Columbia is the story of Theodore Lomax, a nineteen-year-old Union solider in the American Civil War, who is as committed as any to the ideal of human freedom. After being assigned to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman, shortly after the general’s infamous March to the Sea, he willingly participates in the destruction of civilian property in Columbia, South Carolina, believing his acts are justified by Southern resistance to the Northern cause of emancipation. But when the destruction escalates into violence against the civilians themselves, he becomes disillusioned, and feels compelled to strike out in opposition to his own countrymen.
The novel is told from Lomax’s point of view, but there are ten other supporting characters, each with a story of his or her own. There was a time when I thought these stories, or these “Reflections in Broken Glass,” should alternate with the chapters in Columbia, presenting a richer but perhaps more tangled tapestry of the lives that painfully converge in the novel’s climactic scenes. But Columbia is clearly a more coherent narrative without them. Still, they were valuable to me as an author, and so I’ve decided to share them here.
“Sally,” centers on the character of Sally Andrews, and describes her journey as a young girl from the slave cabins on the Andrews plantation to her favored position within their Columbia home.
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They intended Sally for a house slave from the moment they brought her to their home on Elmwood Avenue, but she didn’t really learn what that meant until four years later when she was twelve years old. Before that they let her run with the other children, running until she almost thought she was one of them. It was only when Bessie died that Sally was forced to stop running. And what had seemed obvious and preordained to everyone else for the first time became an overwhelming and pressing reality for Sally.
They were the Andrews, a prosperous and fairly typical family of white landowners in Columbia, South Carolina. The patriarch, Zebulon Andrews, was a graduate of West Point and had served his country faithfully for thirty-five years before settling in to raise cotton on six hundred acres a few miles outside the capitol city. He had acquired the land early in his military career when he had married the daughter of an aristocratic politician who had twice run for governor and been twice defeated. Her name was Victoria Butterfield, and although three previous suitors had all written songs about her -- one about her beauty, another about her charm, and a third, unbelievably, about her feet -- none had been sufficiently eloquent enough to convince her father to release Victoria to the holy trappings of matrimony.
It was the ridiculous and self-absorbed requirement Victoria’s father had drunkenly announced would be the test of all who sought his daughter’s hand in marriage, likening it to some misunderstood traditions of old. In his more sober moments, Judge Butterfield was known to regret having made such a blusterous demand, but he never once had the humility to rescind it, and as much as he decried it, he had turned away three enviable young men whose attempts to indulge his fancy had been both creative and heartfelt. By the time Zebulon came along with his composition dedicated to Victoria’s sagacity and wisdom, therefore, most folks thought old Judge Butterfield’s strange demands on potential sons-in-law had doomed poor Victoria to life as a spinster. Either because the Judge was reluctant to have his reputation besmirched in such a fashion, or because Victoria herself had prevailed upon him to be reasonable, however, Zebulon’s creation was deemed the worthiest of the bunch and the wily old man quickly gave his blessing.
Zebulon and Victoria were married by an army chaplain and spent much of their marriage moving from place to place as Zebulon’s military responsibilities took them from post to post. They were separated for only three years, while Zebulon served with distinction in the Mexican War, leading first a company and then a regiment in two battles that had helped turn the tide for the Americans. After the war their itinerant lifestyle accelerated, the army prizing him as one of its best drill instructors and transferring him from one troublesome unit to the next, where he seemed to have a knack for improving not only conduct but also morale.
As best they could during these nomadic years, Zebulon and Victoria tried to raise a family, and were successful at bringing six children into the world, only one of which died as an infant. Of their surviving children, the four oldest were all boys -- Zebulon, Marcus, Frederick, and Reuben -- and the youngest was a girl, Emily. As babies and children, the boys were all healthy and strong, growing as if by divine right, but Emily and the other little girl born just before her, christened Elizabeth but not surviving beyond her third month, were sickly and weak. Victoria did not believe Emily would survive either, as she seemed incapable of taking nourishment and grew at only an imperceptible rate.
But Emily was special. Although always on the verge of death for the first two years of her life, she somehow managed to survive and grew into a happy and relatively healthy young girl. Her unusual physical characteristics, which is all Zebulon and Victoria thought they were at birth, did not fade with age. Instead they deepened and heralded the mental retardation she would struggle with throughout her development. At two she was very much still a baby, at five she was like what her brothers had been at two, and at ten she was very much like them at five. Her parents loved her no less because of these challenges, and did all they could to show Emily the same fondness and attention they had showered on their boys.
Upon Zebulon’s retirement from the army, the whole family moved to the house on Elmwood Avenue in Columbia. The farmland just outside town Zebulon had acquired when he and Victoria had been married had not been standing vacant for the thirty years that elapsed between his wedding and his retirement. It had long ago been developed into a working and fairly lucrative cotton plantation, run by overseers hired initially by Victoria’s father and returning a steady stream of profits to Zebulon’s estate. With the end of his military career, Zebulon had decided to take over the plantation himself, and have a go at being a gentleman farmer. The house on Elmwood Avenue was part of the holding. Although a smaller one stood on the plantation itself, the one in town was considered more luxurious and certainly gave the owners better visibility among the important social scene in Columbia.
Another thing that came with the property was slaves, more than two hundred of them who lived in a series of long, low buildings on the plantation itself. More poorly constructed than the stables that sheltered the horses, the ramshackle slave cabins were freezing in winter and reeking in summer, and were the only place the plantation’s slaves could think of as home. All the slaves, that is, but one.
Her name was Bessie, and she was the house slave for the overseers who lived in the house on the plantation. Her job was to cook and clean for the white men who supervised the work -- taking the slaves out to the crops each morning and bringing them back to the slave cabins each night.
There were three such men, all hired by Victoria’s father, with one elevated above the other two in authority. This head overseer was a Dutchman named Gunther Van Wijk, and every slave on the plantation feared him. They feared him because by the sad and unfortunate circumstances of their lives, Van Wijk assumed the position of their master, and that gave him the socially-accepted authority to do whatever he wanted to them -- beat them, starve them, work them until they dropped -- Van Wijk could and had done it all, and there was no slave on earth who had the ability and seemingly no one in the white world who had the inclination to stop him. For all intents and purposes, he was their master.
But, of course, he wasn’t really their master. He was only an employee of their master. Their real master for years had been a tall and prematurely gray man called Colonel Zebulon Andrews, an apparition that neither Gunther Van Wijk nor the two hundred slaves he terrorized had ever met. And although Van Wijk never doubted it, connected as he was to the outside world of commerce and communications, the slaves often wondered about Zebulon’s actual existence, telling each other almost mythic stories about him in their inwardly-focused and isolated society.
But Zebulon was no myth to Van Wijk. Although the Dutchman would have never phrased it this way, in many respects Zebulon was Van Wijk’s master, and when news of the colonel’s planned arrival reached the overseer, he immediately sent Bessie to the house in town with instructions to prepare it for the master’s occupation.
Bessie was old as slaves went, almost fifty, and had been a house slave for most of her life. There had been a time in her youth when she had worked in the fields -- fourteen, fifteen hours a day under the blazing sun -- but had been brought inside by her first master because his wife had needed help in keeping the house. Bessie had proved herself useful and had been rewarded in a way perhaps only a plantation slave could appreciate. She was allowed to stay in the house, sleeping on a cot in a corner of the kitchen, eating three meals a day, and cooking and cleaning from sunup to sundown. Bessie had been sold twice after that experience, but each time it was with the understanding she was a house slave, more useful in the kitchen than she could ever be in the fields.
