by T. R. Simon
On the fourth day, the day after Prisca was buried, George Peterson opened the door, dragged me out, and threw me at Rebecca’s feet. He uttered only one sentence. “Tell her what talking will bring.”
Rebecca looked upon me with glassy eyes and, once again, tended to my broken body.
The next day I saw Horatio. He had received the lash twenty times, and still he would not speak. Ignoring his own pain and the risk he was taking, he snuck into Rebecca’s cabin to see me. He propped me up and helped me drink water from a gourd but said not a word.
Rebecca was almost as mute as Horatio, but mouthed “Hush” nervously when I uttered Prisca’s name. When I begged her to speak to me, her response was a frightened whisper. “Samuel is all the kin I got left. If Master George sells him, I got nothing left on this earth. If you care about us that’s still alive, you will put that night away. Put it away like we’ve all had to put away the folks we loved. Lock it in a room inside yourself and hide the key.” She pointed at my heart, at Horatio’s heart, and then at her own. “What you and I know won’t bring no justice outside these walls.”
A month later George sent Timothy and Alice to tie up loose ends in Saint Augustine. It was Mitilde — a girl of nineteen who picked with a stubborn slowness no matter how many times Krowse used the lash — who they took to sell instead of me. Seems my tongue was deemed too great a risk to set loose.
Prisca’s death caused unease among the whites throughout the county and beyond. Uneasy whites always bring black death. Patrols were doubled and more poor whites were made patrollers. Fear in the slave cabins was so thick you could taste it.
The horse thieves George claimed had taken Prisca’s life were never seen again, but that didn’t lessen the vigilance and suspicion that gripped the area. Rather, stories of murderous bandits and rebellious slaves only seemed to flourish and grow in the minds of white folks, and they clutched their guns ever more tightly.
I wasn’t sold, but I was put to work in the fields. Krowse, who had been rewarded for his loyalty with a new horse, would find reason every day to deliver a lash to my back. My fingers, unaccustomed to the work, were slow and clumsy, and they bled from the effort of pulling thorny fluffs of cotton from their sticky casings.
The other slaves gave me wide berth, lest any gesture toward me invite the lash. Their glances were fearful as they passed me, their bags bulging with cotton while mine was barely half full after a whole day’s labor. I’m sure they had their own suspicions about what might have happened to Prisca, but after her death and burial, no slave dared risk invoking her.
Two years later, when Prisca’s death had shrunk to be of no greater consequence than a drunkard knifing his neighbor over a card game, George sold me as a field hand to a plantation six miles down the road. I’m sure I commanded but a modest price, small as I was and my face a studied mask of nothing.
Three months into my life on the new plantation, I tended to a particularly bad whipping. After that, my fellow slaves came to me with their wounds and their aches. Word spread that I had a gift. Folks even whispered that I had the power to sit by the door of death and keep it locked out on the other side. I listened to the old slaves, absorbed the wisdom that had traveled with them from the old countries. I learned the names and uses of every herb and plant that grew. Often I tried remedies on myself first — many a night I spent vomiting when a mixture I made had not yet found the right balance.
I began to see medicine in part as an art, and in part as a sleight of hand. I gave people herbs to bring better function to the body, and I mixed them with visions of the future to kindle hope — a yeast to the medicine itself. It was the visions that folks remembered, whether or not I could heal their bodies, and so a reputation began to spread around me, one that increased the hope I represented by seasoning it with fear. I became known as a conjure woman, a seer, a hoodoo woman.
Over the years I followed the news at Westin through Mary, a cousin of Rebecca’s who was often loaned out to sew delicate lace at the surrounding plantations. She told me that Rebecca brought the child of Samuel and his wife into the world. She told me that Rebecca watched Samuel and the child later get sold west to a place in Louisiana or Mississippi. Once a year, Mary would bring me a piece of paper folded and tied with string: a letter to me from Horatio. Rather than write about himself, he wrote out poems we’d memorized together when we were young. It was a kind of code; it was his way of letting me know that they had yet to break what was at the center of him.
