Currents (2 page)

“No, Masta,” Queenie said, sweet as the shoofly pie she'd begun to assemble. “Bones just goin' up now.”

Master Brewster shook the sweat off his large straw hat and leaned down to tug at the girl's braids. Mama fixed them every day to cover her ears that seemed to sprout straight out from her head. But it never worked. Granny said those ears made her special because she could hear extra good.

“And what is this?” He pointed at the old corncob wrapped in a handkerchief hanging from her neck.

“My baby doll,” Bones answered.

“Ah! Yes, now I see that.” He looked at the plain corncob, with no face or clothes. “And does your baby doll have a name?”

“Lovely. Her name's Lovely.”

“Well, that's a mighty fine name for her,” he said with a chuckle. “Is this another baby doll?” he asked, pointing to the peach pit that she rubbed between her fingers.

“No, this here's a heart.” She smiled up at him. “My pappy carved it for me and give it to me when I was born. I like how it feels.”

“Aha. I see. Well, now you make sure Miss Liza does her reading today,” Master instructed. “She can't just play with the animals, pick flowers, and daydream.”

Bones carefully balanced the breakfast tray the cook had prepared for her young mistress and walked slowly out the back door, calling out behind her, “Oh yes, I will, Masta Brewster. Don' you worry 'bout that.” The
s
-sound in “Brewster” whistled through the gap between her two front teeth. She went down the short path to the big house and up the back staircase, the one the slaves used. Carrying her mistress's breakfast tray upstairs was the first duty of the day, and sprinkling her bedsheets with refreshing lilac-scented cologne was the last duty at night.

F
or the most part, Bones didn't mind her life as Miss Liza's companion. It was certainly much easier being a house slave than a field slave. She had been brought up to the big house when she was five to keep Miss Liza company, and in the six years that followed, the girls had spent countless hours exploring the plantation and playing games. Liza's sister, Jane, was fifteen years old and found plenty of companionship with twin sisters her age who lived on a farm down the road. There was just enough difference in the Brewster girls' ages that Liza needed a playmate of her own. The younger of the Brewster daughters loved to play in the fields and run with the dogs down by the river and on the edge of the woods. She and Bones would gather up pinecones, twigs, fluffy mosses, and little pebbles and build castles with stick bridges and roads that they dug through the soft dirt.

In the afternoons, when the heat drove them back into the big shuttered house, Bones would go to the kitchen and fetch Liza a cold glass of fruity iced tea. Liza always insisted that Queenie make a glass for Bones, too. Then Bones would sit and wave a tasseled fan back and forth over her little mistress while Liza sat with her spelling books and blocks and studied her reading and writing. This was usually done with a great deal of sighing and fiddling, as Liza was not fond of studying. Hanging on Liza's wall was a large, colorful map of the United States of America. Master had stuck a red pin onto the spot to mark the location of Stillwater Plantation, and Liza enjoyed having Bones play student to her geography teacher.

Virginia.

Virginia looked like an old snail trying to slither away from a hungry fox. Liza had taught Bones which way on the map was north, south, east, and west. Just south of Virginia was North Carolina. Long and thin with a tail pointing out west—sneaking into Tennessee. Below that, South Carolina, and then Georgia and Florida.

Bones kept to herself why she was so interested. She reckoned her pappy was in one of those lands, and she planned on finding out where. Her mama and granny didn't know where he'd been sold, but she figured it couldn't be north of here. The Northern states didn't take to slaveholding. If the whispers in the fields were right, the North was going to set all the slaves free or else. She needed to be ready either way. The more she learned about mapping, the better prepared she'd be to find her pappy and reunite him with Mama and Granny. It was going to be a fine day when they were a family again. She had had her plan in place for almost a year now, ever since Liza had begun teaching her the mysteries of the map.

“What do all those lines goin' every which ways mean?” Bones had asked one day, pointing to the letters on some blocks.

“They are the letters of the alphabet, Bones. You've heard Daddy talk about the ABCs. Well, those are the first three letters of the alphabet. See? Here they are. This is an A. The first letter,” Liza had said.

Bones had run her finger up one side, slowly down the other and then connected the two in the middle.

“That's an A?” she had asked, eyes wide.

“That is an A. It sure is. And this is a B. The first letter of your name begins with the letter B,” Liza had explained.

“These the same lines that's on the map?” she had asked.

“The very same.” Liza had drawn two slanted lines connected at their base. “That's a V. Just like the first letter of Virginia. See here on the map. I taught you where Virginia is.”

Bones had looked at her like she had spoken a miracle. It had long ago occurred to Liza that it was more fun playing teacher than simply studying boring books, and in Bones she had an eager student. So afternoons that summer Bones spent learning how to read and write the alphabet, and how to read simple books made up mostly of two-syllable words. She knew that learning how to read the words on the map, instead of just learning the shapes of the states, could only help her with her plan.

B
ones figured that when the Lord was passing out kindness in the Brewster family, he used it all up on Master and his two daughters, because he sure didn't have any left for Master's wife, Old Mistress Polly.