Something strange happened to Bessie after a few months in her first house, something that might have been interesting to white society had there been any sociologists around to study it and something every slave in the South could have told them about had any cared to listen. Freed from the back-breaking, sun-baking, finger-shredding labor of the cotton fields, and chained to the relative comforts of the broom, washboard, and Dutch oven, Bessie found herself suddenly and irreversibly positioned between the society of the whites and the society of the blacks. Before coming to the house, she had been abused by one and embraced by the other, the healing salve of black fellowship and solidarity applied generously to the physical and mental injuries inflicted by the demands of the whites. After coming to the house, Bessie was no more accepted by the whites she now lived among, but she was wholly severed from the companionship of the blacks. Forbidden from straying too far from the house, she had no opportunity to interact with them, and they quickly forgot about her in their on-going labor and misery. If her name came up at all in the slave cabin she used to inhabit, it was usually cursed, the slaves assuming in their ignorance she had gone off and joined the society of the whites, enjoying all their privileges and luxuries.
It was this unique kind of isolation that made Bessie the perfect slave to send unaccompanied into town to prepare her master’s house for his arrival, something that would have been all but unthinkable with any of the slaves off the plantation. Any one of them would have been gone in a flash, running at the first such opportunity from the whip and the lash and the cotton bag. They wouldn’t get far -- they never did -- they would be caught in a day or two by the dogs and the conspiring white society, but that wasn’t the point. The point was they would run because they all still believed there was a place they could get to where their lives would not be as hard as they were on the plantation. What they didn’t understand and what Bessie quickly realized was the only such place that could exist for a plantation slave was the position she had already achieved in the master’s house. Bessie would not run because she had come to realize she had nowhere better to run to.
Three days after Bessie’s arrival at the house on Elmwood Avenue Zebulon and his family made their appearance. This was 1857, and the children at that time ranged in ages from the oldest, Zebulon Jr., who was 18 and a tall young man off at West Point just as his father had been, to the youngest, Emily, who had just turned six. Bessie was standing on the veranda when the coach pulled up, bowing low to Mister and Missus Andrews as they came up to join her, the children pushing their way behind them and running around the side of the house to peer in the windows.
Bessie managed the best she could, but it quickly became apparent taking care of a house inhabited by a married couple with four rambunctious children was a totally different situation than taking care of one occupied by three grown men. Bessie’s increasing arthritis made things the most difficult for her, seizing her hands and knees up at the worst possible moments and extending the time it otherwise took to complete every chore.
By all accounts, Victoria Andrews was not an unfeeling woman, and immediately recognized the challenges Bessie was having adapting to the faster pace and greater demands of her family. In fact, accustomed as she was to living on the military frontier with her husband, where domestic help was all but unheard of, Victoria’s first reaction was to roll up her sleeves and start helping with as many of the household chores as she could. The barrier in this regard proved to be Bessie herself, who expressed a good deal of trepidation at the sight of her mistress stooping down to take up the work of a slave.
“No, Miss Victoria, no!” Bessie had once cried upon discovering Victoria on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, a scrub brush in one hand and a bucket of soapy water beside her. “I won’t have it, I just won’t have it! You on your knees a’scrubbing away like a poor house slave. I tell you I won’t have it!”
“But, Bessie,” Victoria had tried pleading. “I know how your knees hurt you, and I don’t mind at all. Go rest your feet.”
“No,” Bessie had said as resolutely as her station in life would allow. “What would your neighbors think if they were to find you scrubbing the floor while I sat resting my feet? They would think the world had gone crazy, they would. That, or you had gone soft, or I had gone uppity. And I don’t want no one saying either thing ‘bout either of us. Now, give me that brush.”
“No, Bessie,” Victoria had said. “You can’t do it. I can’t bear to see you hurt yourself for my sake.”
“Then ask Mistah Zebulon to fetch another slave from the plantation to help me,” Bessie had said. “They ain’t a white woman in this whole town that scrubs her own floor.”
And that’s exactly what they did. That very evening, when Zebulon came home from a long day overseeing the continuous cycle of planting and harvesting, Victoria spoke to him about getting more help for Bessie, about bringing back another house slave.
Zebulon, like his wife, was also not an unfeeling person, but he knew the value of a slave and was reluctant to pull any out of his cotton fields to satisfy Victoria’s request. In speaking with Van Wijk about it, the Dutchman quickly set his mind at ease about pulling slaves out of the fields for such an unprofitable assignment.
“You can’t turn a hardened field hand into a house slave,” Van Wijk had said. “Them two things are worlds apart and it’s the rare slave that can make the transition from one to the other. Take a soft house slave and put him in the field and he’ll be dead in a week. He ain’t been conditioned right for the strain. Likewise, take a hard field hand and put him in the house and he’ll run off in that same week. You’ve got to give a house slave some degree of freedom to do the things you need him to do around the house, a degree of freedom no field hand is used to. Field hands you got to watch every minute and control their every movement. After living like that, most of them run first chance they get.”
“So what do I do?” Zebulon had asked. “I can’t have my wife scrubbing her own floors.”
“Take a young ‘un,” Van Wijk had said. “One of the children that ain’t been sent out to the fields yet. They won’t know no different and you can condition them into the perfect house slave.”
The suggestion made sense to Zebulon, so the next day he and Victoria rode out to the plantation together and went down to the slave cabins to select one of the children to start helping Bessie. Running around with some of the other young ones they saw a dark-faced and bright-eyed girl of about eight years.
“That’s the one,” Victoria said quietly to her husband. “Look at how strong and happy she is.”
“You there,” Zebulon called out to her. “Little girl. Come over here.”
The other children scattered in several directions, but the little girl did as she was asked, coming over to stand meekly before the white couple.
Victoria got down on her knees before her. “Hello,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Sally,” the little girl said, her voice revealing none of the fear her posture seemed to.
“Well, hello, Sally,” Victoria said. “That’s a very pretty name.”
Sally smiled at the compliment, her white teeth sparkling in the midst of her black face.
“My name is Miss Victoria. I live in a great, big house in the city with four of my own children. How would you like to come live with me?”
Sally looked awkwardly from side to side and then looked up at Zebulon standing over them.
“Are you Mistah Zebulon?” Sally asked.
“Yes, I am,” Zebulon said. “It’s my house you would be living in. Miss Victoria is my wife and the children are mine.”
Sally turned back to Victoria. “Okay,” she said abruptly. “I’ll come live with you.”
Sally had been born on Zebulon’s plantation, but her mother had been sold shortly after her weaning to help raise funds for a new threshing machine. Her father still worked in the cotton fields, but was kept separated with all the other healthy men from the old women and the children. The latter group lived together in one small slave cabin, removed a little from and deteriorated more than the others.
Like the rest of the slave children who were off their mother’s breast but not yet old enough to send out to the fields, Sally was more or less raised by three old slave matriarchs, women who had lived hard and difficult lives and who did all within their feeble powers to spare the children they watched over from the harsh realities of life. They’ll learn soon enough, they would often say to each other while they sat in the shade watching the children laugh and chase one another. Let them enjoy what little freedom the Lord has provided for them.
It was from these women, especially a wizened old slave with stark white hair and the most wrinkled face Sally had ever seen, a stooped old soul known as Grandma Francis, that Sally had heard the mythic tales about their real master. Sally had always been more restless than the other children, and some nights, when she couldn’t sleep, she would sit in the corner with Grandma Francis and listen while Francis whispered what seemed to Sally to be the dark and hidden secrets of the universe.
Mistah Gunther, it seemed, was not their real master. The man who drove the men, including Sally’s father, and the non-nursing women out to the fields every morning, who watched over them, who counted their filled sacks, and who whipped them when they did not meet the quotas he had set for them -- that man had no more claim of ownership over any of them than they had over each other. It was not safe to say so in the bright light of day when anyone could overhear you, but in the dark deep of night while the rest of the plantation slept, Sally used to thrill to hear Grandma Francis say that Mistah Gunther was a nobody. An imposter.
Their real master was a man named Zebulon Andrews, a colonel in the United States Army, an important man with important responsibilities, who would one day come to their plantation and take Mistah Gunther’s place as their overseer. When that day came all the slaves would rejoice because Mistah Zebulon was nothing like Mistah Gunther. Where Gunther was harsh, Zebulon was kind. Where Gunther was ornery, Zebulon was even-tempered. Where Gunther was corrupt, Zebulon was fair and just. When Zebulon came to take his rightful place on the plantation, the lives of all the slaves would improve.
