by Naomi Finley
“I’m coming,” a sleep-thickened voice mumbled from inside. The door swung open, and a skinny slave girl poked her head out. “Missus, what you doing here—”
“It’s time, Rachel.” The woman leaned against the stoop post as a groan escaped her trembling lips.
“Oh, Lard have mussy. Git in here ’fore someone sees you.” Rachel pulled the woman inside.
Inside the shack, the family stirred as the master’s daughter entered. “Pa, go git Jethro. De babe is coming.” Rachel’s father left for the big house.
Once the door closed behind him, Rachel turned panicky eyes on her ma. “Heat some water.”
Rachel showed the woman to the bed. “Don’t fret. We’ll do as planned and no one will find out.”
The woman’s next birth pain hit. She rolled and hit the straw mattress with her fist. Tears streamed down her plump face. The pain left her gasping as it passed. She flopped onto her back.
Her weight gain had camouflaged her pregnancy. She’d feigned an interest in cooking. Much to her mother’s distress, she’d developed an appetite and sampled dishes until she thought her insides would burst. It had been the only way she’d known how to hide the circumference of her middle.
One day her father had rubbed his rotund stomach at her mother’s nagging. “Leave the girl be. She can’t help it that she’s inherited my structure. Besides, the women in my family are known for their healthy appetites.”
Her mother had huffed and gone on about her daughter’s refusal to wear a corset.
“It cuts into me,” she told her mother. “Besides, not all women wear them.”
Her mother had almost discovered her secret a few months ago when she barged into her room. Only quickly dashing behind the privacy screen had saved her. After that she’d told her mother she was too old for her to come into her room unannounced.
The day her handmaid became aware of the hardness forming under the fat expanding the woman’s middle, fear had gripped the woman. “You must never tell!” Her teeth clenched. “Or I’ll see to it you’re sold so far away from your children you’ll wish you had kept quiet.” A reality all too likely.
Her handmaid had said in a fear-infused voice, “I promise, Missus. I ain’t gonna tell nobody.” And she’d kept her promise.
Now the woman lay bursting with child. The child eagerly tore at her insides, demanding to be set free into a world the woman worried would not accept the child because of the Negro blood that would run in its veins. Though desperate to get the child out of her, she couldn’t bear the thought of giving up the baby. Jethro had never revealed the details of his plan to save their child. He’d said he was taking the child to someone who’d care for the baby. But to who, she’d never know. Maybe…it was for the best.
“You lay back, Missus, and no matter how much you want to scream, don’t.” Rachel gently pushed the woman back against the mattress.
The door burst open, and a man of color darkened the doorway. Rachel’s pa stood in the man’s shadow.
“Jethro!” The woman held out a hand, and the man went to her and awkwardly knelt by the bed. He placed a tender hand to her forehead. “I can’t…I don’t know if I can give the baby up.”
“If the babe is to survive, we must do this.” His voice quivered.
“We can hide it. Here in the quarters!” Tears cascaded down her cheeks.
“We already talked about this. The master—”
The pain came again.
“Ma, you get me some clean cloth. Pa, you go now, so de missus has some decency when dis is all over,” Rachel said and, without waiting, she pushed up the woman’s white cotton nightgown.
“Dis right here is de end of us. Ef de masa finds out, we all be whipped until our flesh lays raw,” Rachel’s ma said as she went to get the fresh cloths and her pa left the shack.
“You need to hush dat grumbling ef you expect me to take care of dis gal,” Rachel said.
Her mother returned with the cloths.
“Wipe her brow.” Rachel gave instructions to Jethro before she twisted a cloth into a tight rope and placed it in the woman’s mouth. “You bear down on dis ef you feel de need to scream.”
The woman’s eyes were large and her vision blurred with pain.
During the night, a squalling, red-faced newborn informed the world he’d arrived.
“Et’s a boy. A beautiful, healthy boy.” Rachel grinned, mopping the birth from her nephew.
