An Unlikely Friendship

by Ann Rinaldi

  We chilluns didn't have many chores, so we hunted for turkey nests and got a tea cake for every one we found. I don't know what those white folk did with those turkey nests. As I got older I pondered it out. They did it to keep us busy or when they wanted us out of their sight.

  The slaves all had linsey-woolsey clothing for winter, all spun and made on the plantation's own looms. We house slaves had to make a better appearance so Massa purchased fabric from the Petersburg factory in checks and plaids, and it was soft and pretty to wear.

  Sometimes poor white folk from the area would come and stand around the quarters and try to trade with the slaves. They'd trade their calico and snuff for slave food. That's how poor they were. The slaves in the quarters all looked down on them.

  I tried not to get sick, 'cause if I did, Grandma Sarry would give me turpentine for a sore throat. As it was, in winter I had to wear a bag of asafetida around my neck to keep away all kinds of ailments. In spring I had to take Jerusalem oak seed in syrup for nine mornings. Grandma Sarry said nine was a magic number and by then I would be rid of the worms.

  For headaches she gave me jimsonweed; for warts, nine grains of corn; for measles, corn-shuck tea; for mumps, fresh marrow from the hog jowl. Oh, she knew all the magic one needed to get well. And she was often down to the quarters attending to a sick slave.

  I had friends, of course. Jane was one of them. So was Amos. And I can't think of a better way to tell you how things could go bad for us than to tell you their stories.

  Oh, yes. We have three drivers on this place. Drivers, or overseers, keep the slaves in line and working. Massa has a rule. The ordinary driver is allowed to give no more than six lashes for an offense. The head driver, twelve, and Big Red, the overseer, twenty-four. Anything can be an offense. And we learn that fast.

  I BELIEVE THAT Moses and Solomon in the Bible were negro, that lightning never strikes a sycamore tree because Jesus blessed them, and that springs of water in the ground come from the steps of angels. All these things my mama taught me. And I'll always believe them, because not to believe certain things is to die.

  For the first four years of my life I believed in the Burwells. I stopped putting any trust in them after what happened with my friend Jane.

  To begin with, it was a bad day on the plantation. When I came to breakfast in the kitchen, Grandma Sarry told me it was a day full of bad omens. "Somethin' about to happen," she said. "You mind yourself today."

  I believed her because she was known to sense such things. And sure enough as I sat there at the table eating my hominy and molasses, who came through the door spreading the blue devils but Big Red, the head overseer.

  Big Red is so called because of his fiery red hair. And he is over six feet. Mama says she would never want to have to make a shirt for him. He carried his rawhide whip all curled up in his left hand.

  I'd never seen Big Red without that whip. I think he must sleep with it.

  "It gives him his strength," Mama told me.

  At that same time Robert came through the other door, from the corridor connecting the kitchen to the house. At fourteen, Robert was Massa's oldest son.

  "Got some coffee, Grandma?" he asked. Everybody on the place called Sarry "Grandma." And she spoiled Robert so. I liked him. He paid special mind to me. Grandma said he spoiled me.

  Grandma also said I was never to think of him as a half brother. "Make things more difficult when you both get older," she'd told me.

  I'd noticed that Robert paid less and less mind to me of late. Even though he used to favor me when we ran and played in the yard. Robert had taught me to play stickball, checkers, even to know my letters, which I knew better than any white child on the place. He'd sat me on his knee and told me ghost stories.

  But now he was fourteen and I was four. And I was a nuisance to him at best, and a trial at worst. He'd become embarrassed if I spoke to him in public, glower at me, and tell me to mind myself and leave him be.

  I wasn't wanting to be a trial to any of the white folk. I'd leave him be if that was what he wanted. But I still looked up to him and worshipped him.

  He and Big Red exchanged greetings as if Grandma and I did not exist.

  "Mornin', Big Red," Robert said.

  "Mornin', Master Robert."

  So now. Something else had changed. Big Red, who answered only to Massa, had taken to calling Robert "Master." Well then.

  "I got some bad news," Big Red said.