How, Grandma Francis? How will they improve?
Well, they won’t work as hard for one.
They won’t?
Of course they won’t, child. Mistah Zebulon won’t work the slaves the way Mistah Gunther does. When Mistah Zebulon comes, no slave will work more than twelve hours in a day, and everyone will have every Sunday and every other Saturday off.
What else, Grandma Francis? What else will be different?
The food will be better, and there will be more of it.
There will?
Of course there will, child. Mistah Zebulon will want to make sure his slaves are fed right. He knows a slave can’t work on an empty stomach. When Mistah Zebulon comes, we’ll all get three meals a day. There’ll be eggs and bacon for breakfast, chicken and biscuits for dinner, and pork ribs with fresh cabbage for supper.
Is that all, Grandma Francis? Is that all that will be different?
Lord, no, child. I haven’t told you the most important thing yet.
What, Grandma Francis? What is it?
Well, I’ve heard them say that when Mistah Zebulon comes to the plantation he’ll even let the slaves start working towards their freedom.
What? He’ll do what?
He’ll let them work towards their freedom. Mistah Zebulon will count every filled cotton sack by every slave on the plantation -- not so he can whip them the way Mistah Gunther does when they fall short of the quota -- but because every sack is going to bring each slave closer to being freed.
How, Grandma Francis? How can the sacks set them free?
Each sack is worth something, child. The cotton we pick is sold to buyers all over the world, and Mistah Zebulon will calculate the value of the cotton in every sackful gathered by the slaves. He’ll take a small portion of the money he gets from the sale of each sackful of cotton and hold it on account for the slave who picked it. When that account reaches the price of a slave on the open market, Mistah Zebulon will set the old one free and use the money to buy someone new to work his fields.
Can that be true, Grandma Francis? Can that really be true?
Grandma Francis always assured Sally it was, and then sent her off to sleep, where Sally would dream of her father and her picking cotton and filling sacks until they had enough to buy their freedom, and then going off to find Sally’s mother to live with her.
All these thoughts were in Sally’s mind the day Zebulon and Victoria came to the plantation to pick out a slave child to take back and raise as their new house slave. Looking up into Zebulon’s gray beard and white face, from Sally’s perspective it was like Jesus Christ himself had come to take her to the promised land. And take her they did, at that very moment, without an opportunity to gather the few things she had or say goodbye to her friends or Grandma Francis. Victoria took her by the hand and led her to the buckboard they had ridden in from the house on Elmwood Avenue, and to which they now returned. Sally sat in the back with the dirty straw and a few sacks of oats and watched the slave cabins and then the plantation, the place she had been born and the only home she knew, fade off into the distance, never to be seen by her eyes again.
“Where is she going to sleep, Zeb?” Victoria asked her husband when their horse had pulled them over the last rise and the buildings of Columbia had come into view.
“What do you mean, where is she going to sleep?” Zebulon said, somewhat disdainfully. “She’ll sleep in the kitchen with Bessie.”
“Oh, Zeb,” Victoria said. “There’s not room for another cot in there. If one of them has to get up in the middle of the night, they’re liable to trip over something and fall into the oven.”
“What should one of them need to get up in the night for? I didn’t pay for them to have them go wandering off in the night.”
“Oh, Zeb,” Victoria said again. “You didn’t pay for them. Daddy paid for Bessie, and little Sally, why, no one paid for her. You told me yourself all the children were born right there on the plantation.”
“That doesn’t mean I haven’t paid for them, Victoria,” Zebulon said. “Van Wijk says you can’t send them out to the fields until they’re ten, sometimes twelve years old. They don’t have the strength to make it out there until then. Who do you think pays for their food and clothes all that time? And what about their mammys? Their mammys can’t work for a year while they’re nursing them. How much do you think that’s costing me? Taking a perfectly good slave out of the fields for a year? Van Wijk says it takes a real hard-working slave to come close to making up what you lose on them growing up. Almost better off buying them as adults and selling off their children than trying to breed them yourself on the farm.”
Sally listened to this conversation with great curiosity. She knew they were talking about her, but had trouble understanding all the words they used.
“Well,” Victoria said, “Sally won’t be costing you any more money. Starting today she’s going to start helping Bessie around the house, and I don’t want the two of them crammed together in the kitchen. I want you to set up that back room by the pantry as a bedroom for them.”
“I thought you were going to use that as a knitting room?”
“I can knit perfectly well in the sitting room, Zebulon. Now, are you going to do as I ask?”
Zebulon hesitated for only a moment. “Have Marcus do it for you. I have to get back to the plantation today.”
“Very well,” Victoria said, looking quickly off in another direction to emphasize the resolution of the matter.
Sally had no idea what kind of place they were taking her to, but years later she would remember how it felt to overhear the two of them decide to give her a bedroom she would have to share with only one other person.
Bessie was waiting for them on the veranda just as she had been when Zebulon and his family had arrived three months before. Only this time the Andrews children were there waiting with Bessie, anxious to see what kind of creature their parents had brought back from the plantation to live with them. With Zebulon Jr. off at West Point there were only the four of them -- Marcus, 16, Frederick, 14, Reuben, 12, and Emily, 6 -- but not a one of them wanted to miss the arrival of their new house slave.
To everyone’s surprise, the buckboard had not even rolled to a stop before young Emily came charging down the steps and into the road to get a better look at what her parents had brought them.
“Sister, sister!” she cried when she had determined that Sally was, in fact, a girl. “Mummy and Daddy brought sister for Emmy. Sister for Emmy!”
Before Zebulon could climb down from the driver’s seat, Emily was reaching out for Sally, her fingers opening and closing on the ends of her wildly flailing arms and her legs jumping up and down. “Come play!” she cried as if moments away from the realization of a dream. “Come play!”
As Zebulon helped Victoria down from the wooden bench, Sally dropped quietly off the back of the buckboard. Emily was on her in an instant, wrapping her arms around the taller girl in a tremendous bear hug and stretching up to kiss Sally on the cheek.
“Come play!” Emily said, taking Sally by the hand and practically dragging her up the steps onto the veranda. “Sister play,” she said as she charged past her brothers and into the house with Sally in tow. “Sister play with Emmy!”
The boys could not contain their laughter. As their parents made their way onto the veranda, Victoria asked them what was so funny.
“Emily,” Marcus said, speaking for all of them as he often did now that the eldest was gone. “She really thinks that slave girl is her sister. A slave for a sister! Can you believe it?”
The boys broke into another peal of laughter but Victoria told them to hush. It would not be long before she discovered the boys had been filling Emily’s head with such ideas since they had heard Zebulon and Victoria had planned to bring back another slave from the plantation, and a child slave at that. They had done it for the laugh they subsequently enjoyed, but the damage had now been done, and Victoria discovered she did not have the heart to tell Emily any different, at least not right away. As a result, the first day Sally spent in the house on Elmwood Avenue was a day spent at tea parties and in doll houses.
Marcus set up the back room off the pantry as a small bedroom for Bessie and Sally just as Victoria had asked. That night, after the white folk had left them and before they settled down to sleep, Bessie had a little talk with Sally.
“Your name is Sally, ain’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You just come off the plantation today, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, my name’s Bessie and I’ve been a house slave since I was sixteen years old, and if you know what’s good for you, you won’t ma’am me no more.”
After her day of unbelievable fun and leisure, Sally was not expecting the stern talking to Bessie evidently had in mind. She looked sheepishly down at her bare feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I was being polite. What should I call you?”
“Call me Bessie,” Bessie said. “Just like everyone else does. I don’t know what you think you were brought here for, but after what happened today I can only imagine. That little girl, Emily, she ain’t right in the head. She’s backward and slow.”
“She was nice to me,” Sally said.
