If you add it all up, with Bob in there too, it really does have the look of a family. No, I have no memory of my own kin. Unless this is it. What I’ve been given to defend.
ONLY WHEN MY mistress is in her nap can I sit and not move for a minute. A siesta, she says, for beauty. Each time she wakes up I widen my eyes as if sure enough, she’s already looking better. This day is the same as other days except I’m not thinking about what else can be made with a handful of yams and an egg but about what my plan would be if I was going to make one. Stupid that I didn’t sit in on Bob’s planning. I might’ve learned a few tips. Maybe I can visit Mingo. They were always whispering.
But this is what a woman can come to on her own:
One, kill myself and my children. This is not a good idea because it doesn’t bring them closer to their father (though I don’t know, maybe it does) and I’m squeamish. And can’t help believing sometimes in God, who maybe is wrathful about such things. Two, kill my owners. Or wait till Josiah — or José, or Master — is visiting some other rum dealer and just kill my mistress, which would be easy with a little oleander tea, she even showed me which it was. Or tying her to her bed while she siestaed and setting the bed on fire. Which might be difficult unless I stacked the bed with kindling and even then, I’m squeamish. Three, run the hell away. Not on foot because of the girls, but I guess on a horse. Pack some bags with food (yams, an egg) and head out at night when there’s some other commotion, like one of the fancy parties they sometimes have for the diplomats and the soldiers, or ex-soldiers, depending on which war. Once you’re over the Florida line, the slave patrols stop knowing who you are, especially if you’ve got papers written in Spanish with words that look like libre. And then the only trick is finding where my husband went. Not to the Indians, I know — they checked. It’s got to be west, to that made-up farm. Somewhere west. Well, I can follow a sun and ask people politely if they’ve seen a black man who talks too much, and as long as the horse I pick is the fastest in the stable, we’ve got a chance for a while. We’ll get to the Mississippi, and if we’ve had no sign of him, maybe we’ll think about starting up our own farm. When he hears tell of the rich negress and her wild plow-pushing daughters, he can come find us. If he’s listening for us.
My mistress grunts and heaves herself over on the mattress like a grub flopping out of the dirt. She thinks being fat is pretty, and so she is mighty pretty. She once asked me what I dreamed about and when I said I was usually too tired to dream, she scolded me. “I am always tired,” she said, “and I have most wondrous dreams! Castles and cold rivers and many, many kittens. People don’t dream only because they don’t think, they’re stupid. I do not say you are stupid, but.” I could have told her what I dreamed about, but the shock would’ve kept her up at night and it was best for me if she slept sound.
I know she wants to leave too. I could write her a note, tell her where the keys to the stable are kept.
That afternoon we feed the birds in the dovecote, which aren’t doves at all but blackbirds who are happy to have found a steady supply of crumbs.
In the evening, my back somehow unbroken, I pass Mingo’s cabin on the way to my own. He’s carving at the posts holding up his roof. I stop, see a man who’s a husband too, who talks big but hasn’t left, isn’t missed. I look hard at him, trying to think of what it is I really miss about Bob. How open the man was. How honest, and needy. If I had clutched him back in those first days, maybe we’d have grown into each other. Put all our griefs in the same basket. Don’t know why I never thought how much my own children would love him.
“You need something?”
I shake my head. I don’t have many friends on this plantation, but not enemies either. “What kind of foolishness are you doing to that post?”
“Rot,” he says. “Digging it out.”
“Thought you were making some kind of statue.”
“Any word of Bob?”
“No word. And good riddance.”
He seems a little more surprised than he should. “They send out the dogs yet?”
“Master’s still on his trip. They’re waiting till he’s back. For all I know, they’ll wait even longer. It’s planting time, and he’ll have visitors that don’t like hearing of runaways.”
“They won’t tell you, but it’s harder to find a man once he crosses out of Spanish lands. Never build a farm near a border.”
“Never dig good wood out of a bad post.”
He throws one of his tools onto the porch. “You ever need some warming up at night, you know where to come.” He does a little swivel with his hip that I believe is supposed to be sexual.
“I’d bed your wife first,” I say, and walk off.
After a slim supper I make the girls practice their best quiet faces. I sit them in the middle of the floor while I tinker around, cleaning up the dishes, sweeping the dirt out, mending a torn shirt. Delphy must have promised some treat to Polly, because neither are making a sound. When I’m done with this torture, I kneel down in front of them. Between my daughters and my mistress, my knees are as callused and dry as stumps.
“I think you’re right,” I say. “About your daddy.”
“That we need him,” Delphy says.
“That you don’t need all of this.” I mean yams, dirt, cut skin.
“You find the key?”
“The fastest horse?” Polly says, then puts her hand over her mouth, not sure if she’s allowed to be talking yet.
“If we get caught, I don’t have to tell you what happens.”
“Beaten and sold,” Delphy says.
“Or killed.” She claps her hand up again, this time smiling. Look at this world they’re in; listen to their jokes.
WE DON’T HAVE to wait long for the party. Three days later the master’s back from a trip and brings with him a half-dozen Spaniards who are new to the New World and who trip over themselves flattering my mistress. She runs her hands across her belly as if to goad them further. We serve food on trays, fill glasses, carry coats and hats from room to room. Even our children are dressed up and paraded; one of them knows French, I can’t figure how, and she garbles out a few words so the guests can marvel at the negroes and curse their enemies. After a few hours of this, everyone is very drunk.
The key is kept on a loop by the mirror in my master’s room, which is not my mistress’s room. The only people upstairs are a Spaniard and a slave, halfway to fornication, though I can see that her hands massaging his backside are actually in his pockets, fumbling for whatever’s there, and I keep walking. No one stops me. On my way down the stairs, one man grabs my breast, pressing me hard toward the banister, but I slide limply down onto the step and he assumes I’m as fuddled as he is; unable to reach down for me and still keep his balance, he moves on. The children are in the front room, watching a man snore on the sofa, and I nod at my girls and they follow me out and down the front steps. I stop when I hear her voice from the porch.
“Winna!”
I turn around, my legs prickling.
“Where’s my watering can?”
“Ma’am?”
“Just look at all the sad roses!”
She looks like a white toad dressed in black, happy and sad the way toads sometimes seem, both at once.
“I put it in the attic,” I call back, and she smiles and nods and teeters back inside.
In an hour, they will fall down in their places and sleep until they don’t remember what they swallowed or who they screwed.
“Maybe when you’re a hundred you’ll forget all of this,” I say, but my daughters are too far ahead of me to hear, jogging on their short legs toward home.