Glory over Everything: Beyond The Kitchen House(83)

THEY WAS GOOD boys, but they was only five years old when they took us from the preacher’s place. After a couple of months living at the new place, they start fussing at me to take them back home to find their daddy. I can’t keep watch over them ’cause I’m working in the kitchen house, and during the day they are looked after down in the quarters. At night they come back to me, but then they keep pestering me, where is their daddy and why don’t I take them home. They even cry for the old woman and the preacher man. They tell me they don’t like staying down at the quarters. The other boys fight rough, they say, and if I don’t take them to find their daddy, they’re going to go without me. I get scared and tell them about the patrollers out there and what they do to small colored boys if they find them out on the road. I don’t hold back and I scare them enough so they stay put, but soon after, they start getting into trouble. With another boy, they break in to the springhouse and help themselves to milk and a whole kettle of pudding. They’s lucky that Hester is the one who finds them, even though she paddles them hard.

“You bes’ get those two in line before they put them out in the fields!” Hester tells me. She only has one girl, a little one, Clora, who is easygoing, so Hester don’t know what I’m up against. I tell her maybe she don’t know how hard it is to raise up those two on my own.

“Don’t you go gettin’ on me!” she says. “I’m just tryin’ to do right by you. Those boys a yours need shapin’ up, and you don’ want the overseers on this place doin’ the job for you.”

I know she’s right, but I don’t know what to do. I talk to them again, but they cry and say that they want their daddy back and they want me to go find him. I get mad and say they can’t talk about him no more. He gone, and that’s the way it is! They get quiet and stay that way because they never do see me cry before.

I’m glad to go to work in the morning, because when I’m working hard, I have no time to think. I like to cook, but I miss working outside in the gardens like I did at the preacher’s house. Here the vegetable gardens are the biggest and best I ever seen, but Hester warns me against going in. She tells me that Emma is in charge of the gardens, and nobody crosses Emma. She says on a good day Emma isn’t friendly, but on a bad day even the overseers watch out for her.

“Truth is,” Hester says, “Emma don’t have no scare left in her. She even takes on the mens that are beatin’ on their woman. She goes right on up to them. ‘You wanna fight?’ she says. Then she lands a good one. Everybody says she’s crazy, takin’ on the mens like that.”

The day Hester spilled a pot of stew on her foot, she screamed so loud that I didn’t wait but took off running, pulling her with me, down to the slave sickhouse. There old Tony, who runs the place as good as any white doctor, came to help us right quick. After he got a good look, he called across the room to a big woman who was standing next to a shelf of glass jars. “Emma, bring the med’cine in the blue jar,” he calls. When the woman came over, old Tony points her toward Hester. “Put some a that on that burn,” he says, then goes to help out a woman a few beds down who’s having a hard time with bringing in a baby.

Emma sits down, big and heavy as a stone, and I try not to stare. The woman was ugly-looking, there’s no other way to put it, with her eyes bulging out and no eyelashes and no eyebrows. With hands as big as a man’s and nail beds twice the size of normal, she spread the herb grease over Hester’s burn, and when she’s done, I help her wrap a clean rag around the foot. Hester feels a whole lot better with the grease and cloth taking the air off the burn.

A couple of weeks after Hester’s burn is cleared up, Emma comes up to the kitchen house, looking to talk to me. “They tell me to take somebody from up here to help out ol’ Tony in the sickhouse, and when he don’t need you, you can help me out in the gardens. You was good with Hester, so I’m takin’ you.”

“You sure you got to have her?” Hester asked. “She’s working out here with the cookin’ real good.”

“They told me to get somebody from up here, and I’m pickin’ her,” Emma says, then leaves the kitchen house with me standing there.

“You best go,” Hester says. “Emma gets what she wants. Jus’ stay out of her way and do what she says.”

So that’s how I start working with Emma. Some days we work the garden, some days I work with old Tony, it just depends on who needs what the most. I move my things down to a room off of Emma’s hut, and the boys come there to sleep at night, but they don’t like it ’cause they was just getting used to sleeping at the kitchen house.

The man that lives with Emma comes in and out, but I don’t ever hear them saying two words to each other. I’m guessing he’s the daddy of the baby she has. Right from the start, I don’t like Emma for the way she don’t take care of it. The only thing I see her do is give it her milk. Seems like that baby cries all day. I’m not there two days when I can’t take it no more. I don’t care what Emma’s goin’ to say, I go pick up that baby and clean him up good, and after that I take it on myself to see that he stays clean. I get some grease from old Tony and put it on that baby boy’s sore bottom, and after that he don’t cry as much.

“Why you do that?” she asks when she sees me cleaning his bottom. “He jus’ dirty hisself again.” But I remember what it feels like to have that dried on you and to have it stinging sore. It ain’t right to let babies feel that, and I tell her so.