“Of course she was nice to you,” Bessie said. “She’s nice like that to everyone. She don’t know enough yet not to be nice to everyone she meets. But that’s what I mean, what I’m trying to tell you. Emily’s got no concept of how the world really works and probably never will. But you better figure it out quick or you’re going to find yourself back on the plantation, and in a few years they’re going to send you out to the fields. And take it from me, you don’t want to be sent out to no cotton fields. You want to stay right here and do whatever it is they tell you to do. No matter what it is, it ain’t going to be worse than working out in the cotton fields all day.”
Sally had never been to the cotton fields before, but she knew all about them and how hard they were on the people who were sent to them day in and day out. For years she had watched her father come crawling back to the slave cabins at the end of the workday and collapse from sheer exhaustion, too tired sometimes to eat or wash himself. Sally and the other slave children did not know exactly what the overseers did to their parents while they were out in the cotton fields, but they sometimes made up stories about what was going on to try and scare each other. One little boy who said his mother had told him the truth said the overseers made the people hunch over and scurry about on all fours like beasts, whipping those who did not move quickly enough like a teamster whipping a stubborn mule. Sally didn’t know if that was true or not, but believed it could be, based on how much her father complained about his aching back and the long, thin scars that sometimes appeared there. Whatever it was going on in the cotton fields, Sally knew she didn’t want any part of it.
“What do I have to do?” Sally asked of Bessie. “I don’t want them to send me back. What do I have to do so they will let me stay?”
“You’re going to be the new house slave,” Bessie said. “I’m getting too old to do it all, so they brought you in to help me and learn how to do it on your own.”
“House slave?” Sally asked. She had heard the term before but didn’t know exactly what it meant. Whenever Grandma Francis had used it, she always spoke as if she had a sour taste in her mouth. “What does it mean to be a house slave?”
“You’ll see,” Bessie said somewhat cryptically. “I’ll show you in the morning.”
And the next morning, true to her word, Bessie began giving Sally a thorough understanding of what it meant to be a house slave. It began an hour before sunrise, with Bessie shaking the young girl awake and helping her get dressed. The first thing that needed to be done was baking the biscuits and the two of them marched straight into the kitchen of the still sleeping house to begin the process.
Sally had never baked biscuits before, and at first she thought she was going to like it. Measuring out the ingredients and mixing them together seemed like fun until the kneading began. Bessie’s old and gnarled hands weren’t much use to her for this, so she turned the job entirely over to Sally who, no matter what she did, could not seem to get the technique right.
“No,” Bessie said again and again. “Not like that. Squeeze, stretch, fold, and push. Then turn it and do the same thing again. Like this. Are you watching me?”
Sally was, but still couldn’t knead the dough to Bessie’s satisfaction. And it never seemed to end. Sally’s wrists and elbows were throbbing with the strain, and still Bessie forced her on.
Is it done yet?
Lord, no. The biscuits won’t rise right if you don’t knead the dough enough.
Eventually, the kneading was done, and Sally helped Bessie hand-shape two dozen biscuits and put them on the top rack of the oven. The firewood bin was empty so Bessie took Sally outside, the sun just beginning to peek out over the eastern hills, and had her carry armful after armful of firewood from the pile out back into the house until the bin was full. After the first load, Bessie stayed in the kitchen to build and light the oven fire, sending Sally back out to find her way to the woodpile by herself.
Sally didn’t know how many trips she made -- she only knew how to count up to five, and it was more than that -- but like kneading the dough it seemed like an eternity to her before the wood bin was full. Her already sore arms whimpered under the additional load, her bare feet shuffling heavily up and down the back stairs in the pre-dawn light. While Sally made her circular journey, Bessie was able not only to light the oven fire and get the biscuits baking, she also set the Andrews’s breakfast table and retrieved most of the items needed for the meal from the pantry.
Is it full yet, Bessie?
Lord, no. It ain’t full til you can’t close the lid no more.
Zebulon was the first of the Andrews family to come down for breakfast, making his appearance just as Sally dumped her last load into the firewood bin. Sally didn’t know it that first morning, but Zebulon usually rose before his family, dressed, ate breakfast, and left for the plantation before Victoria and the children even rolled themselves out of bed.
“Good morning, Mistah Zebulon,” Bessie said as he strode unannounced into the kitchen.
“Good morning, Bessie,” Zebulon said, picking up a newspaper Bessie had set out for him. “How are you doing this morning?”
Sally turned away from the firewood bin to see Zebulon take a seat at the small table tucked into a corner of the kitchen as Bessie hovered nearby, pouring him a cup of coffee. When the time came, Victoria and the children would sit in the dining room to take their breakfast, but Zebulon preferred grabbing a quick bite in the little breakfast nook Bessie had prepared for him.
“Oh,” Bessie said, “my joints are a little swollen this morning, but I’m managing. Sure is nice having little Sally along to help me.”
“Ah, yes,” Zebulon said, lowering his paper and turning in his chair. “And how is little Sally this morning?”
Zebulon’s eyes quickly found Sally slumped against the side of the firewood bin in a state of near exhaustion. Under the gaze of her master, she felt it necessary to perk up and pushed herself away from the bin, forcing her eyes open as wide as she could.
“I’m fine, Mistah, sir,” she said quietly. “Thank you for asking.”
“What has Bessie had you do this morning?”
Sally thought for only a moment before answering. “She helped me knead the dough for the biscuits. And I filled the firewood bin all by myself.”
“Splendid,” Zebulon said, turning back to his paper. “It’s good to have you with us.”
Zebulon said not another word to Sally throughout his breakfast, and only spoke to Bessie enough to communicate to her what we wanted to eat. The rest of his attention was consumed by his newspaper, which he carefully folded and refolded a hundred times so he could read every article with only one hand supporting the newsprint.
Bessie quickly put Sally back to work squeezing oranges to fill up a pitcher for the Andrews children to drink when they came down for their morning meal. First Bessie showed Sally where the juicer was kept, a great glass bowl with a jagged mountain rising from its center, and had her carry it to the counter where they had kneaded the dough. Then she took Sally to the pantry and had her haul out a tremendous bag of oranges they found hanging on a hook in there. At the counter Bessie showed Sally how to slice the oranges in two and mash them against the mountain in the middle of the juicing bowl, slowly filling the lowlands with torrents of orange juice and pulp.
Once Sally seemed to have the knack for it, Bessie went to take the biscuits out of the oven and place the trays on the cooling racks. She then busied herself with other chores, but periodically returned to check on Sally’s progress. Each time Bessie would scold Sally for not getting enough juice out of the orange halves, and would take one Sally had finished with and grind it against the mountain to prove her point.
“You see!” Bessie would say. “You see all the juice you’re leaving in the fruit? You’ve got to get that out, girl. You’ve got to push harder.”
Sally would look at Zebulon each time to see if her master paid any notice to her failure, but the old white man sat silently on the other side of the room, reading his newspaper and eating his breakfast. Sally would push even harder with the next piece of orange, harder than she had pushed before, harder than she would ever be able to push again. But each time Bessie would return to squeeze apparently the same amount of juice out of the piece Sally had just finished with.
In a short while Sally’s arms began to ache again, the strain they had received from the kneading of the dough, and then the carrying of the firewood, and now the squeezing of the oranges proving too much for her constitution. Even simple movements of her fingers, to say nothing of the claw-like motions needed to properly juice the oranges, caused shooting pains to fly up her forearms and settle in her elbows. Helpless, but suffering in silence, she got less and less juice out of each orange half she tried, until hardly a trickle could be seen on the face of the glass mountain.
Eventually, Bessie took the job away from her entirely and told her to go cut some flowers from the garden for the breakfast table.
“I’m sorry, Bessie,” Sally said meekly, wanting the old woman to know she was trying her best but also nervous about calling too much of Zebulon’s attention to her failure. “It hurts my arms.”
