Come August, Come Freedom (2 page)

When the fiddle turned suddenly silent and the lively sounds of the dance fell hush, Gabriel knew that Prosser’s man was coming down. On those nights, he would suspend his breath and pray Ma’s psalms while the people slipped off into the shadows and melted away into the trees. During the eerie quiet, Gabriel would stay awake until he heard all return, and until he didn’t hear the shot of a gun.

Ma never went to dances anymore, not since Prosser’s man took Pa off to Richmond. Prosser’s man had come back to Brookfield with the cart full of new people from the city, packed with fine goods from the market house, but empty of Pa. At first, after Pa and his stories of freedom vanished, Ma took to the bed built by her husband.

From his place by the door, Gabriel watched his mother weeping. At night Ma cried, “Tell me, why would the Lord take my husband? What can a woman do, Lord? Tell me.”

Ma seemed deaf to Solomon’s tears and blind to Martin’s retreat into himself. She would not rise even to grind corn. When her turn came around, Gabriel went instead, and Dog went with him. At the mill, with no one to see but Dog, Gabriel wept, too.

Like Pa and for Pa, Ma resisted what life Brookfield had to offer her. After a short little while of Ma’s absence from the field, Gabriel saw Prosser’s man crossing the yard toward their hut.

“Ma?” Gabriel had said. “Somebody’s coming.”

Gabriel’s mother had curled up tight against Pa’s bedpost. But the man picked her up and hauled her to the woodshed next to the tobacco barn. Solomon could not stop him, and Martin dared not try. All three brothers pretended still to sleep when Ma staggered back to the quarter with her white slip in bloody shreds.

The smell of Ma’s torn flesh filled up their hut — a reminder that theirs was a family always at the mercy. Martin and Solomon could not stand to be near her. For a while, they slept elsewhere. Martin, who at the age of eighteen often found reasons to leave the quarter, took to the forest. Ten-year-old Solomon went to stay with Kissey.

Gabriel remained in his place on the floor, but he hardly slept for keeping watch over Ma. During the day, he went with his mother instead of to the great house for his lessons with Thomas Henry.
From here on,
he thought,
I’ll keep Ma from all danger.

After the beating, Ma returned to the field where the people trudged through the tobacco, digging up cutworms and plucking away hornworms. Kissey came at night to doctor her up and to show Gabriel how to wash the gashes in his mother’s back with a tincture of apple-cider vinegar and herbs from the kitchen garden. To Gabriel, Ma’s whip marks resembled the earth between the tobacco hills, newly tilled and ready for planting.

GABRIEL COULD
see how Ma feared to ease up in the field after the whipping. He was still too young then to be made to work all day in the ’baccy, but he took to walking alongside his ma — helping her — so that she would not fall farther behind.

Pa had left Ma in the family way, but despite her imminent condition, she had to labor alongside the other women to save the crop from the ravenous hornworms. Crooked and bent between the tobacco, Ma turned over the thousands of leaves on the hundreds of plants in her rows. From each victimized leaf, she plucked off the grubs and popped off their heads. She saved the hornworms in a basket, for bait when fishing at the brook with her boys on some Saturday evening when they were permitted a few daylight hours away from the field, away from the heat, away from Prosser’s man.

In the tobacco rows, Gabriel went behind Ma, pinching back the long suckers. Ma reminded him, now and then, to wipe the sticky tar from his bare arms and hands. Solomon came next down the line, topping off the flowers to keep the tobacco from going to seed.

Around noon, the man blew the breakfast horn for the first meal of the day. Some workers knelt and ate their sweet potatoes in the field. Some ran back to the quarter to check on the little children. Gabriel and Solomon fought over who would care for Ma. The tobacco field offered no easy shade, no cooling breeze. While the boys argued, Ma stood and arched her back — low, middling, and high up — then collapsed into the yellow-green leaves. The thick tobacco canopy closed up around her.

Solomon bossed Gabriel, “Run, Gabriel. Run get water for your ma.”

Gabriel, who was only nine but strong enough to lift Ma up onto his arm, did not run as his brother said do. “I’m taking Ma to rest, Solomon.”

“Rest here!” Solomon shouted. “If the man finds her gone, be hell to pay — a whippin’ for you both and likely a whippin’ for me, too, Brother.”

Gabriel kept walking, with his arm around Ma’s waist. He hollered to his older brother, “Don’t let him find us! Stir the roosters; make up a fuss. We’ll get back before the second horn blows.”

So Solomon ran; Solomon made a ruckus that drove Prosser’s man toward the house and away from the field while Gabriel tended to Ma.

In the fallow meadow below the tobacco, Gabriel helped his ma to the shade under the low branches of their apple tree. Its king blooms and petals had already fallen, and the crisp, eager smell of new fruit set upon the hillside breeze. Nearby, great whorls of honeysuckle softened the edges between the old field and the ancient forest. All sorts of songbirds darted about the forest glade, flashing gold, cobalt, and, now and again, cherry red. The clover would go uncut until time came to make hay.

Stretching out her swollen feet into the cool clover to comfort them, Ma scraped her thumbnail down each of her fingertips to clear away the green hornworm crust built up from her morning’s work. Her dress was wet from sweat, as if she had waded into water to her neck, wearing all her clothes.

Gabriel thought of her going back to the field, bending over the tobacco plants in the full sun.
Let the grubs and suckers ruin all the ’baccy. She’s done enough today.

“Too hot for you to be working so hard, Ma.” He tore the tail from his own shirt — his only shirt — and wiped the sweat from her face. In the distance, he heard the faint, low call of the first work horn. People would soon set down their children; the man would soon start his count.