Through Mary I learned that Caroline was taken by yellow fever and that Alice died from an infected knee, the amputation coming too late to save her. Four years after that, she brought the news that George had been kicked in the chest and killed by the same horse that had caused Timothy to break his toe. For the five years since Prisca’s death, frost or some other blight wrecked the cotton and newly planted sugarcane at Westin, though curiously it afflicted no place else, at least not to the same degree. I felt no joy hearing any of this, only a quiet satisfaction in knowing that my words had been an instrument for justice.
Toward the end of 1860, just as rumors of war against the government were becoming more rampant, word came to me that Horatio had escaped. I was filled with joy. I lay awake at night praying to every god whose name I knew for him to make it north.
The war did come in 1861, and Timothy, nineteen years old then, purchased a captaincy in the Confederacy. Before he left Westin, he hired out every slave he owned to the surrounding farms and plantations and used the human rent to maintain him. Rebecca was rented out to my plantation. The day she was delivered by cart I ran to her. She was a ghost of her former self, thin, sickly, and weak. I spent weeks coaxing her away from death’s door.
In 1865 the war ended and we slaves were declared free. Rebecca and I walked off that plantation with nothing but the clothes on our backs. We traveled back to Westin, and there squatted on the abandoned land, free women. Rebecca lived two years as a free woman before sickness took her.
Horatio had joined the Union army and fought in the war. After the war, he worked as a blacksmith for a wage in Saint Augustine for three years. Then, like me, the ghosts of his past whispered to him to turn back, and we were reunited in 1868.
Almost twenty years later, a brash young man named Joe Clarke established the charter for an all-colored town called Eatonville. He knocked on my door one morning to ask if I wouldn’t mind letting him build a colored town on the land around my home. He was a man with charm and a vision that could not be denied. I thrilled to his vision and looked forward to seeing the blighted land of Westin engulfed by a town that freedom built.
Horatio was the first to buy into Eatonville. With the money he had saved working in Saint Augustine, he bought outright the land that had once been the Westin plantation and the small plot of land my home stood on. Joe Clarke, a straight shooter, urged him to reconsider; the land was known to be fallow. But Horatio had made up his mind. That same day Horatio put the deeds in my hands, he spoke the only words I had heard him utter since the night Prisca died. “So no one can take from us again.”
One who did not return after the war was Timothy Peterson. No one in these parts had heard from him since he left for the war — not after the war, not when Westin was declared abandoned, not when it was being turned into Eatonville, not anytime after. I believed that, like so many white men of the South, he had given his life for the cause of owning other human beings. I whispered my belief to Prisca’s grave one lonely night, but no sound came back, no sign. I looked around at the fallow land then, and a seed of comprehension slowly germinated: the land was still bearing my curse. If my curse was still working, that meant that Timothy Peterson was still alive.
Zora stood on her toes and knocked with the big brass lion’s head that adorned Mr. Ambrose’s front door. It would never occur to us to go to the front door of any other white folks in the world, but with Mr. Ambrose, it would never occur to us not to.
I remember Mr. Hurs
ton once saying that being friends with a white man is a dangerous proposition, but we couldn’t imagine anything dangerous about Mr. Ambrose. Unlike the other white men we saw on occasion, Mr. Ambrose moved as easily in Eatonville as he did in Lake Maitland. Whether coming to fish or just passing through, folks respected and accepted him. He, in turn, tended to bring out the best in folks. I had always liked him, but he won my unbreakable trust two years earlier when he helped prevent a murderer from slipping through the hands of the law. Mr. Ambrose had helped Mr. Clarke restore a quiet justice to Eatonville, and I looked on him as a friend ever since.
After a minute the door was opened by Millie, who had a baby tied to her back. Mr. Ambrose had never married, so he always hired someone to cook and clean for him. For the last few years it had been Millie, who came early every morning and went back to her husband and children on the other side of Lake Maitland in the evening. We knew her by sight, like we knew every colored person within a five-mile radius.
“Hi, Millie,” we chimed.