“It hurts my arms, too,” Bessie said, grinding one of Sally’s used orange halves on the juicer and coating it with liquid pulp. “My arms have been hurting for fifteen years. That’s why you’re here. To take some of that hurt away. Now, take those shears hanging on that hook and go cut some flowers. Six of them. The biggest ones you see. Way down on the stems.”
Unlike Sally, Bessie did nothing to keep her voice from carrying to Zebulon’s ears. Looking fearfully at her master, Sally saw him intensely studying his newspaper, seemingly oblivious to anything else going on around him.
“Go, girl!” Bessie said. “Go now and hurry back. Miss Victoria and the children will be down soon.”
Sally fled the kitchen at that point, leaving so quickly she nearly forgot the shears Bessie had indicated and had to come back in for them after tripping halfway down the stairs off the back porch. She knew exactly where the garden was. She had passed it an uncounted number of times as she labored at her never-ending task of filling the firewood bin. With the house on the very edge of town, the Andrews had staked off a sizable area for their garden where they grew a great multitude of vegetables for the plates and flowers for the centerpiece on their dining room table. Although Victoria actually did spend some time digging between the rows in a great sunbonnet and calico leggings beneath her skirt, the bulk of the harvest the family received was due more to Bessie’s efforts.
Most of the flowers in the garden were in full bloom, and Sally, who had noticed but not appreciated their color on her many trips to and from the woodpile, now saw them as if for the first time, their deep and vibrant hues impressing themselves on her consciousness in a way she did not anticipate. Pinks, blues, reds, yellows -- they were all colors she knew, but seeing them here in the Andrews’s garden it was as if they had only been described to her before without ever actually seeing them for herself. She had seen these colors back on the plantation. She knew she had. How could she recognize them if she hadn’t? How would she know that warmth and glow was ‘yellow,’ and that serenity and deepness was ‘blue’ if she hadn’t seen them before? But looking at those colors in all their true and natural splendor, Sally had a hard time remembering anything of any color from her life back on the plantation. Looking at the flowers and thinking about it, every memory she was able to dredge up could have been easily captured with a palette of browns, blacks, and grays.
Sally thought suddenly of her father, most probably laboring at that very moment in the cotton fields Bessie had warned her about the night before. They had lived together on the same plantation for Sally’s entire life but had been together so seldom Sally had almost grown used to a constant sense of absence and loss about him. With her mother it was different. Sally’s mother had been sold off the plantation when Sally was still an infant. Sally had no real memories of her, just the soft and primal yearnings that slept within us all and only manifested themselves in our deepest dreams. But her father’s presence was close and regular enough to foster a true sense of longing in Sally’s heart, something satisfied all too infrequently on the plantation, and would now, she supposed, never be placated again.
What had she gotten herself into? Sally’s mind was still very much that of a child, but there had been enough grief and hardship in her short life to give the feelings of doubt and dread she now felt a certain familiarity. And it was this familiarity more than anything that gave Sally the ability to understand and examine her situation in a way that would have been beyond the scope of other eight year olds. The work Bessie had made her do, it was worse than anything she had ever done before. The sun was less than half an hour into the morning sky and her arms already felt as if they would fall off. But Bessie said the cotton fields were worse, and Sally could easily believe they were after witnessing how they had broken and crippled her father, a man who had seemed to Sally stronger than anyone. How would Sally fare there, and did she really want to find out? She might have the chance to see her father more often, but how long would she last under the blazing sun? Here there was a warm cot to sleep on and a roof over her head she was sure would not leak when it rained. And what about these flowers, and the time she had spent yesterday playing with Emily, dressing her dolls and imagining they were--
The sight of the flowers and her passing consideration of them brought Sally back to the reality of what she had been sent out here to do. Looking quickly back at the house, half expecting to see Bessie standing there with her hands on her hips and her foot tapping on the porch floor boards, she moved blindly into the flower garden and frantically began cutting some blooms from their stems. She had removed four of them before she even began to remember the instructions Bessie had given her.
Take those shears hanging on that hook and go cut some flowers.
Six of them.
The biggest ones you see.
Way down on the stems.
Sally looked at the flowers she had cut. Two of them were fairly large, but none of them were the largest ones in the garden. She had begun cutting the first ones she saw and only now realized the biggest ones stood predominantly in another section. Similarly, she had cut them indiscriminately with regard to how much stem she took. One she had cropped about halfway down, but the other three she had snipped practically at the bloom itself.
She looked fearfully up at the house again, convinced now that instead of Bessie watching her impatiently it would be Mistah Zebulon or even Miss Victoria, horrified at what Sally had done to her garden.
Although the back porch was as empty as it had been before, Sally felt her anxiety rising within her exactly as if Victoria had been there and was now darting down the steps and shouting at Sally to stop, stop! STOP! what she was doing. With tears welling up in her eyes, Sally began mindlessly stamping her feet and turning in multiple directions, looking for something or someone to help her out of this situation.
They’re going to whip you, Sally’s fear told her, whispering in her ear like the charlatan it was. They’re going to whip you and send you back to the cotton fields. They ain’t gonna let you stay when they see what you’ve done.
Hush, child, Grandma Francis said, coming in to combat Sally’s fear as only she could. They ain’t gonna do no such thing. What have you done? They told you to cut some flowers and that’s what you did. Who’s going to whip you for that?
But, Grandma, Sally thought. I ain’t cut them right. I was supposed to cut them down on the stems so Bessie could put them in a vase. These here ain’t gonna work at all.
Then hide those and cut some more. Look at all the flowers around you, child. Who’s ever gonna know?
And of course Grandma Francis was right, as Sally had come to learn she always was, whether she spoke in her own voice or in Sally’s head as she was doing now. Sally had grown used to hearing the old woman’s voice inside her head in times of crisis like this one, although this was obviously the first time it had happened with Grandma Francis so far removed from Sally’s location. There was some small part of Sally that was relieved to know she could still hear Grandma Francis’s words from so far away and it, perhaps more than anything else, gave her the peace of mind to keep from breaking down completely. She had no way of knowing it at the time, but an even larger part of Sally would have been relieved to know she would go on hearing Grandma Francis’s kind and practical words of wisdom in her head for years to come, even after the old woman was dead and buried in the Andrews’s slave cemetery.
The first thing Sally did was drop the flowers she had already cut behind the little wire fence that separated the flowers from the vegetables and kicked some dirt over them. She then found the remaining stems and clipped them off as close to the ground as she could to make the absence of the flowers less noticeable. She dropped the stems over a different section of the same little fence and kicked some dirt over them, too. She then set her hands on her hips and took a calm and patient look at the job before her.
The biggest ones you see.
They were Bessie’s words, but this time it was Grandma Francis who spoke them. Sweeping her eyes slowly over the garden, taking a moment to focus on each flower she saw, Sally quickly determined the purple ones in the far corner of the plot were the biggest and most in bloom. She carefully circled around the back of the garden to get the best access to them.
Way down on the stems.
Crouching down so she was sitting on her calves, Sally singled out the stem of the biggest and brightest purple flower and followed it with her fingers all the way down to the ground. Trapping the stem between the blades of the shears, she snipped it off less than an inch from the ground and lifted the flower from its mortal tether. Laying the purple treasure carefully on the ground beside her black feet, her eyes located the next biggest bloom and repeated the procedure. In contrast to her condition only a few moments ago, her mind was untroubled and her movements were deliberate and unhurried. With the second flower lying beside the first, she targeted the next one.
Six of them.
This time it wasn’t Grandma Francis’s voice that reminded her of her task but Bessie’s, full of the scorn and impatience she had used when showing Sally how to knead the dough, or fill the wood bin, or squeeze the oranges. With a sinking feeling in her heart, Sally realized in her haste to get out of Bessie’s sight -- and Mistah Zebulon’s, don’t forget about him, he was reading his paper but could hear what was going on and was probably watching you out of the corner of his eye -- she had failed to ask Bessie how many six was. Sally could only count to five.
Grandma, Sally thought desperately. How many is six?
