Wild, Beautiful, and Free(19)

“Lawd, Jesus Christ, NOOOOOOOO!”

Then sounds of horses trotting and dogs barking. I wanted to go to the door, but Fanny held my arm tight.

“Don’t,” she said. “Stay here with me. It’ll be worse if you see it.”

“See what?”

“They done caught ’em. Montgomery and Laney. They been caught.”

I gasped. I wanted to know how she knew, but then I heard Boss Everett’s voice, loud and taunting.

“Welcome home! Hey, niggers! Mr. Montgomery and Miss Laney have come back! Why don’t y’all come on out and greet ’em real nice.”

I could hear movement, so I knew people were obeying, but their silence pained my heart. I didn’t know what they were seeing, but it was clear Boss Everett was making an example out of the runaways. I shut my eyes and tried not to imagine the condition of the husband and wife. Fanny and I held hands and cringed with the sound of each lash of the whip. They were being whipped at the same time, so both man and woman cried out in a way that was both frightening and unseemly, like a man should never have to hear his wife screaming like that, and she shouldn’t have to hear him plead for mercy. I didn’t know how they could look at each other after that.

In the morning Montgomery and Laney were taken to a slave market and sold off separately.

There were things I had wanted to know from them—which is probably why they were sold: to keep other slaves from asking questions to figure out if they could do the same and be successful where Montgomery and Laney hadn’t been. Which way had they gone? How far had they gotten? Had they seen any other runaways? Boss Everett meant to set an example, but with me anyway, he failed. Montgomery and Laney’s running off inspired me to continue my explorations and see how I might make an attempt of my own.

By that December, though, Fanny was with child and so sick I couldn’t think of leaving her. She threw up every morning, so bad on one day that I made her stay in bed. I worked for both of us. As her baby grew, I felt a resentment growing within me. It was like I was watching my papa and mama’s story play out in front of me—my mama having no choice but to take Papa into her bed. Giving birth to a child who could never have any place or standing in the world. I began to see Papa’s land for me, Petite Bébinn, to be poor recompense, for it wouldn’t have been any better than another form of enslavement—me living there alone, almost no better than being a kept woman. Too light for the notice of some, my light-brown hair too rough and nappy, signaling I was in fact too dark to be accepted by the rest. The thought sapped my resolve. Where would I go if I left the Holloway Plantation? Would Catalpa Valley, with Madame in charge, really be a better place? I began to see that maybe a better place wasn’t anywhere. I might as well stay with Fanny and Aunt Nancy Lynne and Silas.

“You don’t ask me nothing about my baby,” Fanny whispered. It was spring. Aunt Nancy Lynne had said the baby would come in the summer.

“I know where it is. Belly against my back every night. What else do I need to know?”

But I did ask her something.

“Fanny, where are your mama and papa?”

“Never knew my daddy. My mama looked after me and most of the babies here. Taught us how to pick seeds out of the cotton. Taught the girls how to sew. Made sure we didn’t make no trouble.”

“Where is she now?”

“Don’t rightly know. Ran away when I was about your age.”

“Ran away?” My heart thumped hard. “They never caught her?”

“They didn’t miss her right away. I was working in the big house. Then they figured she would come back ’cause of me. She knew they’d whip me.”

“Fanny, no . . .”

She took my hand and put it down the back of her shift. My fingers found the raised cords of flesh on her skin.

“Two lashes,” she said. “Only two on account of my being so young. Corinne in the kitchen got five for spilling a glass of water on one of Massa Holloway’s dinner guests. So I was glad it was two.”

“Don’t it make you mad?”

“Mad about what? Mad my mama left? About getting whipped? That’s the way things are. What good would it do to be mad? I’d have to be mad every day.”

I touched her back again. “I’m mad every day,” I said.

“You been used to a different life, that’s all. Now I can tell you what I’d be mad at.”

“What?”

“If you let all that being mad turn you into something else, like a different girl from when you come here. That girl? She special.”

“How do you know?”

Fanny made me turn around to face her. “Tell me about your mama and your daddy.”

“Nothing to say. My mama was . . .” Suddenly I couldn’t say the word. I hadn’t known the meaning of it before—the true meaning of it—until I’d come to the Holloway Plantation. Slave. Nigger. Not human. Less than nothing. “Like us,” I said finally.

“Your papa didn’t treat her that way.”

“How you know?”

“I know you.”

I shifted on the pallet.

“My baby gonna be birthed right here on this pallet. Where were you born? Where’d your mama die?”

“In the big house.”