“Have you ever thought to be prostitute?” She laughs. We have moved on to the yellow rose that she waters twice as much as the others. It was a cutting from her mother’s garden, back in Spain. “It is not so bad as you think, and money is good. Being wife is just the same, but no money. Look at these, my lands! What did my husband have? And everything he takes. Your husband just take himself, not so bad.”
I heave up one of the buckets to fill her can again. “You’d tell me if they found him?”
She pauses, clutches at the bag that dangles from her elbow. She is looking for her half whip, a lady-sized thing that some man before Josiah had made for her. Is it lambskin, even? I shift a few steps to the side, stare down at the gravel path. She can’t find it and moves on to the oleander flopping against the old brick wall. She pulls off a leaf and looks at me. “Poison,” she says. I wish she wouldn’t laugh so much.
That night in bed while I arrange the cookies on her tray, my mistress says she’s written a letter to her cousin in Seville and is done with this petty New World, it is too confusing and she is given no respect.
“Where would you go?”
She considers this as I rub a cream into her plump cheeks, along the lines in her forehead. “To a true city,” she says, “or the Indies. Rich, rich.”
My back aches from where she whipped me two hours ago. Her little crop was hanging in the pantry, of all places.
“And the plantation?”
“Sold to high bidder!” Her laugh is more like a cackle. “Cane goes away, it doesn’t grow good here anyway. Slaves go away. My husband shrivels, comes begging for me. Don’t mistake me, I am a woman in love. It is right to make them work hard.”
Slaves go away. It’s a miracle that after changing hands from Spanish to British to Spanish, my family has not already been broken down, sold in pieces. Though now, of course, I’m not sure about the word family. But my children. One more whim, one more shift in hands, and they’re gone. Shipped to Louisiana or Virginia, as Bob was once sent from Virginia to Florida, or as I was sent from — I don’t even remember where. Family for us is just what we can count today. It’s not memory, and it’s not future. And this is what I have given my children.
What is there to be practical about?
THE GIRLS ARE in bed when I get home, late, but not asleep. Polly is sticking her finger in and out of her nose, waiting for something to appear. With narrowed eyes, Delphy watches me undress. I crawl in.
She started the field this year and I don’t ask how it is because I know. Long and hot and the clenching pain in the back moves to the thighs and the knees and the taste of your own sweat is a sustenance. My mistress said she could find a place in the kitchen, but I thought the men would lash her less. And they do, because they are waiting for her to stop being a girl. When that happens, I have no plan. So they pull her shirt up to beat her every now and then, so they check for breasts. They haven’t yet done more.
And Bob left us to this?
I don’t know if I love him, but he looks like my daughters, and I’ll be damned if he gets away while I have to watch my children get churned under whatever wickedness we’re given.
Polly is asleep now, her hand still stuck to her face.
“Anyone touch you today?”
Delphy turns to me, reaches her fingers to my back. Rests them like little moths on the welts.
“Delphy?”
“Do you know where she keeps the key to the stables?”
I can’t ask her more. I don’t want to know how close her life is to mine. I want to give everything to her and then let her decide. “You miss him?” I ask.
“I guess I liked him better than you did.”
“That is entirely possible.” I untuck the blanket from Polly’s neck. She always wraps it around herself so tight that I worry she can’t breathe. “So this is what you want.”
Delphy’s hand is a five-legged animal that canters up and down my arm. A trick her daddy taught her.
Family, is it? That’s what’s being asked of me? I can’t figure how my girls got to thinking they weren’t just slaves, weren’t just going to settle. There was none of this a week ago, even with the preacher’s talk of Moses. We were all the way ordinary. Did the work, fell back to the cabin after dark, squabbled. Woke up and did the work.
What is my life? I’m up before the rooster is, gathering food from the scraps that have been handed out five days before and the meager greens my garden makes. By first light there is a poor breakfast for my girls, and they are out, Polly to the granny and Delphy to the fields, a trowel in her hand that she has promised not to break. Her shadow walking away from me looks like no more than candle smoke. Don’t know where in her small body she fits the muscles that will pull up the earth, chop back the cane. I’m in the master’s house before anyone stirs, a bowl of warm water ready for my mistress on her stand, her skirts laid out and ironed, lavender rubbed into her underthings to cut the stink of sweat till wash day. She is up and I am kneeling — sponging her, dressing her, brushing out the night-knotted hair, mixing the rouge for her cheeks. She rattles on about her father or her father’s father, the glory of Spain with all that citrus, what she would do if her husband woke up dead one day. I’m given a lash once across each palm for pulling at her scalp. She says there are places where I wouldn’t be a slave at all, though what use would I be. I top her hair with a lace mantilla and not till she’s left the room to start her day do I take up her chamber pot and carry its slopping stench down the back stairs. And all this before the white folks’ breakfast.
I turn back to my daughter.
“You want your daddy,” I say again.
She smiles, my oldest girl, who hardly ever smiles. The longer she lives, the more things she won’t be able to tell me. And then she’ll have babies of her own and know what it’s like to watch your children hole up their black secrets. Though it is no secret; I too am black. I know.
“And Polly?” I ask.
“Oh, she’ll be quiet. We’ve been practicing being quiet.”
WHAT I REMEMBER about meeting Bob is that my master, who was not Josiah but a man named Cunningham, sold me from his farm because I spit in his daughter’s pudding. There weren’t any witnesses, so I don’t know what evidence they had. I was angry and young enough and not especially patient toward men. And what was Bob but a man being thrown at me. They set us up in our own cabin and said, “Have at it,” and now that I’m more grown I can recognize that I wasn’t entirely kind. I was tired, and I couldn’t explain this to him. It’s different for a woman. He wanted to flop his arms around me, even when he was mad, and all I saw was another weight. Without saying anything, he begged me to love him and I said no.
I was pleased when he started riding to the Indians because it gave me time alone, but that passed when Delphy came. Though she was not a trouble but an ally. A girl who’d grow up and know what it was like for me when I was ten, and fifteen, and twenty years old. This was selfish, to want that, so I did what I could to turn her path different from mine. I made her daddy hold her. I kept her from the kitchen. I talked to her about her grandmas and great-grandmas, even when I had to make it up. I sewed all the holes in her clothes so nothing could be seen.
As we got older, I didn’t mind him so much. He was like a pup, and harmless. He wanted big things and I wanted to keep us all alive, but he was lovable and I don’t lie when I say that it got to where I loved him. If love is relief when they come home in the dark in one piece.
We kept finding each other. Holding on tight. There was a baby that didn’t make it past the first day, the baby that died of the cough, and Polly. And the beginning of another one who decided, before she even saw this misery, not to live at all.