The Cursed Ground

by T. R. Simon

  When Prisca, Master Frederic, and Miss Caroline returned, Master Frederic told me to sit in the front of the carriage on the driver’s bench, next to the boy. The sun beat down on us as we rode over rough roads and through dense woods. A new jungle. Prisca called to me from inside the coach and I called back. We named the few flowers and birds we could recognize, we made up names for the others, and we sang. I became sleepy and almost fell from the narrow perch of the driver’s seat. The boy grabbed me and set me right. He laughed, and I laughed with him. He gently linked his arm through mine so that when sleep overtook me again, I would fall against his shoulder.

  At night we stopped in a town called Mellonville. Mosquitoes played angry music into the humid night air. I slept in a cramped bed next to Prisca. I bit down on my fist to keep from crying.

  As soon as the sun showed itself, we drove still deeper south. It wasn’t until nightfall had been with us several hours that we finally reached a house, lit from inside. The doors opened and two women appeared. They were several shades darker than me and dressed in dull linens worn from patching. Miss Caroline’s voice became sharp, and they did her bidding with hurried steps.

  Inside the house, the boy went to stand with the two women. Prisca and I stood together, Prisca holding my hand in hers. Miss Caroline and Master Frederic exchanged words, but I could not understand them. I looked to Prisca for help, but she just stared at the floor. My ache for Mama Sezelle, for home, was so strong I almost fell to my knees.

  Miss Caroline stepped toward me, saying something. The more she said, the tighter Prisca gripped my hand. I stared into Miss Caroline’s blue eyes, but all I could read in her face was displeasure.

  She addressed Prisca then, who only shook her head. In our old language, Master Frederic told me to let go of Prisca’s hand, even though it was Prisca who held me. I shook my head, too, full of confusion.

  Miss Caroline spoke to Prisca again, her voice low and firm. Prisca still would not look at her. Miss Caroline came toward us and, with her small moist hands, pried ours apart.

  Prisca cried out to Master Frederic, who did not respond. I felt a new kind of fear growing in me. I was in a place I would never choose to come, if choice were ever mine.

  Miss Caroline called to one of the women by the door, who came and took me by the wrist. Miss Caroline led Prisca, me, and my keeper upstairs to a bedroom. In the room was a bed and, next to it on the floor, a straw-filled pallet. The room was lit by three candles casting long shadows on the walls. The woman who had led me by the wrist handed me a worn linen shift, a smaller version of her own. I realized I was expected to wear it. While the three of them watched, I undressed and put on the linen shift. It was rough, not at all like the smooth cotton of my own clothes. I had only a handful of dresses, but they were all pretty, each one something Prisca, who was two years older than me, had outgrown.

  Miss Caroline pointed at the pallet on the floor, then at me. I stared. When I looked over at Prisca, she was crying. She ran to the door and called to her father, loud and insistent.

  When Master Frederic appeared, his face wore no expression.

  Prisca spoke to him in our language. “Why must they take away Lucia’s dresses? And why would they have her sleep on the floor when the bed is more than big enough for the two of us?”

  Master Frederic shrugged his shoulders. “My daughter, this is how things are done here.”

  “That is absurd,” Prisca yelled with fury. “It is not how we do things! Lucia is not a dog!”

  Miss Caroline had moved to stand close beside Master Frederic. She smiled at her new husband, then reached out and stroked Prisca’s tearstained face, as if in sympathy. She then took Prisca’s arm gently and led her to the door. Prisca glanced back over her shoulder at me as they took her from the room.

  The woman who had taken my dress earlier pointed to herself. “Rebecca.”

  I pointed to myself. “Lucia.”

  She nodded and pointed to the straw pallet. She pointed to the bed and shook her head.

  Then she blew out the candles and left.

  All night I lay awake, dreading what further darkness the morning would bring.

