The Place Where the Monster Will Play,
The Place Where the Monster Will Harm
Samuel became a man of ingenuity as he slowly took over Micco’s farm. In addition to Samuel’s thriving cotton harvest, he built a general store where poor, middling, and wealthy white men came together to buy their supplies. There were only two of the latter in the territory. The rich men mostly kept to themselves, though along with Samuel, they had invested in the town’s only cotton gin.
Samuel considered himself a happy man, except for his hungers, which he had difficulty feeding. He would mount his horse and ride through the countryside, until he found a yeoman farmer who would accept money for the use of a little Negro girl. Samuel learned that he couldn’t be choosy during these times. He paid the dollar or two for these moments.
Darker-skinned children had been his favorites at first, but he began choosing bright-skinned girls after he’d expanded his body of scholarly knowledge. He had been surprised to learn that, as Ezekiel had patiently explained to him, the majority of mulattoes were sterile, except in extraordinary cases. Samuel had also examined the works of Petrus Camper, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume from the eighteenth century, how they’d measured the skulls of Negroes and compared them with great apes’ and found them very similar. In his own century, he’d found the treatises of Samuel Morton to be immeasurable—and was very pleased that this brilliant scientist had carried his same name—but if Samuel Pinchard were honest （and not at all arrogant）， these learned observations were not earthshaking, only logical. Samuel’s regret was that he had no inclination for the written arts himself, for if he had, he believed he could have given the scholars a run for their money. And he read the Bible, learning that, along with Cain, Ham, the son of Noah, was responsible for the cursed color of the Negro. God had placed them on the earth to carry burdens, the Negro men and boys were ordained to exhaust themselves in brutish labor, and Negro women and girls to tolerate the weight of white men on their bodies, and if it pleased God, to nurture the seed of their white masters within their wombs. That was the prescribed order of this world, and even in Heaven, Negroes would be expected to serve cheerfully.
And thus Samuel had bought Mamie, the beautiful dark girl whom he chose to work in his kitchen. But he’d forgotten Ezekiel’s teachings and so miscalculated: Mamie was not a sterile mulatta, as his past mentor had talked about. She was a full-blood Negress, and she conceived; though her frame had been thin and she’d given every appearance of not having yet bled, Samuel’s assault had made her pregnant. Yet her hips had been too narrow for labor, and she died after giving birth to a baby boy. So much miscalculation: Mamie may have given the impression of childhood, with her short height and minuscule frame, and the high-pitched octave of her voice, but in fact, Lancaster Polcott, the trader, had no provenance for her birth. When Samuel had discovered Mamie’s pregnancy, he’d estimated her to be around twelve. Yet she was older, though her exact birth date had not been recorded by her original owner. There were many stunted slave girls and women like this: in their early years, their growth was abridged by a lack of hearty mother’s milk, and then a lack of proper food.
The death of Mamie had cast a pall over the plantation. Work slowed, even when Samuel allowed Carson Franklin, the overseer since his father had passed, to use his whip. Samuel ignored the accusatory looks thrown his way from the Quarters-folks. He was the master of this plantation, and as Micco had in times past, when Samuel walked the earth of his plantation, he whispered that this land belonged to him, as did everything that grew upon it. The blossoms, the greenery, the trees, the peaches and other fruit. The creatures: the horses, the cattle, the pigs, the chickens, the Negroes. Under the law, Samuel could do as he willed with any of his creatures—even kill—and no one would take him to task. Thus, any little girl he wanted was his to ruin as he saw fit.
Yet Mamie’s death threw permanent shadows into Samuel’s life: Nick, the child she would bear, and the wrath of Aggie. Nick would become the only person that Samuel would ever love, and Aggie the only person who would acquaint Samuel with shame.
He had been shocked by both emotions that morning when Aggie had brought the baby out to him, wrapped in clean cloth. She’d told him only the Lord could save Mamie. She’d described the girl’s condition, how she was weak and in pain and couldn’t stop bleeding. Her frown had accused Samuel, though her words had been devoid of expression, and suddenly, shame had assaulted him. He’d thought he was suffering from a bout of indigestion, for his stomach lurched. Then he felt weeping coming on, and a feeling he’d never experienced before: self-recrimination. For several seconds, he’d known himself to be a bad person. To push the feeling aside, he’d pulled the cloth off Nick. The baby was white-skinned and blond. His eyes were tightly closed, but in six months, they would change from a newborn’s blue to the eyes of his father. Samuel made a sound—an “oh” of marvel and gratitude—and tears stung his eyelids.