I don’t say anything, because I’m not a fool. But the truth is I don’t know. More importantly, I don’t know if I mind one way or the other.
She doesn’t like it when I’m quiet. She kicks her feet free and stands up, wrapping her shawl around her. “You do a terrible job. I see you tomorrow.”
DELPHY IS PEELING potatoes on the steps. She is nine years old, but looks at me like a grandma would, haughty and suspicious. She hasn’t asked about her daddy today, so I’m waiting for it. The baby is taking the fallen peels and pushing them a few inches into the darkness beneath the house. She says cats live there, but she also says there are rabbits in her mattress.
“Up, Polly,” I say, and she hoists herself off the dirt, wiping at her knees. She gathers up the naked potatoes at her sister’s side and follows me into the cabin, where the fire has almost gone out. I throw some sticks on and poke at it. “Tell Delphy to get the water.”
“Let me,” she says. Her arms shake under the weight of four potatoes.
“Delphy!”
I hear my older girl put down her knife and set out with the pail, and Polly drops her burden and begins to cry.
We’re quiet at dinner. I told them the day he left that family means nothing here. Men move around. They know that. Slave folks are brought together and busted up at the white man’s whim; it’s not our business. They asked didn’t I love them like a real mama would, and I said yes, but different too. I was raised to plant cabin gardens small so the master wouldn’t complain, to look down whenever I was looked at, to help folks around me but only so far. We don’t mourn Papa’s loss, I said, because crying draws attention.
When the plates are clean I wait for it, and it comes.
“You think he made it?”
“He’s only a week gone, Delphy, no telling.”
“But do you think he’ll come back for us?”
“Doesn’t help that he lost his damn horse.” I throw the plates in what’s left of the water in the pail. “Tell me why you want him to so bad. It doesn’t hurt your feelings that he left you behind?”
Polly screws up her face again, and her sister finds a roll of fat on the girl’s arm and pinches it. Polly takes a gulp of breath. “He’s my daddy,” she says.
“And I think he wanted to take us and you wouldn’t let him,” Delphy adds. “I think you were scared.”
“Or sensible. You know how many runaways get killed?”
Polly’s face falls into a shock. Damn it, what kind of mother has to say things like “killed” at supper? In what kind of life is that so ordinary? I lift her and rock her, and above her bawling head I lock eyes with Delphy, who raises her brows at me as if to say, What kind of a mother indeed?
“Your father’s fine. He’s looking for some free land, and knows enough of roads and Indians to get through.”
“Then why can’t we be free too?”
Polly sticks her hand in my shirt, looking for comfort, though she hasn’t found milk there in months.
“If he can go off on his own so easy, then that’s not a family,” Delphy says.
When the señora first allowed the black preacher to visit the plantation, I thought nothing of it. But then the girls came home with stories that didn’t sound much like life. All about daddies looking out for their children, and mamas so sweet they can get a baby without even taking off their clothes. And now our own cabin doesn’t look so shiny to the girls.
With her arms crossed on her little flat chest, and her short hair a ragged halo around her head, Delphy asks me if her father is even a father, and why we give him that name.
“Because he loves you,” I say. I know she knows about love, because Jesus says it all the time.
Polly squirms to get down and bends over, squeezing her legs together. I send her outside to pee.
“If he loves us—”
“All right, listen.” I kneel down in front of her and reach up to her ears. I hold them in my hands like shells. “There is being a father, and there is being a man. And sometimes what makes sense to one isn’t right for the other. Sometimes you’re my daughter and have to think of me, and whether I’d like you to be getting the potatoes done, and sometimes you’re just a girl and you want to go climb the pecan. You hear?”
“So daddy wasn’t thinking of us when he left.”
“Well.” I want to say no, he was being a selfish son of a bitch, but I don’t know if that’s the whole truth.
Polly creeps back in — she’s always pleased with herself after peeing — and lies down on the mattress with a smile. “He plays hide and seek,” she says. “We find him.”
Delphy leans down to me and whispers. “You don’t even care that he’s gone.”
I have never heard such a cruel voice out of my girl. After all that, and he was being a son of a bitch, she’s disappointed not in her daddy but in me. How I failed to give them some kind of damn Holy Family. I am too tired to correct her. Tomorrow she’ll find another way to ask about him, and I’ll try to pretend that it doesn’t matter. Slaves don’t get families. There’s nothing to fight for.
I SHOULD BE grateful to be out of the fields, away from the kettles, but my mistress is near as dangerous as the boiling sugar. She doesn’t want a foot rub today but a stroll in the garden, me carrying the wooden buckets sloshing with water to refill her tiny can. She likes to be the one to water her roses. They don’t do well, maybe because of the salt and sand in the dirt, maybe because she’s a fickle waterer. It comes out in five little streams from the wide head, sprinkling the limp petals, the curled leaves. Nowhere near the roots, but I don’t say anything.
“They have made nothing at all nice,” she says. The English, now Americans, are a favorite subject. The Spanish have had Florida again for a half-dozen years, but she can’t stop railing. They are all rural, knock-kneed, buck-toothed. “You go south more, or west, and see what the Spanish have built. No lazy farms. And you, you could walk to town in a pretty dress and no one to say a word. You are black, yes, but not that dark. Here is boring, all the same, nothing but master and slave.” She holds out her can for me to fill it. “I am sick of here.”
She always says she’s been here too long. She was born here, is what she means, though she likes to pretend she is true Spanish and not a colonial. Married off at fifteen to an Englishman because that’s the way the wars seemed to be going. She hates the blacks with dark skin, the Indians in our fields but not the princesses that visit with their chiefs, all the English, most of the French, and the convicts and the runaways and the hungry. She hates the poor and people who are richer than she is. She tells me all the time about the free blacks, how they’re soldiers and shopkeepers, all over Florida. She wants me to complain as much as she does, but I won’t out loud.
A wasp hovers down to see what’s going on with all this loose water. My mistress lets out a shriek, ducking away, and her short curls bounce. Her stomach leaps along with her. I wave my hand in the air a few times, and the wasp sighs and moves on. I am sick of here too. Maybe always was, but didn’t know the words to say it. Is it being a woman? Was I raised to bear things as they came? I take pride in putting up with shit. But I’m afraid to think what it would mean if Bob wasn’t a coward taking the easy way out, but a man finding a solution. Maybe being a woman isn’t the same as setting your teeth and taking what’s coming to you. Though I am a strong believer in that. Not because God tells us to, but because someone’s got to take the shit of the world, and I still think it’s a sneak who lets someone else carry that burden. But in my strength I seem to be carrying my children down with me. And I am not sure if that is being safe or being wrong.