Wild, Beautiful, and Free(4)

Calista was right. I wouldn’t tell because I didn’t like seeing Papa angry. The noise he and Madame Bébinn made when they argued sounded so loud it seemed to make the floorboards tremble beneath my feet.

“Why does she hate me?”

“I could ask the same thing about Papa.”

“Papa doesn’t hate you!”

“No. He doesn’t.” She gently tugged one of the coppery curls hanging near my shoulder. She used to pull my hair this way when we were younger, thinking it would straighten eventually. “But he doesn’t love me like he loves you.”

Calista pushed open the wide wood door. “Now go. Show Dorinda your wrist. I will soothe Mama.”

When I had crossed the threshold, she closed the door behind me.

Dorinda had midwifed my birth. She’s the one who told me of Madame’s fire and my mama dying. I believed her because I could see the heavy sadness that pulled down her face when she talked of how she couldn’t stop the blood. I would sit in the kitchen listening to her and chewing on the pork crackling she had given me. She went back to kneading bread dough, her work punctuated by heavy sighs.

“I seen many babies come into the world, and I know one or the other, mama or baby, don’t always make it. But I prayed for Lindy. Knew your papa might go crazy for losing her. Didn’t matter what she was. I know love when I see it.

“He loved you right off too. Didn’t matter you was the ugliest baby I ever did see—all that orangey-brown hair, just like his, and a face pinched up like a pomegranate. But he saw himself in you right away, like he done spit you out. Light skinned, too, almost white. I said, ‘Can’t call her nothing but Jeannette because that’s just what she is, a little you.’”

She had warned Papa not to let me out of his sight until I was old enough not to get smothered or bagged up and dropped in a river. Dorinda knew Madame felt me under her skin like a nasty itch and would do anything to get rid of me. Dorinda fashioned a sling and bound me to Papa so he could ride with me daily into the fields. That was my first sense of infinity: an endless ocean of sugarcane flowing beneath me and growing high enough for the fronds to sweep against Papa’s thighs.

He was the talk of the parish—Jean Bébinn and his nigger baby. So many landowners sired children with their slaves. Only Bébinn made anything of it, of one of them. Me. They made allowances for both his wealth and being mad with grief. He also had a wife crazier than him, and they pitied him for it.

I had my questions. Riding the fields with Papa, I saw how the women were made to work as hard as the men. I didn’t see how it could be possible for someone forced to work under the blazing sun to love the ones riding above them and wielding whips. Made no sense to me.

But whenever I asked Dorinda about this, she’d only say, “You can’t know your mama’s mind. You can only know what you know. Does your daddy treat you with love? Ain’t you treated like you matter?”

Of course, I could only say yes, despite sensing that Dorinda probably did know my mama’s mind.

“Then you got something most slaves will never have. Whatcha gonna do with it, Jeannette?”

“Everyone at Catalpa Valley matters, Dorinda.”

“No, they don’t. Not in the way you think. But you keep saying that to yourself. And keep the land on your heart and on your mind. Maybe one day you’ll make that true. Make it true for us all.”

I didn’t understand, but I trusted her, so I said, “I will.”

That afternoon Dorinda gave me biscuits and jam, and I went out to the gazebo on the far edge of the lawn near our wisewomen tree to eat them. I could smell water in the swampy air. It made the air feel like a soft blanket on my shoulders. I was happy then, and the only thing that could make me happier came next: the sound of Papa’s voice rolling to me from across the yard.

“Jeannette!”

“Papa!” I ran to him and pressed my sticky jam fingers to his cheeks. “Where have you been?”

He kissed my forehead. “Oh, I had business. But look—a gift! I ordered it for you long ago, and at last, here it is!”

He returned me to my seat in the gazebo and wiped my hands before taking a small box of blue velvet from his pocket. Inside shone a small locket made of a burnished brown metal.

“Here, Jeannette. Open it like this.”

He took the small oval between his fingers and pried it apart until it became two ovals. I gasped. Each one contained a tiny painting. The face on the left I recognized at once—Papa, his red hair combed back from his blockish forehead and growing down the sides of his face in bushy muttonchops. He wore the sour expression that made him repugnant to others but Papa to me.

On the right, a face I didn’t know but found familiar. Her brown hair was not ringleted like Madame’s. She wore it pulled back from her face, a small dark bun visible at the base of her neck. Her skin was the color of sand except for a whitish blotch like a cloud on her lower right cheek and chin.

“This is Mama?”

“Yes. Your mama. I had it done long ago.”

He ran a finger along the curve of the metal frame. “I couldn’t bear to look at it for some time. Not since she died. You see the scar?” He pointed to the cloud, and I nodded.

“I told the painter not to include it, but your mama insisted. My wife . . .”