Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [32]
“They have measles,” Aunt Anne said when she arrived a while later. “I pray to the Good Lord that you don’t catch it, too, Caroline. I fear you’ve already been exposed.”
For the next week, I hurried down to Slave Row early every morning to help Granny tend the sick babies. Unable to eat, they grew very weak. Caleb and the other two toddlers came down with measles, too, then my sweet little Nellie and another child her age fell sick. I nursed them all day and would have stayed all night if my aunt had allowed it. The children grew sicker and sicker.
“We should pray for them,” I told Granny one day after my aunt had gone back to the house to prepare some more willow bark tea. Granny shook her head.
“We don’t pray for our babies to live. All they’ll ever know is misery and slavery. Much better if Jesus just take them home right now.”
“You don’t mean that! No mother would ever want her babies to die!” I thought of my mother, grieving for her dead babies.
“Well, these here mamas do. They know them babies better off in Jesus’ arms than growing up to be a slave. Better she give them to Jesus right now than to the massa to be sold later on. Then she never have to wonder where her children are at, or if they suffering.”
I lay in bed that night thinking of Granny’s words. I wondered who suffered more—my mother, who knew her babies were in heaven, or Tessie, who didn’t know where her child was or if she’d ever see him again.
The next day I didn’t return to the cabin. I was sick with the measles myself.
Aunt Anne immediately sent for the doctor. Hovering over my bed day and night, she worried herself nearly to death until it became clear that I would recover. When Jonathan returned, she let him sit with me during the day, reading books to me, telling me all about the grand time he’d had with the militia, playing checkers with me when I finally felt well enough. He’d already had the measles.
“How are Caleb and Nellie?” I asked him one day. “And all the babies?” I had tried asking Aunt Anne but she only grew vexed with me for pestering her about them.
“Fine,” he said offhandedly.
I threw one of the bed pillows at him in frustration. “You’re not telling me the truth. I want to know the truth.”
“You shouldn’t get so involved, Carrie,” he said, tossing back the pillow. “They’re only slaves. You wouldn’t be sick yourself right now if you hadn’t meddled where you had no business meddling.”
I felt pulled in two directions at once. I liked Jonathan and I wanted him to like me, but I hated the way he talked about the Negroes, the way he treated them. I knew it bothered him that I cared so much, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d held and soothed and rocked those little babies. I’d fallen in love with Nellie and little Caleb. I needed to know how they were faring. I flung back the covers and lowered my feet to the floor.
“If you won’t tell me the truth, then I’ll just have to go down there and see for myself.”
“Over my dead body!” He came out of his chair in a flash, scooped me up as if I weighed nothing at all, and dropped me back into bed. “Now listen,” he said when we were both calmer, “the truth is, I don’t know how any of them are. We’ve all been too worried about you to bother with them. But if you promise to stay put, I’ll send for one of the Negro girls who lives down there. She can tell you what you want to know.”
That afternoon one of the scrub maids came, a tall, dazedlooking girl about my own age. She showed no emotion at all as she stood in my bedroom doorway and told me the awful truth. “Nellie on the mend now, Miss Caroline. But Caleb and little Kate gone to be with Jesus. All four of them babies gone, too. No help for them, I guess.”
All the grief that I’d felt over losing Grady returned, magnified tenfold. I wept and wept. I couldn’t stop crying. Even when I was no longer sobbing out loud, the tears silently fell, all that day and into the night. It scared me that