“Mabel, that dough is too dry,” she said. “Add a bit of milk to it. Corrine, you making them pieces too big. They ain’t never gonna cook like that. Bess, go get them yams from the cellar—I ain’t gonna tell you again.” She stopped talking when she saw me.
“That the new gal?” she asked Fanny.
Fanny nodded. “Yes’m, Aunt Nancy Lynne. But she don’t talk.”
“What’s her name?”
I held my breath. If Fanny told them my name, they would ask how she knew, me showing up in the dead of night and all and not talking. But Fanny was already ahead of me and being smart about what we had to do.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“I told you, she can’t talk!”
“Dumb?”
“Don’t know, Aunt Nancy Lynne. Can’t tell if I can’t ask her.”
“Fool child, you can ask her anything. The trouble gonna be figuring out what she ain’t gonna say.” Aunt Nancy Lynne put her face so close to mine I could smell the oil of her skin. “You got sense, girl?”
I took a moment to answer. It seemed good to have sense, bad to be too quick. Finally I nodded.
“Go cut up one of them apples.”
She moved away from me so I could see the long wooden table where the other women were working. They pushed and shoved at dough, stirred batter in bowls, and sawed at slabs of meat. On the end closest to me was a bowl of red apples.
I wasn’t used to knives. The long ones looked big enough for me to chop off a finger, and they scared me. I picked up a smaller one with a thin blade and chose a big apple. I cut through it, core and all, to make it two pieces, then kept going like that until the apple was a mound of messy chunks. I wiped my hands on the bottom of the apron Fanny had tied on me. Aunt Nancy Lynne muttered, “Humph,” and went to a pot over the fire and returned to stirring and calling out.
“Lee, take what she done cut there and use it in the applesauce, but pick out them seeds. Child cut up core and all in there. Fanny, you best keep her with you for now. She’ll be in the way in here. Don’t know nothing about being in a kitchen. But I’ll teach her when I got a minute.”
Fanny hesitated.
“Go on now. She’ll do what you tell her to; she ain’t stupid.”
“But I don’t even know what to call her.”
“She looks like a Ruth to me. Call her Ruth, maybe Ruthie. That’ll be just fine.”
Fanny turned her head away from Aunt Nancy Lynne and scratched her face, and when she motioned to me to follow her, I saw she was trying not to smile. I was a slave and an orphan, and I didn’t care if I never spoke again, because no words could catch all the damn hopelessness running at me. That touch of a smile from Fanny didn’t make me feel any better, but suddenly it seemed possible that I could step in the direction of better. And now I had a name that wasn’t mine, and I was supposed to answer to it.
Fanny showed me up the back stair and put a finger to her lips to remind me not to say anything. For a moment, she couldn’t say anything herself. The climb upstairs had winded her. When she had caught her breath, she explained the family and the house. The Holloways were Missus, Massa Holloway, and a daughter and two sons, all full grown. Missus would be getting dressed in the room we approached. We had to go in when she was done and empty the night pots and clean up the washbasins. We refilled the water pitchers. Then we made up all the beds on the floor and gathered anything that needed washing. When we finished, we went downstairs to help Aunt Nancy Lynne in the kitchen. “You know how to sew?” she asked me.
I indicated that I could, a little. Dorinda had taught me.
What I remember most about that day is how we never stopped and barely ate. Aunt Nancy Lynne gave us biscuits around midday, but we had to eat them while we carried out sheets for washing. My legs walked and climbed and my arms lifted and carried more than I’d ever done my whole life. I was so exhausted by the end of the day that I fell onto the pallet and would have fallen fast asleep if Fanny had not roused me and insisted I eat a bit of the collard greens and salt pork that Aunt Nancy Lynne had given us to take back to our tiny shack.
“You’ll be all right,” Fanny said. “You just ain’t used to working. I fell asleep the same way when I first had to go work in the big house.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t rightly know. Seven or eight, I guess.”
“How old are you now?”
“Don’t know when I was born. How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“It seem like I’m older than you, don’t it?”
“Yes. I’d say you’re fifteen or sixteen. Calista, my half sister—you remind me of her. She’s sixteen.”
I went quiet for a moment. “Fanny?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to get used to this life.”
“What else you gon’ do?”
“I don’t know. Not this.”
Those early days of no freedom could have been days of misery. But I was with Fanny. I followed her throughout the house every day emptying chamber pots, washing linens. At night we helped Aunt Nancy Lynne and the other women scrub down the kitchen worktables, wash the dishes, and prepare for the work Aunt Nancy Lynne did at night. Aunt Nancy Lynne liked that my hands were small and careful. She trusted me with the Holloway china, which I cleaned with a soft rag in a pot of soapy hot water.
I felt so grateful to Fanny that I wanted to teach her how to read. It was the only gift I had to offer. Maybe I could unlock something for her, help her feel some of the freedom I had known, give her a piece of the world from one of Papa’s maps. But she refused to learn.
“Don’t make sense for me to read. What would I do with learning? Where would I get a book to look at? If Overseer Everett caught a slave peeking at a Bible, even if it was nothing but the pictures, he’d whip the skin off the bones—man, woman, or child. Don’t matter who.”
But Fanny, as I suspected, was smart. She didn’t want to read, but she had a curiosity about language. I’d been on the plantation about two or three months when we were doing our whispering before going to sleep and she asked me about a word.
“Other day Missus Holloway told me to tell Massa Holloway in the dining room that she gonna be there—” She stopped and slowly formed the pr sound on her lips. “Present-ly. What that mean? Like a Christmas present? Why she say that?”
“Just meant she was gonna go to him soon. Spelled like present, though. The word got two meanings.”
“Two? How you supposed to know both? How can you read it if they look the same?”
“You just know—all the other words around it tell you which meaning to use.”
“Oh Lord.” She laughed. “That’s too hard.”
“You would remember it, Fanny. You’re smart enough to remember.”
“I remember the way my name looked in the ashes when you put it there. I’ll never forget that, for sure.”
Suddenly she gripped my hand.
“Shh!” she hissed.
We heard it far down the lane—a distinct sound of a foot leaving the drive from the big house and biting into the gravel with the first crunch of movement toward the slave quarters. Fanny pressed her hand over my mouth and moved her lips close to my ear. She spoke so softly I only caught the words “no matter what happens.”