She could not pretend she didn’t hear him. It would be bad manners to do so. “Ma ngi fi. Na nga def?” Beauty replied that she was fine, though she lied. And how was he?
“Jamm rek, alhamdulillah.” The small man told her he only had peace, praise God. He continued to talk in English—about this and that—before he told her his name was Joe.
“My name be Beauty.”
“Naw, baby. That ain’t your name no more. You be called ‘Ahgayuh’ now.”
“My name be Beauty!”
She stamped her foot. She didn’t know much Cherokee—they were not the people of her grandparents—but she did know that “Ahgayuh” meant “woman.” If her grandmother Helen were alive, she would have been outraged at the insult.
Joe bowed in defeat. “A’ight, then. But let’s go now, ’cause a storm be coming soon. Hear that thunder roll?” He grabbed her hand, but she snatched it away. Shook loose her mind, trotting. She ran to the fields. There was no place to go. She ran one way and there was a white man blocking her. She ran the other way and a white boy came toward her. She turned and there were red lights in her eyes and then she wasn’t in the field anymore. Beauty was in a ship somewhere, wood upon water. So much water. So many folks and they were naked and they were shaking chains and there were sharks following the wood upon water and the folks were holding out their hands to her but she couldn’t help them and they were lost from their home and she was lost from her home and everyone she loved was dead and someone was whispering leave this place and there will be too much sorrow here but there was no way she could leave and the red lights lifted from her eyes and Beauty saw the field and that’s all she would remember.
The Changing of Beauty’s Name
Beauty was not allowed to recover from her losses. Her grandparents, her mother, her father. To grieve the day that she had been sold for the first time. Or grieve the day in the wagon when the women and the girls had been taken. Or grieve the day she was sold to Samuel Pinchard, the owner of the plantation called Wood Place.
Slaves were not allowed to lie on a quilt-covered dirt floor and weep. Neither women nor men nor children. They weren’t allowed to sleep for days on end, so that blankness would cover the soul or at least take away a memory briefly. Tears and sleep were not luxuries cast to slaves. There was only work. When the cock crowed for work. When the sun rose for work. When the sun fell until the stars cut the dark. Beauty hadn’t learned this in her grandparents’ house, but her senses knew it now. And when she heard the work bell ringing the morning after she was sold, she washed her hands and feet as her mother would have bidden her. She whispered a prayer to the God who had ninety-nine names according to the teachings of her mother’s people. And she followed the folks from her cabin as they drifted outside.
When Beauty approached the Negroes who lived in the three Quarters cabins, asking them the whereabouts of the small man who called himself Joe, she was told no such person lived on the farm. They were sure, and Beauty suspected that the small man had been a vision, as the ship had been. Such as her mother would see when Kiné had stared into the distance for minutes at a time. Sometimes, when Kiné had roused, she’d shaken with the authority of her knowledge.
Beauty’s daily work on the farm was tedious, but her grief was alleviated by a man who lived in her cabin. He was gentle and spoke with the wisdom of the elderly, but he appeared as young as Beauty’s father had been before he died. The folks in the Quarters called this man Pop George and said he was much, much older than he looked. Yet, incredibly, all his teeth were in place. It was a wonderful thing when Pop George smiled, and when he laughed, even more so.
In the evening, Pop George told stories to the children, whose parents sat a distance away. They pretended that they were watching their little ones, when really they were listening to the stories, too. The Quarters-folks insisted that Pop George was nearly one hundred years old. When Beauty told him this, though, he laughed his entrancing sound and said folks in the Quarters were funning her. None of these peoples knew how to count, and he didn’t neither. He would chuckle as someone protested, uh-uh, Pop George. They won’t lying. He knowed they was telling the truth.
Pop George told Beauty that, indeed, he had been born over the water in that place known as Africa. And he had been purchased by the father of their mistress, the girl the Quarters-folks called “Miss Lady.” This had happened before Lady had married their current master, Samuel Pinchard.