The Book of Lost Friends(4)

“Mama! Mama! Mama!” The word spills from me three times more, travels out ’cross the night-quiet fields of Goswood Grove before I clamp my mouth closed and look back over my shoulder toward the sharecrop cabin, hoping they didn’t hear me. No sense to wake everybody with my sleep-wanderings. Hard day’s work ahead for me and Ol’ Tati and what’s left of the stray young ones she’s raised these long years since the war was over and we had no mamas or papas to claim us.

Of all my brothers and sisters, of all my family stole away by Jep Loach, I was the only one Marse Gossett got back, and that was just by luck when folks at the next auction sale figured out I was stole property and called the sheriff to hold me until Marse could come. With the war on, and folks running everywhere to get away from it, and us trying to scratch a living from the wild Texas land, there wasn’t any going back to look for the rest. I was a child with nobody of my own when the Federal soldiers finally made their way to our refugee place in Texas and forced the Gossetts to read the free papers out loud and say the war was over, even in Texas. Slaves could go where they pleased, now.

Old Missus warned all us we wouldn’t make it five miles before we starved or got killed by road agents or scalped by Indians, and she hoped we did, if we’d be ungrateful and foolish enough to do such a thing as leave. With the war over, there wasn’t no more need to refugee in Texas, and we’d best come back to Louisiana with her and Marse Gossett—who we was now to call Mister, not Marse, so’s not to bring down the wrath of Federal soldiers who’d be crawling over everything like lice for a while yet. Back on the old place at Goswood Grove, we would at least have Old Mister and Missus to keep us safe and fed and put clothes on our miserable bodies.

“Now, you young children have no choice in the matter,” she told the ones of us with no folk. “You are in our charge, and of course we will give you the benefit of transporting you away from this godforsaken Texas wilderness, back to Goswood Grove until you are of age or a parent comes to claim you.”

Much as I hated Old Missus and working in the house as keeper and plaything to Little Missy Lavinia, who was a trial of her own, I rested in the promise Mama had spoke just two years before at the trader’s yard. She’d come to find me, soon’s she could. She’d find all us, and we’d string Grandmama’s beads together again.

And so I was biddable but also restless with hope. It was the restless part that spurred me to wander at night, that conjured evil dreams of Jep Loach, and watching my people get stole away, and seeing Mama laid out on the floor of the trader’s pen. Dead, for all I could know then.

For all I still do know.

I look down and see that I been walking in my sleep again. I’m standing out on the old cutoff pecan stump. A field of fresh soil spreads out, the season’s new-planted crop still too wispy and fine to cover it. Moon ribbons fall over the row tips, so the land is a giant loom, the warp threads strung but waiting on the weaving woman to slide the shuttle back and forth, back and forth, making cloth the way the women slaves did before the war. Spinning houses sit empty now that store-bought calico comes cheap from mills in the North. But back in the old days when I was a little child, it was card the cotton, card the wool. Spin a broach of thread every night after tromping in from the field. That was Mama’s life at Goswood Grove. Had to be or she’d have Old Missus to deal with.

This stump—this very one—was where the slave driver stood to watch the gangs work the field, cowhide whip dangling down like a snake ready to bite, keep everybody picking the cotton rows. Somebody lag behind, try to rest a minute, the driver would find them out. If Old Marse Gossett was home, they’d only get a little breshin’ with the whip. But if Marse Gossett was off in New Orleans, where he kept his other family everybody knew about but didn’t dare to speak of, then look out. The whipping would be bad, because Old Missus was in charge. Missus didn’t like it that her husband had him a pla?age woman and a fawn-pale child down in New Orleans. Neighborhoods like Faubourg Marigny and Tremé—the rich planter men kept their mistresses and children there. Fancy girls, quadroons and octoroons. Women with dainty bones and olive-brown skin, living in fine houses with slaves to look after them, too.

Old ways like that been almost gone in these years since Mr. Lincoln’s war ended. The slave driver and his whip, Mama and the field gangs working from see to can’t see, leg irons, and auction sales like the ones that took my people—all that’s a thing in the barely back of my mind.

Sometimes when I wake, I think all my people were just somethin’ I pretended, never real at all. But then I touch the three glass beads on the cord at my neck, and I tell their names in the chant. Hardy gone at Big Creek to a man from Woodville, Het at Jatt…

All the way down to Baby Rose and Mary Angel. And Mama.

It was real. We were real. A family together.

I look off in the distant, wobble twixt a six-year-old body and one that’s eighteen years growed, but not so much different. Still skinny as if I was carved out of sticks.

Mama always did say, Hannie, you stand behind the broom handle, I can’t even see you there. Then she’d smile and touch my face and whisper, But you a beautiful child. Always been pretty. I hear it like she’s there beside of me, a white oak basket on her arm, bound for the garden patch out behind our little cabin, last one down the end of the old quarters.