Wild, Beautiful, and Free(18)

The corners of Aunt Nancy Lynne’s mouth hung down. “So I went in there and got my money and gave it to her. That was six months ago. Ain’t seen a dime from her since.”

“But that’s not right.”

“Who gon’ say so? Me? A court of law? Girl, I know you smarter than that. If the children I birthed from my own body aren’t mine, what claim I got to three hundred dollars?”

I stared at the table full of finished breads. Why were we doing all this?

“The Holloways own me, and as long as they own me, I don’t own nothing.”

“Why do you keep baking?”

“Because I don’t let on to Missus what I take in anymore. Not all of it anyway. I keep enough to give her when she asks for it. Got a hiding place for the rest. Gonna get some freedom for somebody one of these days.”

The days stretched into months. My existence at the Holloway Plantation changed very little. I didn’t call attention to myself, but I knew it would be harder to go unnoticed as I got older. Even at Catalpa Valley, when a female slave reached a certain age, it seemed everyone had an eye on her, negroes and whites alike. White women wanted to use her skills, like Missus did with Aunt Nancy Lynne, or keep her beaten down and away from their husbands. Men wanted to use her like Boss Everett used Fanny. But if the man was a slave, at least there was the possibility of marriage and a family. And this had me thinking about my mama again.





Chapter 4


Aunt Nancy Lynne said Silas could be trusted, and because I trusted her, I talked with him. I liked asking him questions about his travels. From him I learned that the Holloway Plantation was farther east than I’d known before. And there were places where a traveler could get on a train or board a coach and cross many miles. Silas had gone as far north as Virginia with Massa Holloway and didn’t shy away from talking about it. In fact, I liked that about him—he didn’t seem afraid or burdened by his lot. Seemed like he didn’t have a fearful bone in his body. He laughed when I told him so.

“I used to be scared. Scared enough to be scared for every soul under this roof. Scared about being cold, scared about not having enough to eat, scared about gettin’ whipped.” He sat in a corner, cleaning and polishing boots.

“What happened?”

“Just got tired of being scared, I guess. It didn’t do nothing. Didn’t stop Boss Everett from burning me with the fireplace poker when he thought I was lookin’ at ’im sideways.” Silas pulled up his sleeve and showed me the long, thick line of blackened skin running like a mountain ridge along his forearm.

“That coulda been my head. But I was too quick for him.” Silas shrugged. “Anyway, I figured right there I was gon’ stop being scared. Just gonna be me. If I’m me, I can handle things just like I did that burn. They not gonna make me live like a rat. Not Silas.”

What Silas said made sense to me. Made sense when nothing else around me did. Being afraid wouldn’t get me anywhere. I suspected it was the same as with Amesbury—a slave had a certain value; all of us did, from someone small and obscure like me to someone as polished and shining as Silas to every single soul laboring under the sun in the fields each day. The Holloways lost money if one of us died. That was why they were so invested in the whip and branding—pain induced fear, and the fear kept it all going. I don’t know if Amesbury would have cut out my tongue, but it got me to thinking about how to figure out what was a real threat and what was a fear threat. And what could I risk when I knew which was which?

The summer after I turned thirteen, in 1852, I did my risking by not doing what I was supposed to be doing, at least not right away. I would do my work with Aunt Nancy Lynne, but instead of going straight back to Fanny, I would use the warm nights to explore on foot what I could of the Holloway Plantation. That was how I found the clearing where I had been the first night I arrived. Another night I followed Silas because I knew he slept somewhere in the woods but close to the stables. He had a place even nicer than Aunt Nancy Lynne’s, with even boards, whitewashed and pretty. He had a small garden, and I figured that was why he was so well fed. This exploration would be harder to do when I got older. I had to do as much as possible. Take a few chances as they might come to me.

But one chance I didn’t take: In late August, when I’d been at Holloway’s about a year, I saw two slaves running away. It was a man and a woman, one following closely behind the other, slipping through the dark of the woods. The next night Aunt Nancy Lynne told me it was Laney and her husband, Montgomery. They hadn’t been found yet.

“Do you think they will be?”

She was sewing and not looking up. “From now on, it’s day by day,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Every day they’re gone is a chance they’ll stay gone.” She shrugged. “Dogs would have a harder time tracking them.”

Fanny, when I got back to our pallet, said she liked that Montgomery and Laney had gone together.

“If one had gone without the other, they’d be lost forever, like one of them be dead.”

“Seems that’s what you have to do,” I said. “We don’t have anything else but trying to protect the people we love. I think that’s what keeps Aunt Nancy Lynne going.”

Suddenly a scream, raw and desperate, pierced the night air.