  Robert nodded, as if bad news was to be expected and he could abide it without a wink.

  "Sit down," Grandma Sarry told Big Red. "Have some coffee and put down that whip."

  Big Red sat. He put down his whip. Grandma was the only negro on the place who could order him about, or order anyone about, for that matter.

  Grandma put a dish of hoecakes in front of him. And some coffee.

  "You found Basil," Grandma said.

  Big Red nodded. Basil, an important negro on the place because he could do so many things, had gone missing last night. There had been a terrible rain during the night, the Devil's own, Grandma called it, cold and slashing and unforgiving.

  "He daid?" Grandma asked. She was not afraid to steer things along, even in front of Robert. She'd boxed his ears many a time and he was still afraid of her.

  "Yeah," Big Red answered. "I found him in the creek this mornin' floating facedown."

  "Anybody tell Hannah?" Hannah was his mother.

  "No. I was hopin' you would," Big Red answered.

  Grandma just nodded and sighed, pushed me, and told me to stop staring. I went back to my hominy and molasses.

  If I was good, Grandma would give me a little coffee later, very little with lots of milk and sugar. I loved her coffee.

  "What was he doin' near that creek in this weather?" Grandma said.

  "Ran off," Robert put in. "To Bartlett's likely, to see his wife, Lily."

  Lily worked for the Bartletts, two miles down the road. Basil was allowed to visit her only once every few months, but he ran off regular-like to his wife.

  "And last night he had to cross the creek to get home," Big Red put in. "He couldn't swim."

  "What did you do with the body?" Robert asked.

  "Outside, in the wagon," from Big Red.

  There was silence for a moment while Grandma attended to the pots hanging in the fireplace and Robert and Big Red talked small talk about the funeral, which was to be tonight.

  Then, of a sudden, Big Red looked at me. "How old is she?" he asked Grandma.

  "All of four," Grandma answered.

  "Old enough to pick worms off tobacco leaves." He stated it flatly. Then said to me, "You sickly, girl?"

  "Her name is Lizzy," Grandma said.

  "What you good for, Lizzy? Just settin' around and eatin' all day? Or do you work?"

  "She's my mother's girl," Robert put in.

  "Can't she talk for herself? She dumb or something?" he pushed.

  "Talk, Lizzy," Robert ordered.

  "I fetch for Mistress," I said. "I serve her. I'm four."

  "She isn't ever going to work in the fields," Robert told him flatly. "She's special."

  "What makes her special?" Big Red asked.

  Nobody said anything. But the silence was so full you could feel it. And then Big Red said, "Oh, oh I see, another one of the master's special ones." Then he got up and walked to the door that led into the corridor to the house. "Too many special people around here if you ask me."

  "Nobody's askin'," Grandma said. "Why don't you go into the dining room and tell Massa 'bout Basil. He'll want to know."

  Big Red harrumphed and left.

  "You'd best go to breakfast with your family, Robert," Grandma told him. "Or I'll hear it again 'bout your hanging around the kitchen and eating."

  He got up. He did not look at me. But he said something. "Long as I'm around, you won't be picking worms off tobacco," he said. And then he went into the house.

  We went to Basil's funeral that night, but
before the funeral, before night fell, something else happened on that blue-devil day. And it concerns my friend Jane.

  LATER ON THAT DAY word went around the place, the way it goes through the quarters like a dry hot wind, that Massa had given Big Red what for because of the loss of Basil. It was Big Red's fault that Basil had run off again, Massa said. Never mind why or how. It just was. Most everybody on the place knew to stay clear of Big Red and his curled-up whip that day. But my friend Jane couldn't help it. She was right there, in front of his face in the fields.

  JANE WAS JUST ten years old and the kind of friend you could tell anything to. She was more like a sister, but though I had half sisters aplenty in Massa's house, I'd die before I'd tell them anything, much less talk to them. All of Robert's sisters were prissy-boots and like a gaggle of giggling geese.

