Die, I thought, because no one’s going to regret it, not even your wife.
After a few days of suffering like that, he got himself the kind of burning fever that brings demons. He was so misty-minded that he started asking questions that made no sense at all. Who’s inside the lantern? Where’s the river riding to today?
This is September of 1820 that we’re talking about.
He’d always recovered before from his spells, so we weren’t too concerned. Not that it was Dr. Lydell who ever once pulled him back from death. No, sir. It had always been my papa and his curing work. He knew just about everything about herbs and potions. He was famous for that – even among the Indians, because he once cured a deathly ill medicine man who came with a group of Creek braves to River Bend when I was only five or six. He began teaching me most of what he knew about that same time. Though I wasn’t born to it, like him.
Papa told me years before that he’d studied curing in Portugal. He’d lived with a family there and worked with a Jewish magician who had his own apothecary shop. He learned all about which European plants could be used to cure most anything. He’d even been to England to see a man named Jenner who’d discovered a way of preventing smallpox.
Mistress Holly was counting on Papa to save her husband once again. Even though this time he was worse off than ever. I remember her saying in that breathy voice of hers, “Ahm a-cantin’ on ya, Samuel, no wun aylse.”
That was my father’s name – Samuel. In Africa, they called him Tsamma, which is the name of a melon that grows there. His master in Virginia was the one who changed it.
With the Master out of the way in his sickroom, the air of the plantation had lost its bite. We almost believed we weren’t being watched, but we were, since the overseer and the black foremen were always waiting for one little sign of tiredness to call us just plain nigger-lazy, then drag us off to the whipping barrel. Even so, I’d begun thinking nothing would bother me again if the Master would just let me be from now on.
On the night of the Twentieth of September, when the tea-room clock rang its nine o’clock bells, I knocked on Big Master Henry’s door, just like I was supposed to, to bring him his glass of hot lemonade. Lily the cook had made it for him every day for the past decade, just as my papa had told her to. It was made with lemons grown right on the plantation down by Christmas Creek, with honey that my father collected from his hives in Porter’s Woods and Wilson’s Meadow. He had special permission to wander the plantation to collect his honey.
One time the Master told me that the Israelites lived on honey and lemon in the desert, so that was why he drank it. Big Master Henry supposedly knew these things because his papa had been a minister in Charleston. But I’d read the Old Testament from front to back by the time I was ten and never saw any such claim. It was then that I knew for sure that he made up the Bible as he went. Nearly all the white people do, even when they get their quotes right.
“You can remember the words and still not know anything about the meaning hidden underneath,” Papa used to tell me.
So after I’d knocked on his door and been ordered in, I put his glass down on his table – not looking at him because I didn’t want him to notice me ever again. I could hear him wheezing though. Then I slipped out of his room. An hour later, when his wife came to wish him sweet dreams, she found his door locked. She called to him, but there was no answer. He had one of the two keys to the room in his possession. The only other one was in her night-table drawer.
Frantic, she rushed off to get the key. She was powerful afraid to use it though. She didn’t want to find him dead, with his ghost lingering over the body. Mistress Holly was mighty afraid of the dark – because her mother had seen a ghost once rise from her crib and float right out the window – so she shouted to my papa to come up from the larder and open the door. By that time, Mr. Johnson the overseer had been told by Lily the cook that something was wrong in the Big House.
Papa took a long time getting to Mistress Holly, because he couldn’t walk so well. Not since after both his heel-strings were cut by Big Master Henry in the year before I was born. But she wasn’t about to trust anyone else.
Just as he opened the Master’s bedroom door, Mr. Johnson barged into the Big House and came bounding up the stairs. “Get your skinny nigger hands away from there, Samuel!” he shouted, and grabbed the key from Papa’s hand.
My papa said thank you to him, because he was always thanking folks at the strangest times.
The house slaves, me included, were all standing at the bottom of the stairs listening to the hellish caterwauling of Mistress Holly. Lily and her grandson Backbend, who used to help serve supper, were praying that nothing had happened. But don’t be fooled – if they prayed for the Master’s heart to still be beating, it was only because they were worried they were going to be sold to someone even more mud-minded if he died.
As for me, I was hoping real hard that he was as dead as a headless catfish, and I was squeezing my eyelids so tight I might have drawn blood.
Whether my wishes had anything to do with it or not, Big Master Henry was gone as gone can be. Since his drinking glass was empty and had fallen on the floor from out of his big cold hand, I might have been suspected of poisoning him and would likely have been hanged that very night, but there was also a wood-handled knife buried in the side of his neck. That blade saved me from swinging from a tree, I’m happy to say. And Lily too, since she mixed the lemonade. Not that we poisoned him. Lily believed in God’s retribution and wouldn’t have risked His vengeance. As for me, I confess I wanted to. I’d thought of it every time he stuck his broken glass up inside me.
*
How the killer had stabbed Big Master Henry and escaped through a locked door was the mystery everybody wanted to get to the bottom of. It was a twenty-four-foot drop to the ground from Big Master Henry’s window, so nobody could climb up or jump down without using a ladder.
