Always & Forever: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 1) (18 page)

Remy grunted. “I hear der others lots worse dan Gale.”

“Anyway, Gale’s leaving.”

Remy thought for a while. “Den I best be going.”

“Before Christmas?”

He nodded. “De new man, he gone want to show Madame how
tough he be. It be better I gone befo he know me.”

All her life, Cleo had heard stories of slaves who’d tried
to escape. So many of them got lost in the woods and swamps. They’d trail back
into the quarters starved, fevered and swollen all over from mosquito bites.

The stories about the ones who were caught were horrifying.
Cleo knew tales of what some overseers did to runaways were meant to discourage
the slaves, but they were nonetheless true. The beatings that tore the flesh
down to the bone were not the worst punishments. Some overseers, like the notorious Scotsman in the next
parish, used an axe on a man’s foot to keep him on the place.

“The new overseer, he might be a good man,” Cleo said.
“Maybe as good as Mr. Gale.”

“More likely he be like dat man McGraw up de river, de one
Old Sam say love his branding iron.”

“Madame never had any branding on the place, Remy. She won’t
let you be burned.”

Remy pulled away from her. “You talk like you tink I be
caught.”

Cleo sat up. “I know you can handle the swamp, Remy, but the
patrols are out there looking day and night. You remember when they brought Old
Sam back in chains, half dead?”

Remy put his hand under Cleo’s chin and tilted her face to
his. “I goin’ to try, Cleo. You know dat.”

“Yes. I know that.”

They made love again, safe in their bower in the dark. For a
while, they shoved the vigilance required of slaves into the shadows and lived
just for themselves.

Afterwards, Cleo stood on the moonlit gallery stairs and
watched Remy disappear in the pecan trees as he cut around Mr. Gale’s house to
reach the quarters.

With Josie in New Orleans, Cleo sat alone in the bedroom
with two candles lit to study Emile’s map. The river itself would be the
easiest way north, but the most dangerous. Slavers were ever on the lookout for
runaways, and Remy wouldn’t make it even to Iberville if he didn’t leave the
Mississippi as soon as possible.

Fleetingly, she wished she could talk it over with Josie.
That was ridiculous, of course, but Cleo missed her. The luxury of having an
entire room to herself didn’t make up for the loneliness. She sometimes caught
herself listening for M’sieu Emile’s footsteps or imagining she smelled his
cigar. She often talked to her maman, told her she was going to have to mend
another sheet, or confided how much she loved Remy. But ghosts never answered.

If M’sieu Emile were alive, Cleo considered, she might have
asked him if Remy could earn his freedom. It was a common enough arrangement.
An able slave might hire himself out to another white man, the wages to be
turned over to the owner with a small portion kept by the slave himself. But
Madame would never consent. There had been no agreements like that on Toulouse
since Monsieur Tassin died twenty years before, and since the flood and the
cholera, the plantation was short-handed.

Remy would have to take his chances. The cool weather would
keep the snakes sleepy and the mosquitoes down. Cleo could slip him some decent
clothes from Emile’s wardrobe, and she could steal food for him from Louella’s
kitchen or from the table in the big house.

Most of all, Cleo would protect Remy with a forged pass. It
was a terrible crime for a slave to write a false pass. It was even a crime for
Cleo to know how to write. But she couldn’t let Remy face the roving patrols or
the itinerant slavers without it. He simply didn’t have the glibness of tongue
to convince them his business was legitimate if they caught him.

Dawn came grey and cool. Cleo put a shawl over her dress and
stuck her feet in old stiffened leather boots of Josie’s. She often wondered
what Madame would have done for her if Josie’s feet had not always been larger
than hers. Some house slaves had good shoes, and some went barefoot year round.
Now that Emile was gone, Cleo suspected Madame would be content with a barefoot
maid.

When Cleo had ground the coffee beans and collected the hot
breakfast from Louella, she called Madame to the table. Madame Emmeline’s long
loping steps had lost half their length and all their spring since the flood.
Her shoulders turned in slightly now and the angles of her face had softened.

Cleo poured steaming coffee for Madame and then stood nearby
while she ate.

“No marmalade?” Emmeline grumbled.

“No, ma’am.” With a straight face, Cleo added, “Gone in the
flood.” Daily some minor lack would remind them of all that had been washed
away. There was no butter on the place, and there would have been no coffee had
not Tante Marguerite sent Madame five pounds of fresh beans.

