A Light to My Path

by Lynn Austin

  “Yep, that’s right.”

  “Now draw a cat.”

  “But I ain’t finished with the horse yet,” Kitty said. “Don’t you want me to give him a body and legs and a tail?”

  “No, draw a cat,” Kate insisted.

  Kitty obeyed, even though she longed to finish the horse and then fill the page with flowers and trees and everything else she wanted to make. She loved to draw. Missy Claire had seen her sketching a picture in the dirt with a stick and had let her try using a real pencil and paper. Kitty had been entertaining Claire and her sister with drawings ever since.

  Instead of finishing the horse, Kitty reluctantly chose a clean corner of the page to sketch the round head and pointed ears of a cat. She gave it eyes and a nose and whiskers, and was about to start drawing its body when Kate said, “Draw a bird.”

  “What kind of bird, Missy Kate?” While she waited for the answer, Kitty quickly gave the cat four legs and a skinny, pointed tail.

  “Um … those skinny white birds with long legs that live down by the river.”

  Kitty smiled. She loved to draw herons with their slender bodies and graceful necks. But before she had a chance to begin, Missy Claire interrupted.

  “No more pictures. Kitty is my slave and she’s going to play dolls with me now.” She snatched up the paper and shoved it into her sister’s hands. Like all of Kitty’s other drawings, this one wouldn’t be hers to keep, either. Missy Claire needed to be entertained every minute, it seemed, and would quickly become bored with whatever game they were playing long before Kitty did. She had been living in the Big House with Missy for four seasons now, but trying to keep up with her made Kitty all tuckered out sometimes.

  “Here’s your picture, Katie,” Claire said. “Now go away and play in your own room.” She pointed to the door.

  Missy Kate let out a loud wail. Kitty imagined an entire flock of white herons taking flight at the sound. Mammy Bertha scooped Kate off the bed and hustled her out of the room.

  “We’re going to play house,” Missy Claire decided. “My dolls are coming for tea. You’ll serve us, Kitty.” Claire had two beautiful dolls with delicate porcelain faces and real hair. Kitty would watch her dress them in their lacy nightgowns or ruffled dresses, fastening rows of tiny buttons, and she longed to hold them and dress them—just once.

  “Don’t touch my doll!” Claire had shrieked the first—and only—time Kitty had ever dared to reach for one. “You’ll break it!”

  “Oh, please, Missy Claire,” she’d begged. “I promise I’ll be real careful. I ain’t never gonna break your things.”

  “No. I don’t want your filthy hands touching her.”

  Kitty had looked down at her hands. Her skin was dark, but it wasn’t from dirt. Her hands were just as clean as Missy’s were. But Kitty had learned that day that she would have to be content with keeping Missy company while she played with her dolls. Kitty could watch Missy move the tiny furniture in her beautiful dollhouse, but she could never touch it. She could laugh with Claire as she rode on her rocking horse, but she could never ride on it herself. Kitty had learned to accept the fact that Claire’s white skin gave her these privileges; her own black skin denied them.

  “Set the table for tea,” Claire now commanded as her sister’s cries faded in the distance. Kitty hurried to obey. The porcelain tea set was the only toy she was allowed to touch, and she loved the way the smooth, cool glass felt beneath her fingers. It was her job to set the table and serve tea to Claire and her two dolls; Kitty would never dare take a pretend sip from the little cups herself.

  “Go tell Cook I want some cookies,” Claire said. “I’ll get my dollies dressed for the party.”

  “Yes, Missy Claire.” Kitty had learned to always answer that way—and to hurry as quickly as she could whenever she went on an errand. Missy hated it when she dawdled. Kitty ran down the stairs, through the servants’ door to the warming kitchen, then outside to the big kitchen to tell Cook what Missy wanted. The kitchen smelled like smoked pork roasting with onions, and like apples and cinnamon. Kitty drew a deep breath, inhaling the fragrant air. Her stomach rumbled with hunger.

