Her mother raised tired, shadowed eyes to Caro’s. “I know where we are, and I know what we are,” she said.
“What are we going to do?”
Tears slipped down her mother’s cheeks. “That I don’t know,” she said.
Caro couldn’t bear to watch her mother weep. She stumbled into the yard, where the smell of garbage was stronger. Oh, Mama, Caro thought. Oh, Papa. Her eyes smarted with tears. She stood in the sunshine, as her mother had warned her all her life not to do, and she rubbed her face with her hands. The tears came in full force, and she sobbed without caring who heard her.
There was a tap on her shoulder, and then came the sound of Sophy’s voice. She said, “I know you grieve for your daddy, but crying don’t bring him back.”
Caro continued to sob.
Not unkindly, Sophy said, “It do you good to make yourself useful.” She reached for Caro’s hand. “Come with me. We find something for you to do. Do you know how to boil rice?”
Of course she knew. Every girl in Charleston, slave’s daughter or planter’s daughter, knew how to boil rice. She followed Sophy into the kitchen, where Sophy handed her a cloth. “Wipe your face. Then we get to work.”
She did as Sophy bid her, stirring the rice and watching the fire beneath it. When she tired of playing house in the heat of the kitchen, she sat on the steps and petted the kitchen cat. “What’s her name?” she asked Sophy.
“Chloe,” Sophy said.
“Is that her basket name?” Caro teased.
“Sass,” Sophy said. Her face shadowed. “Chloe my daughter name.”
“Where is she? Your daughter?”
“She stay on the Low Country place,” Sophy said. “They all down there, my two girls and my two boys, with their children.”
“What about your husband?”
“He dead many a year.”
Caro let her hand rest on the cat’s soft back. She looked up. “Do you ever see them?”
“Not since I stay in Charleston.” Her voice dropped. “That’s why Marse Lawrence trust me. He know I can’t go. If I run, I never see anyone I love, not ever again.”
As the week wore on, Caro watched as Sophy lived as though she were untouched by slavery. She did no work in the main house. She came and went as she pleased. Despite her economies for Lawrence Jarvie and his sister, she brought home something savory for dinner every day. They ate well: rice full of ham along with the peas, gumbo thick with shrimp and sausage, and one day, even a roast chicken.
Caro asked, “Where does the money come from, Sophy? If Mr. Jarvie is so frugal?”
Sophy looked sly. “I earn it,” she said.
“How? You’re a slave. Slaves don’t earn money.”
Sophy laughed, as she always did before telling Caro she was raised wrong. She wiped her hands on her apron. “Come with me. I show you something. We go upstairs.”
Caro had yet to ascend to the second story, where the slaves slept when the house was full of them. Sophy led her up the ladderlike stair into a narrow hallway with three closed doors on either side. She walked to the end and pushed the door open.
Sophy had given herself the best room on the corridor, the one farthest from the house. It had a window on each wall and would admit a breeze at night. Someone had painted the walls of this room a regal red. The room was full of furniture, better than anything Caro had seen elsewhere in the kitchen or the yard. Sophy had a small four-poster bed draped with netting to keep the mosquitoes away and decked with two pillows and a quilted coverlet. She had a dresser, old and a little battered, but made of mahogany and inlaid with satinwood. She had a comfortable rocking chair with gryphons carved on the arms, and beside it, a little piecrust table adorned with a Staffordshire figurine of a shepherdess bending over her lamb. On a peg on the door hung two dresses, one good black silk, evidently Sophy’s Sunday best, and the other a pretty, well-made calico in a red print.
Caro asked, “How did you get all this?”
“Oh, Marse Lawrence give me the bed and the dresser because he don’t need it anymore. But everything else”—her gesture took it in—“I buy with my own hand.”
“How, Sophy?”
Sophy’s eyes gleamed in complicity. “Tomorrow morning, you help me gather up all them eggs we’ve been saving. You come along with me, and I show you.”
Sophy’s destination was the Central Market. As they approached, the smell, the savor of food combined with the reek of garbage, overpowered Caro. Outside the building stood a throng of market women, baskets on their heads. They were singing out their wares. “Oysters, oysters, oysters!” “Porgy walk, porgy talk, porgy eat with a knife and fork!” “Strawberry, blackberry, every kind of berry. The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice!”
