“Babies is sleepin’!” she hissed in a tone she never took with any adult, much less with the mamas. “If you wakes’em all up, I’ll—”
Before she could continue her thought, the door opened the rest of the way and the words choked in her throat. Standing on the other side wasn’t a slave mama at all, but Miss Sarabeth, the Master’s daughter.
Sarabeth regarded Minervy with a cool expression and a small nod of the head and at first said nothing. She wore a frilly strolling dress and a large-brimmed hat with a little flurry of light green ribbons streaming from it. She carried a closed parasol that she could open to catch any stray beam of sunlight that might get past the oversized hat. At the moment, the morning sun was still low, lighting up Sarabeth from behind in such a way that she appeared to be less a true girl than a shadowed shape inside a cloud of luminous clothes. Minervy squinted to make out her face, and Sarabeth squinted back into the shadowy cabin.
“Miss Sarabeth!” Minervy burbled, still holding her voice to a whisper. “I didn’t know it was you! I wouldn’t’ve sassed you otherwise.”
“That’s all right,” Sarabeth said, waving off the thought as if she hadn’t quite heard it. She craned her head into the cabin and squinted again to see. “I didn’t expect the babies would be so quiet this early.”
“They usually isn’t,” Minervy said. “They usually wait till afternoon to go still.”
Miss Sarabeth, of course, knew that. Until only a few months ago, she would stop by the nursery cabin almost every day. At first she’d come by around five o’clock when the mamas were picking up the babies, so that when the last one was gone she and Lillie could go off together. Later, she took to coming at other times too, to coo at the newest babies and play with the bigger ones and sometimes even help Lillie and Minervy put them to sleep. As a rule, the Master and the Missus didn’t object, reckoning it was good practice for when Sarabeth grew up and had babies of her own.
“In the North, the girls only got doll babies to teach ’em,” the Master would say. “In the South, they got slave babies.”
But it had been a long time since Sarabeth had last come by. It was thus a particular shock to see her here this morning, and an even bigger shock to see how she’d changed. The Sarabeth who was standing in the doorway now was a starched and stiff young woman, looking more like the plantation Missus than a plantation child. Minervy much preferred the girl as she’d once been, and she addressed this new Sarabeth with unaccustomed awkwardness.
“Did you come by to see Lillie, Miss?” she asked.
“Is Lillie here?” Sarabeth asked in return, with a tone that suggested she knew the answer.
“No, she ain’t.”
“I expect I can’t see her, then,” Sarabeth said.
“No’m,” Minervy said, “but she’ll be back tonight. Went off to Bluffton with Bett and Samuel to fetch bakin’ supplies.”
“Yes,” Miss Sarabeth said. “My daddy told me when he signed the traveling papers. Lillie doesn’t tell me such things anymore. I wonder why Bett didn’t take one of the younger children like she usually does.”
Minervy fidgeted nervously. She had asked Lillie the same thing yesterday, and Lillie had answered in a way that wasn’t quite an answer, saying simply that that was what Bett wanted and that that was how it would be.
“I wouldn’t know about such things, Miss,” Minervy now said.
“Strange too that they’d leave you here alone.”
“I wouldn’t know about that neither, Miss.” Minervy struggled to make her frightened eyes meet the other girl’s, but they’d hold still for only a moment before skittering off to something else.
“You’re certain you don’t know any other reason they went?” Miss Sarabeth pressed. Minervy said nothing. “Minervy?” Sarabeth added in a harder tone. She now not only looked like the plantation Missus but sounded like her too.
“No’m,” Minervy said, “I don’t know.” A baby started to fuss behind her, and Minervy glanced over her shoulder. One fussing baby would quickly mean another fussing baby, and soon the whole cabinful of them would be crying. And it would be Miss Sarabeth, who knew better than to disturb them during a nap, who would be to blame. Minervy now turned back to her and spoke in a voice that had an uncommon sharpness to it, one that she had not expected, and neither had Sarabeth—at least judging by the look on her face. “Lillie ain’t here, Miss, just as I said she ain’t.”
