Glory Over Everything (29 page)

“What happens to us now?” I ask when we are alone.

“Now we gets sold,” she say real quiet.

“Who will buy us?”

“Some mens come. They look us over. I gon' tell them I got to take my Jenny or I don' go. I jus' don' go noplace without my Jenny. No, sir, I don' go noplace without my Jenny. No, sir, I don'.”

I don't like the way she keeps saying the same thing over and over, so I sit on the other bench, but when I sit on my sore parts, I get up again. I stand up until I can't no more, and then I wrap the gray blanket around me and I lay down on the hay. The dirt floor underneath stinks like a privy, but I shut my eyes and right away I sleep.

E
ARLY THE NEXT
morning I hear men talking outside the window. One of the voices is Jake's. “She's trained for the big house,” he says. “Worked there all her life, but she knows her place. She's good with little ones and knows how to cook good, too. Only lived in one place, been treated right all her life, but with the crops last year, Mr. Pyke's needing to sell some off. She's one of his best, and he's looking for a good price.”

“You say she's good with children?” another voice asked.

“All by herself she took care of the three little ones at the big house,” Jake said.

“Let's take a look,” the unknown voice said.

The door squeals open. I sit up, feel the soreness on my bottom, and quick get to my feet. The other woman gets up from the ground and moves fast to sit on a bench and pulls her daughter onto her lap.

“Sukey.” Jake comes strutting to me, full of hisself. “This here man is looking to buy you before I even have a chance to put you up on the block.” Jake talks like him and me is friends.

The man looks me over, turns me 'round two or three times, then asks me to show him my hands. My hands are clean, but my nails are all broke up. He turns them over to look at my palms. “It don't look like you do much heavy work,” he say.

“Like I said, she was only used for the big house,” Jake say. “Mr. Pyke spoils his house nigras. She never lived down in the quarters.”

“Can you sew?” the new man asks. I look up to see that he's older than his voice sounds. His clothes are cut good, but he isn't dressed like a man from a big house. Later I find out that he's a buyer for the farm he works on. His eyes are waiting on me.

I nod. “I can sew,” I say.

“Jake pokes me on my shoulder. “Speak up!”

“Yes, I can sew real good,” I say.

The man grunts. “Talk like you might have a little book learnin' in you, too.”

“No, she don't,” Jake says. “Mr. Pyke don't allow no nigras on his place no book learnin'.”

“You know how to read or write?” the man asked.

Yes, I can read and write, I want to say. I can read good! But I know what I got to do. I drop my head and shake it.

“I think they're going to want this one,” he say. “I'll give you seven hundred for her.”

Jake almost falls over his own feet as he goes for the door. “I'll get the papers on her,” he say.

“Hold on,” the man calls. He points to the woman's child, Jenny. “Let me have a look at her. They want another girl, one they can teach from small on.”

Jake goes over and pulls the child off the mother's lap to stand in front of the buyer. The girl is maybe four or five and looks up at the man with her small round face like she's trying to understand what's going on. The mama comes quick and pulls her girl against herself. “She don' get sold 'less I go with her,” she say.

“We don't need nobody for the fields,” the man says. “I'm just here to buy two young ones for the big house. Your girl here will work out just fine for that.”

“I kin work the big house real good,” the woman says, doing her best to smile at the man.

The man grunts. “You know you never worked a big house. I saw the papers on you. Only place you worked was the fields.”

“Please, mister! I work like three peoples, you put me up in the big house.”

“They ain't lookin' for nobody like you.”

“My Jenny don' go if I don' go.” The mother says it like she means it. “Please, mister!” she say, but she can't hold back her crying.

“Listen! You can make this easy or hard on your young one. She's getting a chance to work in a big house with good people. They treat their people fair. You let her go, she got a chance to make a place for herself in a big house. Otherwise she's going to end up a field worker, just like you. And you know once you're on that block, they don't care about keeping you with her. Chances are you get sold apart anyway.”

It looks like the mama's going to start bawling, but when her girl looks up at her, the woman works her mouth against itself. She looks me over good, then quick, she puts her girl's hand in mine. “Jenny, you go with this nice womans. She take good care a you. I come find you some day, and then you gon' be runnin' a big house jus' like your mama always wanna do.”

The man sees this is a good time to get going, so he picks up the child and slings her over to me. “Find the owner and get the papers,” he says to Jake, and nods me toward the door. As we go, the girl figures out what's happening and starts to call back for her mama. My heart turns over when I hear the mother doing her best to sound happy.

“It gon' be all right, Jenny. You go along now. Yo mama gon' come find you.”

As we make our way out of the auction yard and into the man's wagon, the child puts her arms around me and holds on tight. It's like she knows that crying won't do her no good, but her lil heart is pounding so fast and hard that I can feel it against my own.

W
HEN WE GET
to our new place, they think that Jenny is my sister, so I don't say nothing different. Fact is that's the way I come to see her. She was a good girl, and when she ask when her mama's coming I always say, “Any day now, Jenny girl. She coming any day now.” If I was ever looking to find the child, all I got to do was go out to the front of the house where she'd be looking down the road watching for her mama. It got so that I'd a done anything for the girl. Looking back, I wonder if caring for her took out some of the sting of my own worries.

At our new place the people was good enough to their slaves. There was plenty of food, and Jenny and me slept in the kitchen house with the cook. The mistress had four young girls, and we helped her out with them, but we was there no more than four months when the two youngest got the fever and died. Not two days later, the mistress goes down with the same thing, then Jenny. We try to save them, but even with the doctor coming, there's nothing we can do to keep them going. They both go, first the wife, then Jenny, one right after the other. When Jenny goes, the cook tells me if I don't stop cryin' I get sick myself, but that chil' was like my own. Some nights I still wake up wondering what I'm going to say if Jenny's mama ever shows up.

