The missus’s favoured punishment was to strike July sharply upon the top of the head with her shoe. Although hopping and hobbling, the missus could chase July around a room for several minutes to deliver her blow. At these times July would jump, weave and spin to avoid her. For she knew that soon the tropical heat would so exhaust that demented fatty-batty missus that she would fall upon her daybed in a faint of lifelessness. But her missus was a tricky one. Any time she might creep up upon July to deliver that blow. For a punishment left unbestowed brooded within her missus like the memory of a delicious dinner left uneaten.
Sometimes, if the missus was just too weary for spirited reprimand, she might slap July about her face. Mostly one swipe with the flat of her palm. But occasionally, if July had missed the menace in her missus’s eye—those two colourless, vigilant villains that squinted into tiny slits—then she might still be standing to catch the slap from the back of her hand too.
When the missus had first stuck a needle firm into the back of July’s hand, the memory of that earliest smarting wound stayed with July longer than any of the other piercings that patterned her arm thereafter. For it was administered in those early days, when July was only a child of nine years and as constant to her beloved white missus as a newly hatched chick to a fowl.
July had wanted so much to learn how to sew and stitch nicely when she was still that small girl for, at that time, she loved to see her missus pleased with her. Her pink-white cheeks puffing into a grin so wide they looked to span the room as she bounced excited upon her toes. Like the time when July first bent her knee in a perfect curtsey. Come, her missus squealed louder than a trapped pig, ‘Marguerite, you are a good, good, good nigger.’
Yet it was not so much the threading of the little spiky needle with a whisper of yarn thinner than her own hair. Nor that, when July had first started to sew for her missus, she began as she had seen her mama do—with broad stitches that always caused her mama’s stout arm to extend in a wide arc so the long thread may be pulled tight through the rough weave of the Penistone cloth; and that her missus, seeing this lavish movement, frowned and with a wagging finger said, ‘No, no, no, not like that,’ before insisting upon the tiniest stitches upon her delicate fabric; stitches that did cause the needle to nip July’s fingertip, sharp as the bite of a rat, if her eye should stray from its dainty path. No. It was the length of time July was required to sit in almost perfect stillness within her missus’s chamber to perform the task. All day! And July had legs that just did not want to keep her there.
For they were used to spending their working day leading the pickaninny third gang of slaves—their wooden pails swinging easy in their tight fists as they walked, skipped, jumped and dilly-dallied down to the river, twittering like chicks. July, sitting with her missus, would make one stitch, two stitch, three stitch, before her legs would start to jiggle. Four stitch, five stitch, and they would jump up to walk about. ‘Are you finished?’ her missus would call. July, meek as a bullied dog, would sit back upon her seat to begin again. One stitch, two stitch, three stitch, as she did think of those ragged children of the third gang struggling their thirst-quenching loads out to the cane strips of Dover and Scarlett Ponds. How, with their pails full of water, their progress was slow as a line of mourners and they did grunt like crones and strain double to raise the brimming vessels far enough from the ground to carry, not drag, the slip-slopping water upon the long journey to the thirsty mouths of the slaves working the cane pieces.
Six stitch, seven stitch, eight stitch, and she would listen as familiar sounds rode in on the breeze that blew at the long window: the chant of a work song; was that Ned the mule braying? Here them all tramping up to Virgo; that be the ugly driver cracking his long lash; come, is that the massa I hear, agalloping his horse? Why they be yelling? Oh, they be running to catch the cart! And her legs would begin their jiggling once more.
Is it to anyone’s wonder that July, instead of sewing the repair to the pocket of the frock (a small hole made by the missus’s jagged fingernail), took the scissors and carefully cut around the little ear of fabric until the pocket was removed from the dress entirely. Then, hiding the severed pouch away under her skirt, she brightly told her missus, ‘Me done.’
Her missus, inspecting the repair, placed her hand within the pocket, up to her elbow, before she realised that all was not well. Turning the dress inside out so her eye might inspect what her hand already knew, she threw the dress upon the ground and grabbed July by her wrist. With July’s hand splayed in front of her, she picked up a needle, twisted it to perform like a dagger, and stabbed July upon her hand four times with its sharp point.
‘Every time you do something bad when you are stitching,’ her missus said, ‘then I must punish you, or you will not learn,’ before pricking her hand two more times. And July cried out like a man lashed with a cat-o’nine-tails.
‘Mama, Mama, Mama!’ July yelled as she jumped up and down upon the spot. And the little severed pocket of the dress then floated down from where it was hid, on to the floor. All at once her missus’s face began to span the room as she leaned in close to July to yell, ‘Your mama is sold away. She is sold away, you hear me? Sold away. You are mine now.’ And her puffing cheeks were red as Scotch Bonnet pepper as July cried out for her mama once more.
Sitting in a corner of the kitchen, behind the stone of the fireplace under the shelf that held teetering dutch pots and jestas, curled up in as tight a ball as her knees and arms could make, you could always find July in those early days, snivelling and weeping. The longing for her mama became a pain within her fierce as hunger. When anyone came in upon the kitchen—darkening the blazing light at the door like a cloud before the sun—she would look up yearning. For she longed to see her mama standing there; vexed, sucking ’pon her teeth and rolling her big eyes; calling July that her porridge was ready upon the stone and the hut needed sweeping for the wind had blown in a mound of trash while she was in the field and cha! July must come, and come now.
With her eyes tight shut, July could feel her mama beckoning her to leave the sweltering heat of the oven in the kitchen, slapping her hand upon her thigh, ‘Hurry, July, hurry before the missus comes for you.’ Or holding out July’s trash doll—with its stiff gingham skirt and one blue bead eye—to sweet-mouth July home to her chores with a, ‘Peg be frettin’ for you to come.’
But with her eyes wide open, only strangers stood yelling, ‘Come, little nigger, you be sent back to the field if you not behave.’ Yet, no matter whom July kick, spat, clawed and cursed upon, she was never sent home. She ran from the great house nearly every sun-up, searching for a path to the negro village—finding herself enfolded by louring trees or adrift in long grass that tickled at her chin. Yet all that followed this offence was to be chased back by Godfrey’s snarling, slathering hounds before being dragged by her hair to stand before that missus.
Hoping to be lost, then forgotten, in the dews of night she hid in the stables with the horses. Stinking of their dung and rolled in so much straw she appeared like her trash dolly the next morning—yet she was not returned.
Soon the trees near the kitchen were stripped almost bare from switches pulled so Godfrey might whip July’s backside—he complaining all the while of a pain at his shoulder from whacking a piece of tree so often upon her.