This time Minervy held Sarabeth’s eyes as she spoke, and this time it was Sarabeth who broke the gaze and looked away. For an instant, she no longer looked like the Missus at all, but more like the girl she’d always been—a girl like Minervy herself, one wearing a grown-up’s clothes and practicing a grown-up’s manner, but a child all the same. Minervy’s feelings softened, and her tone did too.
“Was you wantin’ to play with Lillie and the babies?” she asked. “Is that why you come? We’ll all be here tomorrow, and the babies is here now.”
Miss Sarabeth looked at Minervy, and her expression wavered from stern to sad, then back again. Before she could speak, the fussing baby—a fat little boy named Charles— began to cry loudly. Immediately Sarabeth flicked her gaze past Minervy, straining for another look inside the cabin.
Minervy turned and hurried over to the boy’s sleeping mat. She picked him up and patted his bottom and was relieved to feel that it was dry. Charles needed only to be held, not to be cleaned. Minervy pressed his pillowy cheek against her own and began to hum a quiet song. She turned back toward the door and started to speak.
“Miss Sarabeth, would you like to—”
She stopped before she could finished her thought. The doorway was empty and Miss Sarabeth was gone, quick as if she’d never been there at all. Minervy bounced Charles gently in her arms and, after a moment, padded to the door and shut out the hard morning sun. It was only then that she realized with unease that she still had no idea why Miss Sarabeth had come around at all.
Chapter Ten
THERE WERE A LOT of reasons Lillie wouldn’t have an easy time finding Henry, and one of them was his name. In recent years, masters had started having fun with what they called their slaves, giving boys fancy names like Caesar and Cassius and girls equally fussy ones like Messalina and Agrippina. Caesar and Cassius were names usually given to horses, and Messalina and Agrippina were what the white girls liked to call their cats. All the names, so the older slaves said, came from long ago in the land of Rome. In a place like Beaufort County in 1863, a name like Patsy or George would serve most slaves better.
Things were a little easier for slaves as old as Henry, who were born before masters started having such sport with names. It sometimes seemed to Lillie that every other slave man around her papa’s age went by one of just three or four very plain names—and Henry was the plainest and most popular of all. Asking after a black man with such a name in Bluffton would therefore not do her much good. Asking after a black man named Henry who also had just one leg ought to have made matters less complicated, but as it turned out, it didn’t.
Approaching white folks was not something Lillie dared do—lest they ask for her traveling papers, which Samuel and Bett still had. Most black folks were easier to talk to, but they couldn’t help very much either. Lillie knew not to bother visiting slaves loading plantation wagons, since they wouldn’t be any more familiar with the people who lived in town than she was, and besides, an overseer or slave driver who happened to be nearby might take a whip to a farm slave who stopped to talk. But there were plenty of other slaves who actually lived in Bluffton, working for merchants and sleeping in tiny cabins behind the shops, and these Lillie did approach.
“I seen a one-legged black man now and then,” answered a slave woman sweeping up in front of the Bluffton bank.
“Is his name Henry?” Lillie asked excitedly.
“Can’t say.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“Can’t say,” the woman repeated. “You’s right about the
leg, though; he’s only got the one.”
Lillie heard pretty much the same thing again from a slave boy sweeping out the blacksmith and saddlery barn, and again from a nervous young slave girl, perhaps three years older than Lillie, who was cleaning the windows of the big dry goods store while the old white man who owned the business glared at her from inside. Some had never seen Henry, some had; none of them knew where he could be found.
“He does keep to himself,” the nervous girl said. “Never talks to nobody and don’t come out much. When he does, he hobbles about like a man in pain.” She said nothing else and quickly returned to her work, as the old man inside picked up a whipping stick with his right hand and began slapping it menacingly into the palm of his left.