  Long after the first rays of sunlight had filled the room, Miss Caroline opened the door to find me sitting on the pallet, knees against my chest. She indicated that I should follow her out of the room and downstairs. On the ground floor, we walked down a hall past several rooms, one of them a library where Master Frederic sat at a long table with Prisca, reading. We passed through a small room that held many things for serving and eating, and out into a yard. In the yard was an outbuilding, which I would learn was the cookhouse. On the other side of the outbuilding’s Dutch door stood Rebecca, the collar of her dress already rimmed with sweat from the heat.

  The yard was neatly raked, and chickens were picking lazily in the weeds. And then I noticed, off to the side, a small pile of sticks and cloth: all I owned, all I had brought with me — my dresses and my shoes — jumbled up with kindling. The boy from the carriage stood by the pile, looking to Miss Caroline for a sign. Miss Caroline nodded and he went to the door of the cookhouse, where Rebecca passed him a flaming stick. He threw it on the pile and I watched my clothes burn. I looked up at him and he held my gaze. There was kindness in his eyes. Again he saved me from falling.

  Once the pile had burned down, Miss Caroline walked back into the main house. I had been given my lesson.

  As soon as she was out of sight, I stumbled over to bushes brimming with white blossoms and emptied what little there was in my stomach. When I turned, the boy was behind me, holding something out to me. Frozen, I stared at him. He looked around carefully before taking my hand and pushing some soft fabric into it, then walked away. I opened my hand. It was a white handkerchief, carefully embroidered with a red flamingo. Prisca had received it as a gift and in turn gifted it to Mama Sezelle, who carried it in her pocket every day — until the night she packed it with my few belongings. The boy whose name I did not know had rescued a small piece of my past.

  Moments later, Rebecca motioned for me to follow her into the cookhouse. There, I worked. I carried the wooden bucket to the well and filled it. I cut okra into thin slices. I salted and rubbed cast iron pans and swept the kitchen. In the afternoon, my chores did not end. Nor did Prisca come to see me

  That night, after the dinner was prepared and I had eaten my meager bowl of grits and corn bread by the fire, Rebecca motioned that I should go upstairs to bed.

  I entered the room I’d been left in the previous night and found Prisca sitting on the bed, her bed. Her eyes had blue shadows, and I guessed that, like me, she had not slept the night before.

  We spoke in the language of our home.

  “They do not allow me to play with you.” Her voice was flat.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because you are a slave now.”

  Only one time after that did she ever mention my condition again.

  For the first two weeks, when the two of us were alone, I allowed myself the fantasy that things between us were as they had been, that we still could enjoy each other’s company in a time and place without slavery. It was a useless fantasy and a dangerous one. The present was a hell with no escape, and the past could change nothing about that.

  We had been at Westin for three weeks. My hands were raw from the heat of the laundry water and the lye we used to wash the clothes. At night after I had served and cleaned, and gotten the fireplace and kindling ready for the next day, I would climb the stairs to Prisca’s room. My legs and arms hurt from the work, and I trembled with exhaustion. As soon as I entered the room, Prisca would beg me to read a fairy tale with her, then demand that we act it out. My eyes would blur the words on the page, and I would try to sit on my pallet whenever our play slowed down.

  One night I told her it hurt my hands to hold the heavy book. She turned them over and looked at my palms. They were cracked and covered in broken blisters. She looked into my eyes, her face
pale and empty. I tried to lie down.

  “No,” she hissed into the night. “You’re Cinderella. And your wicked stepsisters have made you work until your hands bleed! But I am your fairy godmother.” She went to her dresser, scooped out a fingerful of pommade en crème, and started rubbing it into my hands.

  I yanked them away. “This is no story, Prisca. My hands hurt because they work me every hour that there is daylight!”

  Prisca pushed back from me, then began to cry like a child. “I’m trying to help!”

  I instantly regretted what I had said. Not for upsetting her, but for fear that Miss Caroline would hear. If she found Prisca crying, she would lay the blame on me and punish me for it. I had already been yelled at for not dressing Prisca quickly enough, slapped for taking too long to do a task, and pinched purple for dropping a saucer. I was terrified of what Prisca’s tears could bring.

  And so I shushed her, apologizing gently until her tears slowed.

