Well, well, well. Lil Abinya wake up,” he said.

Belle came over to me. “Lavinia,” she said, pushing my hair from my forehead, “that name sounds like you.”

I stared at her, then turned my face away. I was more lost than ever, for I felt no connection to that name.

THE NEXT EVENING I WAS sent home with Mama Mae. I didn’t want to leave the kitchen house, but Belle insisted. Mama said that her twins, Fanny and Beattie, the two girls I had seen working the fan, would be there with me. On the walk over, Mama Mae held my hand and pointed out how the kitchen house was just a short distance from her own small cabin.

Fanny and Beattie were there to greet us. I hung back, wanting to stay next to Mama Mae, but the girls were eager for a new playmate. They drew me into a corner of the small cabin to a shelf that had been carved into one of the logs, where their treasures were kept.

The taller of the two, Fanny was the leader, with her mother’s quick eyes and direct speech; her arms and legs were like those of a colt. Beattie was short and plump, pretty already, with a broad smile emphasized by two deep dimples.