And besides Aggie’s own selfish interests, she worried about the others of her community. There were now thirty-two Negroes on Wood Place, and there was at least one baby born each year. The welcoming of new life should have been a joy, but the enslaved mothers were anxious. Though Aggie had not birthed her own children, she worried, too, about those children that she and Pop George tended and loved. At each new year, for January first was the time of settling debts. If Samuel Pinchard was reckless, this would be the time of selling slaves. Families would be split up. Children might be sold from their parents, as had happened when Kiné was sent over the water.
In June of Aggie’s second year at Wood Place, the kitchen house was finished, and in July, a trader’s wagon pulled up to the farm. He was not the same trader who had brought Aggie to Wood Place; word had traveled that this trader was now dead.
It was not January, so who was Samuel planning to sell? And why? Aggie’s mind flipped through the Quarters-folks but could not locate whom Samuel might discard. Then she saw a woman hop down from the back of the wagon. Samuel appeared in the yard, counted over money to the trader, and cheerfully waved the Negress into the new kitchen house.
The next morning, Pop George told Aggie that the woman’s name was Tut, and she had been purchased as the cook. Not only that, the woman required a child to work as her kitchen help. At midday, Carson Franklin was quiet. Usually he stalked the fields, calling out to those folks he didn’t feel were spry enough in their labors. He carried a whip coiled by his hip but did not use it. Samuel had instructed him never to whip the Quarters-folks; Carson could slap them with an open hand, though not strike with a fist. Carson liked to yell at the folks. Don’t waste no sunlight, he would shout. However, this day, he walked from the fields with Mamie, a very thin, lovely girl who had been purchased the previous new year.
Mamie was an odd child: in the evenings, after her labor had been through in the cotton fields, she would walk to a particularly large pecan tree, sit underneath the tree, and conduct conversations. However, Mamie’s sweet nature and her beauty had brought her acceptance in the Quarters, even with her strange ways. Such a child needed care, not ridicule. Though she was old enough to work the field, Aggie in particular had shown the child special treatment. They both were motherless and shared a terrible kinship.
When Aggie and Pop George saw the overseer with Mamie, they sat up in their chairs. They exchanged glances, but thankfully, Carson was not walking in the direction of the woods where the moon house was located. Instead, he walked Mamie toward the kitchen house. That evening, when her young charges were back at their parents’ cabins, Aggie headed to the kitchen house and peeked through the new glass windows. She saw Mamie sitting at the pine table, peeling potatoes. She returned to Pop George and reported what she had seen. This is how everyone in the Quarters found out that Mamie was the new cook’s assistant.
Within a matter of days, there was a disturbance: screams tearing through the night from the kitchen house. Aggie would not hear these screams, as it was her woman’s interval and Lady and she were in the moon house. Yet upon her return, Pop George reported that Mamie insisted a monster had come into the kitchen house. The monster covered her mouth in the night, trying to steal her breath. However, when Aggie consulted the new cook that Samuel had purchased—the woman named Tut—the woman was unconcerned. She insisted Mamie was only having nightmares.
Thus, Aggie forgot the child’s stories of monsters, aided by the fact that she had fallen love with a man of the fields.
The Courting of Aggie
When Aggie first met Midas, she was not impressed. Though he had the pretty dark-dark color of Aggie’s mother, he was short and skinny, with an abundance of hair that wasn’t groomed frequently, so that it congregated in rowdy clumps.
Aggie ignored Midas when he waved at her during his midday break, when she and the children pushed the babies out to the fields in a wheelbarrow so their mothers could nurse them. In the evenings, Midas sat in the back of the group of children and listened to Pop George’s stories. Midas seemed to enjoy the tales more than the children and laughed and clapped his hands. On Sundays after supper, Midas was forward: he walked to the cabin door to pay his respects to Aggie. He smiled, even when Aggie told him she didn’t have no time for him. When she shut the door in his face, Pop George would chide, why ain’t she let the boy have a few words? Midas won’t tryna hurt nobody, but Aggie would suck her teeth and move to tend to her pot of greens. Pop George worked around her, though, for, after a few weeks of rebuffs, the next time Midas showed, Pop George called a welcome from inside the cabin. Come on in, he hailed Midas. Don’t be standing in the door, like he won’t raised right.