Ma patted her son’s leg. “My baby, run on. I’ll come along. Get to the field before that man finds you with me. Run on, now.”

“Let him come on. Why am I scared of him?” Gabriel bit his bottom lip to stop its trembling.

Ma smiled at her youngest. “Should have named you Daniel, hmmm? Scared of nothin’, run from nothin’, walk right on into the lion’s den. Daniel.” His mother braced against the trunk of the young tree, and in return their tree cradled her body and her burden in its bend.

Ma called on God to keep put the child inside her and let this new one live to play under Gabriel’s tree. Ma still believed, now that the war was ended and a new America waking, that freedom would surely soon come.

Gabriel traced the rise and fall of each birthing pain across Ma’s face. His eyes fell toward her hands, pulling her knees up high. From someplace dark in Ma, he saw the blood soaking her dress red. Ma cried out, “‘My God, I take refuge in you — save me from all my pursuers and rescue me!’”

Because he wanted to please Ma, Gabriel recited the next verse. “‘Or my enemy will savage me like a lion, carry me off with no one to rescue me.’”

The second work horn sounded. Ma pressed against the tree and stroked her stomach while the blood continued to flow; Gabriel wiped pearls of sweat from her brow. He blew a cool breath over Ma’s temple, the way she always did for him on every August night.

Ma leaned on Gabriel to deliver her fourth son. The child crowned quickly and, with a cord wrapped around his neck, took not one breath.

Holding her stillborn infant close to her heart, Ma said to Gabriel, “Your brother here, he’s like Pa. Little One couldn’t wait around for freedom to reach Brookfield. He went on made his own way free, your brother.”

The house dogs bayed. Gabriel heard shouting in the distance. “Ma?” He shook her shoulder. “Somebody’s coming.”

Gabriel knew his brother might have confessed.
Solomon looks after Solomon first.

“What do we say when Mr. Prosser’s man comes for us?” he asked Ma.

Ma shut her eyes and continued the psalm. “‘God is a shield that protects me, savin’ the honest of heart.’”

At Ma’s neck and in the tuck of her arms, spilling out of her dress, Gabriel saw the whip marks made not so long ago by Prosser’s man. Her wounds were pale scars now, all healed up. Gabriel’s hidden wounds, however, cut even deeper.
Let Ma do the praying,
he thought.
One day, I’ll fight for our freedom like Pa.

Gabriel fought no one that day, but he did run up to the great house to fetch Mrs. Prosser. He pleaded for the missus to intervene. Ann Prosser protected them, and neither Gabriel nor Ma nor Solomon got whipped. The next day they buried the little dead child with all of the others who had passed over, and Ma returned to the field. Gabriel went back to his lessons with Thomas Henry Prosser.

GABRIEL LOVED
Thomas Henry like a brother. From the beginning, Thomas Henry Prosser had suckled at one side of Ma while Gabriel nursed at the other. When the boys were babies, Gabriel and Ma had even lived in the great house and slept on the nursery floor, so that if the infant master ever cried from hunger, Ma would be right there.

In those days, Ma ate what the family ate. In the kitchen behind the house, Kissey fed Ma fried asparagus, delicate breads, and nourishing meats to keep her strong and full and ready for little Thomas Henry. Bundled up and placed together, the two babies often napped close to the cooking fire.

Once they reached schooling age, Mrs. Prosser began to teach her son reading and writing and mathematics. She taught Gabriel, too, because the young Prosser boy stayed restless and anxious if his milk brother went too far away.

And in turn, Gabriel taught Thomas Henry the songs from the quarter. So Thomas Henry and Old Major, on the fiddle, together would perform for family from Amherst or friends from Richmond. Sometimes, Kissey would sneak Gabriel into the great house and set him crouched in the dark foyer to watch his friend sing the quarter songs in the parlor. He loved to hear the Prossers’ blue-silk-and-black-velvet-clad guests praise the quarter songs and would have liked to have stood and sung alongside Thomas Henry.

Gabriel especially loved how Old Major’s eyes would find his and share a secret nod that asked, “Can you hear the folks, son? Can you hear them? Shine up; shine out, now.” Then, cloaked away in the stairwell, Gabriel would listen and hear in the music all that the velvet-and-silk people could never know — not even his playmate, Thomas Henry. For Old Major could fill the merriest tune with the running of a river or the calling of a road spilling over with kin and leading them all away to someplace green, someplace open, and someplace free.

As Gabriel neared the age that he would be put to work for Brookfield, he and Thomas Henry still entertained themselves with all sorts of games, day and night. When they played hide-and-seek in the great house, if their voices turned too loud or if they got too up under her skirt, Kissey would shoo them out to the yard. There, along Brookfield’s poplar-lined drive, the boys pretended to be Virginia patriots — James Monroe or George Washington.

Playing war under the old trees, they argued over who should get the part of Patrick Henry. The boys knew all about the brave Mr. Henry. Many times they had heard Mr. Prosser brag to his friends of how his good friend Mr. Henry had roused a gathering of men upon the church hill in Richmond with a strong and stirring speech.

“I was named for him!” Thomas Henry bragged, as if his father’s friendship with the popular orator, now governor of Virginia, should make a difference.

“Well, I was named for the archangel, and it’s my turn,” Gabriel reasoned.

“My father served in the legislature with Patrick Henry.”

“My grandfather was a king!” Gabriel told his friend what Pa had once told him.

Thomas Henry rolled his eyes. “Do you even know what the legislature is, Gabriel?”

“Yes.”

“Can you even spell
legislature
?”