I don’t know, Grandma Francis replied. I’m the one who taught you how to count to five, remember? I can’t count no higher myself.
Well, it’s got to be more than five, Sally realized suddenly. I know all the numbers from one to five and six isn’t in there, so it has to be more than five. But how many more?
I don’t know, child. I wish I did.
Sally closed her eyes as tightly as she could, causing her head to spin a little and forcing her to put out a steadying hand to keep her from tipping over in her crouched position.
Bessie? she thought experimentally, figuring since she had heard the old woman’s voice in her head that Bessie would be able to hear her now. How many is six?
There was no answer. Sally gave it a full thirty seconds but the only things she heard were a few morning birds and the rushing of the blood in her temples. It had been comforting to know everything Grandma Francis had taught her would be with her to help her navigate her way through this strange and difficult world, but it was something else entirely to be confronted with the reality that Grandma Francis’s knowledge would only take her so far and there were challenges ahead -- challenges as seemingly simple as juicing oranges or cutting flowers -- for which she was totally unprepared.
Sally opened her eyes. She looked at the two flowers on the ground beside her, and then at the one she had been targeting as the third.
Six is at least five, she told herself as she cut the third flower and then moved onto the fourth. She cut that one and then cut the fifth, and then hesitated for only a moment before cutting two more. That might not be six, she thought to herself resolutely, but it was more than five and therefore had a chance of being six. If it wasn’t and Bessie scolded her for it, Sally already knew she would simply shrug her shoulders and say nobody ever taught her how to count before. That wouldn’t exactly be the truth, but something had happened to Sally here in the flower garden that made her less worried about a lie here and there to help her get along, especially to someone like Bessie.
That’s right, child. She’s just an old house slave. What she don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her none.
Sally scooped up the flowers and calmly made her way back to the kitchen. She had not taken two steps inside when Bessie descended on her.
“Where have you been, girl?” Bessie cried, taking the flowers roughly out of Sally’s hand and dropping them uncounted into a vase she had already filled with water. “The children are already here and Miss Victoria will be down any minute. Put the biscuits in that wicker basket and bring them into the dining room.” Without a backward glance, Bessie was across the kitchen and through a swinging door.
Sally was left alone in the kitchen, the shears she had used to cut the flowers still in her hand. Zebulon had gone sometime while Sally had been out back, his folded newspaper left on his chair and his soiled napkin on his breakfast plate. Through the door to the dining room Sally could hear the Andrews boys rattling off all the things they wanted Bessie to prepare for them. Sally hadn’t yet learned all their names, but their voices were distinctive enough, Marcus and Frederick wanting strawberries on their flapjacks, but soft-spoken Reuben requesting blueberries and cream. As Sally made her way to the cooling racks to start gathering the biscuits in the basket as Bessie had asked, she heard the old slave address her mistress, who must have just entered the room.
“Good morning, Miss Victoria,” Bessie said.
“Good morning, Bessie,” came the unseen reply, and then a rustle of fabric as if Victoria was smoothing out a top bed sheet with her hand. “Emily, dear,” Victoria’s voice said, its pitch changed as if her head had turned in a new direction. “Let go of Mummy’s skirt, please. Do you want Bessie to make you some breakfast?”
“Sally?” Emily’s voice came through loud and clear in the only tone she knew. “Where Sally go?”
Sally froze as the voice reminded her of the time she and Emily had spent playing together in Emily’s room yesterday.
“I don’t know where Sally is,” Victoria said. “Bessie, where is Sally this morning?”
“She’s in the kitchen, Miss Victoria. She’ll be bringing in the biscuits.”
“Sally!” Emily suddenly cried. “Sally come now!”
“Emily,” Victoria scolded. “Sally will be here soon. Now sit next to Mummy and let Bessie fix you some breakfast.”
Sally continued piling the biscuits in the basket as Bessie had instructed. Emily continued to call for her, and as Victoria shushed and pleaded with her to be quiet, Bessie came walking back into the kitchen. Sally turned quickly towards the door with the biscuit basket in her hands.
“You’d better get in there, girl,” Bessie said as she began pouring some of the flapjack batter she had already prepared in the skillet. “That Emily is about to have some kind of fit over you.”
“Yes, Bessie,” Sally said as her bare feet shuffled across the stone floor and she pushed her way slowly into the dining room.
“Sally!” Emily shouted at her entrance and quickly scrambled out of her chair and ran around the table to Sally’s side.
“Emily!” Victoria cried amidst the boys’s laughter.
Knowing what was coming next, Sally struggled to put the basket down on the table before Emily grabbed her. She succeeded, but nearly tipped over the pitcher of orange juice in the process. If it hadn’t been for the quick hands of the youngest Andrews boy -- Reuben, his name is Reuben, Sally told herself -- all the work she and Bessie had put into juicing the oranges would have gone for naught.
“Sit!” Emily said as she clamped onto Sally’s arm with her white and surprisingly strong hands. “Sit with Emmy. Sister sit with Emmy!”
Emily’s use of the word sister brought a fresh round of laughter out of the boys. Emily seemed unaware of the source of their amusement, however, intent as she seemed to be on bringing Sally around to the other side of the table and pushing her into the vacant chair next to hers.
“Boys,” Victoria said severely, as Emily and Sally passed behind her at the head of the table. “Stop laughing at your sister. Emily, please. Let poor Sally go.”
“But, Ma,” the oldest boy said, the one named Marcus. “She still thinks Sally is her sister. She thinks she’s got a slave for a sister!”
“Marcus!” Victoria nearly shouted at him as Emily forced Sally onto the dining room chair and sat, happy and contented, in the chair next to her. “I don’t care what Emily believes. I will not have such outbursts at the table. Now, stop it, the three of you.”
The three of them looked sullen at their place settings just as Bessie burst back into the room with the first stack of flapjacks.
“Blueberries,” Bessie said happily. “These have blueberries. Who wanted the blueberries?”
“I did,” Reuben said quietly, raising his hand just like answering a question at school.
“Mistah Reuben gets the blueberries,” Bessie said as she set the plate in front of the boy and disappeared back into the kitchen. “Strawberries coming up next,” she said on her way through the door.
“Sawbears!” Emily called to Bessie’s retreating figure. “Sally and Emmy want sawbears!”
“Strawberries,” Victoria corrected kindly. “Emily, dear, say strawberries.”
Emily looked at her mother, an expression of confusion on her broad face. “Sawbears?” she said, her thick tongue incapable of producing the necessary syllables.
If Sally had been frightened before when she had realized she had cut the flowers wrong in the garden, she was absolutely terrified now. Twenty-four hours ago she had been running around with the other slave children on the plantation, the dark cloud that was her future already visible, but still far enough away to have little tangible effect on her life. Now, as a result of forces she did not understand, she found herself seated at the breakfast table with a white family, apparently about to be served strawberry flapjacks by the slave she had been brought here to replace. Was that really going to happen? After the morning of work and sore arms she had been subjected to, was she really going to be allowed to sit here and eat flapjacks covered with fresh strawberries? The idea seemed incredible to Sally, like something out of a dream she had never been allowed to have before, and there was a very large part of her that suddenly wanted nothing more than to do exactly that, to sit here with this white family and eat the flapjacks and fresh strawberries served to her by their house slave. She knew intrinsically she had to sit absolutely still and do nothing to provoke Victoria into making her leave the table.
“So, Sally,” Victoria said, practically stopping Sally’s heart with her voice. “How are you enjoying your new home? Did you sleep well last night?”
Sally looked up at Victoria but didn’t dare make any other movements. It took her brain a few seconds to decipher the words Victoria had used, and then a few seconds more to wrestle with the puzzle of which question to answer first.
“Very well, thank you, ma’am,” Sally said eventually, only half understanding this reply effectively answered both questions.
Victoria smiled at her. “I’m so glad. What kind of things have you been helping Bessie with this morning?”