She frowned to see us, even as her daughter gurgled and banged her little nut-brown fists happily against Millie’s back. “Something happen in Eatonville?” Her aunt lived on the other side of Joe Clarke and her mind must have gone to her the minute she laid eyes on us. Why would we be there but as harbingers of crisis? Unfortunately, she was right.
“We got a letter for Mr. Ambrose,” Zora explained.
Millie opened the door for us to enter, her expression unchanged. Mr. Ambrose appeared from behind her, full of hearty cheer as usual.
“Snidlets! And Carrie! This is a pleasant surprise. I don’t think you’ve ever visited me at home before. Have I gone too long without fishing at the Blue Sink?” His eyes were warm and welcoming, as they always were whenever he saw Zora.
Mr. Ambrose had happened by and helped Lucy Hurston when she found herself alone with Zora deciding to get born early. He had even cut the umbilical cord. After that he’d made it his business to inquire after Zora’s health regularly and keep up with her as she grew. He’d called her Snidlets since any of us could remember.
Zora handed him the letter.
“A letter! Why, this gets more mysterious by the minute!”
“It’s from Old Lady Bronson,” Zora quickly added.
No sooner had the name left her mouth than his smile faded and his brow creased. He tore open the letter and read silently and quickly. Then he sat down heavily in one of the chairs that lined the long hallway.
“This is bad news you bring me, Snidlets. Bad news indeed.”
“We know, Mr. Ambrose. My daddy says men are going to ride on Eatonville. Is that true? Would white folks from Lake Maitland ride on us?”
Sorrowfully, Mr. Ambrose nodded.
“But why?” Zora insisted. “Why would white folks who been living peacefully one town over want to hurt us now?”
I jumped in. “Mr. Clarke says Mr. Polk owns the land by law, but that the law won’t work for us on account of race.”
Mr. Ambrose nodded again. “There’s no law in this country that will help a colored man keep something a white man says belongs to him.”
“My daddy said the same thing,” Zora said. “But slavery is over. Why white folks don’t got to respect the law when it comes to us?”
“The law is reasonable when reasonable men practice it,” he answered. “But when it comes to color, there are very few reasonable men.”
“You’re reasonable,” Zora pushed. “How come other white men aren’t?”
Mr. Ambrose rubbed his forehead, then said, “Because slavery isn’t far enough in our past yet. What we’re facing now is the unfinished business of that slavery.”
“When will it be finished?” Zora demanded.
“That’s what I want to know,” I added.
“I don’t know, girls. White folks have a disease. A disease that started with slavery. We taught ourselves to see colored folks as inferior so we could enslave them. And now we have a need to keep seeing them as inferior. White folks have become dependent on feeling superior to the colored race; no matter how low we fall, we can tell ourselves that the colored man is always lower.”
“Do you think that, too?” Zora asked.
Mr. Ambrose took a full minute to respond. “It would be a lie to say I didn’t. Every white man I know has the seed of race hate planted and rooted in him by the time he’s reached his fifth year. This country is founded on it, and not even a civil war could uproot it. The only way to fight that hate is to consciously decide every day to choose against the hate we’ve been taught.”
He looked from Zora to me, his eyes speaking sadness. “I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to understand that,” he went on. “I joined up to fight in the war like the young fool I was, more fired up with notions of valor and glory than anything else. I saw glory disappear in the first few months. More I slowly came to wonder at the point of valor in a cause I could not justify. Spring of sixty-three found me in Louisiana, at Port Hudson. Ever heard about Port Hudson?”
We shook our heads. We knew our states and their capitals, but less about the rest. He smiled grimly.
“The Union had us under siege. We were starving, reduced to eating our mules. The only thing we hadn’t run out of was gunpowder. We had no way to treat our wounded, so wounded just meant slow death. We had been told the fort we were in was unassailable, but the Union blew it to pieces bit by bit. One night in late June, after endless artillery pounding, there was an infantry assault. Men I knew fell all around me, yet no bullet claimed me. A mortar shell sent me flying. When I came to, I tried to get up and run, but I tripped over the body of the man lying next to me. As I got to my knees, I felt a gun barrel pressed to my forehead. I froze. The soldier pointing a musket at me was a colored boy, not yet old enough to grow a beard, in a Union uniform two sizes too big. He looked at me, and I saw myself in his eyes: a Confederate officer fighting to stay alive so I could go on keeping him a slave. If I had been in his shoes, I would have pulled the trigger, but he hesitated. I could tell he didn’t have killing in him. A shot rang out from somewhere behind me and I threw myself flat on the ground. When I raised my head, I was alive and the boy was dead. Shot dead because he didn’t shoot me first.”
