Wild, Beautiful, and Free(14)

“I am Bébinn! My papa was Jean Bébinn and—”

“Hush! We got to eat and get up to the house. From now on we only talk at night. We be safe that way.”

Fanny stirred up the fire and put a grate over it along with a small cast-iron skillet. She made bland hoecakes out of nothing but some cornmeal, water, and lard. She ate quickly and twice the amount that I managed to swallow. I chewed the makeshift breakfast best I could.

“I won’t say any more until night,” I said. “But Fanny, tell me now. Where am I?”

“This here’s Mississippi.”

Off the maps, that was what that meant to me. No longer on Catalpa Plantation, far from the dirt of my papa’s land. But how far? I couldn’t figure. Were we still near the big river? And how far north?

Fanny grabbed my hand. “Come on now. Gotta hurry.”

We walked along a lane of shacks, rougher than the slave quarters at Catalpa. No steps or small porches. Just row after row of sadness—that was what it seemed like anyway. When the shacks ended, the lane curved to the right and moved under tall trees. Trees so tall I couldn’t see the whole of the big house when we got to it. The house took all the shade while the wood of the shacks baked and dried out in the heat of the sun. We went to the back of the house, where she pushed down on a latch of a back door and we went in. Fanny took an apron from a hook on the wall of a small anteroom and tied it over my dress. Then she grabbed a large black dress from another hook and pulled it on over her shift. She tied on an apron and led me into the house kitchen. We put on soft-soled shoes that made no sound when we walked across the floor.

The room smelled familiar—corn bread, real corn bread and not what I had just eaten, cooled on a side table, and there was a big fire, coffee boiling. Just like Dorinda would have had it at Catalpa. The way it still was, going on without me. My fingers grasped the stone Dorinda had given me in the pocket of my dress, and I took in the whole of the kitchen. It was bigger than Dorinda’s, where she sometimes toiled alone. Four women moved about in the Holloway kitchen. But I could see, or rather hear, they weren’t in charge. A strong-looking tall woman wearing a black dress and white apron decorated with two lengths of white ruffle that crisscrossed her chest worked at tearing collards from their thick stems with her sandy-colored fingers and delivered a stream of commands and criticism while she did it.

“Mabel, that dough is too dry,” she said. “Add a bit of milk to it. Corrine, you making them pieces too big. They ain’t never gonna cook like that. Bess, go get them yams from the cellar—I ain’t gonna tell you again.” She stopped talking when she saw me.

“That the new gal?” she asked Fanny.

Fanny nodded. “Yes’m, Aunt Nancy Lynne. But she don’t talk.”

“What’s her name?”

I held my breath. If Fanny told them my name, they would ask how she knew, me showing up in the dead of night and all and not talking. But Fanny was already ahead of me and being smart about what we had to do.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“I told you, she can’t talk!”

“Dumb?”

“Don’t know, Aunt Nancy Lynne. Can’t tell if I can’t ask her.”

“Fool child, you can ask her anything. The trouble gonna be figuring out what she ain’t gonna say.” Aunt Nancy Lynne put her face so close to mine I could smell the oil of her skin. “You got sense, girl?”

I took a moment to answer. It seemed good to have sense, bad to be too quick. Finally I nodded.

“Go cut up one of them apples.”

She moved away from me so I could see the long wooden table where the other women were working. They pushed and shoved at dough, stirred batter in bowls, and sawed at slabs of meat. On the end closest to me was a bowl of red apples.

I wasn’t used to knives. The long ones looked big enough for me to chop off a finger, and they scared me. I picked up a smaller one with a thin blade and chose a big apple. I cut through it, core and all, to make it two pieces, then kept going like that until the apple was a mound of messy chunks. I wiped my hands on the bottom of the apron Fanny had tied on me. Aunt Nancy Lynne muttered, “Humph,” and went to a pot over the fire and returned to stirring and calling out.

“Lee, take what she done cut there and use it in the applesauce, but pick out them seeds. Child cut up core and all in there. Fanny, you best keep her with you for now. She’ll be in the way in here. Don’t know nothing about being in a kitchen. But I’ll teach her when I got a minute.”

Fanny hesitated.

“Go on now. She’ll do what you tell her to; she ain’t stupid.”

“But I don’t even know what to call her.”

“She looks like a Ruth to me. Call her Ruth, maybe Ruthie. That’ll be just fine.”

Fanny turned her head away from Aunt Nancy Lynne and scratched her face, and when she motioned to me to follow her, I saw she was trying not to smile. I was a slave and an orphan, and I didn’t care if I never spoke again, because no words could catch all the damn hopelessness running at me. That touch of a smile from Fanny didn’t make me feel any better, but suddenly it seemed possible that I could step in the direction of better. And now I had a name that wasn’t mine, and I was supposed to answer to it.