The question seemed familiar to Sally, but if she had answered it recently, she had no idea now how she had responded. “I kneaded the dough,” she said quickly, maybe too quickly. “And filled the firewood bin,” she said after a moment’s thought. “And squeezed the orange juice,” she said after another.
“Goodness,” Victoria said with what seemed to Sally to be genuine surprise. “That’s quite a lot. You certainly have been busy this morning. Would you pour me a glass of your orange juice, please?”
Sally had never been asked to do something with the word please before and at first she wasn’t sure what to do. Was Miss Victoria making fun of her? Was this some kind of trick?
Victoria held up her glass and said the word again. “Please?”
That spurred Sally into action. Standing up too quickly she banged her knee against a table leg and reached across the table for the pitcher of orange juice. Taking Victoria’s glass in her other hand she brought the two together and began to pour out the juice, her wrist shaking under the weight of the pitcher.
“Thank you, Sally,” Victoria said, taking the glass of juice back from the slave child and then, before Sally could sit down again, “Now, would you also go around the table and fill all the other glasses?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sally said automatically, stepping away from the chair Emily had won for her to start filling Marcus’s glass.
At that moment Bessie came charging back into the dining room with two more plates of flapjacks. “Strawberry flapjacks,” she said proudly. “Strawberry flapjacks for Mistah Marcus and Mistah Frederick.”
Bessie set the plates down in front of the two boys, brushing her hip against Sally as she passed by around the end of the table, and began wiping her hands on her apron.
“Thanks, Bessie,” the boys said in succession, each only moments before diving into their respective stack of flapjacks.
Bessie nodded in approval as Sally moved on quietly to fill Frederick’s glass. “Miss Victoria,” the slave said to her mistress, “what can I bring you and young Emily?”
“Oh, Bessie,” Victoria said. “Those blueberries on Reuben’s plate look wonderful. Are they fresh?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bessie said. “I got them at market yesterday.”
Sally stepped over and began filling Reuben’s glass with orange juice.
“Then I believe I will have some of those,” Victoria said. “Blueberries, please.”
“Sawbears!” Emily shouted. “No! Emmy want sawbears!”
“Emily, dear,” Victoria said calmly. “Mummy is going to have blueberries, but you can have strawberries if you want them. Would you like that?” she asked with great inflection, and then very slowly, sounding out every syllable, “Strawberries?”
Emily nodded her head vigorously, reaching for her fork as if the strawberries were about to make their appearance.
Victoria turned back to Bessie. “And bring two flapjacks with extra strawberries for Emily.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bessie said again and began to make her way towards the kitchen door. Sally stood quietly against the wall to let Bessie pass before moving to empty the rest of the pitcher into Emily’s glasses.
“No!” Emily cried, her voice stricken with great concern. “Sally want sawbears, too!”
All movement in the room stopped. Even the boys stopped chewing. Reuben, who had just raised his glass of orange juice to his lips, froze with the glass less than an inch from his mouth.
“Emily,” Victoria said patiently. “Sally will have her breakfast with Bessie in the kitchen after we have been served.”
“No!” Emily shouted defiantly. “Sally want sawbears!”
“Sally can have strawberries, Emily,” Victoria said. “In the kitchen with Bessie after we have been served.”
“No!” Emily wailed as if her world was coming to an end. “Sally want sawbears here! Sister want sawbears with Emmy!”
Victoria looked severely at her sons to stop the laughter before it started. Sally stood frozen against the wall, Bessie a few steps beside her, her hips still pivoted towards the kitchen door.
“Emily,” Victoria said with extreme precision, turning back to the child and taking her hand. “Listen to Mummy carefully. Sally has come to live with us and you can play with her from time to time, but Sally is not your sister. Sally is--”
Victoria’s words were cut off by the highest pitched screech Sally had ever heard in her life. It was so loud and came on so suddenly Sally fumbled and nearly dropped the pitcher of orange juice she still held in her hand. The inhuman cry came from the tiny throat of Miss Emily Andrews and, although it terrified Sally and practically stopped her heart, the reactions of the others in the room seemed to indicate they had been expecting it. As Sally hunched her shoulders in a feeble attempt to protect her ears from the cataract of sound, she saw Victoria simply close her eyes and the boy named Reuben sedately place his glass back on the table.
Emily’s cry slowly descended into words as she began to thrash about in her chair. “Sister here! Sister here!” she moaned over and over again as Victoria tried in vain to calm her down.
“Emily, please,” Victoria said, raising her voice in an attempt to make herself heard. “Stop this right now. This is not how a lady conducts herself at the table.”
Emily was oblivious to her mother’s concerns for propriety. The tears beginning to flow, the child was kicking one of the table legs as she continued her bellowing mantra.
“Sister here! Sister here!”
“Emily!” Victoria shouted at her, her voice perhaps more frantic than she would have preferred. “Emily, Sally cannot eat at our table. She is not your sister!”
It was the wrong thing to say because it completely sent Emily over the edge. Flinging herself from her chair, Emily started writhing about on the dining room floor, her flagellating feet catching on the hardwood surface from time to time and shifting her bit by bit under the table.
“Emily!” Victoria cried, the anger in her voice completely replaced by fear as she pushed her chair away from the table and dropped to her knees beside her daughter’s spastic form. “Bessie, she’s having another fit! Get a cold compress and the elixir!”
Sally saw Bessie dash from the room out of the corner of her eye. Hugging the pitcher of orange juice against her chest, she tried to press herself back and through the dining room wall. Emily’s cries had lost all their coherence and had become more like growls coming from the back of her throat, as if she had become some kind of animal staked to the Andrews’s dining room floor. Although Sally could not see her clearly, she did see that Emily’s dress had bunched up around her waist in her convulsions, revealing her pale little legs.
“Bessie!” Victoria cried as she tried to calm Emily’s movements with her hands. “Hurry!”
The boys were out of their chairs as well, Marcus running off into the kitchen to help Bessie track down the necessary items, and Frederick and Reuben more slowly making their quiet way to the corner of the room where their sister lay writhing on the floor.
“Emily,” Victoria said, trying to cover the anxiety in her voice with placating tones. “Emily, my darling girl, please calm down. Mummy’s here. Mummy’s here.”
Victoria’s words seemed to have little effect on her daughter, who continued to squirm and struggle against her mother’s restraining grasp and bleat like an injured pig stuck in a fence. Sally stood rooted in her spot in the opposite corner of the room, too petrified to venture out in any direction. The heavy dining room table obscured most of the scene from her view, but she found herself gazing on it nonetheless. The two boys, standing to Victoria’s left with blank faces and restless feet, the top of their mother’s head and her lined face looking down at the troubled child in her lap, the table, and Emily’s wriggling legs and one skinny white arm.
Bessie came bolting into the room at that moment, a wet towel in one hand and a stoppered bottle in the other. Marcus followed in her wake and together they pushed their way into the crowded scene in the opposite corner.
“Here, Miss Victoria,” Bessie said, her voice sounding more strained to Sally’s ears than Victoria’s. “Take this, take this!”
The slave pushed the bottle into her mistress’s raised hands and then stepped sprightly over Emily’s prone form to crouch down on her opposite side, pressing the cold compress carefully down on what Sally assumed was the girl’s forehead.
“Emmy,” Bessie said with pained and unrepentant affection. “Emmy, everything’s gonna be all right. It’s gonna be all right.”
Bessie’s words seemed to have even less of an effect on Emily’s tantrum than Victoria’s did. In fact, Sally thought, if they had any effect at all it was to intensify her uncontrolled frustration. Her foot connected with one of the dining room chairs, knocking it over onto its side with a clatter, and her growls notched up into real screams buried in the back of her throat.
“Emily!” Victoria cried, the sound of abject terror creeping into her voice for the first time. “Emily, please! You must calm down. Dear Lord, please calm down!”
The hurricane that was Emily still raged beneath the table as Bessie and the Andrews family huddled around her in an effort to contain the destruction. All their eyes seemed focused on Emily until Sally saw Victoria’s head pop up suddenly, scan the room, and then settle on her.