When Madame Emmeline finished her blood sausage and corn
cake, she motioned for Cleo to stand across the table where she could see her.
Cleo waited while Madame eyed her over her coffee cup for a moment.

“You know, of course, that Mr. Gale is leaving.” It was a
statement. Cleo knew Madame only pretended not to know she listened at doors.
“Monsieur LeBrec arrives today,” she went on. “He will have a few days overlap
with Mr. Gale in order to become acquainted with our routines. Until Mr. Gale’s
family vacate the overseer’s house, the LeBrecs will need lodging. The other
slaves have too much to do right now to be taken away from their jobs. I want
you to prepare the new carriage house for them.”

“Shall I leave the carriages in the outdoors? What if it
rains?”

“Then they will get wet.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Let Louella know the LeBrecs and the Gales will dine with
me tonight. I’m tired of sitting at this table all alone.”

“I’ll tell her to come up to the house for the menu.”

Madame Emmeline waved a dismissive hand. “Tell her to serve
whatever she likes.”

That evening, the two overseers and their wives sat down to
supper at Madame’s table. Mrs. Gale and Madame LeBrec each wore her best dress
and spent the evening gauging how much superior she was to the other overseer’s
wife. Both were bathed and curled and rouged, and since each believed in her
own supremacy, they were happy in each other’s company.

As Cleo waited table, she closely observed Monsieur LeBrec.
He was a Cajun and affected a gentleman’s hair-cut with a pomaded wave of thick
black hair. His brown jacket was well made, but Cleo noticed the fine darning
stitches in each elbow.

“Me, I had no trouble with slackards at my last job,” LeBrec
was saying. “Punishment, swift and sure. A pocket knife, a quick notch in the
ear. That’s what keeps your slaves in line.”

“You’ll find, I believe,” Mr. Gale answered, “we have good
workers on Toulouse, Mr. LeBrec.” Cleo heard a hard note in Mr. Gale’s voice.
“Take those fellows you watched building the cabins this afternoon. You didn’t
see no slackards among them, I’ll warrant. Fair treatment, that’s what it takes
to get the most out of your slaves.”

LeBrec smiled. Cleo read arrogance in the curve of his lips
under the black mustache, its tapered points carefully waxed.

“Fair treatment? Your average slave don’t know what fair is.
That’s when you get young bucks running off, thinking they’re going to outsmart
you.”

Mr. Gale stiffened. “We haven’t had a runaway in all the years I been here.”

He looked to Madame Emmeline to confirm this. In the past, she would not have tolerated talk of
slaves at her table, but now she seemed indifferent to the increasing heat in
the argument.

“That is correct, Mr. Gale.”

LeBrec snorted. "I am no coddler, Mr. Gale."

Mrs. LeBrec touched her husband’s sleeve. He was becoming excited.
She smiled at Madame Emmeline in apology. “These two men spent the whole
afternoon together,” she said with a nervous laugh, “and they still haven’t
managed to get everything said.”

Once the women had curtailed the men’s discussion, LeBrec lost interest in the pleasantries of trivial conversation. His eyes
followed Cleo as she moved around the table pouring wine.

Occasionally, Emile had had a guest who did not grasp the
relationships in this house, and the man would look at her much the same way as
LeBrec did now. She understood that look, and her hands trembled.

When Cleo reached for his glass, LeBrec’s right hand, hidden
from the others by Cleo’s body, slid up Cleo’s leg under her skirt to caress
her bottom. She jerked back and knocked the glass to the floor.

Quickly, she knelt to pick up the pieces of the broken
goblet.

“Silly girl,” Madame LeBrec shrilled. “It’s so hard to train
a slave to handle nice things.”

Cleo looked up as she gathered the shards in her apron, and
LeBrec’s eyes moved from her cleavage to her face. His smile was a signal Cleo
understood as well as if he’d spoken.

Cleo hurried from the room with the broken glass as if to
fetch a new goblet from the pantry. Instead, she passed the pantry to slip into
Emile’s old sitting room. She closed the door behind her and pulled her legs up
into his old leather chair. She hugged her knees and took in the lingering
scent of his tobacco. Who would protect her now?

