Wild, Beautiful, and Free(17)

But Aunt Nancy Lynne spoke to that, too, like she knew what I was thinking.

“She gon’ have to talk if she work with me. Don’t look at me like that, Fanny. I know the girl can talk.” She narrowed her eyes and peered at me. “Can’t you? I hear you sometimes.”

“It’s not her fault,” Fanny said. “Man who sold her threatened to hurt her.” She lowered her voice. “And she can read.”

“Can she work figures too?”

Fanny looked at me, and I nodded.

“All right then. Leave her to me.”

That night Aunt Nancy Lynne laid out a pallet for me behind a curtain in the pantry. She gave me a biscuit and a bit of ham to eat for dinner and told me to lie down and rest. She would call me when she was ready for me to work.

And work I did. I prepared the ingredients—cut up butter, sifted flour—while Aunt Nancy Lynne performed the magic of putting it together the right way. I built up fires and moved the pans of buns, crackers, and rolls in and out of the oven. This became my existence at the Holloway Plantation. When I was done baking with Aunt Nancy Lynne, I would walk back to the barren four walls I shared with Fanny. If Everett had been there, he would be gone by then. I would fall onto the pallet and into a deep sleep.

We did eat a little better because of my work with Aunt Nancy Lynne. Instead of leftover flour and scraps of fat we were allowed to scavenge after the Holloways’ dinner was done, Aunt Nancy Lynne would send me away with a fresh bit of bread or a small basket of crackers. It became poor comfort, though, as the months passed and the winter came on. The winters were mild but cold, and our thin clothes, made from scraps like the food we ate, provided no warmth. Aunt Nancy Lynne and Fanny worked through the autumn to stitch together new dresses of linsey-woolsey so we’d look presentable working in the house for the holidays.

Another thing I liked about night work: When the men who worked late or at other plantations came back, they would stop in the kitchen, and Aunt Nancy Lynne would feed them. This was how we got news. One slave, Silas, knew the most because he traveled with Massa and had gone on many journeys with him. He’d been on trains and had seen cities like New Orleans and Atlanta. His appearance was different, too—he was always clean shaven and wearing nice clothing that Aunt Nancy Lynne had made for him.

Silas was how we found out about what the abolitionists were up to and how the people of the Southern states didn’t want to stop keeping slaves.

“If abolitionists had their way, we’d all be free tomorrow,” he said.

Aunt Nancy Lynne shook her head. “Guess they don’t have their way, do they? And I don’t see them getting it anytime soon.” She often sounded bitter, and I soon learned she had good reason to be.

Working so close to her as I did, I got to know her better. She was intelligent and highly valued by the Holloways for her wisdom. That was why they let her earn money. She’d wanted to buy the freedom of her children, a boy and a girl, who she had kept as close to her as she could. Her little shack on the lane was the nicest because the boy had learned carpentry skills and kept the shed in good repair. They were allowed to live as a family, and she thought that she could save up enough to buy their freedom.

“But my boy, Jacob, he got hired out on New Year’s Day, 1850.”

Every year on the plantation, after the holidays, came the day when the Holloways would hire out slaves to work elsewhere until planting season came around. It was always a fretful time. A scant few might better their situation if they went to a kindly owner who clothed and fed his slaves well. But mostly that wasn’t the case, and any slave who knew better would rather shiver in their windblown shacks than work for a massa who could only afford to hire slaves and not have his own. They were the meanest souls because they knew nothing they had was any good. The only thing that kept them from working a slave to death was the knowledge that they had to bring them back in a few months.

Aunt Nancy Lynne’s son had been hired to a good massa, but that had turned out to be a blessing and a curse. A blessing because he’d been valued and well fed. A curse because the man could afford to buy Jacob away from the Holloways.

“I still figured I could buy him back. Worked my fingers to the bones, didn’t sleep for what seemed like a year. I had three hundred and twelve dollars. Three hundred and twelve dollars of good paper money.”

“Was it enough?” I asked. I felt a twinge of hope despite knowing the answer couldn’t have been in Aunt Nancy Lynne’s favor. She was still shoving dough in hot ovens in the middle of the night, and there was no sense of joy about her.

“Won’t never be enough. White folks will never let it be enough.” She rubbed her hands against each other, and the flour on her skin drifted into the air between us. “One day the Boyce brothers came by the house with a brand-new chandelier Missus ordered for the front hall. Made of brass, it was. I was thinking about who the poor nigger gonna be to have to polish the thing. Then Missus asked me to loan her money to pay for it.”

“What? Why?”

“She went all pouty. Say, ‘Aunt Nancy Lynne, go in and get me the money to pay Mr. Boyce. You know my husband isn’t home.’ I said the Boyces could bring the chandelier back when Massa come home. She smacked me on the back of my head and told me don’t be ornery. ‘It’s just a loan,’ she say. That she didn’t want the Boyces to take the chandelier all the way back to their place; it was too big and too heavy.”