Around the market, drawn by the refuse it created, roosted birds with sleek black bodies and long curved beaks set into red, mottled, featherless heads. The flock that perched on the roof regarded the flock that skulked and pecked below. Caro asked, “What are those birds?”
Sophy said, “Turkey vulture. Some folks call them Charleston eagles.”
Caro watched them swoop from the rooftops to the ground. They were graceful in flight. “Goodness, they’re ugly.”
“Turkey vulture got to eat, too. Just looking for his dinner.” She took a cloth from her pocket, laid it on the sidewalk, and set her basket atop it. She said, “Now we ready.”
In a powerful voice, she began to sing: “Eggs so good, eggs so fine, come to buy these eggs of mine. Eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs!” Her voice joined the others in a threnody of commerce as the crowd swelled past.
Caro was suddenly embarrassed. Ashamed. What was she doing on the street, in the company of a Low Country market woman shrilling about eggs? The sun felt hot on her face.
“Maum Sophy!” a woman called. “Stop that racket you make. I want to buy some eggs from you!” She wore plain gray muslin and a white apron, like the Jarvie slaves.
Sophy laughed. “Miss Cissy, it is good to see you. How many eggs you need?”
“Give me a dozen. The biggest you got.”
“Hold out your basket.” Sophy chose the eggs carefully and set them into Cissy’s basket with equal care.
Cissy regarded Caro. “Don’t recall you before. Is you just up from the coast?”
“Yes,” Caro said. “From St. Helena.” As though she were listening to someone on the stage, she heard her own diction, so different from the speech of the Low Country.
Cissy said to Sophy, “She talk just like a lady. A white lady.”
Before Caro could explain, Sophy jumped in. “She brought up in a grand house,” she said. “Her massa just die, and his brother take over the house. He don’t want her, so he send her to me, her and her mama.”
Caro thought, Every word of that is true. She added, “Sophy takes good care of us.”
“How much you ask for them eggs?” Cissy asked Sophy.
“Same as always. A quarter for a dozen.”
Cissy dug in her pocket for the money and carefully counted it into Sophy’s palm.
“I thank you, Miss Cissy,” Sophy said. “You keep well.”
“You too, Maum Sophy. And you too. What your name?” she asked Caro.
“Caroline.”
“Young Miss Caroline.” Cissy chortled. “Just like a lady!”
When Cissy was gone, Caro said irritably to Sophy, “Why would she care how I talk?”
“Because you look like you from the rice field, but you talk like you went to Madame Devereaux’s.”
“I can’t help it,” she said.
“Well, hush and help me. Still have plenty of eggs to sell. Can you sing?”
Caro thought that being able to sing a Schubert lied would be an unlikely way to sell an egg on the street in Charleston. “Not like you.”
Sophy shrugged. “Eggs so fresh, eggs so fine, come to buy these eggs of mine!” she sang.
All her life Caro had h
eard the rhythm of the Low Country, the rhythm of Africa, in the speech of the slaves of St. Helena. She had always thought of it as a sign of ignorance. Today she heard it afresh. She thought, It’s just like a foreign tongue. Like French. She could learn to speak it if she wanted to.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, as the air turned too hot for the ocean to cool it, as the smell of garbage began to overpower the smell of fresh food, people stopped to interrupt Sophy’s song and buy her eggs. Unlike Cissy, a cook who needed eggs by the dozen, other customers were black people buying for themselves, an egg or two at a time, enough for a batch of biscuits or cornbread. Sophy knew them all. She asked after husbands, brothers, sisters, and children; after funerals and weddings; after parties and maroons. No wonder she hears everything, Caro thought.
Many people asked after Caro—it surprised her, that in this crowd was no one she knew—and she let Sophy explain for her. More than one woman glanced at Caro’s face and said, “She mighty pretty. When the men find her, she get married right away!”
She recalled her mother’s worry, and her father’s. Too educated for a slave man, and a slave to anyone who was colored and free. The pain of it was muted now, swallowed up by the greater pain of her father’s death.