  “That Missy sure is a spoilt one,” Cook said, shaking her head at Kitty’s request. “She’s thinking I ain’t got nothing better to do than wait on her all day? Don’t she know Massa’s got company coming and I need to be fixing dinner?” But Cook wiped the sweat off her brow with a bandana and waddled over to retrieve the cookie tin. “Missy ever sharing any of these cookies with you?” she asked.

  Kitty shrugged. “Sometimes … when she ain’t wanting no more.”

  Cook placed three fat sugar cookies on a plate, then handed a fourth one to Kitty. “Eat it quick, and don’t tell her I give it to you,” she whispered.

  Kitty grinned. “Yes, ma’am! Thank you, ma’am!” She skipped out of the kitchen, balancing the plate. As she followed the walkway to the house again, she was torn between eating her treasure slowly, savoring every bite, or gulping it down in one or two bites in order to hurry back, as she’d been told to do. She decided to eat one bite slowly, making it last all the way to the house and up the stairs, then hide the rest of the cookie in her pocket for later.

  When Kitty returned to the bedroom, swallowing her allotted bite, Claire was nowhere to be seen. It took Kitty a moment to realize that she had ducked behind the folding screen to use the “necessary.” Claire would make her run back downstairs to empty it, next thing. White ladies were very lucky, Kitty thought. They never had to go all the way outside to use the privy the way menfolk and slaves did.

  Kitty carried the plate over to the tea table while she waited. Missy had finished dressing her dolls and had seated them on two little chairs. But one of the dolls had slumped sideways and looked as though it was about to fall. Kitty reached to straighten it. The doll felt much lighter than Kitty had expected—and her hair looked so soft that she couldn’t resist stroking it, just once.

  “What are you doing!” Claire shrieked. “Don’t touch her!”

  Kitty whirled around in surprise. “But she was falling over, Missy Claire. I just sat her up again, and—” Missy raced across the room and slapped Kitty’s hand for daring to touch her doll, then she slapped Kitty’s face—hard. Tears sprang to her eyes. Kitty had often seen Missy’s mother strike the chambermaids that way, but Kitty had never been slapped herself.

  “Get out! Get out! Get out!” Claire yelled, pointing to the door.

  “I’m sorry, Missy Claire, but I thought—”

  “You’re very bad, and you can’t play with me anymore!”

  Tears rolled down Kitty’s face as she hurried from the room, her cheek stinging. She didn’t dare cry out loud, nor did she dare go off by herself to lick her wounds. Whenever Missy sent her away she was supposed to go find Mammy Bertha and help her tend Missy Kate or Missus Goodman’s new girl-baby, Mary.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Bertha asked when she saw Kitty wiping her tears.

  “Missy slapped me,” she said, pouting. “Her doll was about to fall off the chair, and all I did was try and make it sit up again. She told me to get out.”

  From the way Mammy puckered her lips and shook her head, Kitty knew she wasn’t going to get any sympathy from her. “Ain’t Missy always telling you not to touch her things?”

  “But it was going to fall. I thought—”

  “You ain’t supposed to be doing no thinking. Just do whatever the white folks say, and if they say never touch their things, then don’t you dare touch them. Only job you have is obeying. You hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now turn off them tears and come help me fan Missy Kate so she can take a nap.” Kitty lifted the skirt of her pinafore to dry her eyes, and the cookie she’d hoarded slid out of the pocket. She wasn’t quick enough to catch it before it hit the floor, and it crumbled into pieces. Her tears started falling all over again. Bertha glared at Kitty as she dropped to her knees and scooped up the crumbs. “Ar
e you stealing that cookie from Missy Claire?”

  “No, ma’am. Cook give it to me, I swear. You can ask her yourself.” Kitty stuffed the crumbs into her mouth. They tasted gritty with dust.

  “You better believe I’m asking her … and you better not be spinning no lies.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  The long, hot day seemed to last forever. Late in the afternoon company arrived for dinner, just like Cook had said they would. Mammy Bertha said the guests were spending the night, and everyone had to be on their very best behavior—including Kitty. The two older girls, Claire and Kate, had to get scrubbed and brushed and dressed in their finest Sunday dresses, then they sat in the parlor and visited like proper young ladies. With all the fussing and showing off, Kitty didn’t have a chance to eat anything all day except her one crumbled cookie. When the girls were finally in bed, Mammy Bertha told her she could go out to the kitchen and see if there was anything left over from dinner.

