Chapter Six
Joan had fierce opinions. Opinions I’d never known a person to have. She’d never wanted children. She didn’t care about money
or material things. And she despised the institution of slavery. She said it was immoral and that slavers were wicked people.
Unchristian. “Your daddy calls himself a Quaker,” she said, gnawing on pumpkin seeds and spitting the husks into a bucket,
“but Quakers don’t believe in slave owning. It’s against their moral code. Ask him about that, why don’t you?”
I’d never heard that before. “The Bible doesn’t forbid slavery, Aunt Joan,” I said, parroting my father, “either in the Old
or New Testament.”
Joan smiled at me with exaggerated patience. “Debt slavery is different from chattel slavery, my dear. The stealing and selling
of human beings is a capital offense, according to Old Testament law. Exodus twenty-one, sixteen: He that stealeth a man,
and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.”
“But—but Abraham had slaves.”
“Abraham also had three wives. You approve of bigamy now?”
“Slavery brought Christianity to the heathens,” I said. “We civilized the savages.”
“If by ‘civilizing’ them you mean chaining and whipping them into submission and stripping them of freedom.”
“Many slaveholders are fair and just,” I insisted.
I’d seen enough newspaper stories about life in the North to know that slavery was vigorously opposed in some places.
There were marches and rallies, editorials in newspapers, laws to protect free Black people.
In some states, I’d learned, Black people owned land and homes and even businesses. They paid taxes and voted.
In Wilkes County, nobody mentioned any of that. Slavery was as much a part of life as going to church on Sundays or decorating
a fir tree with candles at Christmastime. It was, as Papa said, the way of the world—or at least the world I was born into,
and as far as I knew, the world in which I would die. Everyone around me believed in that world the way they believed in God:
with a blind, unquestioning stance.
“Sallie, listen.” Joan chewed on a seed and spit out the husk. “It’s not only the horrific injustice of it. Slavers are corrupted
by power. No man should have so much dominance over another. It’s unnatural. It breeds idleness, and idleness is a poison.”
I thought about the work Joan did by herself on this property, the work I’d been doing since I arrived. At home, Dinah and
her daughter, Grace, worked alongside a revolving group of women: Sylvie, Charlotte, Mary Ann. My relationships with them
were intimate in the most transactional ways. They helped me dress, prepared my baths, emptied my chamber pot, nursed me when
I was sick. They kept our whispered secrets—or so we hoped. But what did we know about them, really? Our attention was fleeting,
incurious, glimpsed only from the corner of an eye.
I’d learned to make idleness appear productive: to fixate on inconsequential tasks, to stretch an outing or a decision into
an entire day. We all did, didn’t we—my mother and my sister and I? Pretending to be busy when we weren’t?
Mama had no reason to leave her room, where her world was neatly arranged around her comfort.
Summoned by her little bell, Dinah brought everything she required, from breakfast to the midday meal to supper, with a tea tray in between.
The drapes were opened and closed, the pillows fluffed and arranged, the bed linens washed and returned, the chamber pot emptied—all by Dinah’s hands.
Even so, it would be a long time before I could hear—really hear—what my aunt was saying. I clung to the familiar justifications.
“It’s the law of the land, Aunt Joan.”
Joan nodded. “For now. Other parts of the country are more enlightened.”
“Why do you live in the South, then?”
“I wonder that myself sometimes.” She waved a hand in the air, taking in the humble cottage, the vivid purple myrtle, the
dark forest just beyond the clearing, the blue-green far-off hills. “It’s in my bones, I guess. Where else would I go?”
Grace lived with her mother, Dinah, in a cabin down the hill from our house. While Addie preferred playing house and making
clothes for her dolls, Grace, like me, was happy to spend her days outside. We spent long hours together roaming the property,
chasing each other through the corn and wheat fields, drinking tart cider on the porch in the late afternoon sun. We wandered
through the brush beyond the fields with tin pails in our hands, following the footpath to the stream, gathering raspberries
and blueberries for Dinah to cook into pies. We played hide-and-seek among the clotheslines, in the barn, in the apple cellar.
At the stream, we rolled down our stockings and stuck our toes into the water, sweet relief from the heat. We took naps on
my bed. When Grace was asleep, I’d gaze at her pretty brown skin and black eyelashes, as long and curly as a doe’s. So different
from my ruddy freckled face, my wispy, pale lashes.