  When we played around the quarters with the other slave chilluns and Massa's white chilluns (yes, they played with us, too), Jane always looked after me, especially in those days when Robert didn't come to play anymore. She had to look after me. Too many times Mikey, Big Red's little boy, hit me with a stick or shoved my face in the dirt. I dared not do likewise to him, just because he was Big Red's boy, but that was no account to Jane. She roughed him up a couple of times, so he left us crying. Nothing was ever said or done, until that day.

  I didn't know of it until after sundown when I went to the quarters to see who was about to play with. The chilluns were playing all right, but Jane wasn't there. I asked around and Mikey spoke up. "She's a sissy-boots, always cryin'," he said.

  The other chilluns told me where to look, and so I went to find her. Sure enough, there she was behind the washhouse, bawling like a stuck pig and throwing up.

  "Jane, are you ailing?"

  She waved me off, but I stayed.

  "Should I get Grandma Sarry?"

  She gulped back her tears and wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. "Yes, no, I dunno. Ain't nothin' she can do for me."

  Then she told me what happened. "He made me bite the heads off all of the worms."

  "Who? What worms?"

  "Big Red. This afternoon. I was workin' in the tobacco fields. He said I left some worms on the leaves and he called me over and made me pick them off and bite their heads off and swallow them."

  My world whirled around. I felt sickly myself then. I could think of nothing to say so I went to her and hugged her. "Come on with me in the house. Grandma Sarry will fix you up."

  "I don't want to swallow turpentine."

  "No. I'll ask her to give you candy," I said with all my four-year-old reasoning.

  Jane was never the same after that. No more did she protect me against Mikey. And there was nothing either of us could do.

  Grandma Sarry did give us both candy that night. Fresh-rolled taffy. And then we had to go to Basil's funeral so she gave us both lightwood torches.

  Slaves are always buried at night. It's the only time we have to mourn proper-like. All Massa's negroes are buried in a beautiful grove full of evergreens. We sang our sad and broken songs. Basil's wife did not come to the funeral. I do not know if, at that time, she even knew he was dead.

  ALL THE TIME, even on the best of days, even when the slaves sang in the fields and had corn shuckings and weddings, we were threatened with the specter of the negro buyers. They came from Petersburg. And once in the hands of the negro buyers, we would be taken and sold South, where we would never again have our hominy and molasses. Where we would have to eat cottonseed to survive.

  If I was sold down South, I would, as soon as I was old enough, be in the fields from before sunup till after sundown. Maybe picking worms off cotton or tobacco and being made to bite off the heads of the ones I missed and eat them, by a driver ten times worse than Big Red.

  I HAVEN'T TOLD YET about others on our plantation. Oh, there were dozens of slaves, so I can't name them all. But the ones that were important to me are as follows:

  There was Uncle Isom who was old but still worked. He made the shoes for everybody on the place and told stories to us little ones when we visited his shed.

  There was Aunt Charlotte, who was really my aunt because she was my mother's sister. She was personal maid to Mistress, and she had three daughters, Amy, Hanna, and Lucy, who all did housework and waited on the table. Even though it was the unwritten rule on plantations that house servants be mulatto, Aunt Charlotte had somehow convinced Mistress that Amy, Hanna, and Lucy were handsome enough to work in the house. So they slipped into their jobs by the skin of their teeth, and they seemed to know it. Seemed to know that with one offense they'd be out in the hot fields all day, hoeing and digging and picking. And they just out and out hated me because I was so light skinned. And never missed a chance to let me know it.

  Of course, there was another rule. That house servants never fight. And this they knew, too. I could tease them all I wanted when they were mean to me. And they couldn't do a thing about it. Because if they hurt me in any way, they'd find themselves in the fields.

  "Massa's little darling," they called me. Though I couldn't see that I was favored.

  Then we had Minna's Ralph. Minna worked in the fields and her thirty-year-old son Ralph was what the slave traders would call a "prime nigra." He was strong and a good worker. His back had never been touched by a whip. He bore no scars like so many of the other men did. At the slave sales in the old market in Petersburg they'd put him up on the block and bid him off just like they'd do with the best racehorses, and Ralph knew it.

