Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [5]
“Luella had to help me today because they took Grady away and Tessie was crying, and—”
She put her hands over her ears. “I told you, Caroline, I don’t want to talk about those people. Proper young ladies don’t concern themselves with such unpleasant subjects as slaves. I’ve warned and warned your father that you were becoming much too familiar with them, and see here? I was right. This is exactly what I was talking about. It isn’t good for you at all. Ruby, don’t just stand there gawking; fix the child’s hair.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ruby guided me out of my chair and seated me at my mother’s mirrored dressing table. I watched as she took off the net that Luella had clumsily pinned on and began brushing my hair with my mother’s silver hairbrush. The soft bristles caressed my head the way Tessie’s gentle fingers did when she stroked my temples to soothe me to sleep.
“She have your hair, ma’am,” Ruby said. “So thick and nice. She look like you when she grow up . . . see?” Ruby deftly twisted my hair into a little bun and held it up on the back of my head like a grown-up lady’s. Somehow she had made it puff out on the sides, too, so that my face looked fashionably moon-shaped, like my mother’s.
“Can Ruby pin it up like that, Mother?” I begged. “So it looks like yours?”
“Heavens, no. You’re much too young.”
“Please, just for fun?” I don’t know what made me so brave. I was usually too timid to say a word to anyone, especially to my mother, who was a virtual stranger to me. But I missed Tessie, and I took courage from the fact that Mother seemed to be climbing her way up from her sad spell again. As I watched her face, reflected in the mirror, she finally smiled.
“Oh, all right. Pin it up for her, Ruby. Then Caroline and I can sip our tea like two Richmond belles.”
Ruby expertly parted and pulled and twisted my hair, sticking hairpins in the back and tucking a pair of Mother’s beautiful ivory combs on the sides. My head felt strange and wobbly. I stared at myself in the mirror and barely recognized the grown-up girl who stared back.
“Missy Caroline gonna be beautiful, just like you, ma’am,” Ruby said as she worked. “And she have your skin, too. Just as white as milk.”
“If only we can keep her from running all around in the backyard from now on, it just might stay white, too,” Mother said. “I told her father she’s twelve years old now, and it simply won’t do to have her pretty white skin all freckled from the sun. Or worse still, to have her looking as brown as a Negro. Honestly, it’s disgraceful enough that she plays with one of them all day without her looking like one of them, too.”
Grady.
I suddenly recalled the feeling of warm sunshine on my hair and my face, of cool grass beneath my bare feet, and the sound of Grady’s rippling laughter as we chased each other around the backyard. High above us, I remembered my mother standing behind her curtained window like a shadow, watching.
Tears filled my eyes. Grady was gone—my playmate, my friend. They’d thrown him into the back of a wagon full of Negro slaves wearing chains.
Mother didn’t seem to notice my tears as she rattled on and on. “Goodness, you do look all grown up, Caroline. Why, before long you’ll be too old to wear short-sleeved dresses. We’ll be sewing hoops to your petticoat instead of those girlish cords you’re wearing. But I really must remember to tell that worthless cook of ours to give you more to eat. Honestly, you’re thin as a willow.”
I was fine-boned and very small for a twelve-year-old, but it wasn’t Esther’s fault. She did her best to try to fatten me up, complaining that I didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. She swore that a good, strong wind would pick me up and blow me clear to Washington, D.C.
“Now, come back over here and sit down, Caroline. We have some very important changes to discuss.”
Mother’s words sent a shiver through me. I slipped into my place at the tea table, but I was suddenly too nervous to eat. I hated change of any kind. Other girls my