Currents (7 page)

“Old Mistress say to drop you off when we get back so you can carry water to the field hands.” She shook her head. “Can't says you been much company, girl.”

“You enjoy your ridin' this morning?” Mama came up beside Bones, her face creased with dirt and sweat and a broad grin spread across her face. “You all right? Look like you saw a ghost instead of enjoying a morning off work.”

“I'm fine Mama, just old Mabel's driving was so jerky it make my stomach sick. I'm fine now. I'll get some water when I go to the river and be just fine,” Bones said, slinging the empty water jugs over her shoulders and running down to the riverbank.

The cool water filled up the clay vessels that hung at each end of the rawhide string around her neck. She thought about what would happen to her if she fell into the river and let it carry her on downstream. Baltimore, she remembered from the maps she'd studied in Liza's room. She would float right on down the James River to Baltimore and then on out to sea.
Nothing holding me here now
, she thought,
except Mama and Granny
.

That night she dropped her carved heart in its bottle under the bed pallet and crawled on top to think things through. She'd just have to adjust her plans. No need to be figuring out the southern states anymore. But all her learning wouldn't be for nothing. She had a new destination in mind now. Someday. Maybe she'd go when she was a few years older. She'd start readjusting her plans now.

North.

Someday that's where she'd head. North.

“F
inish dustin' everything in the dinin' room and then do the same in Masta's study,” Queenie ordered. “But don' go movin' anything from its place, you hear?” She tucked a stray hair under her freshly ironed bandana turban. Bones noticed that while Queenie was always trying to tame her unruly hair, it had a mind of its own. Little pieces sprung out the sides or top of her head no matter how tightly she pulled it into a bun or how much she tried to vanquish them beneath her turban. Now that her hair was turning gray, her efforts seemed even more fruitless.

“I hear,” sighed Bones, tucking a few rags, beeswax, and a bottle of linseed oil in the pockets of her apron. “Queenie, how old is you?” she asked suddenly. “And is that the name you borned with?”

“Why, I don' know how old I is. But I knows my mammy was Nellie and my pappy was John, and I was born in the summer. They gives me the name Queenie. I got five sisters and five brothers, but I don't know where any of them is. They got sold off before me. I don't know I been sold till Masta call me to the big house and tell me. I belong to Masta Brewster from then on.”

She gave the young girl a gentle push. “Humph. It a funny thing, but the jaws is the only part of the body that likes to work. Better get to you chores or you be sold off 'cause you nothin' but a lazybones. I got my cookin' to do here.” Queenie carefully shaved pieces from a block of sugar, placing them into a wooden pestle and grinding the sweet slivers to a fine consistency with her mortar. There would be a tart for dessert tonight—filled with figs glistening under a coating of honey, fresh from the plantation's hives.

“Be extra careful around the glass bowls and dishes,” Queenie called out. “You drop and break somethin' and Old Mistress—she'll whip you again.” Bones, with Lovely swinging from her neck, let the kitchen-house door flap shut behind her.

She worked quickly, inhaling the faint honey smell of the beeswax as she swirled it in round, shiny circles on the dark wood furniture. She moved each of the tall glass hurricane lamps, dusting and polishing under each as she went along.

After finishing the dining room, she carefully moved books in the study, dusting each one before putting them back exactly where they came from. She couldn't help it—her eyes read the words on the front of each book. But she was careful not to look as if she was reading them, in case old Wolf Woman was lurking around the corner. She was almost finished when she picked up a small red leather volume to dust it. The title written across the front of the book in large black letters caught her eye.

Slave Birth Records, Brewster Plantation

Bones wasn't sure what the word
records
meant, but her fingers froze around the book. Slave birth. She stood motionless, listening for any sound of the Wolf Woman before slowly turning around. She was alone. She placed the book on the table so if she was caught she could quickly close the cover and act as though she were simply dusting. She couldn't read the first page when she opened the worn leather cover. It was written in the curly letters that Miss Liza had told her were called cursive. Turning the pages, she discovered neatly printed entries for every slave that had been bought or born or died at Stillwater Plantation. A page was allotted to each slave in order to record their name, birth date, if and when they had been sold, and the date of their death.

She closed the book and pretended to dust under the table. Had she heard breathing in the hall outside the room? She turned and looked but saw no one and went back to the little book. Flipping the pages as silently as a thief, she came at last to her name. AGNES MAY BREWSTER. She stared gap-mouthed, tracing the letters with her finger, her name fairly blooming off the page.

Agnes May Brewster
Born: July 1843. Colored slave.

