“I must go to him,” Mother says. She makes two attempts to rise before she manages it with her huge belly and her shaking legs. She packs her case. She talks to Grandfather and to Ann and Joe Hall. At the last minute, she decides to take Edwin along. Edwin, she says, will cheer Father. So the tractable child goes and the intractable child stays.
v
The Enslaved
June and Rosalie are not left fending for themselves and caring for Asia alone in the wilderness with only their drunken grandfather to help. Far from it. By 1838, the farm is home to some forty people, most of them slaves who live in a scatter of cabins at the forest’s edge. Father has leased these slaves from their owners to work the farm, but he also pays them wages directly and a handful have been able to buy freedom with that money.
Once, when Rosalie was nine or so, she heard Aunty Rogers say to Mother that the distance between owning a slave and leasing one was not so great. “In my house,” Mother had said, “we respect the natural dignity of every single person God made.” Rosalie was shocked by how angry she sounded. Suddenly it seemed as if Aunty Rogers and Mother were quarreling.
But then Mother asked about Aunty Rogers’ bad knee, which, as luck would have it, was very bad on this particular day, bad enough to require a detailed description. “It cuts under my kneecap like a knife,” Aunty Rogers said, and then, feeling the insufficiency of this, “like a ribbon of fire.” The contentious subject of slavery was forgotten. Ann, who was working in the kitchen at the time, said that’s a shame about Aunty Rogers’ knee.
Ann and Joe Hall are more like family than Aunty Rogers, yet Rosalie doesn’t think of them as aunt and uncle, only as Ann and Joe. Joe came to the farm in 1822, so she’s never known a home without him. He’s been a steady, comforting presence in her life.
In Father’s absence, Joe runs everything. He sets out the work schedules; he plants the crops; he runs the dairy; he oversees the workers; he does whatever repair jobs need doing. Joe is very black and very tall, a giant well over six feet while Father barely clears five. “Well, I can’t help but laugh,” Aunty Rogers told Rosalie once, “when I see them two try to put their heads together.”
When she was four or so, Rosalie asked Joe why he was so dark and he told her he was descended from the royal house of Madagascar. It had thrilled Rosalie to think that a lost prince was tilling Father’s fields.
She continued to daydream about it. For a while she inked in the faces of royals on Father’s playbills—Hamlet and Richard and even Othello, whom Father played darker than most, but never nearly as black as Joe. She’d imagined Joe restored to his kingdom, possibly through her connivance, the role she’d have in his court. She’d altered the stories she knew about King Arthur to fit, tried to think how Joe might prove his claim. He was terribly strong. Pulling a sword from a stone would be almost too easy. Possibly he’d kept something, a brooch his mother had pinned to his swaddling clothes, something he could now produce. Possibly he had a birthmark by which he could be identified as the rightful king, not something she could ask him, but not impossible. Rosalie loved to imagine the court gathered as she herself argued his case, their suspicions turning gradually to joy. Something would have to be done about his name, of course. She’d never heard of a King Joe.
As infants, all the children slept in beautiful wicker baskets Joe made for them. As youngsters, they trailed him about the farm like ducklings. As adolescents, they love him no less, but they begin to find his lack of education, his grandiose claims, and his interminable stories amusing. They entertain each other imitating his speech. As an adult, Asia will refer to him fondly as faithful. Their faithful old Joe.
* * *
—
Joe’s wife is a slave on the Rogers estate. Not Aunty and Elijah Rogers, but the larger estate of Elijah’s father, Rowland Rogers. With Father’s wages, Joe is slowly gathering the five hundred dollars Ann will cost. Rosalie can’t wait for this to happen. Then Ann will finally live here on the farm with Joe. Then their babies will be free born.
They have two children already, two girls—Lucinda and little Mary Ellen—both of whom belong to Rowland Rogers. Ann is pregnant again and this baby, too, will be his.
Ann and Joe do nothing but work, not just on the farm, but anywhere they can find a job—sewing, carpentry, fieldwork, and farming—but a day has only so many hours in it. The pennies are slow to accumulate. Rosalie hears Ann talking with Mother. It makes sense for Joe to buy Ann first, since that will mean freedom for any babies that follow. But the children would be cheaper, and, should Rogers have a bad harvest, he’s more likely to sell them. So should they buy Lucinda as soon as they can or the baby as soon as it arrives? Or should they keep saving for Ann?
Mother tells Rosalie privately that she needn’t worry about any of this. Mother is sure that Mr. Rogers won’t sell Ann’s children away. He’s reckoned to be a generous man and a tolerant slaver by every white person in the neighborhood.
She seems remarkably oblivious to how much Ann hates him though it’s obvious to Rosalie. Ann and Joe have been married for years, but Mr. Rogers never lets Ann stay the night here. And Rosalie knows that Mother knows that one day when Ann was working in his fields, he’d refused to send for her as one of her own children choked to death.
Ann and Mother are bound together by their dead children. Ann has two—the little boy who choked and a baby girl who died before she could be named. Both are buried here on the farm. In working for Mother, Ann has traded time with her living children for time with her dead. Their graves abut the family graveyard, but outside the railing rather than in.
Rosalie has never felt their presence, but then she wouldn’t recognize them by feel or voice. It’s possible they’re there and just not interested in Rosalie. Sometimes she thinks she’ll ask Ann if they speak to her, but she always thinks better of it. Mother must never learn about the ghosts.
* * *
—
So Rosalie grew up with slaves all about her. As a child, she swam with the children, climbed after them into trees, joined the pack following Joe Hall, their personal Pied Piper, as he went about his business. They were some of her first playmates, but their childhoods ended while they were still children and they were returned to the estates that owned them, to work the houses and fields while their parents remained in Father’s employ.
She’d had one particular friendship, lasting nearly two years, with a little boy named Nelson. Nelson was, like Henry Byron, good at making up games and good at playing the games he’d made up. Nobody knew exactly how old he was, but probably younger than Henry and certainly younger than Rosalie. He would come into the yard some mornings after breakfast and whistle for June or Henry or Rosalie to come out—not a one-note, fingers-in-the-mouth whistle, though he could do that, too, but a whole stanza of a song Rosalie didn’t know.
Many years later, quite grown-up, Rosalie will hear this song again, hear it played on the fiddle by a man in a Baltimore park, when she is out for a Sunday stroll with her family. The others will walk on oblivious, but the tune will come for her like a fist, knocking the breath from her lungs. That tune will bring back everything. Nelson first, of course, Nelson smiling up at her from the yard, and then, the sharp, cutting memory of Mary Ann, begging to be allowed to come along when Rosalie leaves her to run off and play, and of Elizabeth, her arms outstretched, her cheeks flushed, her nose running, her light hair sparse over her baby skull.