Mr. Ambrose held his head in his hands.
“Two weeks later our commanding officer surrendered. The surviving officers were sent to Johnson’s Island, where we spent the rest of the war. But in the early rays of morning after that boy’s death, I made a promise to God. I told Him that if He saw fit to spare my life, I would honor Him by never using my life as anything other than an instrument of peace. And to this day, I have never gone back on my promise to Him.”
Zora reached out and put her hand on Mr. Ambrose’s arm.
Mr. Ambrose patted her hand with affection, even as his face remained drenched in sadness. “Listen, I need to talk to some folks, even though I doubt it will do any good. You two hurry home and keep your wits about you. You see white folks coming, you hide right quick, hear me? You hide!”
The urgency in his voice told us that what Joe Clarke and Mr. Hurston feared was surely coming to pass.
He put on his jacket, ushered us down the steps, and, just like Old Lady Bronson had done, nudged us in one direction while he hurried off in another.
Zora and I walked home from Mr. Ambrose’s place, our thoughts heavy.
“Hey, you two!” I looked up to see Micah and Teddy coming our way. My heart gave an involuntary skip at the sight of Teddy, and I had to remind myself that I was still angry with him for saying I had tried to kiss him when it was him just as much as me.
Zora sped up to meet them. “Where y’all going?”
Teddy looked down and Micah answered. “Moss Star is down the road a bit. I think his leg might be broken. He’s too skittish for me to get close, so Teddy’s coming to see to him.”
I looked at Teddy and my heart melted. Knowing how much Teddy hated to see any animal suffer, I knew it had to be even more u
nbearable when it was one that held his heart, like Moss Star.
About a year earlier, Teddy’s oldest brother, Jake, had clipped a hedgehog with his hoe, tearing a gash in its soft belly. Teddy had leaped to save the creature. Jake and Mr. Baker told him the animal would die, but Teddy refused the fact with the will of a sentry standing guard. He stayed by the hedgehog night and day, cleaning its wound, feeding it, and on the fourth day it rose like Lazarus from the dead. Teddy took the healed creature outside and set it down at the edge of the field.
As Jake liked to tell the tale afterward, the hedgehog ran into the field without even a backward glance: “‘So much for all your effort, Teddy!’ Daddy told him. But Teddy, he just said, ‘You don’t save a life for it to be beholden to you. You save a life because your heart tells you to.’ I can tell you,” Jake said, “that was the last time any of us ever told Teddy he couldn’t heal anything.”
I stood with the Bakers on that. I truly believed that there was no animal, sick or hurt, that Teddy couldn’t fix.
“Come on, Teddy. We’ll go with you,” I said, taking Zora’s hand.
Zora grabbed Teddy’s arm and we walked on until we got to a stand of holly trees. There stood Moss Star. Normally regal, his posture was slightly off-balance. His mane, always so smooth and fine, looked like straw. He was holding up his right front leg, almost like a pointer dog. When he caught sight of Teddy, he nickered and bobbed his head up and down.
Teddy slowed way down and stepped steadily toward Moss Star while Zora and I waited a ways off so as not to spook him. Moss Star stayed right where he was until Teddy reached him. Then Teddy began to caress his neck and speak to him softly. Moss Star nuzzled Teddy’s cheek in return. Then Teddy bent down and stroked the top of Moss Star’s leg, making sure the horse settled enough before touching the injury. After gently probing the lower part of the leg, Teddy stood back up and put his arms around Moss Star’s neck. The two of them stood like that for several minutes, Moss Star curving his neck around Teddy so they were embracing like old friends. When Teddy walked back to us, he had tears in his eyes.
