The Cursed Ground

by T. R. Simon

  “Abhorrent?” Miss Alice made a sound between laughter and choking. Everyone at the table froze. “Abhorrent is what my mother has been forced to endure for three years.”

  Prisca was startled into silence by Miss Alice’s ferocity. Miss Caroline went as pale as her daughter had flushed red. “Alice, no!”

  Miss Alice didn’t stop. “Abhorrent is the abomination that your father brought into this home!”

  She seemed to be teetering on a precipice and had taken Prisca to stand with her on the edge.

  “You’re mad,” said Prisca, recovering herself. “What possible abomination could you associate with my father?”

  Miss Alice leaned back, a serpent poised to strike. “Do not continue to play us for fools. Do you think us all blind to the ways of the institution we live under? I saw it the minute you two set foot in my mother’s house.”

  Prisca’s face showed no further comprehension. I felt a deep and terrifying dread.

  Miss Caroline grabbed her daughter’s wrist. “Please, Alice, in the name of the Lord! You will make matters worse.”

  Miss Alice struck. “What is abhorrent is that Frederic brought his bastard child, your half sister, to live under this roof, to live in my mother’s house!”

  Prisca blinked, her face blank.

  As for me, for the first time since being whipped, my back felt no pain, but I thought my legs would buckle. I felt hot and cold. I fled the room.

  I ran through the serving room, past Rebecca, who called after me with alarm, and out into the steamy air. I couldn’t breathe. The ground was sinking below me; the stars were falling above me. I collapsed. The world, my world, was upside down. I dug my hands into the dirt. I tried to hold on to something solid.

  Miss Alice’s words rang in my ears. Fool. Bastard child. The institution we live under. And then the memory of things Mama Sezelle used to intimate: Don Federico thinks of you. You are important to Don Federico. Don Federico will take care of you. . . .

  And then some things deeper. The way I knew Prisca’s thoughts and feelings. When we were young, the way it pained us to be separated. The indulgences, small though they were, that Master Frederic sometimes accorded me and no other slave at Westin.

  For the first time in my life I said the two words out loud. “My father.”

  Then I spit. I could not bear to hold the phrase in my mouth. It was the truth, but I wanted no part of it. What kind of father raises two daughters, one free and one a slave? What sort of man enslaves his own daughter to be sold?

  In the very same instant, Miss Alice had given me my father and taken him away.

  Rebecca was now beside me, pulling me up. “Quick, come back inside. If they have to look for you it will mean another whipping for sure.” She pushed me back through the door of the smoky cookhouse just as Master George entered. He looked at us steadily and then turned back without a word.

  Rebecca looked into my eyes. “Whatever they do to you, it will soon be a memory.”

  It was almost another two hours before I had dried and stored the last dish. As I walked back to Rebecca’s cabin, the lights in the main house were being extinguished.

  Prisca was lying in wait for me again, this time by the stables. She put her finger to her lips and motioned me to follow her inside. The first stall of six held her horse, Blue Boy. He nuzzled her as she opened his stall, pushed his large head away, and sat against the wall. She pulled me down next to her.

  Sitting in the dark surrounded by the warm musky smell of horse manure and ripe hay, I didn’t know what to say or how to be with her. She was the same girl I had known my whole life, yet everything about who we were to each other had changed.

  “How long have you been waiting out here for me?” I asked.

  “An hour or so,” she answered in our native tongue, not willing to risk being overheard.

  I willed myself to speak. “I have known it and not known it.”

  She put her hand on mine. “Me too. I have always loved you beyond friendship.”

  I had nothing to give back. Did I love Prisca? I was sure I had loved her when I thought we were both free. Though we hadn’t been equals in class, we had been equals in choice and we chose each other. Now I was her slave. Was loving her even a possibility anymore?

  I remained silent.

  She looked at me calmly, evenly. “Once they take you, there is no guarantee I will ever be able to find you again. I can’t bear that. I am ashamed of myself. I have been ashamed of myself for the last three years. I did what I thought I had to do, but I did not do what was right, even as I knew what right was.”

