And Samuel held his head and cried. His plans for Eliza Two had been dashed: he could not abide ugliness or imperfection in any being.
And Samuel’s affection had been cast aside: Nick, the only human being he’d ever loved had run away, and before that, he had arranged Samuel’s defeat. This is what Samuel would believe for a very long time: he would be unaware of who actually had crossed him. Samuel didn’t know that Aggie had been his opponent. Her woman’s spirit had reawakened, even in the bleakness.
The Aftermath of Scars
In North Carolina, a territory far from our land, there lived a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She was the daughter of two mulattoes whose parents had been mulattoes in turn. Such proximity to the blood of her masters had been considered a gift and would be touted as such in the next century, by male thinkers and writers who did not understand the plight of women. Who considered themselves experts on the rivalry between “the house” and “the field.” The ability to place brown paper next to a hand or face and remark on the skin’s light victory. The pulling of a fine-tooth comb through hair with ease, instead of an encountering of resistance.
Yet when Harriet Jacobs would write about her life as a slave, how, like Frederick Douglass, she would eventually escape bondage, how before her freedom, she had hidden for seven years in the small space of an attic—space that was only rivaled in its misery by the hull of a slave ship—Harriet would describe the labor of those Negroes who lived next to the mouths of plantation big houses. The girls and women who would be forced to bear their master’s light-skinned children. And those children could not claim their masters as fathers, and sometimes were sold. And should we speak of what is tapping at the back of logic’s skull? That enslaved boys and men were not safe from their masters’ reach, either?
Thus, Harriet would alert her readers that there was no difference between “house” and “field.” Though daytime labor might have been easier in the master’s kitchen or in his laundry, when night fell and the Quarters-folks laid their exhausted bodies on floor pallets, those slaves who tended to the masters slept with fear. And those women and girls—and sometimes boys and men—had aching bodies as well, not from cultivating rice or tobacco or cotton, but from withstanding the weight of their masters—and sometimes mistresses—on their bellies or chests or backs. And these slaves turned their heads toward walls to keep from breathing the conqueror’s air.
When Eliza Two was shorn and scarred, she was eleven years old. Her father had begged her to run away, but she did not want to leave her mother, and the only home she’d known. Yet she had acquired an adult’s knowledge.
As a very small child, Eliza Two had been proud of her bright color and her long, glossy hair, which had been remarked upon by the Quarters-children she had played with, before she shed her front teeth. And if she didn’t guess that her lighter skin separated her from her playmates, the larger, two-room cabin where her twin, her parents, Aggie, and Pop George lived announced superiority, for Eliza Two’s playmates were jammed along with thirteen or fourteen other Quarters-folks into a one-room structure. When her front teeth fell out, Eliza Two was not sent to the field wearing a ragged tunic. She was dressed in a linsey-woolsey frock sewn by Tess. Shoes were put on her feet, cast-offs from her master’s daughter. There was food of varied kinds in the big house kitchen. And Eliza Two had begun to take on airs of superiority, though she had been lectured against this by her grandmother. Eliza Two even had felt superior to her twin sister, because Rabbit was dark-skinned with coiled, wooly hair.
The realization of her past foolishness would take some time for Eliza Two to grasp. Yet before that era of wisdom, there would exist in her a sadness and anger toward her master and her grandmother. Eliza Two would feel ugly and ashamed, and she would retreat into quietness, where before, she had been a sparkling, charming child.
The one blessing in this hooded time was that Samuel Pinchard pretended that Eliza Two did not exist. He removed her from the big house, but did not throw her into the fields, for he still believed that Nick would return, and Samuel did not want Nick to leave again in anger over Eliza Two’s mistreatment. She became the only Negro on the premises without a purpose: silently, she sat in the yard in front of her cabin, listening to Pop George tell stories to the littlest ones. She ignored the apologetic glances of her grandmother, who asked Eliza Two’s forgiveness every day. Yet the girl did not yet have sympathy for Aggie. The memory of the knife was too fresh, especially when the scabs fell from her cheeks and were replaced by wormed scars.