The Kitchen House (4 page)

During the day Mama encouraged me to go off with the girls. We often went down to the barns where Papa George worked, and there, I met their older brother, Ben. He was Belle’s age, eighteen, and even larger in stature than his father. Because of his great size, I might easily have been frightened by him, but I became enamored.

Ben was an outgoing man with a hearty deep laugh, and I watched in envy as he gently teased his little sisters. He must have taken pity on me, for he soon included me, calling me a little bird. How could I fly with my thumb in my mouth? he wanted to know. After that comment, determined to please him, I made certain to keep my hand away from my face when in his presence. Following my first introduction, my one request to the twins every morning was to go down to see Ben. The girls teased me, and when Belle overheard, she asked, “You like Ben?” Though embarrassed, I nodded. She smiled at me, the first time ever. “At least you got good sense,” she said.

I began to keep aside a bit of my evening meal, and in the morning I could hardly wait to give Ben my offering. He never failed to show surprise and always ate it with a great show of pleasure. One day, in return, Ben presented me with a bird nest he had found. All the riches in the world couldn’t have bought it from me; it was to become the first in my collection of abandoned bird nests. I carefully placed it on the floor beside my pallet, next to my treasured doll.

T
HE TWINS AND
I
WERE
playing by the stream the afternoon Jimmy, a young man from the quarters, stole the board. We didn’t know
how to swim, so we waded knee-high near the mossy bank, tossing white water into the air and twirling into it, finally exhausting ourselves. We were resting on the stream bank when Fanny’s finger suddenly went to her lips to quiet us. We followed her as she crept into the thick bushes and parted the leaves to see a young dark Negro man a short distance downstream, crouched in the shade of the springhouse. That building, I knew, held cooled butter and cheese and often some puddings, and my first thought, when I noted his thin bare chest, was that he looked hungry.

He glanced back and forth and, seeing no one, sprinted up to the next building, the smokehouse, which held the year’s supply of meat. A pungent scent of hickory smoke seeped from the building, where it permeated the heavily salted pork and beef cuts hanging from the beams inside. Fanny and Beattie both sucked in their breath when the man undid the latch and entered. Beattie whispered that it should have been locked and that Papa George carried the key.

We watched until we saw him again. He left, but not with meat. Instead, he had a board under his arm: It appeared to be a floorboard about three feet long. He ran back to the cover of the springhouse, then, after a short pause, turned and dashed through the woods, down the hill, in the direction of the quarters.

I ran after the girls when they went for Papa George. We found him with Mama Mae in the chicken pen, helping her catch a hen. As we rounded the corner, he caught one and held the squawking bird by its feet.

“Papa,” Fanny called as we ran up to him. “Papa! Jimmy from the quarters take another board from the smokehouse.”

Mama Mae took the chicken from Papa and walked to the back of the coop. The three of us followed as Papa and Mama Mae began to argue.

“This has got to stop,” hissed Mama.

“They needs the salt,” Papa said. He left then, and Mama Mae furiously plunked the chicken on the wood block.

She turned to look at the three of us. “You saw nothin’,” she said
before she lifted a small ax and, with one blow, chopped off the chicken’s head. She flung the chicken’s body to the ground as blood pumped from its neck. The head lay severed while the body stayed on its feet, terrifying me with its morbid death dance. I turned and ran for the kitchen house, passing Papa George, who was headed for the smokehouse with a replacement board. Belle was in the kitchen yard, tending a large pot of boiling water over an outdoor fire. I surprised both her and myself when I ran and clung to the safety of her skirts.

When Mama Mae followed, I was relieved to see that the chicken, hanging upside down in Mama’s grip, was now still. I stayed next to Belle and watched Mama dip the bird in the scalding water. When she pulled it out, she did not wait for it to cool before plucking the feathers. I thought she was angry, but after she’d eviscerated the chicken, she called me over to see how the in-sides held a perfectly formed egg. “See, no reason to get so scared,” she said. “Mama just killin’ a chicken.” Then she gave me the egg to have for my supper. It was still warm.

A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, I went with the girls down to see the children in the quarters. The twins were forbidden to visit without their mother, but Fanny, already rebellious, convinced Beattie and me to go with her.

