Currents (3 page)

Bones nodded furiously, her hands in tight fists by her sides.

“You're lucky I don't have you skinned. Go back to your cabin. Now!” Old Mistress ordered. “Someone will be there shortly to give you a whippin'.”

Bones's feet would not move.

“Run, you little black beast!” Old Mistress snapped. Her hand came down with a slap on the back of Bones's head as the girl finally flew out the door and down the back steps.

B
ones went back to her cabin to wait. No one was back from the fields yet. She quickly took Lovely from around her neck. She dropped her carved peach-pit heart into the wide-mouthed bottle that she used to store it in and hid both the treasures under the sleeping pallet to protect them. She had seen Ben, the hulking black overseer, flog grown men and women, but she had never seen a child whipped. Ben lived alone in a cabin on the other side of the plantation. The Brewsters didn't want him living near them, and it would have been too dangerous for him to live among the slaves' quarters. The other slaves hated him. He showed no hesitation to use his whip on his own people when ordered to. It was not unusual, after a visit from Ben, for a slave to find his kettle or blanket missing. Fortunately, Master Brewster only used beatings as a last resort, so they were delivered few and far between.

Bones heard the sound of Ben's boots dragging in the dust. He stopped in front of her cabin, and Bones dropped to her knees, her heart pounding in her ears.

Ben stood just outside the closed door, slowly slapping what Bones imagined was his whip against the side of his leg. She smelled cigar smoke drifting through the walls, and the smell turned her stomach. She heard him sniff and clear the phlegm from his throat. He spit into the dirt next to the cabin.

When the door flew open, Bones saw that Ben carried a bunch of hickory sprouts tied together instead of the big leather strap he used on the grown-ups. He also held a bucket that reeked of vinegar.

Her heart fired inside her chest, and she stared at the floor. The air was so quiet she could almost hear his gaze slowly travel around the cabin, looking for some little trinket he might want. Her eyes squeezed shut, and she listened as his feet shuffled around the room, stopping here and there. He paused in front of the fireplace, cleared the phlegm from his throat again, and spit it into the embers from the morning's fire, where it sizzled and hissed. He circled her, whistling softly, and then stopped. His eyes slid around, finally settling on Bones trembling on the floor, and he let out a long sigh, as though he was bored by this puny little chore in front of him.

“Pulls your shirt up, gal,” he drawled, looming above her. He smelled of sweat, tobacco, and liquor.

“Please,” she whimpered, clasping her knees tight.

“I said, pulls your shirt up. Gals that don't hear so good gets it worse,” he ordered.

She was afraid she would faint, but she slipped her shirt up to her shoulders. Her ribs protruded like a bird's bones from her narrow back, and her skin felt clammy.

He pulled the handmade whip back and snapped it hard against her back, and she screamed when it bit into her flesh. She hunched her shoulders, and her hands flew up and covered her ears. The hickory sprouts snapped hard across her back again. She shrieked and fell facedown on the floor.

“Oh, pray. Oh, pray.” She groaned and tried to crawl under a chair. But Ben grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her back.

“Don't try and go nowhere, gal,” he growled.

Pulling her knees up underneath her, she tucked her head down when the whip cracked a third time. She bit her tongue, and blood mixed with drool oozed out from the space between her front teeth.

“Oh, please, please, no more, sir,” she wailed, words and blood both spitting out of her mouth.

Ben picked up the bucket and snorted. “Gots a little salt and vinegar here for you.” He swung the pail back and threw it in her face. “Mistress says to never use them eyes to look at nothin' you not supposed to again.”

“I won't, oh no, no, please!” she screamed, shaking her head wildly, and squeezing her burning eyes shut. “Have mercy on me.” Bones shuddered.

“Girl,” he snickered, “don't expect there's no mercy for you in this world.”

With that, he picked up his instruments of torture and calmly walked out of the cabin, Granny's pipe tucked in his side pocket. He left his victim alone in a little wet heap on the floor. For weeks after, the smell of cigar smoke made Bones gag.

The angry purple welts across her back and red, swollen eyes lasted for two weeks. Bones swept and washed the kitchen and porch floors and performed her duties anyway. Mama and Granny were as angry as wet bees with Old Mistress Polly, but knew to keep their fury to themselves. They applied cool homemade salves to Bones's back and face every morning.

Lying in her bed at night, Bones went over and over the map in her mind, being certain not to forget any details. When she found out what state her pappy had been sold to, she would know how to get there—which direction to go. In the darkness, she traced each letter of the alphabet on the inside of her arm with her finger, imagining each state and its place on the map.

V-I-R-G-I-N-I-A.

South of Virginia, shaped like one of the boots that Master wore when he rode his horses: L-O-U-I-S-I-A-N-A.