That evening LeBrec’s wife kept Cleo running for first one
thing and then another as she settled her family into the carriage house. Was
there not another lantern? Little Yves required a pillow. Sylvie’s cot was so
hard; perhaps there was another mattress she could lie on. By the time Cleo had
satisfied the LeBrecs, the quarters had been long dark.

The following morning Cleo gathered Madame Emmeline’s linens
to take to the wash house. She hoisted the basket to her head and crossed the
yard, passing the new carriage house on the way. Madame LeBrec made a point of
cutting Cleo’s path.

“
Bonjour
, Madame,” Cleo said.

“Stand still a minute, girl.”

Cleo waited, wondering if the woman expected her to turn the
barn into a palace. But the mind of the overseer’s wife was on her husband.

“Monsieur LeBrec is a handsome man,” she said. “And a man of
appetite.”

Cleo held her breath.

“I saw you looking at him.”

“No, ma’am,” Cleo protested.

“The last girl, I had her branded. Among other things.” The
woman turned to go, but added over her shoulder. “Just so you know.”

Back in the house, Cleo polished every piece of furniture.
Then she scrubbed the floor in the dining room on her hands and knees. She
climbed on a stool and polished every facet of the chandelier in the parlor.
She worked furiously all day, scared and desperate.

There was no one to help her. She couldn’t tell Remy. What
could a field hand do against an overseer? Madame might be made to understand,
but not until too late, when LeBrec had already laid his hands on her.

As Cleo shook the tablecloth over the gallery rail, Mr. Gale
emerged from Madame’s office. Cleo took a step toward him, and he paused, his
hat in his hand.

“Mr. Gale?” Cleo whispered. “This new overseer...”

He nodded once and put his hat on. “You best keep close to
the house, gal,” he said. “That’s all I got to say to you. Stick close to the
house.”

But she had to see Remy. The moon was high when she arrived
at their special place. She waited, and the moon moved a hand’s breadth across
the sky. Remy wasn’t coming. Sometimes Mr. Gale was out and about until late
into the night, and sometimes Remy fell asleep before Cleo could get loose from
her chores. He was an eager lover, but a man who worked at hard labor twelve
hours every day carried fatigue on his back.

Cleo followed the moonlit patches back toward the house. Her
own steps dragged with exhaustion, but when she heard a noise in the shadows,
she quickened her pace.

“Hey, there, girly.” It was Monsieur LeBrec. “What you doing
out here so late? Looking for trouble?”

He stepped close and she smelled liquor on his breath. He
grabbed hold of her arm.

“You got yourself a buck sniffing around you? That why you
out here? Want some of that buck, do you?”

“No, Monsieur. Let me go, please.”

“ ‘No, Monsieur.’ Don’t she talk pretty. Little gal got a
tongue on her. Setting yourself up with airs, ain’t you? ‘Please,’ she says.”
He bent down till his breath was full in her face. “You a spoiled little
nigger. But we can fix that.”

Cleo twisted her arm free and ran for the house. LeBrec’s
low laugh followed her.

Cleo hardly slept all night. She heard Madame Emmeline get
up, pace for an hour, then go back to bed. She was still awake when Madame rose
and sat in a creaky rocker on the gallery to watch the sun rise.

Later that morning, Cleo watched Mr. Gale load his family on
a wagon and leave Toulouse for a new life in Texas. She heeded his advice and
kept to the house all day. After dinner, though, Monsieur LeBrec conferred with
Madame Emmeline in her office. That was her opportunity to see Remy for a few
minutes.

She hurried down to where the men were building a new sugar
mill. Remy wasn’t there. She tried the quarters where the new cabins were going
up. Old Sam was hammering floor boards, and she asked him where Remy was
working.

Sam leaned back on his heels and wiped the back of his neck
with a kerchief. He took a long time to answer. Finally, he said, “Cleo, he
gone.”

“Gone? But...” Cleo gaped, her senses gone stupid. “But I
had a bundle for him.”

“He pick a good time, Cleo. Gale be on his way. Dis new man
don’t know who is who. It a good time.”

Old Sam stood up. “Now don’t you cry, honey.” He hugged her
and patted her back. “Worry don’ fix nothin. You know dat. Remy a smart boy. He
gone be all right.”

Cleo felt safe in Old Sam’s arms, but she knew it was an
illusion. He couldn’t protect her from LeBrec, and he couldn’t protect Remy
either.