After the wife is gone, the master walks around like he can't remember his name, then sends his other two girls to live with his own mama up in Washington. I guess he don't have no more need of me, 'cause he sells me off by the end of that month. All told, I was there about six months.

The next place they sell me to is a preacher's farm . . .

I
N THE EARLY
morning I posted the letters, then anxiously boarded the stage. My destination was Edenton, North Carolina, located some ninety miles south of Norfolk. According to the map, Southwood—the plantation where Pan hopefully awaited me—was located some miles north of Edenton. How Henry had obtained the details of where his son was taken he had not said, though he did suggest a strong underground connection by which messages were passed. How reliable this information was, I did not know, yet it was all I had to go on.

I planned to stay in the town to uncover information about the owner of the plantation and hoped that freeing Pan would be as simple as offering a heavy purse. I dreaded the transaction, for I would be obliged to go to a plantation that owned slaves, the thought of which petrified me.

As the coach moved along, I forced myself away from these thoughts and tried to put my focus on what was out the window. At any other time, the road we traveled would have had my full attention, for it ran alongside the canal that had been dug through the Great Dismal Swamp. This waterway was now the major thoroughfare connecting the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia to the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, and it had been dug by slaves who inched their way through twenty-two miles of impassable jungle. Now large barges, sloops, and schooners all traveled the route, carrying trade and passengers to and from the Norfolk region down into North Carolina.

This vast swamp was so huge that it was said to cover over a million acres. What had interested me since childhood were the numbers of unrecorded botanical and birds species said to be found in the region. So it was that as we rode along, in spite of all my anxiety and emotional turmoil, I began to take note of my surroundings.

Seated at a window on the right of the carriage, I was able to look out onto the canal and was struck again and again by the multitudes of turtles basking on logs that bobbed on the water's edge. It was already mid-May, and I might have opened my window for some fresh air had I not been so concerned with giving entry to the swarms of biting flies and mosquitoes. I peered across the waterway and into the swamp, but it was impossible to see through the tangled reeds and bushes and into the dense and dark stands of juniper and cypress that reportedly sheltered bear and bobcat and the cottonmouth snake.

Four other passengers were in the coach with me, along with their excess luggage. A middle-aged father and his two daughters, accompanied by a female servant, were returning home from a visit to Williamsburg. Shortly after our journey began, introductions were made, but I soon turned again toward the window and paid little attention to them until, sometime into the ride, I became aware of the older of the two girls making whispered comments to her younger sister.

“Oh, Addy, you don't think—”

“I do!”

The younger one, dressed in pink-and-blue-flowered calico, looked to the father, whose attention was focused out the window. “Oh, Papa, are we truly in danger?” she asked.

“What?” he asked, shaking himself as though out of a reverie.

“Addy said that we are in danger! Is that true?”

“Certainly not!” he said. “Addy, you must stop frightening your sister.” He frowned at his eldest daughter.

“Father, you know as well as I that there are escaped slaves who hide out in these parts, and that should they ever stop our coach, we would be murdered for our clothing alone.” She rose slightly from her seat to adjust her full skirts, also of calico, but hers of a green color and a larger pattern.

“Addy, I asked you to stop this talk!” the father said.

I glanced over at the Negro servant and guessed she was not yet as old as Miss Addy. Though she did not speak, the young servant's eyes told me that she, too, was frightened.

“Father,” Addy said, “I would rather we were all prepared to meet our death than to sit in ignorance, should the worst present itself.”

The three girls sat opposite the father and myself; now the youngest of the sisters lurched over to sit between us. As bags between us were set to the floor, the young girl removed her bonnet and handed it to her father before she settled herself against his shoulder. “Oh, Papa,” she said, slipping her arm into his, “you would not let them kill us?”

“Of course not, Patty. I am well armed,” he said, making a show of thumping the traveling bag that sat wedged between his feet. He settled her bonnet on top of the bag. “Any renegades would learn in short order who they were dealing with.”

“So I see, Father, that you acknowledge there is danger?” Addy said.

“Is there, Papa?” the young one asked. “Are there bad slaves hidden out here?”

He sighed unhappily as he gave a dour look to his oldest daughter. “It is rumored so.”

Patty leaned across his lap to stare out the window. “But why here, Papa?” she asked. “Why would anyone come here? Just look! See how dark it is in the trees. And look at the water. It is so brown that it looks like coffee. Why is that, Papa? Why is the water brown?”

“I've heard it said that it is because of all the dead Negroes,” Addy said. “The snakes got them.”

“Adelaide!” the father said. “Stop teasing your sister! You know full well that the water is the color it is because of the tannin from the cedars. One more word from you, miss, and that new gown coming from Williamsburg shall be returned.”

Addy gave a light laugh. “Daddy, you know that you would as soon see me naked as without my new dress.”

Patricia gasped, and the servant girl gaped openmouthed while her father shook his head at his daughter. “What would your poor dear mother say . . .” His voice broke, and Addy, who recognized that a line had been crossed, spoke up.

“I apologize to you, Father, as well as to everyone present.” She nodded toward me. “I do believe that the danger we face has me overexcited. I do not like the feeling that this land gives off, and the sooner we are through it, the happier I shall be.” She sat back, satisfied for the moment. She sighed and then removed her bonnet as her younger sister had done. A pale green ribbon held her black hair in place, but when she tossed her head, the ribbon slipped free. She shook her head again and did nothing to restrain her long hair when it fell loose around her shoulders, but her dark eyes glanced over to see her father's reaction to this demonstration of impropriety. When he did not appear to notice, she left it as it was. Then she looked at me and gave a bold smile.

Catching her smile, the father, as though to apologize for his daughter's forthright behavior, addressed me. “Do you have children?” he asked.