  She bowed her head. I was sure she was about to cry, but I was wrong. The tears didn’t come, and she kept on, her voice bitter. “We have both been enslaved — me by lies and you by outright bondage.”

  I could only stare at her.

  “I cannot blame you for your silence now. I cannot change what my father did to you, what he did to us. But I can change what will happen to you the day after tomorrow.” Prisca drew a gold necklace and pendant from her dress sleeve and held it up. A ruby surrounded by small diamonds glinted in the moonlight. “I am not entirely penniless,” she said, and made a hollow laughing noise. “It’s not worth enough to enable me to buy you, but is more than enough to buy us passage to New York.” She raised her eyes to meet mine. “I thought I was free, Lucia, but I’m not. I’ve been asleep, but I am awake now.”

  “Now you are awake?” I did not mean for my words to sound bitter, yet they did.

  “Yes, now I am awake. Now I am prepared to fight for what I should have fought for before. I did nothing and I benefitted from what was done to you. I see that now.”

  “You mean, now that we are sisters? Now that we are kin? You mean it took shared blood for you to start caring about my welfare?”

  Prisca looked down. “I realize how this must seem to you, that I seek only to save my own soul from damnation, but I swear to you it is not true. I seek to do what is right because I have participated in what was wrong. If, once I secure your freedom, you no longer wish to see me, I will understand. I will not force you. But for God’s sake, let me make right between us the little I can. Let me unlock the shackles my father placed upon you.” She put her hands on my shoulders and delivered her final revelation. “Lucia, to do this, we must run tomorrow night.” It was a question as well as a statement, and she waited for my answer.

  I touched the searing welt under my heart. Running was a slim shot at freedom. Staying was a guarantee of slavery. I thought of the slave market that awaited me at Saint Augustine in a week’s time. Running or staying, I would lose Horatio and Rebecca. But if I gained freedom, who knew? Perhaps fate would allow me to reach back and alter their fates as well. I nodded my assent.

  She leaned closer. “Stay alert. I will call to you tomorrow after midnight, as soon as I’m sure everyone is asleep. We will take Blue Boy and ride through the night. At Mellonville I will trade in the pendant and the horse and we’ll pay to join a carriage.”

  She continued. “Throughout, you will simply act as my slave. What could be more natural than a young woman on her way to visit an aunt in Savannah with her slave attending? No one ahead of us will ask questions, only those who follow. And we will make ourselves as plain as possible.” With that, she pressed the pendant into my hand. “Sew this into your dress. If we are waylaid, it will be assumed that anything valuable is on my person.”

  Then she got up, brushed the straw from her skirt, and quietly slipped out of the barn. The plan was made.

  I stood and put my hand against Blue Boy’s flank. My heart still beat quickly, and I tried to draw calm from the horse’s slow breath and loose-limbed ease. As I opened the stall door, I spotted Horatio standing in the shadows. Relief flooded me.

  I took his arm and whispered, “Prisca wants us to run.”

  He chose his words carefully. “Miss Prisca thinks you can just go, but the paddyrollers will be after you by midmorning. If Miss Prisca run
with you, she stealing Miz Caroline’s property. They as likely to lock her up as kill you.”

  “I know that.”

  “You seen what they did to Sibby.”

  “Yes.”

  His words were slow and halting. “I ain’t never known kin aside from my mama . . . but if I lose you, I lose my kin. But they gonna take you, one way or the other. So you run.”

  I took his hand in mine and held it, not wanting to let go. A sound outside caught his attention and he gently prodded me toward the barn door. “I’ll sleep in the stable tomorrow night,” he whispered. “I’ll have the horse fresh.”

  Twice in three years I was being torn from a person I loved. I looked to the moon and stars and begged for a sign.

  I woke to the sun, a faint orange ball behind a dense veil of clouds. The air, thick with humidity and heat, slowed even time itself. With the fate of Eatonville hanging by a thread, I longed for my mama. I wanted to hug her and smell the reassuring scent of lye soap on her fingers. Most of all I wanted her to tell me we were gonna be safe, that we would weather this storm the same way we had weathered other storms. But Mama was out of my reach, and I out of hers, and the passage to safe harbor could not be promised.