The woman who bought the last of Sophy’s eggs asked after Caro, and Caro herself spoke to her. She had been listening hard to the Low Country speech all day. She said, “My name Caro, and I grow up in de Jarvie house. Stay with Maum Sophy now. She take good care of me.”
Sophy wished the customer well and in surprise, said to Caro, “What you say?”
Caro said, “I tried to sound like I’m from the Low Country. Did I do all right?”
“You rattle me,” Sophy said. She picked up her empty basket and felt for the coins in her pocket. “We do all right. A dollar and a quarter.” She counted out a few coins. “Open your hand. This for you.”
“Sophy, you shouldn’t,” Caro said, suddenly embarrassed.
“Your pretty face made us some money today.” She gave Caro the money, a quarter in silver coins. She said, “I buy us some shrimps for dinner tonight.”
The money felt sweaty in Caro’s palm, but its weight was pleasing. This was money she had earned by her own hand, as Sophy said. She said, “I long for oysters. Could I buy oysters with this?”
Sophy laughed. “Twenty-five cents buy you a whole gallon of oysters. They spoil before we eat them. Get a scoop for a nickel, two for a dime, and have money left over.”
When they returned to Tradd Street, Caro ran to the shack, calling, “Mama! Mama!”
Kitty opened the door. “Caro, don’t shout. What is it?”
Sophy said, “She come to the market with me, help me.”
“Sophy and I sold eggs at the market today. I made a quarter, and I bought some oysters for us with my own money.”
Kitty regarded Caro with an unhappy look. “And you got yourself a sunburn too, I see.”
Caro reached for Kitty’s hands. “Mama, aren’t you happy? About the money and the oysters?”
Sophy spat. “Sunburn! Is that what you care about?”
“She’s a planter’s daughter. Who will she marry if she’s burned black by standing on the street at the market?”
“She a slave! Who do you think she going to marry?”
Kitty glared at Sophy, unable to reply. She put her hand to her chest and began to cough, a dry, rasping sound.
Sophy asked, “How long you cough like that?”
Kitty was still furious. “I’ve had a cough before. It’s nothing. I’m all right.”
Sophy shrugged off Kitty’s denial. “Don’t help your daughter if you take ill,” she said. “I make you a tea for that cough.”
When Caro opened the kitchen door, Sophy ignored her crestfallen face. Sophy said, “My man Sunday come tonight.” She smiled. “Sunday Desmond. You meet him tonight when we all have dinner together. Your mama, too.”
“If she’ll eat with us.”
Sophy shook her head. “She foolish to miss a fine dish of shrimps.” She shooed away the cat, which had jumped on the table and was sniffing hopefully at the shrimp bucket. “Chloe, go on! You get yours later.”
Several hours later, when the oyster stew simmered on the trivet next to the shrimps in tomato sauce, when the chicken was nearly roasted on the spit and the biscuits cooled in their serving dish, Sophy set the kitchen table. Kitty, drawn by the shrimp, had deigned to join them.
Sunday Desmond greeted Sophy with a big squeeze of an embrace and a kiss on the lips that left her breathless. “Sunday!” she gasped, pleased and embarrassed as a girl.
“Brought this for you, too, sugar,” he said, handing her the bottle. The wine shimmered, pale yellow in the afternoon sun. “Good with a dinner of shrimps,” he said.
He had a dark, seamed face and intelligent eyes, dark brown flecked with a golden color like the wine. He had the thick forearms of a workman but the sculpted hands of a craftsman. His fierce appearance was softened by his gentle tone of voice.
Sophy said, “Did you finish that job of work you had? The house on Montagu Street?”
“All done. My time my own for a few days.”
“Sunday work as a carpenter,” Sophy explained. “His master let him hire out.”
“You’re a slave?” Caro asked.
“My master don’t mind because he get half of what I earn. And I’m all right, as long as I carry this.” He pulled his slave’s badge from his pocket. “A carpenter license cost him seven dollar a year!”
Caro asked Sophy, “Do you have a badge, too?” She had never seen it.