Lillie turned away, feeling frustrated as well as hot, hungry and increasingly thirsty. The morning sun had now given way to high sun, and keeping the clock tower in sight, Lillie could see that it was now close to two in the afternoon. She’d had nothing to eat and not a sip to drink since breakfast early this morning, and while there were public water barrels and dippers in front of many of the stores in Bluffton, a black child dared not touch them with her hands or—worse—her lips. It was a footrace to see whether her hope or her strength would give out first, but whichever one failed her, it seemed less and less likely that she’d find the man she’d come to see in the two and a quarter hours she had remaining. When she left Bluffton today, it could be years before she’d ever have permission to come back.
As Lillie’s mind was filling with these dark thoughts, she once again scanned up and down the streets and this time saw something she hadn’t expected at all: a familiar face. Leaning wearily against a hitching post next to an old, gray-muzzled horse was an equally old slave named Abner, who’d once worked the barns at the Bingham Woods plantation. Abner was one of those people who looked like they were meant to be old—as if they’d never been young. “Hatched from an old egg,” was how Mama put it, and to Lillie that seemed about right.
When Lillie was little, Abner would sometimes visit Greenfog on business with his master, and when he came down to the slave cabins for food and water, he seemed to take special pleasure in playing with the children. He never could keep any of their names straight, and so he called all the boys either Edward or John, after his own sons who’d been sold off when they were small. He called all the girls either Eliza or Lillie—and though Lillie herself knew he was likely thinking of two girls from long ago who happened to have those names, she liked to think that maybe he’d taken a special shine to her.
If Abner never looked especially well to Lillie, he looked even worse now—thin, with little left of the crop of white hair he’d once had. He also appeared, even from a distance, to be down to his last few teeth. Still, the man was Abner if he was anyone, and Lillie hurried over to him.
“Abner?” she asked. He looked up and squinted at her. His eyes were red and rheumy, and his face was covered with white stubble—not the kind that came from a face not having been shaved in a week or two, but the kind that came from skin that was so old it just didn’t have the strength to push out true whiskers anymore. “Abner Bingham?” she asked, guessing she’d better use the last name all the slaves on his plantation were given. The man shook his head no.
“Beg pardon,” Lillie said, flustered. “I thought you was someone I knew.”
“I was someone you knew,” the man answered. “Used to be Abner Bingham. Now I’m Abner Blue.” He read Lillie’s look of confusion. “I was manumitted, sugar.”
The word, as always, carried a thrilling jolt. Manumitted meant freed, and while Lillie had met a few such remarkable slaves in her life, she hadn’t met many—mostly because there just weren’t many around. Most freed slaves had earned their manumission papers by performing some heroic act like saving their master’s life. A few had been industrious enough and frugal enough to work extra jobs for which some masters offered pay, and purchased their freedom with their earnings. Fewer still had been freed after fighting in the war. Abner was too old to fight or to save anyone’s life, and the master of Bingham Woods was known as a man who guarded his coins and rarely extended his slaves any special rewards.
“How’d you get loose?” she asked. “I didn’t think anyone got manumitted where you was.”
“Most don’t, but the old ones sometimes do,” Abner said. “Leastways the very old ones. Master Bingham likes to work his slaves till they can’t work no more, then work’em a couple years past that. Them what are finally no good for any labor at all, he frees. We gets one suit of clothes, one pair of shoes, and we gets driven here and left. Costs him less than feedin’ us till we finally passes on, I reckon.”
“How do you eat then?” Lillie asked.
“Take odd jobs when they’s about. Get paid in coin or food.”
“Where do you sleep?”
Abner smiled a smile that didn’t really look like a smile and inclined his head in a manner that took in the whole town. “Any place the dogs ain’t claimed.”
Lillie’s mind filled with a picture of Bett—who was younger than Abner but not by much—living the same life, and her eyes welled up. Abner noticed and offered a smile that looked like the genuine thing.
