“And then what happen?” Beauty would ask again.
“Nothin’ else, baby,” Kiné would tell her daughter. “I’se here now, and so is your daddy. And we both loves you. That’s all you need to know.” And she would take her daughter into her arms.
A Terrible Journey
There were years of happiness for Kiné and then tragedy: Baron and Helen died of a sickness that struck the territory, and Kiné died soon after. Undone by his losses, Paul began to take to drink, to go off into the wilderness for two or three days. While he was gone, his daughter, Beauty, tended to the farm, keeping a gun and a long staff by her side to scare off animals.
One morning after an extended, drunken absence, Paul returned with a woman, riding in front on his horse. Paul didn’t say where the woman had come from, but she was neither a Creek woman nor a mestizo. She was white and, based on her rough manner and reddened hands, she was not from a family of means. Paul seemed bewildered by his new wife’s presence even as she moved into the larger room where his parents had slept. When Beauty went to her father, complaining that her grandmother had told her this bed would go to Beauty after Helen’s passing, Paul told her she was being selfish. He had been very lonely. Yet the white woman didn’t stop Paul’s drinking and in months he sickened and died.
After the burial of her husband, Beauty’s stepmother pretended not to know that the small farm now belonged to Paul’s daughter. One morning she told Beauty she had a great surprise for her. Beauty was relieved; perhaps she and her stepmother would finally be friends. They rode the horse together until they came to the federal road that had been cut through the lands of the Cherokee and the Creek. There, a white man and a young mulatto stood by a wagon. The mulatto grabbed Beauty. As she struggled, she saw the white man hand her stepmother money, and she understood: Beauty had been sold as a slave to a trader.
It was a weeklong journey in the wagon as the slave trader stopped other places and acquired more slaves. During the day, there were only two corn cakes apiece for each slave. At night, cooked streak-o-lean to chew on. Throughout the day, blessed sips of water. It snowed in stingy specks or they were plagued with freezing rain. The two little girls were lucky; they were allowed to sit in the back of the wagon. Beauty and the other woman walked behind without fetters. There were purchased men, too, chained together behind the horse of the trader. Beauty was also lucky; she’d been wearing shoes when she was sold. The others in and beside the wagon were barefoot, and the other woman caught frostbite. The mulatto boy held the woman down while the trader did the ax work. When the screaming started, Beauty made a bare spot in her mind. She crawled into it.
Now the woman with no feet sat in the wagon. She cradled the little girls and gave them their water. Beauty slowed her walking and held hands with the woman. During the times of rest, Beauty braided the hair of the little girls in rows like corn, as her mother had worn her hair. When the wagon stopped for the next to last time, a white man came out from a large cabin and picked up the woman with no feet. The rags wrapped around her stumps fell away, exposing raw meat to the cold. The woman dropped into a faint. Beauty fainted, too, and when she awoke she was in the wagon and the woman with no feet was gone. The little girls were gone, too.
Beauty crawled back into her bare space, and when she was sensible again, she saw that she stood in the middle of a field. Woven between the twigs of the plants was whiteness, though not as pure as snow or as beautiful as the tail of a deer. She shielded her eyes. There was a voice behind her, speaking English.
“All this be cotton.” She turned to see a very small man: he was the height of a child and his short legs were bowed, like twigs bent before breaking. “All that over there be cotton, too. Ain’t no way to get away from it. It’a follow you into your dreams and it’a be sleeping beside you on your cooling board.”
Beauty was wary. This man was the size of a child, but as such, he might be “one of the little.” She had to be careful. Helen McCain had spoken of these little people—powerful supernatural beings who would walk through ordinary people’s lives, but who could not be trusted. If disrespected, they could cause terrible events.
Then the small man surprised her: he spoke in the language of Kiné, who had taught her child the simplest of greetings in the Wolof of her African home.
“Salamalaikum,” he said.
“Malaikum salaam,” Beauty said haltingly.
“Na nga def?” he asked.