As for the two keys to the room, one was found by Mr. Johnson in a pocket of Big Master Henry’s dress coat, which was folded on a chair in his bedroom. The other had been in Mistress Holly’s night-table drawer. She’d been playing solitaire on her bed for two hours previous to finding her husband’s body. If the killer had taken the key earlier, then how did he – or she – return it to the night table where Mistress Holly had found it?
The ladder was found safely locked away in the First Barn. There was no blood on it. And none of the field slaves had seen anyone climbing up the side of the house. So Mr. Johnson had the foremen tie Crow over the whipping barrel. Then he raised his cat and let it fall, because “that damn careless nigger” had been the Master’s personal slave and ought to have protected him.
Crow wept like a baby under his ten lashes, since the skin that had been flayed from his back years earlier had grown over the bones with thick scars that were sensitive as burns. Mr. Johnson kept spitting out tobacco juice onto the black man’s legs to humiliate him.
The next day Crow told me, “Ya know, Morri, I was so ashamed to let go like that, but it was like I was bein’ cut open with a rusty saw.”
I hugged him and said we were all proud of him. I promised myself I’d see them all pay one day. I just didn’t know how yet.
We all kept our mouths shut during the whipping except to count the strokes and pray for Crow. The overseer then picked out Lily’s grandson Backbend from our line. He was only eleven and his mamma was dead. He had big dark eyes and the softest lips of anyone at River Bend.
“I’m gonna whip this boy ten good strokes too,” Mr. Johnson said, “unless you niggers tell me what happened last night. And I’m gonna keep pickin’ out your children till one of you speaks the truth.”
Lily shrieked and fell to her knees and begged him to be kind to her boy.
Most likely any one of us would have stopped his suffering by calling out the name of the culprit if we had truly seen him.
“Shame, shame, shame!” I yelled. “You is payin’ yer toll to hell ri
ght here, right now, Mr. Johnson.”
“You next, Morri!” he hollered back. “I ain’t gonna suffer your big mouth. And you’re getting twenty strokes!”
I was too angry to be scared. And too lightheaded with the truth of the Master being dead. I figured that the worst had happened to me already.
My papa then said he would not let anyone hurt me, but Mr. Johnson said, “Shut up, nigger, or I’ll give her thirty!”
“Thank you, Mr. Johnson, sir,” Papa replied real nice. “But if you whip my daughter, I can promise you some very, very serious consequences that you are not going to find agreeable,” he added, smiling.
“You can, can you?”
“Indeed, I can. Mistress Holly will need me should either of her children take ill. And I shall need Morri with me. And healthy. Just as I need Backbend in one piece as well.”
“Shut that big mouth of yours, nigger!”
Mr. Johnson turned to Backbend and raised the lash above his head.
After the third stripe across the boy’s back, when his tears were rolling down his cheeks and he’d already filthied himself, Papa limped forward and said, “I did it. I killed Big Master Henry.”
“Done it how?” Mr. Johnson demanded.
“I took the ladder and I climbed up quietry-quietly. Big Master Henry was asleep and I stabbed him.”
“You, with that gimp of yours? Climbin’ up the ladder would be near impossible.”
“Yet that is just what I did, sir.”
“Why would you?” said Mr. Johnson, squinting.
“He cut my heel-strings, sir.”
“That was more than ten years ago.”
“Still, that is the reason.”
“So how d’you kill him without getting blood on you?”
“I wore gloves.”
Mr. Johnson spit. “Where are the gloves now?”
“Christmas Creek.”
“And how did you get the damned ladder out of the barn?”
Papa couldn’t answer that, since everyone knew only Mr. Johnson had the key.
“Not another word from you, Samuel!” he warned.
He was about to start whipping Backbend again, and then it would be my turn, but Weaver stepped forward and said that he had done it.
“And how did you get the ladder out of the barn?” Johnson asked. He spit twice real quick, which meant he was at the end of his patience.
“Wid da key, Mistuh Johnson.”
“My key?”
“Yessuh.”
“But I had my key with me all evenin’. I’m sure of it.”
“I duhn used mah root bayag,” Weaver confessed.
“What bag was that, nigger?”
“De condrin’ bayag.”
“What in God’s name are you talkin’ ’bout now?”
“His conjuring bag,” Papa repeated, because Mr. Johnson sometimes pretended that he was plain unable to understand Weaver and some of the other slaves.
“Weaver,” the overseer spat, “get your ragged black hide back in line now!”
Papa stepped forward again and said, “Nobody knows who killed Big Master Henry, Mr. Johnson. So take me instead of my Morri or I promise I’ll put an arrow in your heart.”
His words made me shake. Papa was just over five feet tall, with tight peppercorns of gray hair growing a bit thin on top, but he was more than Mr. Johnson’s equal, and we all knew it. Now that my papa had threatened him, the overseer was finally getting the idea that he was losing this wrestling match with us. Because if my father was willing to risk being lynched for speaking the way he did, then he could be pretty damned sure that we weren’t lying and that no one knew the identity of the killer.
“You niggers get back to work. I’ve had enough of your lies for one day,” he shouted.
After that, he cut Backbend free, and the boy ran off.