That was all. She closed the book and furiously dusted and waxed around the room a second time, always keeping her ears open. Finally, she picked up the little red book again and quickly found her page. Her fingers trembled as she slowly, quietly, and inch-by-inch tore the page away from the spine, folded it in half, and tucked it deep inside her apron pocket. She placed the book back where it belonged and walked quickly out the back door and down the path to the kitchen house, her heart hammering in her ears.

“You finally done, Bones?” Queenie asked as the girl neatly replaced the linseed oil and dusting rags in the kitchen's cleaning cupboard.

“Yes'm. I'm goin' home now for a minute before I go back down to the fields. Don' feel so good. Linseed-oil vapors got to my head.” She shoved her hands in her pockets so Queenie wouldn't notice them trembling.

She ran back to the cabin and took the bottle that held her carved heart out from under the sleeping pallet. She read the page with her name one more time, then quickly rolled it up, stuffed it inside the bottle alongside the carved heart, and corked it. She took a candle from beside the fireplace, lit it, and held it over the cork, letting the wax drip down and seal the stopper around the bottle's neck. Outside, she looked around to be certain she wasn't being watched and crawled underneath the cabin to hide the bottle next to a rock.

The danger of her impetuous act weighed on her more and more as the day went on. Granny and Mama were still working in the fields when she got back to the cabin that evening.

That night it rained hard, the drops making
pingping
sounds as they found their way through a small hole in the roof and hit the metal pot that Granny kept by the door.
Thank goodness I sealed the top of the bottle with wax
, Bones thought. What if the rain started a river of mud that ran under the cabin and flushed the bottle out from behind the rock and into the open where someone might find it in the morning? What if some animals drug it out? Bones lay in her space on the straw pallet between the two older women, her mind racing with unruly thoughts of the punishment that was sure to come if her crime were discovered. And this time she knew she would not be alone in the punishment. It was unbearable to think what Old Mistress would do to Granny and Mama.

“Why you so jittery? You thrashin' so much I can't sleep,” Granny complained, punching down the straw under her head into a more comfortable shape.

“I'm not,” she protested, faking weariness and squeezing her eyes shut. Where could she move the bottle so it would be safe? She considered the woods. But the forests in these parts were infested with panthers and bears, and she had seen bears walking like a man out of Master's fields, carrying ears of corn in their arms. The only time anyone went into the woods, they were on horseback or armed with axes to chop down trees for firewood. For every spot she thought of, she could imagine the Wolf Woman sneaking up on her like a whisper, discovering her, and the whupping and salty vinegar that would follow. She had been warned, and next time it would be worse. She might even be sold. Taken away from her Mama. She wondered if her pappy knew when they called him and the other men up to the big house that they were going to sell him that day or if he thought it was a day like any other. Did he think he was going up to trim Old Mistress's hedges or paint the front door? Did he wonder when they shackled him to the other two slaves and threw him in the back of the wagon how his wife would feel?

Bones would rather die than be sold. Agnes May would rather die.

T
he next morning, Bones awoke to the sound of the turkeys plopping down from the trees. She quickly slid out of bed and out the door, and walked around the cabin. There was no bottle lying on the ground in the open. She blew out a deep breath and went back inside.

“You walkin' in your sleep, Bones?” Mama asked, rubbing her own eyes. “What were you doing?”

Bones let out a quick laugh and lied. “No, I'm not walkin' in my sleep. I just thought I heard Queenie comin' with breakfast.”

“I told you the Lawd gave you those big ears so you could hear extra good!” Granny said, gleefully. “Listen now. You hear that? That's Queenie's wagon coming now. Bones heard it before anyone else.”

The roosters carefully picked their way across the dirt yard, stopping occasionally to crow and yank an unlucky worm from its hiding spot in the damp ground. Doors creaked up and down the rows of slave quarters as people came out for breakfast, carrying their mussel-shell scoops. Queenie's horse-drawn wagon rattled down the muddy road carrying the big pots filled with corn bread porridge and molasses laced with whatever meat was left over from the Brewsters' dinner the night before. She stood and scooped heaping servings onto each wooden tray, her beefy black arms still coated with a dusting of fine white flour from the biscuits she'd made earlier for Master's breakfast.

A half hour later, the trays were returned to the wagon, and Queenie prepared to drive back to the kitchen. The slaves headed off to the morning's work, and the sun began to rise up over the river.

“Bones, Masta wants you to carry water to the field hands again today,” Queenie said. “They be workin' extra to get in the harvest. Need every hand they can get in the field.” She stared down at the child, her chin rolls bunching up like an accordion. The cook hoisted her broad hips up onto the wagon's seat with a groan. She practically blotted out the sun as she waved for the little girl to follow her back to the kitchen house to clean the breakfast dishes and start preparing for lunch.