Wild, Beautiful, and Free(15)

Fanny showed me up the back stair and put a finger to her lips to remind me not to say anything. For a moment, she couldn’t say anything herself. The climb upstairs had winded her. When she had caught her breath, she explained the family and the house. The Holloways were Missus, Massa Holloway, and a daughter and two sons, all full grown. Missus would be getting dressed in the room we approached. We had to go in when she was done and empty the night pots and clean up the washbasins. We refilled the water pitchers. Then we made up all the beds on the floor and gathered anything that needed washing. When we finished, we went downstairs to help Aunt Nancy Lynne in the kitchen. “You know how to sew?” she asked me.

I indicated that I could, a little. Dorinda had taught me.

What I remember most about that day is how we never stopped and barely ate. Aunt Nancy Lynne gave us biscuits around midday, but we had to eat them while we carried out sheets for washing. My legs walked and climbed and my arms lifted and carried more than I’d ever done my whole life. I was so exhausted by the end of the day that I fell onto the pallet and would have fallen fast asleep if Fanny had not roused me and insisted I eat a bit of the collard greens and salt pork that Aunt Nancy Lynne had given us to take back to our tiny shack.

“You’ll be all right,” Fanny said. “You just ain’t used to working. I fell asleep the same way when I first had to go work in the big house.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t rightly know. Seven or eight, I guess.”

“How old are you now?”

“Don’t know when I was born. How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“It seem like I’m older than you, don’t it?”

“Yes. I’d say you’re fifteen or sixteen. Calista, my half sister—you remind me of her. She’s sixteen.”

I went quiet for a moment. “Fanny?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to get used to this life.”

“What else you gon’ do?”

“I don’t know. Not this.”

Those early days of no freedom could have been days of misery. But I was with Fanny. I followed her throughout the house every day emptying chamber pots, washing linens. At night we helped Aunt Nancy Lynne and the other women scrub down the kitchen worktables, wash the dishes, and prepare for the work Aunt Nancy Lynne did at night. Aunt Nancy Lynne liked that my hands were small and careful. She trusted me with the Holloway china, which I cleaned with a soft rag in a pot of soapy hot water.

I felt so grateful to Fanny that I wanted to teach her how to read. It was the only gift I had to offer. Maybe I could unlock something for her, help her feel some of the freedom I had known, give her a piece of the world from one of Papa’s maps. But she refused to learn.

“Don’t make sense for me to read. What would I do with learning? Where would I get a book to look at? If Overseer Everett caught a slave peeking at a Bible, even if it was nothing but the pictures, he’d whip the skin off the bones—man, woman, or child. Don’t matter who.”

But Fanny, as I suspected, was smart. She didn’t want to read, but she had a curiosity about language. I’d been on the plantation about two or three months when we were doing our whispering before going to sleep and she asked me about a word.

“Other day Missus Holloway told me to tell Massa Holloway in the dining room that she gonna be there—” She stopped and slowly formed the pr sound on her lips. “Present-ly. What that mean? Like a Christmas present? Why she say that?”

“Just meant she was gonna go to him soon. Spelled like present, though. The word got two meanings.”

“Two? How you supposed to know both? How can you read it if they look the same?”

“You just know—all the other words around it tell you which meaning to use.”

“Oh Lord.” She laughed. “That’s too hard.”

“You would remember it, Fanny. You’re smart enough to remember.”

“I remember the way my name looked in the ashes when you put it there. I’ll never forget that, for sure.”

Suddenly she gripped my hand.

“Shh!” she hissed.

We heard it far down the lane—a distinct sound of a foot leaving the drive from the big house and biting into the gravel with the first crunch of movement toward the slave quarters. Fanny pressed her hand over my mouth and moved her lips close to my ear. She spoke so softly I only caught the words “no matter what happens.”

We lay still in the dark. The fire had burned out long ago. I prayed the dark would protect us, make us invisible so whoever was out there wouldn’t find us and would keep on walking. My plea went unanswered.

When he opened the door, the smell of him flooded the shack. He stank of whiskey and sweat and the mustiness of a cellar. I crouched closer to Fanny.

Next thing I knew, he was on top of me. He didn’t say anything. His large puffy hands fumbled over me and pulled at my shift. The shock of his silence kept me from crying out with words. I pushed at his chest and shoulders, but my thin, straw-like arms were useless. I felt another hand on me, on my shoulder, and I realized another set of hands was pushing and we were all tied into a wordless, grunting, whimpering ball of struggle. Fanny was pushing me off the pallet. I slid onto the dirt floor and rolled away. He must have thought she was fighting him. I heard the blow of his hand against some part of her, her head or her face. Then Fanny, I knew, was the one underneath him. I wanted to help her, but her left arm stuck out straight, keeping me away from her. I wanted to leap onto Everett, for this was certainly him, and rip at his hair and pull his eyes out to get him off Fanny.