The day Carson told her to follow him, Aggie walked behind him at a distance, praying that he would not try to hurt her. They walked across the fields and deeper into the woods. When they came upon the moon house, Aggie tensed, but Carson seemed nervous as he told her go on inside. Go on, now. Then he walked away.
When Aggie knocked on the door, Lady answered and, with blushes and shy words, told Aggie she had begun her first bleeding time. She was fourteen—this was the era when girls did not bleed as early as they would in future times. Aggie had never spoken to the girl with whom she was expected to keep company. The first interval that Aggie stayed in the moon house with her, there was silence between them, as she and the girl shared the tasks of cooking simple stews from the supplies that had been left for them in the yard. Thankfully, Lady did not expect Aggie to attend to washing her soiled undergarments: she shook her head bashfully when asked. And Aggie was grateful for the break from field work. She didn’t ask Lady how she had been chosen to keep her company.
By the fourth set of days together in the moon house, there was greater ease. And something else: Aggie’s own cycle had synced with Lady’s. That month, she followed the girl behind the cabin to the space where the two special buckets were. She waited for Lady to finish washing her women’s rags, to spill the pink water to the ground, and then stick her hands in the other bucket to wash herself clean with clear water. Then Aggie held out her hands for both buckets, so that she could fill them with water for her own washing. She and Lady exchanged a smile. That evening, they told stories to each other, tales of animals that talked. Lady gave a small “Ah!” when Aggie confided that her father had been the son of two Creek mestizos. When Lady confided that her father and mother were mestizos, Aggie remembered Pop George’s words: she did not want to anger this girl and feel the whip’s fire. And so Aggie did not say, not only was Lady’s father part Creek, he was part Negro, too.
That month, after Aggie took her final, cleansing bath and returned to the field, Carson Franklin told her she no longer would work in the cotton. Now she would work alongside Pop George, looking after the children who had not yet lost their front milk teeth. Within a year, Aggie and Pop George would share their own two-room cabin, which sat a hundred steps from the larger cabin of their master, and Aggie would treat the man as her father. Some of the Quarters-folks began to refer to Aggie as a “yard nigger,” but after Pop George scolded them, they stopped. After all, Aggie tended to their children and loved them as her own—see how she gave the children hugs and kisses? Won’t nothing to be mad at Aggie ’bout, Pop George said. And the Quarters-folks deferred to him, as he was their elder. They were kind to Aggie, and in time, they came to respect her greatly.
The Kitchen House
Two years had passed since Aggie had come to the farm, and as with each cotton harvest before it, changes were made at Wood Place.
Samuel Pinchard charged his overseer with finding Quarters-men to cut down remaining trees on the new portions of land he had acquired. He had bought farms bordering Wood Place from yeoman farmers, those who had cleared some of their land on their own already to plant crops, but who hadn’t been able to make their land profitable. Samuel gave them pennies on the dollar for each acre.
Samuel was planning to build a grand structure with the trees the Quarters-men cut down, what he would call his “big house,” even as, like other slaveholders, he would stand aside while the Quarters-men did the building. In the future, Samuel would talk about the house he had “built,” as though he had labored alongside those dark men, straining his own muscles. It was slow-going work for the Quarters-men, transporting the pine trees, cutting the trees into planks, and sanding the planks smooth. Samuel wanted his big house to be perfect. That would take some time, but in the interval he had the men build a kitchen structure two dozen feet away from the future back of the big house. The kitchen needed to be close enough that his own food still would be warm when brought to him, but far enough away so that if the kitchen caught fire—as many kitchens did in those days—the flames would not spread to the big house.
Yet there was no cook except Lady, not yet, and no children for Lady, either. In the moon house, she confided to Aggie that her husband did not sleep in the double-rope bed Micco had given them as a wedding gift. Samuel either slept on a pallet in their cabin’s front room, or elsewhere on one of his nighttime journeys.
The year of the building, Samuel walked around his property, smiling and waving at the Quarters-folks. They smiled back and dipped their heads submissively, though they did not like him: he was a white man and the owner of slaves. Nor did they trust him. And when his mood changed, the Quarters-folks told each other, see there? For on those days, Samuel’s face would register great misery. He would straddle his horse and ride off. In a day or two, he would return in a jocular mood. He brought rock candy and passed it out to the children. He thanked the Quarters-folks for their labor, and Aggie began watching him for signs of drink. She remembered similar behavior with her father, when Paul would dive into his cups. She was afraid that Samuel might sell the plantation or gamble it away. And then the family that she had cobbled together—Pop George, the children, and all the Quarters-folks—would be lost again, and misery would descend.