Glory over Everything: Beyond The Kitchen House(65)

The first time he slap her, she stays sitting up. The next time she goes down. When he goes for her again, I jump him. He tries to shake me off, but I get ahold of his arm with my mouth and hang on. After he works me loose, he sends me flying against the wall. When Master Marshall comes at me again, Miss Lavinia starts crying for him not to hurt me. “She is only a child! She did nothing wrong,” she say.

“Your nigra bites me and she did nothing wrong?”

When she get to her knees in front of him, he look down at her so ugly that I think he gonna kill her.

“Marshall, I’m pleading with you not to harm her,” she say.

“Get this nigra out of here!” He pushes me at Papa George, his best slave, who runs things down at the barns. “Get her down to the quarters!”

“Please, Marshall,” I hear her say, “she’s like my own child.”

“Like your own child!” he yell. “The titles you give these nigras! You talk like she’s kin to you!”

When Papa George takes me down to the quarters to stay with Ida, all the while he talks to me. “You do what Ida say and you get along jus’ fine. In time Masta Marshall forget you down there and they bring you back up. And don’ go cryin’ and carryin’ on, so’s you don’t have Rankin payin’ attention to you.”

Hearing Rankin’s name make the hair on my neck rise up. The only man on that farm that I’s more scared of than Master Marshall is Rankin.

When Papa George hands me over to Ida, I get scared and start calling out to him, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me!” Two times he turns ’round like he’s comin’ back, and when Ida waves him on, I only yell for him louder. Ida hits me hard and tells me to hush up! That quiets me. Nobody never hit me before.

Ida’s a tall woman but skinny like a post. Even for a slave, she got a hard look about her, and I wonder if it’s because all she ever raised was boys. She sure don’t give off no warm feelings to me.

“You want Rankin in here?” she asks. Her eyes show worry when she says that, and I wonder how she can be scared of him when she had all those babies with him.

Two days pass and still no one from the kitchen house or the big house comes down to see me. I don’t have none of my nice clothes and I got only one pair of shoes and no combs for my hair. Still I keep thinking that any day Miss Lavinia will send Papa George down for me.

Everything at Ida’s is different from up at the big house. She lives in one room, and at night I got to sleep beside her on a dirty floor pallet. Then two of her boys come in and sleep across the room from us. One looks about my age and the other is older. In the days I’s there, they don’t say one word to me but watch me when they think I don’t see. I got on a pretty green dress of Miss Lavinia’s that was cut down to fit, but what they most keep looking at is the soft leather shoes on my feet. They don’t have none.

I do my best to help Ida out. It’s winter, so she don’t work out in the field. Instead she spins wool. She good about showing me how to card the fiber by pulling the wool through long nails. Even if it’s not a hard job, my arms and shoulders get tired real quick. But Ida don’t let me stop. She keep me going, saying, “You never know when Rankin’s gonna show up, and we better be working.”

One afternoon I ask about her children. “I only got boys. My older two was sold,” she says, not looking in my eyes. “Rankin say they was troublemakers, but”—she whisper—“it just that Masta Marshall needin’ the money. Now I got the two you see at night. My other one, Jake, he workin’ with Rankin and live with him at the overseer’s house.”

“Why does Jake stay with him and not with you?” I ask.

“Jake’s the only one almos’ as white as his daddy. He was just a little one when he sees his big brothers get sold. When he see them go, he don’ stop carryin’ on until Rankin tells him if he don’t shut up, he’s the next one. After that, Jake change. He don’t call me Mama no more, and one day he says, ‘Ida, you’ll never see me get sold. If I do anythin’, I’ll do the sellin’. Then he goes to live with his daddy in the overseer’s house, and after that he do everything he see his daddy do.”

“Would they ever sell you?” I ask.

She stops the spinning wheel and works the wool in her hands. “Maybe so,” she say real quiet.


THREE DAYS AFTER they take me from Miss Lavinia, the slave traders come. Ida and me jump awake when Rankin and Jake bust open the door in the middle of the night. When Rankin starts tying up my wrists, I yell to Ida, “Go get Miss Lavinia!” but Ida just stands there quiet.

“Shut up!” Rankin talks to me in a way that makes my mouth go dry. He grunts at me. “Nigras, acting like white folk! There’s one more up in that big house that needs sellin’,” he says to Jake. “That Jamie the next one to go.”

“You mean the one with the bad eye?” Jake asks.

“Yah, he’s the one.”

“He’s white as me,” Jake says.

Rankin snorts. “He’s white as you, but that don’t mean you both not nigras.”

The dark look that goes across Jake’s face scares me so much that I start to call out again for Miss Lavinia. That’s when Jake takes a rag that was tied around his neck and comes at me.