  It was very late, but Kitty was surprised to see the kitchen all lit up. A big gathering of colored folks sat around the table, talking and eating roast pork and chicken and a bunch of other goodies from the white folks’ dinner. Four strangers—the house slaves who had traveled along with the white guests—sat among the usual kitchen workers. Kitty fixed herself a plate of food, then sat on a stool near the door, listening to the news and gossip that the newcomers had brought.

  “Delia, here, is a storyteller,” the visiting coachman told them after a while. He gestured to a tiny gray-haired woman who was no taller than Kitty. “Delia’s knowing all the old tales about our people before we was slaves,” he said.

  Everyone seemed real excited to hear Delia’s stories, and they begged and begged her to tell one. The kitchen grew so quiet that Kitty was almost afraid to breathe. She sat forward in anticipation, watching the storyteller’s every move. The little woman closed her eyes for a long moment, as if looking deep inside herself for the words.

  “Back home where our people come from,” Delia began, “folks call a storyteller like me a griot. We’re the ones who’re remembering the old ways and the old stories and passing them on to our children and to their children, so our past don’t get lost. My mammy was a griot, and her mammy was one before her, so the stories I know go way, way back to a time that nobody alive can even remember no more—a time when all our people were free.” She sighed as she said the last word, and it seemed to Kitty that it fluttered from the storyteller’s mouth like a little bird and flew away.

  “It’s only in the telling of our story that we’re ever gonna remember who we really are,” Delia said. “And that’s something we ought never ever to be forgetting.” She gazed all around at her listeners, and her dark eyes rested for a moment on Kitty.

  “We once lived in a land called the ‘Mountain of Lions,’” Delia said, “in a tribe called the Mende. It’s a big, rich land where every single person has black skin. Ain’t no white-skinned people there at all, back in the beginning. And the whole land’s belonging to us—all the forests and fields and rivers and hills is ours. We can hunt game and plant our own rice and build our own houses and live any way and anywhere we want to with no one but our own leaders telling us what to do. Long before the white men came, our people are learning how to trap the water and making it go wherever we want. We’re making fields that we can flood and drain to grow our rice. Our women are weaving baskets out of sea grass for gathering up the crops and winnowing the rice. We’re a peaceful people, living in our own villages with our own families all around us.”

  Kitty listened, fascinated, unable to imagine a land without white people. Delia’s voice was as soothing as a cup of warm milk, and her small, wrinkled hands gestured gracefully as she talked.

  “Then one day the white men come,” she said. “They’re seeing all that we have and how hard we’re working, and they’re deciding they want us for their slaves. So they come with their guns and chains, and they’re stealing our people away, catching us in the woods and snatching us from our homes and away from our children. They’re tying our people together with their big chains and forcing us to march a long, long ways. They ain’t even caring that some folks are dying along the way of hunger or weariness or fear. No, them white men take all our captured people to a fortress on an island where we can’t escape. They’re putting us to work there, laboring to crush shells into lime. Our people are thinking life can’t get no harder than this—but it does. Turns out we’re just working to make lime while we’re waiting for the ship to come. And, oh my! One day that slave ship surely does come.

  “Seems like the white men just forgetting we’re people, the way they’re packing us down into the belly of that ship. They’re making everybody lay down on hard wooden shelves, one row stacked up on top of the other, so there ain’t even room to sit up. We’re all packed in there so tight that nobody can move. The white men are filling up the whole ship with slaves that way. And it don’t matter to them if folks is sick or needing to use the privy, it just have to run down on top of everybody. My Lord! There’re folks dying of hunger and thirst and heat and grief every single day. That ship’s tossing and rolling on the waves, and you can hear the sound of them waves pounding against the planks day and night. And also the sound of tears. Seem like the ocean’s gonna overflow from all our tears.