  In that moment I learned to be a slave even with Prisca. To bottle up my feelings and my fears so that she did not unleash the force of her own power, a power she herself barely understood. The power to be a whole person, her whole self, while I was now forced to exist as a fraction of a human being, a slave with no rights to my own self. What Prisca did not understand, but that I now did, was that the past meant nothing.

  She answered me in a ferocious whisper. “Out there you’re a slave, but in here we are as we always have been. In here, nothing has changed!”

  That first year Prisca often pulled me into her bed during the night and wept onto my shoulder. I did not weep with her. I lay still, the flesh-and-blood doll she turned to when her loneliness became too hard to bear.

  It had been three years since I first came to Westin, the name they gave this farm in the Florida wilderness, and Master Frederic was dying.

  Miss Caroline had at first denied the signs — he passed water in the night, the whites of his eyes were yellow, and his fingernails splintered. I said nothing, but Prisca watched me watch him. She knew that, having been raised by Mama Sezelle, I recognized the signs of death. Three years of living as a slave had altered me, however, and I had become adept at keeping my emotions and thoughts from betraying themselves on my face.

  Prisca was sleeping, her brow and chest beaded in sweat. After all this time, we still shared a room — not because I had any say in the matter, but because Prisca demanded it. I walked to the window in the hopes of catching a slight breeze. In the fields, the other slaves were already in the cotton. There were sixteen of us altogether at Westin. Twelve worked the field full-time; three tended to the household and its needs. Between the house and the field was Horatio, the boy who sat next to me on our long trip to Westin, the boy who saved a small piece of cloth from fire. It had taken me three days to learn his name, six months to learn his language, and twelve months to teach him how to read simple sentences. Horatio was my best friend.

  I watched him getting water for the horses, stooped under the weight of the two buckets, his thin frame a balance scale tilting from side to side.

  I heard yelling from the field and wondered who Mr. Krowse, the overseer, was showing the whip to. As much as I feared the whip, today I imagined it could almost be better than the long hot hours waiting for death.

  I poured water into the basin, and the sound woke Prisca. She sat upright. “Is he gone?”

  I shook my head. She exhaled slowly and got out of bed.

  “Do you want to wash?” I asked, pointing at the basin of fresh water. She shook her head and stepped into the same dress she had worn the day before, not waiting for me to button it, and left the room without another word.

  I walked over to the basin and splashed cool water on my face. That’s when I saw it: a peppered moth, coal black, perched on the dresser, its silvering wing dust glinting in the reflection of the glass. I had never seen one during the daytime before and never one so large. It was almost the size of my hand. The words of Mama Sezelle and the old island women came back to me. “An easy death brings rain, and a hard death brings an omen.” Then I remembered what Mama Sezelle had taught me: fear is the absence of understanding; knowing the ways of the natural world is power. I remembered some of the stories and the legends the old women in my homeland told me. I remembered some of their ways: I made orange leaf tea to stop vomiting, bathed a scorpion bite in spruce tea, and applied a sweet potato root poultice on burns. But now I wished I had fought sleep harder and had listened more intently to the signs the old women spoke about in hushed voices on warm island evenings. Now more than ever I needed to understand their meanings.

  I turned around and moved toward the moth, holding out my hand. It alighted on my finger as if accustomed to human touch. I gazed at it with wonder and a small shudder. An endless minute passed. And then, moving with the slow grace of a weighty bird, the peppered moth flew out the open window just as Prisca’s screams began to reverberate through the house.

  I ran downstairs, but stopped at the door to the drawing room.

  Miss Caroline’s grown daughter, Alice, was holding on to her, as if to comfort her. Miss Caroline’s face was drawn, her pale-blue eyes rimmed with red. The faces of Miss Alice and her husband, Master George Peterson, by contrast, were somber but not grief-stricken. They looked as well-rested and easy as they had five months ago at Christmas. The Petersons’ son, Timothy, a pale, thin version of his tall and dark-haired father, did not even look at his dead step-grandfather. His eyes instead searched the faces of his parents, as if he didn’t know how he was supposed to react or to feel and needed to take his cues from them.