  Itching to get the day started, I nudged Zora, who was awake in a second.

  “Let’s get going before we catch Mama’s eye,” she said.

  We raked the yard, threw ash in the privy, fed the chickens, and slopped the pigs without being asked. Then we wolfed down our grits and eggs and were out the door before Mrs. Hurston could finish tying Dick and John to a day of yard work.

  We both kept conversation inside our own heads for most of the walk to Old Lady Bronson’s house. We had seen her at Mr. Polk’s a day and a half ago, but so much had happened that it felt much longer than that.

  I was still putting together what Joe Clarke had said: it was in the power of the law to fix this, but white folks wouldn’t let the law work for colored folks; if the law didn’t work, we were at the mercy of a mob of white men who would hang a colored man for no reason at all — and do worse if they had a reason.

  Old Lady Bronson’s house was set in a clearing surrounded by loblolly pines — a small, tidy island set about with red clay pots growing aloe, lemongrass, dill, garlic, and sweet basil. There were others full of spiky- and smooth-leaved herbs and plants I didn’t know the names of. Her porch was strung with flame vine. Despite its beauty, most folks thought of flame vine as a pest because it spreads fast as wildfire, but the vine on Old Lady Bronson’s porch was the picture of good behavior, hanging like perfectly combed hair, its blossoms falling like crimson streaks from the sun itself. We walked up the steps to the screen door and met Old Lady Bronson about to leave on the other side, a black satchel over her shoulder, her hair in a long silver braid.

  She opened the door and stepped out, her eyes sharp as an osprey’s. “I expect this isn’t a social call, am I right?”

  Zora and I glanced at each other and back at her. Without softening her gaze, she motioned for us to sit down on the steps. “Out with it. I don’t have time to waste on girlish foolishness.”

  “You gotta save Eatonville,” Zora blurted out.

  Old Lady Bronson cocked her head. “Eatonville? Now, how in the world did a whole town come to lay its troubles at your door, small fry?”

  Zora told all about last night’s meeting, and Old Lady Bronson’s face grew dark with the telling. When Zora was done, the old woman’s mouth was tight.

  “Polk thought he’d scared Peterson off. I should have known that was dream-thinking.” She spat on the ground. “He must not know I’m here,” she muttered, but not to us. “After all these years, he must think I’m dead.”

  Zora straightened her back and raised her voice, reminding Old Lady Bronson that we were still there. “If you had let us tell what happened to Mr. Polk, maybe folks could have talked to him sooner.”

  “What do you mean, child?”

  “I know Mr. Polk is protecting the land, but it’s not worth my daddy’s life or anybody else’s. It’s not too late. You can get him to sell it. You can talk to him — he’ll listen to you. If he sells it to that white man, Mr. Clarke and my daddy and brothers and all the other men won’t have to risk their lives protecting him tonight.” If desperation could carry the day, there would have been no refusing her.

  “That white man doesn’t want to buy the land. He wants to take it. And Polk will never let that land go, not as long as he’s breathing air.” Old Lady Bronson spoke in a voice as flat as if she’d just told us the sky was gray.

  “But why? There ain’t nothing out there but an old plantation house almost swallowed up by the woods! Why would he want to save a place where white folks kept slaves?”

  Old Lady Bronson looked at Zora sharply. “How do you come to know what’s on Polk’s land?”

  Zora was bolder by the minute. “We found it yesterday, looking for Moss Star. Please, Miz Bronson, please talk to him. Why does he want to keep that land when he doesn’t even use it?”

  Old Lady Bronson passed her hand over her eyes. “Believe it or not, that place was home to Polk and me for many sad years.”

  Zora and I startled like squirrels.

  “You and Mr. Polk lived in that house?” I blurted. It made no sense to me.

  She nodded grimly. “We were slaves. The Westin place was a plantation when we were young. It was our prison and our hell here on earth.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I felt my throat closing up.