The new mother sank into the bed. Her eyes squeezed shut as tears soaked her sweat-speckled face. Jethro kissed her cheeks and pushed back the wet hair framing her face.
“Let me see my son.” She held out shaking arms.
Rachel stared at her, hesitant. “You got to be careful. You can’t go gitting attached to de boy.”
“I know,” she said, her voice tattered.
Rachel placed the infant in his mother’s arms. “He’s a real fine boy, Miss Josephine. A real fine boy.”
Blinded by tears, Josephine became engrossed in her son. Small. Helpless. Innocent. She lightly brushed his head of tight, damp curls. Alert and silent, he squinted up at his mother as if studying her. “He’s perfect. I shall call him Samuel after the prophet. May the Lord not take out our sins on our son.” Fear and remorse engulfed her as she looked at Jethro.
For a few precious moments, they celebrated the life they’d created with their love. A forbidden love. An act that was sinful before God and society. All too soon, the realization of what they had to do replaced their happiness.
“I must take him before the sun comes up.” Jethro reached for the baby. A moan escaped Josephine as he pried the boy from her fingers.
She couldn’t do this. Her heart shattered. She knew she’d never love another child like she did Samuel. Her heart would never heal from the longing for him. In the reality life was forcing her to face, she glimpsed the pain and suffering the Negroes had endured. And in this realization, she felt great, unbearable shame.
Jethro headed for the door. “Wait! Wrap him in this.” She held out her shawl.
Jethro returned to the side of the bed.
The invisible fingers around her throat squeezed the air from her lungs. She planted a tender kiss on her son’s head. With her thumb she stroked his cheek and whispered, “May God bring you to my arms once more.” Broken and exhausted, she fell back against the bed and turned her head to face the plank wall. “Go now before I change my mind.”
The door opened, and Jethro fled with his son into the night.
With the baby clenched against his chest, Jethro bounded through the woods toward the Livingston Plantation, leaping over fallen trees and bushes. The pounding of his heart blocked out the mewling of the infant. Within hours the sun would rise, and he’d be missed as the slaves set out to perform their daily tasks.
On his trips running errands for his master, he’d memorized the path he’d take when his child arrived. Keeping a mulatto child at the plantation would mean death. Josephine’s pa didn’t bed the slave women, and he’d spare nothing and no one to figure out who the baby belonged to. Slaves were to be registered with the town of Charleston and tagged. But some masters avoided registering their slaves to evade paying taxes. Mr. Abbotts was not that sort of man. He wanted every slave’s tag number recorded in his books and the town’s files. If the master found out the child was his daughter’s, he’d have the infant sold off or drowned in the river. He would not allow the shame of his unwed daughter giving him a grandson by a slave.
If the child stood a chance at life, it was at the Hendricks woman’s plantation. Jethro had never met Miss Hendricks himself, but his mama said the woman’s father had helped a slave or two in his time. Word was the Hendricks man was dead. Jethro had overheard the master and his friends talking about the Guardian, and how the planters in Charleston County were assembling in homes, deciding what was to be done if they could catch the man.
A while back Jethro had been hired out to Mr. Anderson, and he’d crossed thr
ough the woods near the Livingston Plantation just before dawn. At the sound of the hounds, he’d crouched low in the weeds along the riverbank. He had seen it all. The Hendricks woman running with the child, followed by another white woman. Then the Hendricks man exited the house dragging an ailing slave. He’d watched as Livingston’s slaves stumbled from their shacks and spread out across the work yard. The white women, along with another man, boarded a riverboat with the slave and the child and hid them under the tarps before pushing off down the river.
They’d barely pushed off before some white men, one he recognized as Mr. Carter, arrived at the plantation and chatted with Mr. Hendricks. Soon after, Mr. Hendricks mounted a horse and rode off with the hunting party.
He’d kept the Hendrickses’ secret, but in doing so, he’d contrived a plan. A plan to save his child from an inevitable fate.