As we grew older, I became aware of other differences.
Dinah sewed new dresses for me each year and Grace wore my patched and faded hand-me-downs.
Grace could play at my house, but I wasn’t allowed at hers.
I had begun to detect a tone, brusque and impatient, that Mama didn’t use with my other friends.
She’d call, “Grace? Time to leave now,” sending her down to the cabins without a word of goodbye.
I sensed the wrongness, though I had no language for it.
I knew the word slave, but I didn’t understand what it meant, not really. It was just a word, like farmer or blacksmith. A word adults used in passing in a clipped, offhanded way. What could it possibly have to do with Grace, a child, my friend
and companion? What could it have to do with me?
One morning, home from school with a fever, I heard Grace in the bedroom next to mine, Addie’s room, humming a tune. I got
up and went into the hall and peered in. She was shaking out a blanket.
“What are you doing?”
Grace glanced over her shoulder. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“But why?”
She draped the blanket over Addie’s mattress, shaking her head.
I felt my body prickle. Grace was tidying up after us, like her mother did. I could see the same care in her movements, the
same meticulousness as she tucked the blanket in at the corners.
Just then, Dinah called up the stairs. “Grace? You about finished?”
Grace gave me a long look. “Almost.” She put the pillows in place.
The next time we played together, Grace called me Miss Sarah.
I made a face. “Why’d you call me that?”
“My mama said I have to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do.”
No one had told me anything.
“Why does Grace call me Miss Sarah now? And why isn’t she in school?” I asked Papa that evening as we sat on the porch.
He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe. “It’s against the law.”
“What’s against the law?”
“Teaching a slave to read or write.” He patted my knee. “It’s for the best, Sallie. They don’t want to, anyway. It’s counter
to their natures.”
I knew Grace wanted to learn to read. I’d seen her leafing through the books I left lying around on the floor.
“Grace does.”
“Grace is only beginning to understand what’s appropriate for her.” Lighting his pipe with a taper, he said, “Everybody has
their place and their function, Sallie. Take men and ladies. Ladies are gentler and more sentimental by nature. They’re important
to the household, vitally important, but their role is different. They can’t—and shouldn’t—own property, or sign contracts,
or vote. They don’t possess the logic, you see.” He puffed on his pipe. “Black folks, too, have their place. They’re the engine
that keeps a civilized society running. They don’t pine for advancement. They’re satisfied with their lot. And you should
be too.”
I nodded, trying to grasp what he was saying, wanting to understand. My emotions were a jumble. Not for the last time, the
story I was being told about how I was supposed to feel and what I felt were vastly different.
I sensed I was at the edge of something dangerous. A precipice. It scared me, so I stepped back.
I did not ask Grace if she was satisfied with her lot. It seemed like a question I couldn’t ask.
Things were already changing between us. Grace was becoming wary around me, afraid to tease or provoke. She had a sly sense
of humor and a keen awareness of the world, but now she kept her opinions to herself. I got used to seeing her scrubbing laundry
in the lean-to and washing dishes with her mother. I got used to her calling me Miss Sarah.
My heart ached with the loss of our friendship, but I did not know how to get it back.
Neither of us talked about it. We just learned to adjust.
It has been this way for a long time, I told myself. Since long before either of us was born. Since before the United States
was even a country.
One evening at Aunt Joan’s, sitting on the porch with a nub of a candle, she turned to me and said, “You’re not that different
from her, you know.”
“Who?”
“Your mother. She was a trusting soul. Like you. The difference is, she trusted your father, and you trusted a scoundrel.”
I stared at her. “What do you mean?”
Joan poured bourbon into her teacup and took a sip. “Your brother, Alston, was, let’s just say, unexpected. Whatever faults
your daddy has, and Lord knows he’s got plenty, he was decent enough to marry her. Of course, she came with a fortune. That
helped.”
I sat back, my breath loud in the space between us. I hadn’t known that. I probably never would’ve known.
“Let me ask you something.” She gestured at my midsection. “Do you regret it?”
The answer came easily, as if it had been biding its time. Despite the disgrace, despite the consequences, even though I’d
disappointed my parents and sullied my prospects for marriage, I did not regret that my predicament had led me here, to this
place, so different from the life I knew.
“I don’t,” I said. “I guess that’s strange.”