The quarters were set up far down the hill, alongside the stream. Coming from the woods, we approached the cabins from the backside, where attached lean-tos sheltered stacks of split wood. The cabins were built of rough-hewn logs and chinked with mud. Each had two doors with a wall in the center of the cabin that created two separate homes. When we peeked in one, the room looked small. Pallets were piled in the corner, and a large black iron pot stood alongside the fireplace. Wooden spoons hung from pegs on the wall, and worn rags were draped over a piece of rope strung across the room. Under a small open window, flies buzzed, searching unsuccessfully for crumbs on the homemade table and the wooden bowls stacked there.

Fanny said this was where Jimmy and his many brothers lived. With her fingers, she named each of them. “Ida his mama, and she have this many boys.” She smiled, holding up six fingers.

We heard children and followed the sound. It led us past a number of double cabins and several small gardens. When we rounded the final cabin, we found ourselves in a large dirt yard. Down a distance was a clapboard house, and Beattie whispered that this was where the overseer lived, away from the others. “He white,” she said in my ear.

From the center of the yard, an old woman called out a greeting. “Well, well! It de Fanny and de Beattie.” She straightened up her thin rounded back as best she could and continued to stir the contents of a black kettle that bubbled over an open flame. “Yous here to eat?” she asked. A group of children stood back from her, watching carefully.

“No, Auntie. We got to go right back up,” Fanny said.

“And who dis?” The old woman’s dark eyes peered at me.

“This Abinia, Auntie. Belle her new mama,” Fanny answered. I glanced at Fanny, wondering at the title she’d given Belle.

“Uh-huh,” replied the old woman, looking me up and down before turning back to her work. She called over two of the boys to help her remove the pot from the fire and set it on the side to cool.

When she took a large wooden paddle to stir the cornmeal again, I caught a pleasant waft of the salty smell of pork, but I was surprised to see her stir up a piece of board from the bottom. She looked about carefully before removing it, then threw it quickly on the fire. I’m not sure how I knew, but I was aware that this was a piece of the board from Jimmy’s smokehouse theft.

With the help of the boys, she poured the hot meal into a wooden trough not unlike the one Papa George used for his pigs. A tall girl emptied a small wooden bucketful of buttermilk over the stiffening corn mush, and the old woman used her cooking paddle to combine the two. When she nodded to the children, they rushed eagerly to their meal. A few of the babies clung to their older siblings and were settled on a lap or placed at the trough,
where they all began to eat. Some of the children had thin pieces of wood to help scoop up the food, though most used nothing but unwashed hands, and the yellow mixture soon turned dark. When I saw their hunger, I was struck with a deep familiarity and turned away, my mind anxious to keep at bay memories it was not yet ready to recall.

W
E WERE BACK AT THE
kitchen house in time for our own afternoon meal. That day our wooden bowls contained a roasted sweet potato, a generous slice of boiled ham, and an ear of sweet corn. I felt guilt as I began to eat, remembering the children we had just left, but the cause of my guilt soon changed when I heard Fanny lie to Mama Mae about where we had spent the afternoon.

A
S COLD WEATHER APPROACHED, OUR
responsibilities grew. The girls were taken up to the big house to learn from Mama, while I was kept down with Belle. When Fanny balked at the housework, Mama sat her down in the kitchen house and, within earshot of Beattie and me, lectured her daughter. “What you thinkin’, Fanny? You forgettin’ that you a slave? You don’t know by now, anytime the cap’n want, he can sell you? Anytime Miss Martha say she want you gone, you gone.”

“I’d just say no, I’m stayin’,” Fanny sassed.

Mama’s voice shook. “You listen, girl. I’m gonna tell you what happens when you say no to a white man. I watch my own daddy get shot when he saddle up and ride out on a mule to get help for my own sick mama. She havin’ a baby, cryin’ out for help. I standin’ right there when that masta say to my daddy to get down from that mule. When my daddy say, ‘No, I’s going for help,’ that old masta shoot him in the back. That night all I know to do is keep the flies away when I watch my mama die. When that old masta sell me, he say I’m good for nothin’ but the fields. And that’s where I grow up, workin’ hard, right ’longside Ida, until old Mrs. Pyke call me up to the big house to feed Belle. It don’t take long for me to see what I got to do to stay up there. I work for Mrs. Pyke like I don’t know
what tired mean. Nothin’ that I won’t do. ‘Yes, Mrs. Pyke, you right, Mrs. Pyke,’ that all I say. You girls watch me close. I act like I don’t have no mind of my own, except how to make everybody in the big house happy. That because I mean to stay up there, and I tryin’ hard to keep you girls with me.