As the plantation came into view, he paused and leaned back against a tree to catch his breath. He peeked at his son, who wailed with displeasure at the jostling of their escape and his hunger.
“Shh, little one. We’re almost there,” he soothed, caressing his son’s cheek with the back of his long finger.
When the infant’s cries had quieted, he examined the grounds. The plantation was still. He moved with haste across the backyard to the front steps. His eyes roved the vicinity as he mounted the steps. In front of the double doors, he knelt and laid his son on the veranda.
“They will take care of you here. It’s a good place for boys like you,” he said, swallowing back tears. He patted the silk shawl and rose to his feet.
Then he heard her move. His eyes darted to the rocker and the Hendricks woman sitting there. Fear yanked at his heart. He turned, and his bare feet thrashed down the steps.
“Wait, don’t go!” she called after him.
Only when he reached the woods did he glance back. He saw the woman bend and lift his son. Her gaze turned to the woods. She stood unmoving, as if pondering what to do, and then her hand grasped the door handle, and she vanished inside.
Jethro tilted his head to look at the sun that spilled across the sky. A warning: morning was upon him.
If you are up there, watch over my boy, he prayed through the tears burning his eyes.
He reeled and raced toward the Abbotts Plantation.
Willow
I WIGGLED MY ARMS INTO a dressing robe and tied the rope about my waist before wandering downstairs. The early hours of the morning while the plantation still slept were when I cleared my mind. They had become my favorite hours of the day.
In the warming kitchen, I found day-old biscuits and slathered one with freshly churned butter and cherry preserves. With the biscuit in hand, I opened the front door and sauntered outside.
Sinking into a rocker, I curled my legs up under me. In the distance, the sun was awakening. The master of the skies parted the darkness, brushing strokes of bright orange and red across the sky with His promise of a new day.
From the corner of my eye, a movement caught my attention, and I turned my head to see a colored man slink around the edge of the house. He looked over his shoulder and around the plantation, unaware of me. He ascended the stairs with a red bundle in his arms.
I squinted to get a better look. He wasn’t from Livingston. I sat unmoving, not daring to breathe. He knelt and laid the bundle carefully on the veranda. He mumbled something and affectionately touched the package.
It moved.
I leaned forward. The man noticed my movement, and jerked his head in my direction. Our eyes locked. The agony pooling in his dark eyes was quickly replaced with shock and then fear. He leaped to his feet and his slave tag flashed as he fled.
“Wait, don’t go!” I jumped to my feet.
The man never stopped. He vanished into the woods.
A muffled wail drew me to the red bundle. From within a small, dark fist thrust at the heavens.
My hand flew to my breast. A baby.
The cries grew more frantic, and I awkwardly bent and lifted the bundle. I tightened the blanket around the baby, sealing his arms and legs securely as I’d seen Mary Grace do with Evie when she was a newborn. Still, the child wouldn’t calm.
Once more I looked to the woods before opening the door and going inside.
“I’m not good at this,” I said, bouncing the baby up and down, which only made his pitiful cries grow louder.
I was about to burst into Mammy and Tillie’s room when Mammy, doing up the last buttons on her dress, opened the door. Her face was lined with concern.
“Where did you git dat babe?” She held out her thick arms. Not waiting for my reply, she said, “Hand de chile to me.”
I passed her the baby. “Someone left him on the veranda. What’s wrong with him?”
Tillie, still in her night clothes, ambled over to us to sneak a peek at the baby.
Mammy pulled back the blanket and gasped. “De child ain’t barely born.”
“How do you know?” I edged closer to get a better look at the baby, now that his squirmy body was safe in Mammy’s arms.
“Got de birthing still on him.” She placed her pinkie to the baby’s mouth, and he turned his head into her finger and tried to gnaw it off. “He’s hungry,” she said.
Oh. I sighed with relief as the baby’s cries turned to feverish whimpers when Mammy’s finger proved to be an insufficient food source.
“Tillie, go git Mary Grace. She can feed de chile.”