“You cryin’ for me, sugar?” he asked. “No, no, I cry for you. You is still a slave.” He squared his thin shoulders as much as he could. “I is a free man. Took the name Blue—Abner Blue—to remind me of the big, wide sky.”
Lillie blinked her tears away, forced a smile and tried to say something, but before she could, a cross-looking white man emerged from the nearby stable and began striding toward them. Abner saw him coming, sighed and moved away from the hitching post.
“A good thing you come off that post,” the man called out.
“Yessir,” Abner answered wearily.
“Free man or no, you got no business disturbing the horses,” the man said. “Now you shoo, and take that little girl with you. She don’t look like no freedchild to me, and I’ll set the law on her if she don’t show me she’s busy with something.”
Abner placed a reassuring hand on Lillie’s shoulder. “She’s busy, sir,” he said. “We both is.” He nudged Lillie toward the town square and the two began walking away, as the white man stood angrily near the hitching post with his fists on his hips.
“I got the whole day to pass the time with you,” Abner said. “But it don’t do for you to get in trouble. So s’pose you tells me what you come for?”
“I’m lookin’ for a man,” Lillie said. “A man named Henry. Used to be a slave, but he ain’t no more.”
Abner nodded. “Used to have two legs, but he don’t no more neither?”
“You know him?” Lillie asked, this time trying not to let her hopes climb too high.
“There ain’t but two free black men in this town, and there ain’t but one who’s short a leg.”
“Where does he live?”
“Don’t know for sure,” Abner said, and Lillie slumped. “But I been told he got himself a job cuttin’ wood and makin’ chairs and tables. Likely sleeps in a shed ’round back of the furniture maker’s store.”
“Is he there now?”
“Oughta be. I don’t see him ’round the streets but one or two times a month.”
Lillie spun around toward the square and looked at the clock tower. It was twenty past two; she now had less than two hours to find Henry, conduct her business and get back to the wagon before Bett and Samuel would have to leave without her. “Can you tell me how to get there?” she asked Abner.
“It’s a long run,” he said. “All the way back to the spot where the road you drove in on meets the town. Fork right—not left—and go just a short piece past that.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the square. “If that clock up there is pressin’ on you, you’d best go.”
Lillie wanted to do just that, but she could not help looking Abner up and down one last time, filling with sorrow at the used-up look of the old man. “What about you?” L
illie asked. “Ain’t you hungry? We got bread and water back in our wagon.”
“I done told you I’m fine,” Abner said. “Now, you go do what you come here for.” Lillie stayed where she was. “Go, Lillie, child,” Abner insisted.
Lillie beamed. “You remembered who I am!” she exclaimed.
“Of course I do,” Abner said and smiled at her. Then the smile faltered and his expression seemed to go cloudy. “You’re the one what’s called Eliza.” He shooed her away once more, and this time Lillie turned and sprinted off as fast as she could, hoping he didn’t see the tears that sprang once more to her eyes.
The run to the furniture store was indeed a long, hot one, and by the time Lillie got there, she was badly parched. The dry dirt of the town’s roads swirled up as she ran, and her face and lips felt gritty with the stuff. When she reached the yard in front of the stable-like furniture store, she staggered to a stop, breathing heavily. The building was marked with a sign painted in red: A. A. KILE’S FINE FURNITURE & CABINETRY—PIECES MADE & MEASURED.
The wide front door was flung open on a large workshop, and Lillie could see a variety of furniture in various stages of completion standing next to low piles of smooth-cut lumber. Though no one was in sight inside, a few tools and a sweat rag rested atop a sawhorse; the tools would not be left about where anyone could snatch them unless the person using them was nearby.
“Hello?” Lillie called out in a voice too timid to be heard. There was no answer, and she tried again, this time louder. “Hello!” she said.
Again there was no response, but Lillie did hear something—a sort of step-scrape sound coming from around the back of the building. The sound drew closer, though slowly, as if whoever was making it could move only so fast. Lillie had no doubt who that person was and she called once more. “Is anyone there?” she asked.
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