*
The crime was never solved, though I was pretty sure I knew who’d done it – Little Master Henry. He’d been out at a party, but he could have walked the last few hundred yards of his way home and snuck back into the house without being seen. Or maybe he had been seen. And heard too. Likely no slave would have admitted to that, even if Backbend had been flayed down to his skeleton. Accusing the heir to the throne of River Bend would have been a death sentence.
Little Master Henry had everything to gain from his papa’s death. With the blade of one small knife, he inherited half the plantation. The other half went to Mistress Holly, of course.
In any event, we were about to have ourselves a new Master.
*
Two weeks after Big Master Henry’s death, on a bright Sunday afternoon, Papa asked me to sit on a stool with him inside a circle of fuchsia bushes he’d planted. Dozens of pink, purple, and red bell-shaped flowers were dangling all around us. Papa always said that fuchsias liked people knowing how pretty they were and grew offended if you looked away too quickly. I knew what he wanted me to tell him, but my heart was thundering. He said, “I’ll not make you say a thing. You can tell me when you’re ready.” I leaned my head upon his shoulder. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep against me, Morri. I shall not let you fall.”
XXXI
After learning of my father’s betrayal from Benjamin, I immediately posted a letter to Mother and Aunt Fiona asking that they be ready to receive us in their home in about two weeks.
Grandmother Rosa clearly wished for me to invite her too, if only so that she might be allowed the dignity of a refusal, but Mama would have had my head on a platter if she joined us.
Grandmother’s last words to me were “John, you were always a clever child, but never kind. Much like your mother in that regard.”
“I am genuinely sorry, Grandmother. I’d have preferred being a better grandson. I assure you that if I could stay in Portugal, I would. Cruelty is not my intention.”
“It is never our intention, John.”
*
Luna Olive Tree had no living relatives, so I went to her home on St. John’s Eve to ask her if she might consider joining us in England once we were settled in; Portugal’s precarious political situation was making me think we’d all be better off there, at least for the foreseeable future.
“Oh, John, it’s too late for an old goat like me to go anywhere,” she sighed.
I argued with her, but she kept telling me that it was impossible. I thanked her for all that she and her sister had ever done for me, which was a great-great deal. “You saved my life by finding Senhor Gilberto to train me,” I told her.
To make me cry, she said, “We never had children, but we had you, John, and both Graça and I were eternally grateful.”
*
Aboard our ship, a sense of death lodged itself in my gut. The mad thought that Papa might still be alive somewhere, hiding from us out of shame, kept me bound to silence. I knew it could not be true, but I could not fully accept his death, even after all these years. When my daughters came to my side, we held hands and watched our home disappear.
*
We arrived in London on the afternoon of July the Third. We found Mother and Aunt Fiona in hearty spirits, so thrilled by our arrival that they hopped around like schoolgirls and asked endless questions without waiting for replies.
Our initial conversation set the slightly hysterical and comic tone for our first days with them, which pleased me greatly as it served to camouflage my worry.
Fiona’s blue eyes were radiant. “I canna believe it!” she kept exclaiming. “They are bonnie burdies indeed. Why, their doony feathers are all gone!”
“What’s doony?” Esther asked.
“Downy,” replied Mother.
“And burdies?”
“Lassies.”
“Let me get a good look at you all!” Fiona said, moving back to take us in as we sat on the sofa.
“You’re frightening the children, staring like that,” Mama joked.
Fiona patted her bun of gray hair. Her eyes filled with tears as she whispered bonnie burdies
to herself. Then she said what Mother and I had been hoping she would not: “If only James were here to see you all.”
*
Mother looked wonderful and had allowed her hair to shine with its natural silver. That first day she wore amethyst earrings and a pearl necklace I remembered from my childhood. She attributed her overall confidence to London, where she felt perfectly at home and could live openly as a Jewish woman.
Fiona agreed that the city’s astonishing diversity had certainly helped my mother, but she ascribed more importance to her piano lessons. Highly regarded as a teacher, her fame had spread, and she currently had students from as far away as Camden Town. One of her former pupils, a twenty-two-year-old Londoner by the name of Ian Pitt, had accompanied the well-known tenor Renato Vecchia on his recent tour of France and Italy.
As for me, I attributed much of her change to Aunt Fiona herself, who was very little put out by what others – particularly men – thought of her. She dressed the way she wanted, spoke her mind, and anyone who didn’t like it be damned!
One last reason for Mother’s sense of peace may have been that, in moving to England, she had placed herself a thousand miles from her own mother’s criticisms. She and I did speak of Grandmother Rosa upon my arrival, of course. When I suggested that she might consider inviting her for an extended stay, she retorted, “John, my mother only wanted your sympathy. She and my brothers have always been at war with me, so now let them delight in each other’s company.”
Mama finally told me what had caused the rift between them and how her deep affection for Violeta – and even Daniel – was connected to her own past.
When she was just fourteen, her piano teacher had touched her in inappropriate ways. “I was left scared and confused,” she said. “I’d looked up to him like a god – he played so beautifully. And I’d always trusted him. To have him betray me like that … in that terrible way, it took away my faith in so many things.”
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