Homegoing(28)

The hiccups had not stopped, continuing since the day TimTam had brought her into Ness’s cabin hoping to scare the child into speaking. Everyone pitched in with a remedy.



“Stand da girl upside down!”

“Tell her hold her breath and swall-ah!”

“Cross two straws on top her head!”

The last remedy, put forth by a woman named Harriet, was the one that seemed to work. Pinky made thirty-four trips to the creek without a single hiccup. Ness was on the porch getting her fill of water on Pinky’s thirty-fifth trip back. The two redheaded Stockham children were out and about that day. The boy, named Tom Jr., and the girl, Mary. They were running up the stairs just as Pinky rounded the corner, and Tom Jr. knocked the plank so that one of the pails went flying into the air, water raining down on everyone on the porch. Mary started to cry.

“My dress is all wet!” she said.

Margaret, who had just finished ladling out water for one of the other slaves, set the ladle down. “Hush now, Miss Mary.”

Tom Jr., who had never been much for gallantry, decided to try it just then for his sister’s sake. “Well, apologize to Mary!” he said to Pinky. The two were the same age, though Pinky was about a foot taller.

Pinky opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“She sorry,” Ness said quickly.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Tom Jr. said.

Mary had stopped crying and was staring at Pinky intently. “Tom, you know she don’t talk,” Mary said. “It’s all right, Pinky.”

“She’ll talk if I tell her to talk,” Tom Jr. said, shoving his sister. “Apologize to Mary,” he repeated. The sun was high and hot that day. Indeed, Ness could see that the two wet drops on Mary’s dress had already dried.

Pinky, eyes welling with tears, opened her mouth again and a wave of hiccups came out, frantic and loud.

Tom Jr. shook his head. He went into the house while everyone watched and returned with the Stockham cane. It was twice his length, made of a dull birchwood. It wasn’t thick, but it was so heavy that Tom Jr. could hardly hold it with both of his hands, let alone the one it would take to snap it back.

“Speak, nigger,” Tom Jr. said, and Margaret, who had long since stopped her ladling, ran into the house crying, “Ooh, Tom Junior, I’m gon’ find yo daddy!”



Pinky was sobbing and hiccuping all at once, the hiccups blocking whatever speech she might have given. Tom Jr. lifted the cane in his right hand with great effort and tried to snap it over his shoulder, but Ness, who was standing behind him, caught the tip of it in her hand. It tore through her palms as she tugged so hard that Tom Jr. fell to the ground. She dragged him half an inch.

Tom Allan appeared on the porch with Margaret, who was breathless and clutching her chest. “What’s this?” he asked.

Tom Jr. started crying. “She was gonna hit me, Daddy!” he said.

Margaret tried to speak up, “Massa Tom, you lie! You was—”

Tom Allan raised his hand to stop Margaret’s speech and looked at Ness. Maybe he remembered the scars on her shoulders, remembered how they had kept his wife laid up in bed for the rest of that day and put him off his dinner for a week. Maybe he wondered what a nigger had to do to earn stripes like that, what trouble a nigger like that must be capable of. And there his son was on the ground with dirt on his shorts and the mute child Pinky crying. Ness was sure that he could see clear as day what had happened, but it was the memory of her scars that made him doubt. A nigger with scars like that, and his son on the ground. There wasn’t anything else he could do.

“I’ll deal with you soon enough,” he said to Ness, and everyone wondered what would happen.

—

That evening, Ness returned to the women’s quarters. She crawled into her bed and closed her eyes, waiting for the images that played every night behind her lids to still to darkness. Beside her, Pinky began to hiccup.

“Oh Lord, here she go! Ain’t we had enough trouble fo one day?” one of the women said. “Can’t get no kinda rest when dis girl start to hiccup.”

Ashamed, Pinky slapped a hand to her mouth as though, with it, she could erect a wall to block the sound’s escape.

“Don’t pay dem no mind,” Ness whispered. “Thinking ’bout it only make it worse.” She didn’t know if she was speaking to Pinky or to herself.



Pinky squeezed her eyes tight as a series of hiccups exploded from her lips.

“Leave her be,” Ness said to the chorus of groans, and they listened. The events of the day had planted a little dual seed of respect and pity for Ness that they watered with deference of their own. They didn’t know what Tom Allan would do.

In the night, once they had all finally reached sleep, Pinky rolled over and snuggled into the soft skin of Ness’s gut. Ness allowed herself to hold the girl, and she allowed herself to drift off into memory.

She is back in Hell. She is married to a man they call Sam, but who comes straight from the Continent and speaks no English. The master of Hell, the Devil himself, with red-leather skin and a shock of gray hair, prefers his slaves married “for reasons of insurance,” and because Ness is new to Hell and because no one has claimed her, she is given to calm the new slave Sam.

At first they do not speak to each other. Ness doesn’t understand his strange tongue, and she is in awe of him, for he is the most beautiful man that she has ever seen, with skin so dark and creamy that looking at it could very well be the same thing as tasting it. His is the large, muscular body of the African beast, and he refuses to be caged, even with Ness as his welcoming gift. Ness knows that the Devil must have paid a great deal of money for him, and therefore expects hard work, but nothing anyone does seems to tame him. On his first day he fights with another slave, spits on the overseer, and is stood on a platform and whipped in front of everyone until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby.