A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [71]
McSimmons turned. “It’s not her,” he said. “Though I think she was one of my father’s slaves.”
“Where’s she been till now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember her.”
“Where have you been, girl?” Mistress McSimmons asked me.
“I told you, ma’am,” I said. “I ran away when everyone else was killed.”
“Don’t be impertinent with me—I asked you where you’ve been!”
“With some other people, ma’am—they took care of me.”
“Where, you fool!”
“Over yonder, ma’am,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction from Rosewood. “I ain’t sure exactly.”
“With that white girl’s family who was with you?”
“Yes’m.”
“Do her people have a name?”
“Uh … I forgot, ma’am.”
“You’re as stupid as you are ugly! I don’t believe you.
—She knows, William,” the lady said, turning to her husband. “I can see in her eyes that she’s lying. I’m telling you again what I told you before—you take care of it, or else you won’t like the result.”
She turned and walked back into the house, leaving me alone with William McSimmons. It was all I could do to keep from quivering from head to toe, because even if he didn’t remember me, I sure remembered him. He was the meanest of the McSimmons boys, besides being the oldest, and I’d felt the lash of the whip from his hand more times than I wanted to remember. And he was different than his pa when he whipped us—William McSimmons seemed to enjoy it, which I don’t see how anyone could, no matter what color anyone was.
He grabbed my dress by the back of the neck and half dragged me alongside him toward the barn.
“I’ll teach you to lie to your betters, girl,” he said. “You’ll tell me where the other girl is if you know what’s good for you.”
“But I don’t know what other girl you mean, sir,” I said.
“Shut up, you! We’ll see what you know when you taste the end of my whip.”
I winced in pain, trying not to cry out. One thing I knew about men like William McSimmons is that crying out made them all the angrier. He hauled me into the barn and half threw me to the dirt floor while he grabbed a whip from where it hung on the wall. Then he walked toward me again where I was struggling to get back to my feet, and ripped at my dress two or three times till my back was bare, then started lashing me with his whip.
I’d almost forgotten how much it hurt to be whipped with those tiny little leather straps. I screamed in agony at the first lash, but after four or five, the shock from the horrible pain silenced me until I just waited, trembling in terror, for each new lash.
“I see from your back that you’re an ornery one,” he yelled. “Did me or my pa do that to you?”
“Yes, sir,” I whimpered.
“Are you ready to tell me what you know?” he asked.
“She—curse the fool girl, I can’t even remember her name!—disappeared not long after you did. You must have helped her. She could never have survived on her own, she was such a half-wit.”
“I don’t know who you mean, sir. All the rest of the slaves but me was killed when—”
“She wasn’t a field slave. She didn’t live with the rest of you. She was a house slave and was fat as a cow when she disappeared. Now where is she!”
Three more sudden lashes whipped across my back, and again I screamed out. I could feel that my back was starting to bleed. I couldn’t help thinking of Emma and little William and what would happen to them if this terrible man found them. How could anyone be so evil that he’d want to kill his own son? But I had no doubt that’s what was on his mind.
I fell to the floor, feeling like I was going to faint from the pain.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I whimpered. “I don’t know who you mean.”
“Then you are an imbecile! Maybe you’d rather die yourself.”
He turned and strode angrily out of the barn. I took a deep breath and just lay there sobbing, wondering what was going to happen to me. Before I had the chance to think about getting up and making a run for it, two men came in, grabbed me without even letting me cover myself up with my torn dress, and dragged me out of