Tillie slipped past us and down the corridor.
“You say you found him at de front door?”
“A man dropped him off.”
“You git a luk at dis man?”
“Briefly. I rose early and was on the front veranda when he came up the steps. The darkness made it difficult to get a good look at him.”
“You know de man?”
“No. But I do know he was a slave.”
“Why would he bring de boy here?”
Her questions were my own. I recalled the agony in the man’s eyes. “I believe the man is the boy’s father, or related somehow.” I touched the blanket the baby was wrapped in. “This cloth is made of silk. Not something a slave would have.”
Mammy nodded her agreement. “Maybe he’s a house slave, and he stole et from his missus.”
“It’s possible.”
“What will you do wid de boy?”
“We’ll care for the child. The man trusted this house with the life of the baby, and we must see he receives the best care.”
Wild-haired and rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Mary Grace trailed in behind Tillie. Without questions, Mary Grace held out her arms and Mammy placed the baby in them. She entered Mammy and Tillie’s room and sat down on the edge of the bed. Unbuttoning her top, she revealed her breast and placed the infant to it. Soon the baby ate greedily.
My body relaxed. “Will you care for him until we can figure out what to do with him?”
“I’ve got plenty of milk for Evie and him both,” Mary Grace said.
“You’re relieved of house duties until I can figure this out. Please care for the boy and help Sara with the children.” I left them to get dressed. Tillie shadowed my steps.
My thoughts returned to the man who’d fled. It was evident he thought the child would be safe at Livingston. But how had he come to that perception?
ONE EVENING I SAT IN the cabin Mary Grace shared with Sara and the others, holding the infant. Over the weeks since the baby was left at Livingston, I found myself drawn to him. Unlike Mary Grace’s daughter, who had screamed until she was purple in the face, day in and day out, this baby was content.
Beautiful and peaceful, I thought as he held my finger in his small fist.
So far no one had made mention of a missing slave baby. I suspected that maybe no one knew of the baby’s existence.
“The child needs a name,” Mary Grace said from where she sat on the floor playing with Evie and Noah.
“I thought…we could call him Sailor?”
�
�Sailor?” Tillie’s mother, Sara, said from her rocker. “Dat an odd name for de boy.”
“Miss Willow is an odd one herself,” Mary Grace said with a light chuckle.
I wrinkled my nose at her. “I don’t know why, but that’s the name that came to mind.”
“It’s quite a sight, seeing you sitting there all mother-like,” Mary Grace said. “You’d get all squirmy whenever I tried to get you to hold Evie.”
“Babies make me nervous. They’re fussy, and I don’t know what they want. If they could talk from birth, maybe I wouldn’t find them so scary.”
“Yet you don’t seem to find him scary,” Mary Grace said.
“I do…but for some reason he likes me. And I feel the need to protect him.”
Mary Grace stood and hovered over the baby and me. “Because someone left him in your care?” She gently touched his cheek.
“Maybe. His father brought him here for a reason. He trusted we’d care for him.”
“How you know he’s de boy’s father?” Sara said as she lit her pipe.
“The way he handled the child, as if he was the most precious thing. He appeared to be going through agony, but it was obvious he loved the infant. He felt he had no choice but to leave him. I saw it in his eyes. I felt his pain.” My voice succumbed to the sadness I carried for the father.
Mary Grace caressed my shoulder with a hand. “You have a big old heart. Since we were girls, you couldn’t help yourself. Can you believe once she brought a dead snake that was shedding its skin to Mama, asking her to fix it?” Mary Grace directed her question at Sara with a shake of her head.
Sara removed her pipe and smiled. “Always bin a tender-hearted gal as long as I knowed her.”
“Mammy had worked miracles before. She fixed the broken leg of that chicken I brought her,” I said.
“Hogwash. She went and found another chicken from the hen house and made you think she’d fixed it when in all actuality that scrumptious chicken pie you had for your evening meal was your little friend.” Her eyes gleamed with glee.
