We lay still in the dark. The fire had burned out long ago. I prayed the dark would protect us, make us invisible so whoever was out there wouldn’t find us and would keep on walking. My plea went unanswered.
When he opened the door, the smell of him flooded the shack. He stank of whiskey and sweat and the mustiness of a cellar. I crouched closer to Fanny.
Next thing I knew, he was on top of me. He didn’t say anything. His large puffy hands fumbled over me and pulled at my shift. The shock of his silence kept me from crying out with words. I pushed at his chest and shoulders, but my thin, straw-like arms were useless. I felt another hand on me, on my shoulder, and I realized another set of hands was pushing and we were all tied into a wordless, grunting, whimpering ball of struggle. Fanny was pushing me off the pallet. I slid onto the dirt floor and rolled away. He must have thought she was fighting him. I heard the blow of his hand against some part of her, her head or her face. Then Fanny, I knew, was the one underneath him. I wanted to help her, but her left arm stuck out straight, keeping me away from her. I wanted to leap onto Everett, for this was certainly him, and rip at his hair and pull his eyes out to get him off Fanny.
He grunted and panted and sounded, at times, breathless. But Fanny’s silence deafened me. I stifled the tears rising in my throat. It was over fast, and Everett stumbled out after, still without a word.
I wanted a knife in my hands. I thought only the cool of a blade pressed into Everett’s white flesh could lessen my burning anger.
“I’m all right,” Fanny finally whispered.
“Fanny.” I wet a rag in the small bowl of water from our table and crawled back onto the pallet. I took a guess as to where her bruises might be and touched the rag carefully to her face.
“Shh.”
“He does this?”
“Shhh. Yeah.”
“You pushed me away.”
“You too young. Wouldn’t know how to take it.”
“I’ll never let him do that to me.”
“Like you could’ve stopped him just now?”
I was silent. My anger soured into shame. I lay the wet rag on her forehead, and I turned away from her on the pallet.
“Jeannette,” she said. “You don’t know nothing about being a nigger.”
“Me being a nigger is like you with reading. Something I don’t want to learn.”
“You don’t learn, you get yourself killed. Or worse. Just pray. Pray for all of us.”
I folded my arms beneath my head. “Pray to who?” I asked. “And what for?”
“God.”
“God don’t seem to be much good around here.”
“You don’t know that. All of us dumb when it come to that.”
I sat up again. A warm bubble of anger formed deep in my chest. “What do you mean?” I said. “Like there’s a reason for negro men to be branded like cattle? And you and, for that matter, my mama being taken against your will?”
Fanny touched my arm and shushed me. “God don’t cause any of this craziness,” she said. “He probably just as mad about it as you are.”
“Then why don’t he do something about it?”
“How do you know he ain’t?”
I bowed my head. I thought about how I didn’t have Papa or a mama; how Madame had sent me away.
“It’s awful you here,” Fanny said, like she’d been reading my mind. “But you ended up with me, and we can look after each other. That’s something.”
“Yes.”
“So pray to God and say, Thank you! You can do that.”
She pulled me to lie down again, and she put an arm around me.
“I guess so,” I said. But I didn’t see my way to it just yet.
Church at Catalpa Valley happened every week. It involved a lot of talk about hell, and that didn’t interest me. Sounded like God caused plenty of trouble.
“What do you know about God, Fanny? Is there a church here?”
“I don’t need no church. I feel God around me all the time, even when I was little. Don’t need no white man waving a big old book at me to tell me about God. And I suspect that white man making up a lot of what he talks about anyway.”
I didn’t know what “worse” meant for Fanny, but I suppose there are other ways of dying. Like how, with each encounter with Boss Everett, my heart reconsidered the story of Jean Bébinn and my mama and my living in the world. I thought about what it had been like for my mama, whether Papa had gone stealing into her bed and, night by night, taking her soul away in pieces. When I closed my eyes, I tried to recall her face in the locket, her expression blank—neither serene nor frightened, neither happy nor sad.
“He come out here after his wife got big with a baby,” Fanny said. I had asked her about Everett and whether he had a wife. “He stops messing around when you get big like that.”
“What? You had a baby?”
“Naw.” She paused. “Well, I did. But she was dead when she was born. Boss stayed away after it happened. Now he back.”
“I’m sorry about your baby.”
“I’m not good at carrying a baby.”
I put my arms around her.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You’re good at everything.”
“Well, right now we have to take care of you. If he gon’ start up again regular, you can’t be here.”
“Where am I gonna go? I don’t wanna stay with anyone else. I don’t know nobody else.”
“Aunt Nancy Lynne will know. Maybe you can help her with her night work.”
“Aunt Nancy Lynne, can Ruthie help you bake crackers?”
Aunt Nancy Lynne’s crackers and pastries were famous all across the countryside. Neighbors requested her wares for their special occasions, and the Holloways allowed her to earn her own money baking. She did it at night, after her kitchen duties were over.
“Why would she want to stay up all night in the kitchen with me?” Aunt Nancy Lynne paused over the chicken she was carving up into parts. She peered over her glasses and studied Fanny. “Boss Everett bothering you again?”
Fanny’s chin dipped to her chest, and she nodded. She squeezed my hand, and I didn’t know what else to do but look down too. Because now I would be really alone and without words. When would I speak now? No one else cared for me. I received only cold looks from the quarters when Fanny and I walked to and from the house. Those looks came of my looking too strange, too white. To the other slaves, my looking like that meant I could only be a spy or some kind of abomination.
But Aunt Nancy Lynne spoke to that, too, like she knew what I was thinking.
“She gon’ have to talk if she work with me. Don’t look at me like that, Fanny. I know the girl can talk.” She narrowed her eyes and peered at me. “Can’t you? I hear you sometimes.”
“It’s not her fault,” Fanny said. “Man who sold her threatened to hurt her.” She lowered her voice. “And she can read.”
“Can she work figures too?”
Fanny looked at me, and I nodded.
“All right then. Leave her to me.”
That night Aunt Nancy Lynne laid out a pallet for me behind a curtain in the pantry. She gave me a biscuit and a bit of ham to eat for dinner and told me to lie down and rest. She would call me when she was ready for me to work.