I was thrown to the ground and told, “Stay!” Then a colored man, naked to the waist, was thrown near me. He landed heavy like a sack of potatoes and didn’t move or make a sound.
“Nigger passed out,” I heard a gruff voice say.
The man’s face was half-concealed behind a length of leather strapped over his mouth. There was enough firelight for me to see he was unconscious. When he hit the ground, an awful smell reached me. I saw a huge welt in the shape of an H and a W together rising from his skin, and I realized I was smelling burning flesh. I threw up.
Someone grabbed me by the wrist.
“What about this one? Jeez, she’s messed all over herself.”
Again, a light was shone in my face, and I stared into the face of what I was sure was the devil. One of his eyes was dead blue, the other brown. He had thick, greasy lips that protruded from underneath a heavy, dark mustache.
The one who’d grabbed me said, “She’s little, ain’t she? Just a bag of bones.”
The devil man spat out tobacco juice. “Amesbury said she’s twelve.”
“I’d sell my prize hog to slaughter if she is! I’d say ten at the most.”
“Either way, we shouldn’t brand her. She so light that Missus Holloway will want her in the big house. Gal almost white. Blue eyes and all.”
“Go put her in Fanny’s place. She’ll look after her in the morning. Aunt Nancy Lynne can sort her out after that.”
The hands carried me somewhere and shoved me into a dark space. I fell into something that felt like a table. My side hurt.
“Who’s there?” The voice sounded high but calm. I said nothing.
“Ain’t you got a name?”
I stayed quiet but breathed hard from the pain in my side.
“Come on over here.”
I followed the voice in the darkness and felt smaller hands this time. They went over my shoulders up to my head and held my face between them.
“Lawd, you ain’t nothing but a chile. Lie down here. Go to sleep.”
The voice reminded me of Calista’s—the voice of someone not yet a woman but no longer a girl. I obeyed her and, with my own hands out in front of me, felt my way down to a pallet on the floor. It had a roughness that made me think it was made of hay and with a rough covering like burlap. It wasn’t bare wood floor like the cart, so I was grateful for the pallet and the voice that had led me to it. The voice’s soft hands cradled me to her like a doll, and I felt warm and even safe. I fell asleep.
“Lawdy, help me!”
I opened my eyes and saw that my bedmate had drawn away from me. She’d pulled the cloth of her shift to her mouth like she wanted to muffle the sound.
“You a white girl?”
“No.” Then I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand. I looked around the room and saw nothing but a rough table and the smoke of a small fire burning out black and dirty in the hearth. I whispered, “He said never to speak.”
“Who?”
I moved away from her, the both of us at the ends of the pallet. I had more right to be scared. She had sounded like a girl, but to see her in daylight, she was much bigger than me, with heavy breasts and thick hips that made her seem full grown. But I sensed she looked older than she was in the same way that I looked younger than I was. I couldn’t have scared an adult the way I had scared her. She must have seen I was more afraid than she was, because she lowered her voice too.
“It’s all right. Nobody here but us.”
“The man who brought me here.”
“How come you can’t talk?”
“They might find out. Find out I can read.”
She sucked air through her teeth. “Writin’ too?”
I nodded.
“Show me.”
I went to the hearth and knelt near the ashes on the floor. She stood tall over me. I guessed she couldn’t be much older than Calista. Her large breasts were barely contained by the loose cloth of her shift.
“What’s your name?” I whispered.
“Fanny.”
With my finger I drew the letters into the dust and ashes. When I was done, she stared hard at the word and traced the indentations with her own long fingers.
“That’s me. That say me.”
Her hands went to her face, and the ash dusted the cheeks of her tawny-brown skin. She closed her eyes, and I thought she might even lick the ash from her fingers. She looked again at the floor.
“Fanny.”
She stood and shuffled her wide bare feet through the letters until they were smeared and gone, and I wondered how she could stand to have her feet so dirty. But we stood on a dirt floor, and I guessed dirt was the way of life in this place. Like Madame had said, dirt was all my mama had. Now dirt was how I had to live.
“That man right. Boss Everett, he the overseer, whip us both to death. But he don’t know?”
I nodded, then asked, “Is that the man with the different-colored eyes?”
“Yeah. Don’t say nothin’ to nobody but me.” She lowered her voice even more. “And whisper. Can’t let anybody hear.”
I nodded again.
“What they call you?”
“Jeannette. I’m Jeannette Bébinn.”
“No Bébinn now. We all called Holloway. That’s your name.”
“I am Bébinn! My papa was Jean Bébinn and—”
“Hush! We got to eat and get up to the house. From now on we only talk at night. We be safe that way.”
Fanny stirred up the fire and put a grate over it along with a small cast-iron skillet. She made bland hoecakes out of nothing but some cornmeal, water, and lard. She ate quickly and twice the amount that I managed to swallow. I chewed the makeshift breakfast best I could.
“I won’t say any more until night,” I said. “But Fanny, tell me now. Where am I?”
“This here’s Mississippi.”
Off the maps, that was what that meant to me. No longer on Catalpa Plantation, far from the dirt of my papa’s land. But how far? I couldn’t figure. Were we still near the big river? And how far north?
Fanny grabbed my hand. “Come on now. Gotta hurry.”
We walked along a lane of shacks, rougher than the slave quarters at Catalpa. No steps or small porches. Just row after row of sadness—that was what it seemed like anyway. When the shacks ended, the lane curved to the right and moved under tall trees. Trees so tall I couldn’t see the whole of the big house when we got to it. The house took all the shade while the wood of the shacks baked and dried out in the heat of the sun. We went to the back of the house, where she pushed down on a latch of a back door and we went in. Fanny took an apron from a hook on the wall of a small anteroom and tied it over my dress. Then she grabbed a large black dress from another hook and pulled it on over her shift. She tied on an apron and led me into the house kitchen. We put on soft-soled shoes that made no sound when we walked across the floor.
The room smelled familiar—corn bread, real corn bread and not what I had just eaten, cooled on a side table, and there was a big fire, coffee boiling. Just like Dorinda would have had it at Catalpa. The way it still was, going on without me. My fingers grasped the stone Dorinda had given me in the pocket of my dress, and I took in the whole of the kitchen. It was bigger than Dorinda’s, where she sometimes toiled alone. Four women moved about in the Holloway kitchen. But I could see, or rather hear, they weren’t in charge. A strong-looking tall woman wearing a black dress and white apron decorated with two lengths of white ruffle that crisscrossed her chest worked at tearing collards from their thick stems with her sandy-colored fingers and delivered a stream of commands and criticism while she did it.