“Keep it in my pocket when I go out. Don’t really need it. Everyone know me, and as long as I mind my own business, the Guard don’t bother me.”
“Why would they?” Caro asked.
Sophy said, “They keep a sharp eye on anyone black. So mind yourself when you go out.” She asked Kitty, “Did Marse Lawrence buy badges for you and your girl?”
Kitty tossed her head. “No, he did not,” she said.
Sunday sniffed the air appreciatively. “A fine dinner,” he said affably. “Oysters, too!”
“Caro buy them for us.”
Sunday laughed, a rich sound, dark like coffee and chocolate. “So this is Miss Sass that I been hearing all about.”
“Does everyone in Charleston know me as Miss Sass now?” Caro asked, but she knew she was being teased, and it gave her pleasure, even as she blushed.
Sophy laughed. “Now you have a basket name,” she said. “Miss Sass, that your basket name!”
Later, after Kitty and Caro returned to the shack, Kitty settled herself on the bed. Sophy had given them a candle and some matches, and Caro lit the candle against the darkness.
Her mother’s face deeply shadowed in the light of the single candle. It added to her look of strain and fatigue. She coughed again and tapped her chest, trying to make it stop. She said, “Sophy means well, but she isn’t a fit companion for you. Neither she nor that man she’s befriended.”
Caro didn’t like the sound of the cough. It softened her. She said, “They’re kind to us. And they’re happy together.”
Kitty said, “Two slaves in a makeshift connection. Don’t think of such a thing for yourself.”
Caro flared, “And what kind of a connection will I have?”
The next morning, as all of them sat in the kitchen together, Sophy invited Kitty and Caro to accompany them to church.
“No, thank you,” Kitty said coolly.
“Do you good to go to church.”
Kitty said, “Who do you think you are? Not my missus and not my mother. I’ll raise my daughter as I see fit. I don’t need you to drag her any deeper into slavery.”
“Drag her! When you have a head full of foolishness. Act like a lady!”
Sunday cleared his throat, but both women ignored him. Kitty said, “I was the mistress of James Jarvie’s house, and I’m still a
lady.”
Sophy said, “No, you a slave. You a fool to think you a lady.”
Caro intervened. She grabbed her mother’s hand. “Mama, stop.” She reached for Sophy’s hand. “You stop, too.”
The two women, a fallen lady and a half-free slave, glared at each other like two cats in an alley.
“Don’t fight,” Caro pleaded.
Sunday said, “Not on the Lord’s day, Sophy.”
Sophy glared at Sunday, too. But she took a deep breath and said to Kitty, “You her mama. You want to cherish her and protect her. Won’t take that from you. But you don’t know Charleston like I do. I help her. I help you, too, if you let me.”
“Please, Mama. Let her apologize to you.”
Kitty said stiffly, “All right, Miss Sophy.”
“Then you come to church with me? Even though you both godless?”
“It’s the Lord’s day,” Caro said.
“What is your meetinghouse?” Kitty asked, her gentility returning.
Sunday said, “We go to Zion Presbyterian. The Reverend Girardeau treat us right. Black folks sit in the pews, not up in the balcony.”
At the church, Sophy was an important parishioner. The Reverend Girardeau himself greeted her, giving her the dignity of her surname—a name that Caro hadn’t realized she possessed. When he was introduced to Caro, he called her “Miss Jarvie,” an unexpected courtesy. He greeted her mother as “Mrs. Jarvie” and pressed her hand in politeness, welcoming them both and hoping that they would return on every holy day. As in the market, Sophy’s many acquaintances crowded her. They asked after Caro and requested to be introduced to Kitty.
Caro recognized Maum Cissy from the Market. She was resplendent today in a silk dress that must be a cast-off from her missus.
In the pew, her mother to her left, Sophy to her right, Caro sat. She looked around the church full of the dark faces of the enslaved, and her mother’s words rang in her ears. She bowed her head, not in prayer but in tears, thinking of her father and his love for her, which was too selfish to let her go. She was a lady among slaves and a slave among ladies, and there seemed to be no place in Charleston that would have her.
Charleston's Daughter Page 7
