Phebe
At Morrisania, everything changed.
Here was safety. Here was dignity. Miss Nancy had a position within the household and her own pretty bedchamber. Phebe saw what it meant. First thing her mistress did was to run her hands up and down the splendid bed hangings. Second thing? Setting Phebe free.
“If you wish to leave, I’ll help you in any way I can. But I’m hoping you’ll stay at Morrisania with me, for as long as you are happy to.” Phebe couldn’t speak, only nodded. She would stay.
In her own room for the first time in her life, sleep was hard to find. She lay awake, watching the moon, welcoming the wind rattling the windowpane and the call of an owl. Her mind roved the past, from the slave cabins at Tuckahoe and her sister fading into nothingness in their mother’s arms, to Mr. Randolph’s face in the candlelight at Bizarre, to the blood and panic at Glentivar. She saw herself running down Mr. Harrison’s staircase, so new, the smell of freshly cut wood still hung in the air. She remembered the fearful thud of her heart when she thought all would be lost. She scolded herself to forget what happened. It made no sense to be haunted by the past, and yet it came at her, night after night.
At first, she stayed distant from the other staff in the house. Those months in New York City were a jangle of new voices and accents, confusing enough to make her head spin, and it was no better here. Mr. Morris had a French valet who spoke English as though his mouth was crammed with cake. The two German maids, with broad foreheads and long blonde hair, whispered to each other in their own language. Those two were shy as mice with everyone but the cook, a free Black woman, as firm as she was frank.
“Call me Martha and make yourself useful,” the woman said. “Your Miss Randolph says you work just for her, but in here, we pull together like family. And fight like family too, some days.”
It was like no family Phebe ever knew, a muddle of Black and White, old and young, some wise-cracking, others quick-tempered, never quiet. They all heeded Miss Nancy, though — every inch her mother’s daughter when she chose to be.
And then they were married.
“We’ve reached safe harbor,” Miss Nancy declared one evening as Phebe combed her hair. “Mrs. Booth’s damp bedroom and all the snubs and vicissitudes of Richmond and Newport were worth it, for they paved the road to Fairfield and my good husband.”
“It does my heart good to see you so happy.” They smiled at each other in the mirror. “Now, just imagine if you was to have a child.”
Miss Nancy froze. Phebe could have bitten her own tongue out.
“You know that’s impossible. God would not permit it.”
Impossible? Not permitted? She opened her lips, but Miss Nancy was up on her feet and gone. Phebe was alone in front of the mirror, comb still in hand.
Impossible. The word buzzed in her head. It was unlikely, perhaps, but far from impossible. Something at that long-ago trial convinced her mistress she was to blame for the infant’s death. But what if the child hadn’t died at all?
It all came back. Syphax and Mr. Randolph talking. Them not knowing she was there under that porch at Bizarre. The child, taken alive from its mother’s arms. The woman, Rachel, and the talk of her fair-skinned child. Questions Phebe might have asked, should have asked, but never did.
After all these years of silence? She saw no path to the truth of it now.