South Carolina—shaped like a wedge of Queenie's shoofly pie.
They cannot beat the learnin' out of me
, Bones thought defiantly.
South Carolina, Georgia, Florida . . .

“She get hers,” Granny would fume about Old Mistress. “God seen it all and marked it down. She nothin' but an old, rich devil.”

At first, Bones was certain that Liza would come find her, but as the days went on, the truth in Mistress's words settled on her. They were not friends. The Brewsters owned her. In Bones's heart, though, she still believed there was something more than that between her and Liza.

During those two weeks, she slept naked on her stomach until her wounds closed up. The stinging cuts were eventually replaced with three jagged scars shaped like lightning strikes that ran across her back.

T
he wind seeped through the gaps in the cabin walls all through the night, reminding the women that cold weather was coming. They would patch them up with mud before the air got colder. Master would appear one day soon with shoes for all his slaves, as he did every year. They felt lucky in this way. Many plantation owners let their slaves go barefoot all year. Frostbite was common.

The sound of the wind made it hard for Bones to sleep, and Granny's nose made a whistling sound when she snored. The old woman and the wind took turns. The wind would rise up and heave through the old cabin. Just when it would stop, Granny's nose would start up again and let go a long snorty whistle. This went on most of the night. The wind, Granny's nose, the wind, Granny's nose.

“You need to forgets about that readin', Bones. It can only be trouble for you,” Mama said as they lay in the darkness. Bones slept in the middle between her granny and her mother on sacks stuffed with straw. Lovely, wrapped in her handkerchief, slept tucked under her arm.

“I can't, Mama. Once you knows it, it sticks there. I can't help it. And Miss Liza didn't mean to get me in trouble.”

“I know that,” Mama said. “But you old enough now to know that slaves are sold off for knowin' how to read. Sometimes they even killed. You need to wash that learnin' outta you brain. Please listen to me now.”

“Mama?” She hesitated. “Why they sell my pappy?” Her mother rolled onto her back and rested her face on the edge of the rough sack, pieces of her hair escaping from the bun tied up on top of her head. She had soft, wide brown eyes, but hard work had beaten her face so she looked older than her twenty-seven years. Still, as her mother lay there with a little sliver of moonlight coming through the cabin and resting just so across her face, Bones could imagine what her long-lost pappy must have seen in her. Bones had the same soft round eyes as her mother, but Mama's had grown squinty from working in the sun for so many years.

“The crops was poor that year,” Mama finally said. “Didn't need so many men. Masta up and sold him and two more men. Just took him one mornin', and I ain't never seen him again. Mm-hmm. He was a handsome man, he was—tall and broad shouldered.”

“Why they call him Fortune?” Bones asked. “That's a funny name.”

“They called him Fortune because he was good with wood making, and they could sell the chests and bureaus he made for a lot of money,” Mama said. “Twice a year Masta Brewster took his chests down to Richmond. Anyway, he was stubborn like a mule. Didn't want to belong to no man and kept trying to run off. They would have killed him or chopped off his hand, except then he wouldn't have been able to make furniture for them no more. So they took an ax and chopped off his left ear instead. That stopped him runnin',” Mama said.

“He didn't run again, Mama?” Bones asked.

“No. He just do what they say and come home every night to me and you and Granny. Then one day they call him and two others up to the big house, and I never see him again. Never even let him say good-bye.”

“Tell me again about the day I was born. When Pappy give me his heart.” Bones rubbed her little carved heart between her fingers.

“Well,” her mama began, sounding too tired to talk. “You come right out, and your pappy say how beautiful you are. He thinks you the most beautiful baby on the whole plantation. And then he pulls a little peach pit out of his pocket that he's carved into the shape of a heart. That man could make anything. And he'd carved tiny vines and a flower all over that heart, and he put it in your little hand.”

“And what did I do then, Mama?” Bones asked.

“You closed your tiny fingers around it. We couldn't believe it! And then Fortune say, ‘Now my baby girl will always know she gots her pappy's heart in her hand.'”

“I just love that story, Mama.” Bones sighed. “Where do you think my pappy is? You ever hear anything—anything at all?”

“No. But somewhere far away. Maybe Mississippi, I hear, or someplace called Alabama.” She covered her eyes with her small hands as if to wipe out his memory. “Lord, I loved that man. And they just up and sold him—sold my Fortune,” Mama said.

“Just like he was any old thing,” Bones said softly.

“You go to sleep now,” Mama said. “Roosters be crowin' good mornin' to us before you know it.”

“I will, Mama,” she whispered, trying to remember how many
s
's were in Mississippi—the state shaped like a piece of bread with a bite taken out of it.

She pulled her little nightshirt up over her eyes, snuggled Lovely close to her heart, and thought,
Snug in my little cabin, but still with my sorrows, worth no more than a cow, or a horse, or a dog
.