“There’s not a day go by that I don’t say, ‘Thank you, Lawd, for sendin’ me up to the big house and for givin’ me the cap’n for my masta. I know there nothin’ right about being a slave, but who I gonna tell that story to?

“Now, Fanny, you still wantin’ to get yourself sold, you ask Papa how he get here. Then you get yourself ready, because he gonna cry when he tell you, and by the time he finish, you be cryin’, too.”

Wide-eyed, the three of us had nothing to say when Mama finished.

L
ATER THAT MONTH, THE TWINS
told me of a new arrival, another adult, who had come to join the family. He was from England, a tutor, they said, sent by the captain to teach his children. When Fanny declared that she didn’t like him, I don’t remember asking her why.

I was certainly curious about the big house and the children in it, but the girls told me that they did not often see the inhabitants. If they should, they were instructed not to initiate conversation but to nod and go about their tasks. When Beattie supported Fanny in saying that their work, dusting and cleaning floors, was tedious and unexciting, I ceased to mind that I was kept back in the kitchen.

Belle was softening toward me, and as she did, I became even more eager to please her. It was already my responsibility to scatter the corn and wheat for the chickens, so I was doubly proud of myself the day she trusted me to go down to the chicken house to collect the eggs. When Papa George saw me leaving the hen yard, he came my way. Eager to shine at my new responsibility, I painstakingly placed my full basket on the ground before carefully closing the gate behind me. “You good with the hens, Abinia,” he said. “You a good girl.”

His smile radiated through to my lonely heart and suddenly opened it to a new possibility. “Papa,” I asked, “is Dory your girl?”

“That she is,” Papa said.

“Are Beattie and Fanny your girls?” I asked.

“They sure enough is,” he said.

“Papa,” I asked, “is Belle your girl?”

“Why you ask all this, chil’?” he said.

“I was wondering, Papa…” I said, then stopped and focused on my toe as it drew a line in the dirt.

“Go on, chil’, what you wonderin’ about?” he encouraged.

“Could I be your girl, too?” I asked quickly.

The large, broad-shouldered man looked away before he answered. “Well, now,” he said, as though he had given it deep thought, “I sure do think I would like that.”

“But,” I said, concerned that he hadn’t noticed, “I don’t look like your other girls.”

“You mean because you white?”

I nodded.

“Abinia,” he said, pointing toward the chickens, “you look at those birds. Some of them be brown, some of them be white and black. Do you think when they little chicks, those mamas and papas care about that?”

I smiled up at him, and he rested his huge hand on my head. “I think I just got me one more baby girl,” he said, tousling my hair, “and I’m gonna call her Abinia. How about that! I say, ‘Thank you, Lawd!’ Ain’t I just the luckiest man!”

I skipped all the way back up to the house. Belle scolded me when she found a broken egg, and I promised her that I would be more careful the next time, but my singing heart wasn’t apologetic in the least.

A
LIGHT SNOW WAS FALLING
the early December night when Mama Mae brought the shrieking baby Henry to the warm kitchen. The twins followed her, and we three sat together and watched as Belle
and Mama Mae applied warm soaks to the baby’s swollen feet and hands. But he would not stop his agonized screams.

“Fanny, you go up to get Dory. Miss Martha takin’ the black drops all day, and for sure she sleepin’ by now. Uncle Jacob keep an eye on her till Dory get back.”

Fanny turned to run, and Mama called after her, “Tell Dory to bring the black drops with her.”

When Dory arrived, she tried to comfort her baby by nursing him. In his pain, he refused the solace, tossing his head back and forth. Dory herself began to cry. “Mama, what can I do?”

“He not good, baby,” Mama Mae said to her oldest daughter. “I see this before, down the quarters. We give the drops to ease him.”

Mama held the little brown bottle Dory had brought from the house and mixed some of the dark liquid with warm water. Dory held the suffering child while Belle opened his mouth and Mama carefully dripped the mixture in. Baby Henry coughed when he swallowed, but to our great relief, he soon fell into a deep sleep. Later, there was a light knock, and Uncle Jacob entered.