Yellow Wife(21)

The girl’s guttural screams sounded like glass exploding in my ears. It was a sound that haunted me for months. I never told Mama what I had seen, and thought I would never experience such terror, until I found myself sitting in the back of the rickety wagon, tied to unfamiliar bodies and headed to a jail for punishment. Would I be burned at the stake like the witches in Miss Sally’s stories? Stretched out and whipped like a runaway, or sold farther down south as a field hand? Mama always said the deeper south you went, the harder life proved for a slave. Wherever we were headed I would need all my strength and fortitude. I put on a brave face and prayed that the whites of my eyes did not betray my horror.

The woman with the bloodied dress and knotted hair wept loudly. I looked to the woman in the green scarf who sat across from us for an explanation. Blood smeared her hands too.

“What happened?”

She looked to the front of the wagon, then spoke out the side of her lips. “I delivered her baby in this wagon few miles ’fore we pick’t you up. Baby come out with the cord ’round ’em neck.” Her breath was hot against my ear. “Trader take the dead thing from her arms and throw it in the ditch. Don’t bury ’em or nuttin’.”

The woman kept staring at me. “You real pretty.”

I looked down and saw that I still wore Mama’s red dress. Suddenly, I felt ashamed. “I was at my mama’s funeral when they came for me. My name is Pheby.”

“I’s Alice.”

The wagon rumbled along. The bloody woman’s head bounced from side to side like she had no control over her neck. The men in the wagon were clustered in one corner, we women in the other, and the three drivers rode up front. I felt the lump swelling in my head from where Snitch hit me, but it did not compare to the sense of dread that swam in my stomach. I was wishing that I had eaten something at Mama’s gathering, when the bloody woman doubled over with her hands on her belly. She groaned and seemed to bear down like she was defecating. Then the afterbirth oozed out from between her legs. She shrieked and then fell back, her face withered in pain.

“Shut up back there,” the trader driving the wagon called over his shoulder.

The blue glob with bloody streaks sat between us, wiggling with every bump of the wagon. We smelled the foul metallic odor the whole way up the road. I closed my eyes to shut it all out, but could not find stillness. Sometime in the middle of the night, we stopped at a little roadside shack.

“Up,” the driver shouted at us. He had a long beard that reached the top of his shirt collar.

When we stepped down out of the wagon, I concentrated on walking close to the bloody woman, holding her up like a crutch. Inside the dank, windowless cabin, people were crammed together, leaving no room for even a pill to fall. But still we were shoved in too. The heavy air smelled rancid and our captors left us to go outside. I imagined they chewed tobacco, passed whiskey, and discussed their profit shares.

The bloody woman leaned into me. “I’s Matilda.”

“Pheby Delores Brown.”

“That’s a lotta names.” She placed her head on my shoulder, and just that quick, I heard her snoring.

I did not sleep. I focused on supporting Matilda. We were packed inside the hot, tiny house for a while. Had I been home, I would have collected the eggs from the chicken coop, waited on Aunt Hope to fry them, and served breakfast. But I was not home; I had been stolen from my family. To survive this, I could not let my mind succumb to the misery that threatened to strangle me.

Just before daylight, a clean-cut man walked through the door. He carried himself like he was the man in charge.

“Move out,” he barked at us.

His accent had more twang to it than I was accustomed to hearing. He probably came from farther down south. Maybe New Orleans or someplace like that. My gang lined up, and as we moved outside, the man in charge counted us off. Altogether we made sixty-one. Forty men and twenty-one women. All of us women from the wagon were untied and then retied to the other women from the shack. The ropes around our wrist made our hands jut forward, and a halter was slipped over our necks. I continued to stay close to Matilda through the sorting process and she was tied behind me. Alice stood way at the other end of the line. When our captors completed our bondage, they told us to sit on the damp ground and went on to ironing the men.

“Boys, get in two straight lines.”

One hefty man paused to figure out the instruction and earned a whack over his back with the club. “Move it, nigger. Ain’t got time to waste.”

After that, the men hurried to make the lines. The whites with clubs moved through the men slaves, fixing a thick iron collar around each of their necks and then securing it with a padlock. A thick chain of metal was threaded through the clasp of each lock, securing the row together. Their hands were then cuffed tightly in front of them. I had never seen a coffle before and felt sickened by the sight. Despite Miss Sally’s piano lessons and pampering, and Mama’s protection from the hardships of Lowtown, I stood ill prepared to be tied up and driven like an animal. Here I was just like everyone else. Handled like goods to be sold.

“Get up,” called the man in charge. “March out.”

We obeyed, and began our procession to God knows where. I walked as one of the few people wearing proper shoes. I could not envision what it felt like to trek through the woods barefoot with the constant pricks of stones, pine cones, and needles. The first few hours tired me like doing my morning chores, but they passed in relative silence. Then, after a while, Matilda resumed her whimpering.