“Sally, dear,” Victoria said, her eyes hot with fire but her voice returning to something close to normal. “Bring me a spoon from the table.”
For a moment Sally did not move, surprised at being spoken to and realizing there was nothing to keep her from being pulled into the scene on the opposite side of the room.
“Sally!” Victoria practically shrieked at her. “Bring me a spoon, now!”
That got Sally moving. She had no idea what Victoria wanted a spoon for, but she knew what a spoon was and saw several of them on the table. Moving forward to put the half empty pitcher of orange juice down, she snatched up a teaspoon and began making her way around the perimeter of the room.
Emily continued kicking and screaming, thrashing and squirming about as if trying to climb out of a pit, and as Sally rounded the corner of the table she was finally able to get a clear picture of the whole scene. Emily’s face was bright red, flushed with so much blood it almost shone, her lips and cheeks coated with a mixture of mucus and saliva. Bessie crouched next to her, her hands now clasped around the young girl’s wrists, fighting to keep her flailing arms from injuring themselves or those around her. Victoria sat on the floor with Emily’s head in her lap, one hand pressing the cold compress against her forehead and the other hooked under Emily’s chin, trying to hold her daughter’s head up to receive the spoonful of elixir she intended to administer. The potion now rested in Marcus’s hands, the eldest boy standing by his mother’s right shoulder, the bottle in one hand and the stopper in the other, his face a mixture of sadness and patience as he awaited Sally’s arrival with the spoon. The two other boys, Frederick and Reuben, stood as they had before on their mother’s opposite side, both pressed fearfully against the wall, Reuben appearing only slightly more composed than his older brother. Surrounding Emily as they did, the group of them seemed to call Sally’s attention to the struggling girl, the six-year-old with the mind of a toddler and the feral eyes of a cornered animal.
As Sally approached, however, Emily’s eyes suddenly softened back into rationality and her struggling ceased.
“Sally,” she said in a voice that cracked, her throat tired and worn out from the growls and screams that had been forced through it.
They all looked up at Sally -- Reuben and Frederick and Marcus and Bessie and Victoria -- they all looked up at Sally with identical expressions on their faces. Relief that the storm appeared to be over and surprise that the sunlight which had dispelled it seemed to come in the form of a little slave girl named Sally who none of them had known yesterday at this same time.
“Sally,” Emily said again, the name distorted more than normal because of her mother’s hand still clamped firmly under her chin. “Sally want sawbears.”
Sally did her best to ignore the other eyes boring into her and focused instead on the strangely gentle and kind ones staring at her from Emily’s wide face. They had an eerie power to keep her here, to keep her from giving into every screaming instinct her body had to run away from this place and the people that populated it. Those eyes were innocent and alluring now, potently so, even as they had moments before been the exact opposite, had been angry and vicious enough to rip holes in whatever and whoever they stared at. Without having the idea fully formed in her head, the concept that both states of mind could exist with equal and interchangeable intensity in the same individual had completely mesmerized Sally.
“Emily?” Victoria said cautiously, turning her own eyes down onto her daughter’s face. “Emily, are you all right now?”
Emily’s eyes flicked up to her mother and Sally felt them release her, exactly as if they had held Sally up on her tiptoes and had now let her fall back down onto her heels.
What is she, Grandma? What is she that she can hold me so?
I don’t know, child. I don’t know.
“Sally and Emmy want sawbears,” Emily said again, exactly as she had said it before at the table, as if the tantrum had never occurred.
Victoria was the only one brave enough to negotiate with her at this delicate moment. Everyone else held his or her breath, waiting to see what agreement the matriarch would be able to reach with her elfish child.
“Emily,” Victoria said warily, as if using the time it took to pronounce the name to fully form the ideas coming together in her head. “If Bessie brings strawberry flapjacks for you and Sally, will you sit at the table like a good little lady and eat them?”
Of all the people hanging on Victoria’s words, it was the old house slave Bessie who let an uncontrollable gasp escape her at this scandalous suggestion. Bessie had been a house slave for thirty-six years, in four different households, and never had she been invited to eat a meal at the master’s table. Like white women scrubbing their own floors in this part of Columbia, it simply was not done.
Victoria shot her slave and angry stare, commanding her with her eyes not to dare upset the tenuous peace she was working towards. Sally was the only other person in the room besides Bessie to be in a position to see Victoria’s stare, and it was more than just the look of fury and determination that chilled Sally’s blood and made her feel weak in the knees. Victoria’s eyes did much more than intimate something to Bessie, did much more than communicate with her, they downright spoke to Bessie, and Sally heard the words as clearly as if they had been recited aloud.
Mind your place, you black devil. Remember who I am and what I can do to you. If I say you’re going to serve that black child strawberry flapjacks at my table, than that is damn well what you are going to do. That is, if you want to spend the last few years of your miserable life in this house and not stooped over in my husband’s cotton field.
“Sister have sawbears with Emmy?”
Sally shivered anew as Victoria’s cold and calculating eyes turned away from Bessie and down with love and resignation to her only daughter.
“Yes, Emily,” Victoria said, not an ounce of the venom that had been present in her eyes now detectable in her voice. “Yes, Sally will have strawberries with you.”
Things quickly returned to some semblance of normal after those words. Emily worked her way to her feet and resumed her seat at the table, her mother quickly reaching out to straighten the garments that had gone askew in her thrashing. Bessie used a corner of her apron to wipe Emily’s face clean and then silently retreated to the kitchen. The Andrews boys filed back to their seats around the table, the youngest one, the quiet one named Reuben, setting right the chair Emily had knocked over and offering it gallantly to Sally before taking his own.
“Sally, dear,” Victoria said, easing back into her chair at the head of the table. “You must be hungry after all those morning chores. Won’t you please join us for breakfast?”
Emily turned and smiled broadly at Sally, the slime scrubbed off her face but her complexion still glowing with the blood that had recently rushed to it.
Sally was uncertain what to do, standing there nearly frozen in place with the spoon she had taken off the table still in her hand. Looking around the room she realized the spoon was the only evidence left of the tribulation that had just occurred. The spoon had been meant to deliver the elixir that supposedly would have quenched Emily’s fire, but Sally’s very appearance had done it first. Sally had a hard time understanding how the disaster could have struck so quickly, seemingly out of nowhere like a summer storm, and then how it could just as quickly drop back down over the horizon, out of sight and, seemingly, out of mind. Sally had come from a place where nothing ever seemed to change, where change happened too slowly to regularly be noticed. Each day on the plantation began and ended the same way with the same predictable patterns of activity and rest. Here, things seemed to happen at random, with no one really able to predict what would happen next.
“Sally,” Victoria said again, the slightest tinge of impatience coming into her voice. “Won’t you please sit down and have breakfast with us?”
The eyes of Victoria, Emily, and the three boys on her, Sally knew she had better sit down, and sit down she did, in the chair Emily had chosen for her and which Reuben had set right.
No, child, Grandma Francis whispered in her mind as Sally took her seat and Emily beamed at her with an expression born only out of the deepest and most devilish satisfaction. Not random. Things here don’t happen without cause. They happen because she wants them to. That strange looking girl with the mind of a baby who thinks you’re her new sister. She’s the one that makes it all happen.
Grandma was right as Grandma usually was, Sally could see that plainer than anything she had ever seen before. Her eyes shifted awkwardly around the table and settled on the purple flowers she had clipped so recently in the garden.
“Mmmm,” Victoria said as she lowered her glass of orange juice from her lips. “The orange juice is wonderful, Sally. Thank you so much for squeezing it.”
“I cut the flowers, too.” Sally said brazenly, knowing without understanding she was protected now, protected in a way she never would have been had she stayed on the plantation.
“They’re beautiful, Sally,” Victoria said, her voice very nearly covering the reality she spent most of her time denying. “Absolutely beautiful.”
+ + +
“Sally” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/shermans-march
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