  Ralph knew that he'd bring $1,500 for Massa. If Massa ever needed $1,500, he'd be the first to go.

  So Ralph wanted to run. But he needed money. And he found it in the pocket of Massa's jacket when Massa took it off one day in the barn.

  Massa was wild with anger. But I think he was more scared. It's one thing to have lazy nigras, it's another to have nigras who steal.

  So here is what he did. He gathered us all together in the quarters. I saw Minna's Ralph. He was on the edge of the crowd when Massa had one of the nigras bring out a small coop. In it was his best rooster, who was as mean and wily as old Brer Fox.

  That old rooster's name was Belshazzar, like the last king of Babylon that Grandma Sarry told us about. Then Massa had us all line up and file past Belshazzar's cage and stick a finger out at him.

  The one Belshazzar bit would be the one who stole the money, Massa said.

  And that person would be whipped.

  I remember standing in front of Mama and feeling her hands on my shoulders and hearing her whisper in my ear not to worry. "Nobody gonna hurt you while I'm around."

  Well, I knew that wasn't true. I knew if Mistress took it in her head to whip me, nobody could stop her. Not my mama, or even Daddy George if he was around. And it made me mad that Mama would even say such.

  Then, before we even got near Belshazzar, Big Red, who was pacing up and down with his whip, noticed that Minna's Ralph was missing. He wasn't in that line, or anywhere near it. So they knew that Minna's Ralph was the one. Else he wouldn't have gone missing.

  We don't get near the papers. They don't come to the quarters. But they come into the house. And Mama read it to us. An ad in the Petersburg Intelligencer advertising a reward for the return of Minna's Ralph, a thirty-year-old buck from Sappony Creek way, who'd run off on his master.

  We who knew of the ad told others. And everyone waited. First days, then weeks for the return of Minna's Ralph. But he never came back. Somehow that money must have gotten him into the Underground Railroad. And by a month later he was likely up North.

  And I didn't tell you about the most important one of us yet. So I will now.

  Amos was just three, and the darlingest baby on the place. He ran around free, playing in and out of the house, the quarters, anywhere he wanted to go. He was in that part of his life where he didn't know he was a slave yet. Where he thought the whole world was his.

  Lots of times I played with him. I was teaching him his letters when the bad thing ha
ppened to Amos.

  Master was short of money. Word went around in whispers from slave mouth to slave ears. It was September and Massa had just purchased his hogs for the winter and he didn't have the money to pay for them.

  He owed $400. A lot of money. Four hundred dollars was the going price now for a healthy young slave child. Everybody on the place knew it. And so Jane and I were told to walk quietly, with downcast eyes. To be near as we could to invisible. You don't have to teach a slave child how to do that. We're born knowing how to make ourselves invisible.

  Except Amos. He wasn't about to walk. He had places to go so he ran. He could never keep those bright brown eyes of his downcast. They were looking straight out at the world, daring anyone to stop him.

  He called me "Wizzy" because he couldn't say the letter L. He was the fifth of his mother Lana's six children. One baby came after him. Lana was the laundress.

  So there is Amos, running around to beat all Satan's underlings, and there is Massa looking around and wondering where he's gonna get $400. And his eyes light on Lana and he figures, "She's got six of 'em. She won't miss one."

  So he sends word down to the quarters that Lana is to clean and dress Amos and send him to the big house. I greeted him when he climbed the front steps, all spiffed up and smiling. I took his hand and led him into the parlor like I was told to do. I sat him down and kept him quiet. We practiced our ABCs.

  Massa was in his study, offering some whiskey to the man who'd come half an hour earlier. I knew who the man was. The slave trader from Petersburg.

  I don't know what I expected. That he'd be wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork, I suppose. I was surprised to see a well-dressed man in broadcloth, neat and polite and kind, when he walked through the door.

  "Wizzie?" Little Amos looked at me wide-eyed. He knew something was wrong.

  He put his little hand in mine and I held it. And we sat in silence until the door of Massa's study came open and the two men appeared.