  “Then why not get rid of it?” Zora demanded. “Why keep any part of slavery close to you, especially if it can hurt Eatonville?”

  Old Lady Bronson looked sadder than I’ve ever seen a grown person look. “Horatio and I made a mistake. We thought knowledge of what happened on that land was ours alone. We thought that by not speaking about it we could keep the poison waters of slavery from spoiling the new well of Eatonville. We were wrong. We thought we were protecting Eatonville from knowledge of a horrible past, but we were really protecting ourselves from the pain of our own memories.” And here she hung her head in shame. “The past is living in each one of us. Trying to push it down below remembering just makes it find another way through.”

  She looked at Zora. “I owe you an apology. You were right to want to tell. I was wrong to bind you to my secret. I don’t know that telling could have done any good, but not telling has surely made things worse.”

  Old Lady Bronson sat down between us and pulled us against her with strong hands. I could feel the rapid beat of her heart beneath the rough linen of her indigo dress, and I finally understood something. I had always thought Old Lady Bronson was a witch, and so I feared her strength and power. But all that time, she was just a woman, filled with the same vulnerability, pain, and misery life holds for each of us. I reached out my arm and wrapped it around her waist.

  “Listen,” she said. “There is one person in Lake Maitland who may have some influence over the white folks there, but I need the two of you to work with me. You know where Mr. Ambrose lives?” We nodded. “I’m going to write a letter, and I want you to take it to him as fast as you can. Hear me?”

  “Yes’m,” we said.

  She gave us a tight squeeze to emphasize her point, then was up and back inside her house with the energy of a woman half her age.

  She reappeared a few minutes later with a sealed envelope and pushed the letter into Zora’s hand. “Now, run!” And with that she shoved us one way while she hurried off in the other direction.

  We were slow to get going at first. I think we were both too dazed to make our feet move. Zora looked down at the envelope. It was addressed to Jude Ambrose.

  “Jude,” Zora said. “I’ve been knowing Mr. Ambrose all my life, but I never thought about him having a first name.”

  My thoughts drifted back to Mr. Polk’s property and the plantation house we had stood in. “I keep thinking about Old Lady Bronson and Mr. Polk on that plantation,” I said. “As slave
s.”

  “Me too. It pains me to think of it.”

  “Mama and I live in the same house we lived in with my daddy, and everything reminds me of him every day. You think it’s like that for her and Mr. Polk? You think all of Eatonville reminds them of when they were slaves?”

  “It seems like it must,” Zora answered. “It must hurt something awful.”

  “If I had lived on that plantation, I would have torn it down by now,” I all but spat. “I would have burned that rotten house down to the ground.”

  Zora tilted her head like she was listening to a thought from far away. “Maybe. But maybe burning it would feel like burning their memories.”

  “But why would you want to remember such a painful memory? Something that took your freedom away?”

  “Maybe they don’t think of it like that,” she said. “Maybe they see that house and think about a part of their life that’s gone. If they destroyed it, every bit of that life would disappear, like a piece of themselves. Maybe they need something from that house. Maybe Mr. Polk is trying to hold on to something more than land.”

  I couldn’t imagine what they would need from such a torturous past, but Zora’s argument held a kernel of truth I could not deny. I always hated visiting my father’s cousin Elsie — she was so crotchety and mean — but without her I would never have learned about the peach tree my father planted as a child, or tasted its sweet fruit. And now that my father was gone, Cousin Elsie’s peach tree was one of the few tangible things I had left of him. Whenever we visited her and I ate those peaches, I could see my father’s smiling face — for one delicious moment I had him back. No amount of pain caused by Elsie’s ceaseless complaining and chastising could make me give up my father’s peaches. Maybe it was like that for Old Lady Bronson and Mr. Polk. They had to keep the horrible to hold on to something good.

  “Yet and still,” I said, “I hate thinking of them chained up as some white person’s property. I can’t begin to imagine Old Lady Bronson without her fishing pole, popping up anywhere you least expect her. And how could someone have owned Mr. Polk the same way he owns his horses? I hate the whole idea of it.”