“Musta been a terrible day the day she was born,” Granny always sputtered, slowly shaking her head back and forth. “Musta been a dark storm or somethin'.” Granny was wiry and thin from working the fields, her hair pure white, and Mama often wondered aloud if the Brewsters were ever going to bring Granny in to work in the big house. Bones worried that they were just going to keep her working in the fields till she dropped dead one day over a tobacco plant.

Old Mistress Polly's disposition was as sour as a briny pickle. While her husband was tall and graceful, she was small and plump, with narrow, gray-green eyes that rested inside little slits under her short forehead.

Sometimes the house slaves would look up to see her shadowy figure on the wall. They knew she was lurking around the corner, waiting to catch them not doing their chores so she could lurch out with her hickory stick and smack their hands. Many of them took to calling her Wolf Woman behind her back because of her slanty, gray-eyed stare, and everyone tried to stay out of her way to avoid her fits of ill humor. The Brewster sisters never talked back to their mother, and like everyone else, they preferred the company of their father.

It was a quiet autumn afternoon, and a river breeze pushed through the shutters' open latticework. Liza and Bones were excited. The newest edition of
Merry's Museum Magazine
had arrived that morning. Liza had explained to Bones that it was the most popular magazine among children everywhere. It was filled with stories for children about people having daring adventures. Liza's favorite section every month was the puzzles and letters from children to Uncle Merry, but Bones was mesmerized by the stories about foreign lands and the exotic animals that lived there.

“Finish writing the sentences I've given you, and you may look through my new
Merry's
,” Liza instructed Bones.

Bones flew through her assigned work, wondering all the while to herself:
What magic is in this month's magazine?

She wasn't disappointed. There was a black-and-white engraving of waterfalls in New York, and one of a Christmas tree with little white children dressed in fancy clothes sitting under its branches hung with glowing candles, candies, and small toys.

Bones's heart nearly pounded through her chest when she turned a page and read a title: “Africa: Dr. Livingstone's Journeys and Researches in South Africa.” An illustration on the opposite page showed a canoe with seven or eight men being thrown into the dangerous waters, their arms flailing as a monster beast rose from the water. The words beneath the picture read:
Boat capsized by a hippopotamus robbed of her young
.

“Miss Liza? What is this word?” Bones pointed at
capsized
.

“‘Capsized,' Bones. It means to overturn in the water.”

“Oh my,” Bones whispered.

It got better. The next story she found was titled “Africa and Its Wonders.”

Lord, if she could only show this to Granny.

“‘The trees which adorn the banks of the Zonga are magnificent,'” she read, hesitating to sound out the last word. “Miss Liza, Africa—she's a powerful, beautiful place,” Bones finally announced.

Liza laughed. “Yes, I suppose it is.” She suddenly tilted her head toward the bedroom door when she heard the hall floor creak.

Bones quickly put aside her writing paper when she heard familiar steps stealing down the hallway outside Liza's bedroom. By the time the door thrust open and Old Mistress Polly burst into the room, Bones had already picked up her fan and was busy shooing flies away from Liza's face.

Old Mistress's left eyebrow flew up. “How is the reading coming along?”

“Very well,” Liza replied. But worry lines pinched her forehead, and she fiddled over her book as her mother's glare bored through her.

Old Mistress's eyes swept the room, landing on Bones's writing pad. When she walked over and picked it up, Bones broke out in a sweat, and her fan began to shake.

“What is this?” Old Mistress asked, her breath warm on the back of Bones's neck.

Before she could answer, Liza spoke up. “Some old papers of mine.”

The Wolf Woman squinted harder at Bones's childlike letters, so different from Liza's more graceful, swooping words and curly letters.

Bones looked down and saw her spelling book and the map on which she had printed the states and each state's capital poking out from under her skirt. Mistress suddenly yanked the little black girl up by her arm and snatched the papers from beneath her. Bones's beginning letters were carefully scrawled on page after page next to Liza's.

She did not fully understand why, but she knew in that moment that she was in fearsome trouble. She picked up her fan again and began furiously waving it next to Liza. In mid-swoop, Mistress ripped it away and began swatting her on the head with it.

“Mama!” Liza protested.

“Are you teaching this Negra to read and write?” She turned her crimson-faced anger on her own daughter. “Answer me!”

“I am practicing to become a teacher.” Liza stood up as tall as she could and faced her mother square on.

With one quick swipe, Old Mistress Polly struck her own daughter in the face with the fan.

“You do
not
teach Negras to read or to write! It gives them a bad attitude and makes them dangerous, Liza!” Old Mistress Polly wailed. “And it is against the law.”

Sweat dampened her dress under her arms, and her veins pulsed against her temples. Leaning down close to Bones's face, she delivered a good hard slap to be sure Bones was paying attention.

“If I ever find you touching one of these letter blocks or near a book again, I'll have you sold to another plantation, and you'll never see your mother or granny again. You hear me, gal? We sold your father, and we'll sell you, too. You are a slave. Do you know what that means, Bones? You are our property. We own you. You belong to us just like our cows and our chickens and our horses and our tobacco fields. And if we are not happy with those things, we get rid of them. And if we are not happy with you, we will get rid of you. Do you understand what I am saying?” Old Mistress's face was the color of a plum, and her hands were trembling when she finished.