Hester(97)

Mercy closes her eyes, puts her face to my belly, and begins to hum. The sound is a thin pastel green that deepens and fades with her simple tune. Green is Nell’s color. Green is goodness, something wholesome that can be lost or taken away or kept alive in the dark winter.

“You warned us so we could run, me and Ivy.” Mercy is half singing, half speaking, all of it so quiet I can barely hear her. “Didn’t think her legs would do it, but she’s strong. God was with us and we met one of your ladies on the road and I told her to send for Eveline. Looks like she did right, too.”

I crane my neck to whisper, “Your man from Baltimore is looking for you. Edward told them he knows where you are.”

“Shhhh.” She presses me back onto the lump of pillow. “Nobody’s going to find us here. And it’s not me he’s looking for.”

“It is you.” I must make her understand. “A man named MacGreggor in Baltimore. Edward said there’s a very big reward.”

Mercy shakes her head. The whole room seems to shrink to a place beneath her hands—a globe the size of my belly glowing, the round firmness of an iris bulb.

“He ain’t looking for me.” Mercy looks at Ivy’s sleeping figure. “But I got to protect the child.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re in it now, so you should know.” Mercy’s voice is a singsong that turns to waves of purple. “It’s Ivy’s father who’s looking for her. The white devil named MacGreggor. He’s Abraham’s father, too.”

“And their mother.” I say it slow, because she didn’t understand me the first time. “He’s looking for the children and their mother.”

“Like I told you, I was born free right here in Salem.” Mercy hums.

“Are you saying you’re not their mother?”

She shakes her head.

“In heart I am. But not in body.”

“And you were never a slave?”

“Born free,” she says. “What I told you about me and my mama is true.”

“Then who is their mother?”

Mercy lets her breath out slow. I think of her on the wharf the day we arrived. Zeke on the path the day Nat taught me how to swim. Abraham gone north.

“The children’s mama was a slave by the name of Ida. Five years ago, MacGreggor brought her up with him to Boston. Didn’t care that she was carrying his child. Brought her and their son, too—a comfort woman, she was, you know what I mean? He used her the way he wanted.

“Pretty Miss Ida and her big belly was sitting in a hotel lobby in Boston one afternoon when our own Mr. John Remond walked right up to her and said she didn’t need to stay with the man who owned her. ‘You’re free here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,’ he said.”

Mercy’s hands are warm on my skin.

“Ida was a slave in Chesapeake Bay, and she cared for nothing more than seeing her children to freedom. Ran off into the Boston market, just about right under the master’s nose. When MacGreggor and his men were looking for her, she found her way here.”

“Here?”

“To me. To this place, the sugar house. Ida was the first. Ivy was born right here, on this very floor.”

She’s rubbing my belly, humming low and steady.

“If they were free, why did they have to hide?”

“There’s no justice for a slave,” Mercy says. “Slave escapes to the North, she’s free. Slave catcher finds her and gets a judge to sign a paper, he can put her in chains and bring her back down south. Ida was born a slave so her children were still slaves, and if the judge signed a paper, any man could’ve brought them back to MacGreggor.”

“Like Edward planned to do for the reward,” I realize. “And that rough man Zeke and I saw the day of Charlotte’s wedding.”

“That’s right,” she says. “Reward and rumor of a runaway brings every kind of low man to town.”

I’ve seen how justice and the law work for some and not for others. Even in Scotland there was rich man’s law and poor man’s law.

“Ida was weak from running. Baby came early. When she started bleeding, she said, ‘My children got to be free.’ And so they were.”

This is the story Nat read to me the day of our picnic: the promise extracted from the midwife upon the mother’s deathbed. How did he know?

“Before she died, Ida begged me to get a message to her brother back in the Chesapeake. Said Atlas would come for the children one day. He would find a way free; that was always their plan. We did what we could and kept the children with us. And after five years, Atlas came—not too long after you got here, Atlas found his way to us.”

I remember the sound in the woods, the sight of Mercy running before the dawn. The man who wasn’t Zeke.

“But slave catchers were on his trail, and we had to get him north. We sent Abraham with Atlas like we promised—the captain took them.”

“Captain Darling said he was making a run for whale oil,” I remember.

“That’s right.” She nods. “They weren’t safe here. You can’t stay in Salem now either, not with what you did to Edward,” Mercy says. “You know it, right?”

“Edward wanted to kill me,” I say. “And he meant to, until I stabbed his eye.”