  “Takes a long, long time for that ship to sail to the white men’s country. The full moon comes around twice, maybe even three times before we’re finally landing here in the Low Country. The new land seems a lot like back home, but we ain’t free no more in this new place. Rice we’re growing ain’t feeding our own families no more. Our husbands and children are getting sold away from us and moving someplace else. We have to work like animals for the white men, digging canals and ponds and growing rice for all of them because we’re their slaves now. Our people ain’t free no more. White men got guns, so they’re capturing us and making us do all their work.”

  She leaned forward, her body tense, her eyes bright with tears. “But don’t you ever forget that a long time ago, we was free. That’s the way God created us. The way we’re supposed to be—free.”

  When Delia finished, nobody moved. The room had grown so quiet that Kitty could hear her heart beating in her ears. This terrible story couldn’t be true, could it? Missy Claire was old enough to read books aloud to her and Missy Kate, with stories of fairies and elves and animals that talked, but Kitty knew those stories weren’t true. Could this one be?

  “That story true?” she whispered, breaking the silence.

  “Yes, it’s true!” Delia said, slapping her palm on the table. “Every word I said is just as true as I’m sitting here. Black folks was born free and we was meant to live free. They stole that away from us. And now they’re trying to make us forget that we ever was free. But don’t you ever forget, honey. You remember who you are, and who your family is, and where you coming from.”

  That night Kitty dreamed that white men chased her through the woods and captured her and locked her in a dark, fearsome place. When she awoke she felt as though she hadn’t slept at all. The nightmare reminded her of the old dream she used to have when she was very small, and she wondered if she had once lived in the land where there were no white men. But no, Delia had said that story happened a long, long time ago. “You remember who you are, who your family is, and where you coming from,” Delia had said. But Kitty didn’t know who her family was or where she’d come from. She couldn’t remember.

  Kitty was still thinking about all of these things the next morning as she opened Missy’s bedroom curtains and saw the Great Oak Tree outside. She was certain that the tree was linked to her past, somehow—part of the dream she used to have when she was very small. But Kitty could no longer remember why the tree was important to her or what it meant. When she and Mammy Bertha were alone in the nursery, Kitty gathered the courage to ask about her past for the very first time.

  “Mammy, did you ever know my mama and daddy?”
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br />   Bertha closed her eyes for a long moment. “Yes, child. I knowed your mama,” she said softly. Mammy was usually very talkative and full of stories when they were alone, but she suddenly seemed sorrowful and afraid to talk.

  “Well, where is she, Mammy Bertha? What happened to her?”

  Mammy turned away. “We can’t talk about it now,” she said. “You come see me tonight, after Missy Claire’s falling asleep.”

  Kitty thought the day would never end. Claire kept her hard at work until late that night, hauling hot water for her bath and brushing her hair, then making her stay and keep her company until she fell asleep. Every time Kitty sat up on her pallet beside the bed and looked to see if Claire had fallen asleep yet, Missy would glare down at her and say, “Why do you keep staring at me like that? Go to sleep!” But a mixture of dread and anticipation kept Kitty wide awake.

  At last Claire slept, and Kitty managed to tiptoe from the room and look for Mammy Bertha. They found a quiet place to sit, outside on the steps of the warming kitchen, and Mammy told Kitty the truth.

  “Your mama’s named Lucindy, and she used to be one of Missus Goodman’s chambermaids right here in the Big House,” Mammy began. “She’s a pretty gal like you, always sweet and cheerful to everybody. One day she fall in love with a man named George—your daddy. He’s working as a slave for the preacher man and his wife, all the way over in town. Lucindy’s meeting him while their massas go to church every Sunday, and pretty soon the two of them’s falling in love. Everybody try and tell them it’s gonna be hard for them to be together, but they decide to jump the broom anyways. Every Saturday night when his work’s all done, your daddy George come walking all the way from town just to be with his wife. Then he’s walking all the way back home again. His massa’s a good man, though, and he’s giving George a pass so he can come and go without the paddyrollers bothering him.