Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [21]
“Have you seen your family yet?” I asked Tessie before drifting off.
“No, Missy,” she whispered. “They all field hands. I have to wait till sunset, when they come in from the fields.”
“May I go with you?”
“Down Slave Row? That’s no place for Little Missy. Why you want to go down there?”
I couldn’t explain why to myself, much less to Tessie. I suppose I remembered all the happy times I’d spent in our kitchen with Tessie and Grady, or out in the carriage house, talking to Eli, and I wanted to replace the image of Slave Row that I’d seen earlier with a happier one. I was certain that Eli would be down there, too, laughing and talking with Josiah.
“Jonathan already showed me Slave Row,” I told Tessie. She didn’t answer. I wondered if she had fallen asleep.
But later that night, while Daddy and the others were visiting in the parlor after supper, Tessie came to me and pulled me aside. “I take you down there now . . . if you still want to go,” she said.
Tessie’s family was truly happy to see her, but Slave Row wasn’t a place of warmth and laughter like our kitchen back home. An atmosphere of weariness and wariness hung over all the cabins, so that even the small children seemed subdued. I caught a glimpse inside her family’s unlit cabin, enough to see that it had a dirt floor and was nearly bare of furniture.
“You back here to stay, girl?” Tessie’s mama asked as her family stood around their front stoop, visiting.
“No, my massa just come for few days.” She wrapped her arm around me and pulled me close, as if sensing my uneasiness. “And my little Missy come long, too.”
“Must mean Old Massa’s dying if young Massa George come back here,” Tessie’s father said.
She nodded. “All the folk up the house think so. He in a real bad way, so I hear.”
“Wonder what become of us when he die? You hearing anything, Tessie?”
“Don’t know about that,” she said. “But my massa, he got plenty money, so his family must have plenty, too. Probably no one have to be sold.”
Tessie’s father puffed on an old corncob pipe. “If you dream of Massa counting money, means someone gonna be sold.”
Slowly, one by one, the other slaves ambled over to the cabin to greet Tessie and join the conversation. I didn’t see Eli, but Josiah stood at a cautious distance, watching and listening. The young man beside him was shirtless, and when he turned around I saw ridges of ugly welts on his back, like a furrowed field. I couldn’t stop staring.
“What happened to him, Tessie?” I whispered.
“Overseer’s whip what happened.” She turned my head away and held me close to her side so I couldn’t see him.
As more and more people gathered near the cabin, I began to sense how uncomfortable they all were around me—and I began to grow uneasy around them. I couldn’t understand why that was, why these servants were so different from our servants at home. For the first time in my life I felt out of place. I felt white. And I didn’t like the feeling at all. I wiggled out of Tessie’s grasp.
“I’m going back to the house now,” I told her.
She looked over at Josiah. Their eyes met. “Then I going, too,” she said.
“No, stay as long as you like, Tessie. I can walk back by myself.”
I threaded through the crowd before she had a chance to follow me. But when I reached the last cabin I heard someone behind me say, “Peculiar little white gal, ain’t she?”
Chapter Four
Hilltop, July 1854
I awoke at dawn to the haunting sound of the conch shell, blowing to summon the field slaves. A few minutes later I heard a faint rumbling and recognized it as wagons rolling and the tramp of marching feet. Then, above the sound of roosters crowing and birds calling, I heard music—the song of the slaves. I never will forget that shivery, mournful sound.
Nobody know the trouble I see. . . . Nobody know but Jesus.
It was singing, yet it wasn’t—it was weeping. And when the sound finally faded away, I realized that I was weeping, too.
My grandfather died that day. Aunt Abigail arrived in the afternoon with her husband, a minister, and he conducted the funeral service the following