Glory over Everything: Beyond The Kitchen House(64)

“You can’t leave him there,” I say. “The dogs will get at him!”

Skinner snorts and turns around to look at the road in front of him. Before I can stop myself, I get hold of the shovel and use everything I got left in me to shove it into Skinner’s back. It feels good when he tips right off the wagon.

“Whoa!” The driver pulls the horse to a stop, and after Skinner gets himself back in, he grabs the shovel away from me. When he swings, I duck, but the shovel gets me in the head.


THE WOMAN TAKING care of me comes over a couple times a day. My head’s not right, and it takes a long time before I can stay awake. When I start feeling good enough to look around, I see that I’m in a big room made out of wood with no paint. There’s no pictures hung, but it got windows and is filled with beds, maybe five along each side of the wall. Most of the Negroes in the beds are women having babies. I wonder where I am and what’s going on, and I ask that woman who looks out for me, but she don’t say nothing and I don’t know why.

The woman is built big, like my mama’s friend Sheila, but Sheila liked to laugh and this one don’t. When she’s working on my head and it hurts, sometimes I tell her to quit it, but it’s like she don’t even hear me.

I got a long cut down the back of my head where the shovel hit me. When the woman’s not looking, I touch it and can feel it drying up. When I’m awake, I try to figure out how to get back home, but then I go to stand up and everything gets shaky and I got to lay down again.

One night after I’ve been there a while, the big woman comes to work on me and sits on the side of my bed heavy, like she’s tired. She always moving around, but this time she looks done in. She works on my head, but in between she keeps rubbing on her belly. I see it’s round and I wonder if she eats a lot or if she’s having her own baby. Her hands are so dried out that they rub rough on my head.

I try to get her to talk to me. “If you use some lard on those hands, they’ll smooth right up,” I say.

She looks at me and then at her hands like she don’t believe what I just say.

Across the room there’s a man they brought in last night who got beat up so bad that all he does is moan. I’m glad that he isn’t calling out like he did before, but a woman who’s having a baby is startin’ some yelling of her own. The big woman goes over to her, and when I see how that baby comes out, I felt like yelling myself. Thing is, after the baby comes, the mama starts to love on it, and that makes me cry. I want my own mama, and I wonder if she and Randall is together yet. And what’s my daddy gonna say? When I get home, he’s gonna whoop me good, but I don’t care. I just want to go home.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


1830


Sukey


THEY BRING IN a boy that looks so much like one a mine that I can’t hardly stand to look at him. His head is so cut up I don’t think he’ll make it, but I stitch it and clean it up, all the while trying not to think of my own boys.

For a couple weeks this one don’t move, don’t do nothing, until one day when I’m cleaning his head, his eyes open and he gives me such a pretty smile that it hurts to see it. Then he goes right to sleep again. Next time he wakes up, he stays awake longer. He’s scared and he keeps asking me to come sit with him. But I got my work to do, and besides, I don’t let myself favor no boy like this when I know what’s coming down the road.

Every time I get around him, he asks questions. “Where am I?” he asks, and when he talks, I can tell he has schoolin’, maybe as much as me. I don’t say nothing, but that don’t stop his questions. “They gonna sell me for a slave?” I got to look away because he got those big eyes, and sometimes they still got a smile left in them. But he keeps talking. “I’m no slave. I’m free and I got took from Philadelphia. My daddy was a slave and it was bad for him. He’s gonna whoop me for sure when I get back.” I put my finger up to my mouth to shush him. Everybody I’m caring for in this sick house has big ears. That’s how Thomas keeps everybody in line, paying off the ones with the biggest mouths. Keeps everybody scared of everybody else.

“My head hurts and I want to go home,” the boy says, and then he turns away like he don’t want me to see him cry.

One night he tells me to bring over my can of lard, and when he starts rubbing my hands with the grease, I just sit there staring at him. Where’d he come up with that idea? I want to ask, and no sooner do I think it than he tells me how his sick mama liked to have her hands rubbed. He is some kinda chil’!

“Are you a slave?” he asks.

I nod.

“My daddy was born a slave. You born a slave?”

I don’t say nothing and he don’t ask again, just keeps rubbing my hands. I close my eyes and think about how, for the first years of my life, that word didn’t mean nothing to me.


I WAS BORN at a tobacco farm in Virginia where the mistress, Miss Lavinia, raised me from a baby and was like my own mother. We’d go out riding together, me dressed smart as her. She had me reading some and writing, and I had my own bed in her room. That’s how close we was, with me living up at the big house right there with her. She always kept me away when Master Marshall was around because he had no feel for slaves, but then he was mean as a snake with everybody, even her, and he was her husband. That last day when he come in all fired up, in all my thirteen years, I never see him mad like this. I was sure he was settin’ to kill her.