  I found Prisca kneeling by her father’s bed, a tumult of sheets. Master Frederic had given death a hard fight, but now his limp body and Prisca’s weeping were all that was left of the battle.

  Prisca was now an orphan, like me. I had spent my whole life with him and Prisca, but his death did not move me in the slightest. The only sorrow I felt at his dying was the sadness I felt for Prisca’s loss of her father. I do not think a slave who has seen the power of the whip can truly sorrow for someone who owns people, no matter how benevolently he owns them. If there is a kindness that can soften the blow of stolen freedom, I have not seen it.

  I moved toward Prisca, but the tight grip of Miss Alice closed around my arm. “Go cover the mirrors, girl,” she said to me. So I left to gather white sheets.

  The afternoon turned hot and humid, and the sickly-sweet smell of gardenias further choked the air. Prisca disappeared into her room while the drawing room was prepared and Master Frederic’s body laid out with fitting dignity. When Miss Alice sent me up with cool water and buttered bread, I could hear weeping on the other side of the locked door, but she did not answer my knock.

  Back in the cookhouse I helped Rebecca squeeze lemons for lemonade and stuff blueberry pies. Rebecca was a small woman, half as round as she was tall, the color of dark maple syrup, with almond-shaped eyes that all but disappeared on those rare occasions when she laughed. She worked at a rapid pace, the sweat dripping from her brow.

  The second my hands fell idle, she gave me a new task. “Snap beans need readying,” she ordered, looking up at me. Then something beyond me caught her eye, causing her to gasp and take a step back.

  I turned around to see that the peppered moth had lighted on the ledge of the bottom Dutch door, its wide black fan of wings stark against the thick ivory paint.

  “Such a moth,” she whispered, frightened.

  The arrival of the moth was as arresting to Rebecca as it had been to me, but it did not frighten me as it did her.

  Before I could reach the door, Timothy’s voice rang out from the direction of the stables.

  “Rebecca! Come! I’m thirsty and I want cool water!”

  At fourteen he had already mastered the implicit threat of his father’s commands.

  He was coming toward the cookhouse. Across his shoulder was slung the rifle he always carried, pressed tight against his lean frame like a
second spine.

  We reached the Dutch door at the same time, he on the outside and me on the inside. We both looked at the moth.

  Startled, he hit at the creature blindly and the moth fell to the ground.

  I called out “No!” just once, but I was too late. In one swift move, he had taken the rifle from his back and smashed the moth with its barrel. The moth no longer moved, but he struck it a second time and then kicked it away. He looked up then and I saw his face. It was red, as if with rage, but I recognized it as the mask of fear he often wore.

  Rebecca pulled me roughly away from the door, invoked Jesus, and spit in the fire.

  Timothy stared at us. “Rebecca, bring my water out front. I want to sit in the shade,” he ordered, then reshouldered his weapon and walked off. Rebecca moved to obey his command.

  Once he was gone, I went to where the moth lay and picked up its mangled body. It fluttered slightly in my hand, the last life leaving it. My fingers glowed with silver dust from its once-glittering wings.

  Mr. Polk’s cabin sat at the far end of the paddock, straight and narrow like a skinny woman. Compensating for her lack of curves, the small house wrapped itself with star jasmine bushes, waving their bright petals like thin white handkerchiefs, and beauty berry bushes whose flowers danced. All the color and movement made a person forget that the house was no more than eight feet across and ten feet long — tiny enough to make Mama’s and my three little rooms seem like a palace. Most of Mr. Polk’s land may have been wild and uninviting, but the part he cultivated and tended for himself and his horses beckoned to the Florida sun to shine down love on it.

  Teddy knocked softly. The man who answered was not the bloodied and disoriented soul we had found in the middle of the night before. Mr. Polk stood before us fully himself again. He was wearing fresh clothes and his arm was wrapped in a tight sling. Outwardly, there was nothing that a fall from a horse couldn’t explain. Behind him the little cabin was tidy and welcoming, making it clear that Old Lady Bronson had indeed returned in the morning.