“That coulda been my head. But I was too quick for him.” Silas shrugged. “Anyway, I figured right there I was gon’ stop being scared. Just gonna be me. If I’m me, I can handle things just like I did that burn. They not gonna make me live like a rat. Not Silas.”
What Silas said made sense to me. Made sense when nothing else around me did. Being afraid wouldn’t get me anywhere. I suspected it was the same as with Amesbury—a slave had a certain value; all of us did, from someone small and obscure like me to someone as polished and shining as Silas to every single soul laboring under the sun in the fields each day. The Holloways lost money if one of us died. That was why they were so invested in the whip and branding—pain induced fear, and the fear kept it all going. I don’t know if Amesbury would have cut out my tongue, but it got me to thinking about how to figure out what was a real threat and what was a fear threat. And what could I risk when I knew which was which?
The summer after I turned thirteen, in 1852, I did my risking by not doing what I was supposed to be doing, at least not right away. I would do my work with Aunt Nancy Lynne, but instead of going straight back to Fanny, I would use the warm nights to explore on foot what I could of the Holloway Plantation. That was how I found the clearing where I had been the first night I arrived. Another night I followed Silas because I knew he slept somewhere in the woods but close to the stables. He had a place even nicer than Aunt Nancy Lynne’s, with even boards, whitewashed and pretty. He had a small garden, and I figured that was why he was so well fed. This exploration would be harder to do when I got older. I had to do as much as possible. Take a few chances as they might come to me.
But one chance I didn’t take: In late August, when I’d been at Holloway’s about a year, I saw two slaves running away. It was a man and a woman, one following closely behind the other, slipping through the dark of the woods. The next night Aunt Nancy Lynne told me it was Laney and her husband, Montgomery. They hadn’t been found yet.
“Do you think they will be?”
She was sewing and not looking up. “From now on, it’s day by day,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Every day they’re gone is a chance they’ll stay gone.” She shrugged. “Dogs would have a harder time tracking them.”
Fanny, when I got back to our pallet, said she liked that Montgomery and Laney had gone together.
“If one had gone without the other, they’d be lost forever, like one of them be dead.”
“Seems that’s what you have to do,” I said. “We don’t have anything else but trying to protect the people we love. I think that’s what keeps Aunt Nancy Lynne going.”
Suddenly a scream, raw and desperate, pierced the night air.
“Lawd, Jesus Christ, NOOOOOOOO!”
Then sounds of horses trotting and dogs barking. I wanted to go to the door, but Fanny held my arm tight.
“Don’t,” she said. “Stay here with me. It’ll be worse if you see it.”
“See what?”
“They done caught ’em. Montgomery and Laney. They been caught.”
I gasped. I wanted to know how she knew, but then I heard Boss Everett’s voice, loud and taunting.
“Welcome home! Hey, niggers! Mr. Montgomery and Miss Laney have come back! Why don’t y’all come on out and greet ’em real nice.”
I could hear movement, so I knew people were obeying, but their silence pained my heart. I didn’t know what they were seeing, but it was clear Boss Everett was making an example out of the runaways. I shut my eyes and tried not to imagine the condition of the husband and wife. Fanny and I held hands and cringed with the sound of each lash of the whip. They were being whipped at the same time, so both man and woman cried out in a way that was both frightening and unseemly, like a man should never have to hear his wife screaming like that, and she shouldn’t have to hear him plead for mercy. I didn’t know how they could look at each other after that.
In the morning Montgomery and Laney were taken to a slave market and sold off separately.
There were things I had wanted to know from them—which is probably why they were sold: to keep other slaves from asking questions to figure out if they could do the same and be successful where Montgomery and Laney hadn’t been. Which way had they gone? How far had they gotten? Had they seen any other runaways? Boss Everett meant to set an example, but with me anyway, he failed. Montgomery and Laney’s running off inspired me to continue my explorations and see how I might make an attempt of my own.
By that December, though, Fanny was with child and so sick I couldn’t think of leaving her. She threw up every morning, so bad on one day that I made her stay in bed. I worked for both of us. As her baby grew, I felt a resentment growing within me. It was like I was watching my papa and mama’s story play out in front of me—my mama having no choice but to take Papa into her bed. Giving birth to a child who could never have any place or standing in the world. I began to see Papa’s land for me, Petite Bébinn, to be poor recompense, for it wouldn’t have been any better than another form of enslavement—me living there alone, almost no better than being a kept woman. Too light for the notice of some, my light-brown hair too rough and nappy, signaling I was in fact too dark to be accepted by the rest. The thought sapped my resolve. Where would I go if I left the Holloway Plantation? Would Catalpa Valley, with Madame in charge, really be a better place? I began to see that maybe a better place wasn’t anywhere. I might as well stay with Fanny and Aunt Nancy Lynne and Silas.
“You don’t ask me nothing about my baby,” Fanny whispered. It was spring. Aunt Nancy Lynne had said the baby would come in the summer.
“I know where it is. Belly against my back every night. What else do I need to know?”
But I did ask her something.
“Fanny, where are your mama and papa?”
“Never knew my daddy. My mama looked after me and most of the babies here. Taught us how to pick seeds out of the cotton. Taught the girls how to sew. Made sure we didn’t make no trouble.”
“Where is she now?”
“Don’t rightly know. Ran away when I was about your age.”
“Ran away?” My heart thumped hard. “They never caught her?”
“They didn’t miss her right away. I was working in the big house. Then they figured she would come back ’cause of me. She knew they’d whip me.”
“Fanny, no . . .”
She took my hand and put it down the back of her shift. My fingers found the raised cords of flesh on her skin.
“Two lashes,” she said. “Only two on account of my being so young. Corinne in the kitchen got five for spilling a glass of water on one of Massa Holloway’s dinner guests. So I was glad it was two.”
“Don’t it make you mad?”
“Mad about what? Mad my mama left? About getting whipped? That’s the way things are. What good would it do to be mad? I’d have to be mad every day.”
I touched her back again. “I’m mad every day,” I said.
“You been used to a different life, that’s all. Now I can tell you what I’d be mad at.”