And work I did. I prepared the ingredients—cut up butter, sifted flour—while Aunt Nancy Lynne performed the magic of putting it together the right way. I built up fires and moved the pans of buns, crackers, and rolls in and out of the oven. This became my existence at the Holloway Plantation. When I was done baking with Aunt Nancy Lynne, I would walk back to the barren four walls I shared with Fanny. If Everett had been there, he would be gone by then. I would fall onto the pallet and into a deep sleep.
We did eat a little better because of my work with Aunt Nancy Lynne. Instead of leftover flour and scraps of fat we were allowed to scavenge after the Holloways’ dinner was done, Aunt Nancy Lynne would send me away with a fresh bit of bread or a small basket of crackers. It became poor comfort, though, as the months passed and the winter came on. The winters were mild but cold, and our thin clothes, made from scraps like the food we ate, provided no warmth. Aunt Nancy Lynne and Fanny worked through the autumn to stitch together new dresses of linsey-woolsey so we’d look presentable working in the house for the holidays.
Another thing I liked about night work: When the men who worked late or at other plantations came back, they would stop in the kitchen, and Aunt Nancy Lynne would feed them. This was how we got news. One slave, Silas, knew the most because he traveled with Massa and had gone on many journeys with him. He’d been on trains and had seen cities like New Orleans and Atlanta. His appearance was different, too—he was always clean shaven and wearing nice clothing that Aunt Nancy Lynne had made for him.
Silas was how we found out about what the abolitionists were up to and how the people of the Southern states didn’t want to stop keeping slaves.
“If abolitionists had their way, we’d all be free tomorrow,” he said.
Aunt Nancy Lynne shook her head. “Guess they don’t have their way, do they? And I don’t see them getting it anytime soon.” She often sounded bitter, and I soon learned she had good reason to be.
Working so close to her as I did, I got to know her better. She was intelligent and highly valued by the Holloways for her wisdom. That was why they let her earn money. She’d wanted to buy the freedom of her children, a boy and a girl, who she had kept as close to her as she could. Her little shack on the lane was the nicest because the boy had learned carpentry skills and kept the shed in good repair. They were allowed to live as a family, and she thought that she could save up enough to buy their freedom.
“But my boy, Jacob, he got hired out on New Year’s Day, 1850.”
Every year on the plantation, after the holidays, came the day when the Holloways would hire out slaves to work elsewhere until planting season came around. It was always a fretful time. A scant few might better their situation if they went to a kindly owner who clothed and fed his slaves well. But mostly that wasn’t the case, and any slave who knew better would rather shiver in their windblown shacks than work for a massa who could only afford to hire slaves and not have his own. They were the meanest souls because they knew nothing they had was any good. The only thing that kept them from working a slave to death was the knowledge that they had to bring them back in a few months.
Aunt Nancy Lynne’s son had been hired to a good massa, but that had turned out to be a blessing and a curse. A blessing because he’d been valued and well fed. A curse because the man could afford to buy Jacob away from the Holloways.
“I still figured I could buy him back. Worked my fingers to the bones, didn’t sleep for what seemed like a year. I had three hundred and twelve dollars. Three hundred and twelve dollars of good paper money.”
“Was it enough?” I asked. I felt a twinge of hope despite knowing the answer couldn’t have been in Aunt Nancy Lynne’s favor. She was still shoving dough in hot ovens in the middle of the night, and there was no sense of joy about her.
“Won’t never be enough. White folks will never let it be enough.” She rubbed her hands against each other, and the flour on her skin drifted into the air between us. “One day the Boyce brothers came by the house with a brand-new chandelier Missus ordered for the front hall. Made of brass, it was. I was thinking about who the poor nigger gonna be to have to polish the thing. Then Missus asked me to loan her money to pay for it.”
“What? Why?”
“She went all pouty. Say, ‘Aunt Nancy Lynne, go in and get me the money to pay Mr. Boyce. You know my husband isn’t home.’ I said the Boyces could bring the chandelier back when Massa come home. She smacked me on the back of my head and told me don’t be ornery. ‘It’s just a loan,’ she say. That she didn’t want the Boyces to take the chandelier all the way back to their place; it was too big and too heavy.”
The corners of Aunt Nancy Lynne’s mouth hung down. “So I went in there and got my money and gave it to her. That was six months ago. Ain’t seen a dime from her since.”
“But that’s not right.”
“Who gon’ say so? Me? A court of law? Girl, I know you smarter than that. If the children I birthed from my own body aren’t mine, what claim I got to three hundred dollars?”
I stared at the table full of finished breads. Why were we doing all this?
“The Holloways own me, and as long as they own me, I don’t own nothing.”
“Why do you keep baking?”
“Because I don’t let on to Missus what I take in anymore. Not all of it anyway. I keep enough to give her when she asks for it. Got a hiding place for the rest. Gonna get some freedom for somebody one of these days.”
The days stretched into months. My existence at the Holloway Plantation changed very little. I didn’t call attention to myself, but I knew it would be harder to go unnoticed as I got older. Even at Catalpa Valley, when a female slave reached a certain age, it seemed everyone had an eye on her, negroes and whites alike. White women wanted to use her skills, like Missus did with Aunt Nancy Lynne, or keep her beaten down and away from their husbands. Men wanted to use her like Boss Everett used Fanny. But if the man was a slave, at least there was the possibility of marriage and a family. And this had me thinking about my mama again.
Chapter 4
Aunt Nancy Lynne said Silas could be trusted, and because I trusted her, I talked with him. I liked asking him questions about his travels. From him I learned that the Holloway Plantation was farther east than I’d known before. And there were places where a traveler could get on a train or board a coach and cross many miles. Silas had gone as far north as Virginia with Massa Holloway and didn’t shy away from talking about it. In fact, I liked that about him—he didn’t seem afraid or burdened by his lot. Seemed like he didn’t have a fearful bone in his body. He laughed when I told him so.
“I used to be scared. Scared enough to be scared for every soul under this roof. Scared about being cold, scared about not having enough to eat, scared about gettin’ whipped.” He sat in a corner, cleaning and polishing boots.
“What happened?”
“Just got tired of being scared, I guess. It didn’t do nothing. Didn’t stop Boss Everett from burning me with the fireplace poker when he thought I was lookin’ at ’im sideways.” Silas pulled up his sleeve and showed me the long, thick line of blackened skin running like a mountain ridge along his forearm.