Chapter 11
ELEVEN
ZINNIE
Miss Tandy’s passing cast a shadow over our hearts that wasn’t easy to shake.
We mourned not merely her loss but the unthinkable way her life was taken.
Plantation people paused for a moment of silence but found no need to carry her corpse to a better place, attracting buzzards or other scavengers along the way.
Instead, she was laid to rest mere feet from where she was attacked.
We the enslaved offered a hymn and a prayer.
When plantation people pressed on, giving us no mind, I placed a small sachet in her grave.
It was filled with herbs, roots, and soil wrapped in the kerchief she’d been wearing when breathing her last breath.
It would keep and protect her remains while guiding her spirit’s connection with the ancestors in her final ascent.
That sachet-giving didn’t feel like much, yet I prayed it was enough while navigating a rough road with the aid of my walking stick as mournful breaths tumbled across my lips.
Slavery was never easy but tragedies like this siphoned off whatever joy we managed to experience, making life feel more unjust and laborious.
Felt like somebody bound our hands behind our backs and put blindfolds over our eyes—tossing us in the middle of a constant, unfair fight when all we were doing was trying to stay alive.
Ours was a tenuous existence with incessant demands doing their best to drain our faculties.
Yet we couldn’t relinquish living. We simply kept striving. Pushing. Or, in our case, walking.
Forward motion was our only option.
At least there’re no more irons about Alretha’s ankles!
God must’ve doused the Petersons with a bit of Christian charity after Miss Tandy’s death.
They’d responded to that horrendous attack by unshackling the grief-stricken Alretha and letting her move about with human dignity versus like an animal captive.
She might’ve moved more freely physically, but the rest of her seemed lost, broken.
Whenever we were within each other’s presence, I treated her with extra kindness, but it was as if her spirit had tumbled into a pit and got tangled up with unbreachable loneliness.
Don’t fret. She’ll be back when she sees fit.
Mama Ruth’s assurance settled softly like a caress as I skirted a shallow dip in the road with my baby on my back.
Mississippi. Tennessee. Missouri. My newborn wasn’t so newborn anymore and seemed to have picked up a pound or three every state and month that passed.
She was very much like her sisters had been at her age—a happy and good-natured baby.
But her attachment differed from theirs.
Maybe it was this walking across the world that made her need me differently.
She wasn’t content as her sisters had been to stay in her basket in eyesight of me.
My littlest bit was most content when strapped to my body, as if she feared I’d somehow walk to Salt Lake Valley without her.
I felt Hattie’s added weight against my back those days when I was wearier than others.
But hers was a weight I preferred to my child, my children, being somewhere I wasn’t.
She cooed as if offering agreement.
I peeked over my shoulder to find her big brown baby eyes taking in the world around us. “You’re a nosey little something, Ms. Hattie. Whatcha looking at?”
She responded with happy gurgling noises and a toothless grin. Thick, dark curls capped her head where slick strands had been. Sweet brown now burnished once pale, newborn skin.
“Let’s put that nosiness to use and learn something.
” I observed our surroundings, instantly finding a matter of interest. I pointed out a cardinal flitting towards a tree.
“See that? It’s a bird. Its color is red.
And those things carrying it across the air are called wings.
” I smiled when she cooed again as if signifying understanding. “You’re such a smart baby.”
“Mama, my bottom hurts!”
“Yeah, we been riding so long my legs don’t work.”
My Annabelle and Abigail’s complaints interrupted our lesson, floating back to me on the spring breeze from several oxcarts up the trail. “Y’all got crunchy tailbones and liver for legs?”
My girls giggled and answered, “Yes, ma’am!”
“Mmm-hmm. Come on, then.”
“Can we come, too, Aunt Zinnie?”
I considered my nieces and nephews before shielding my eyes and gazing at the trail behind me in search of Lovie.
My sister wasn’t visible. That growing baby in her belly had her moving slower these days.
Ella and I took turns accompanying her at her decreased pace.
In my opinion Lovie should be riding like the children.
But God hadn’t hit Ryland and Norene Tolliver with that kind of charitable consideration.
“I suppose it’s alright. Your mama won’t mind.” I waved the children off the oxcart and watched the group scamper down with the vivacity of newly freed fugitives.
That water incident in which we’d almost lost my Abigail was far enough behind us that the plantation people relaxed their orders and were more lenient about instructing the children to always ride to protect their human property.
They had other concerns. Namely leaving Missouri and nearing Kansas and Indian territory.
They’re scared of retribution for their thievery.
Seemed like plantation folks found pleasure in forgetting others were human.
Killing. Raping. Taking. For any whim. Any reason.
Even sanctifying heinous acts in the name of God, their rights, and religion.
Indians were native, here long before those little lost pilgrims who wouldn’t have survived without them.
Two centuries was enough to erase merciful kindness from the minds of white men.
Now, they feared and hated the natives. Wanted them out of the way, to lay claim to their land as if divinely given.
I watched the children bounding towards me, remembering Mama Ruth’s saying: “‘That greedy Jefferson and Monroe thought they handled the ‘Indian problem’ back in the 1820s.’”
Those U.S. presidents had proposed separate territories.
As if Indians living where they’d always lived was a hindrance to whiteness.
I wasn’t even a woman yet when that old hateful Andrew Jackson came into office and made the separate territory proposal a reality by signing the Indian Removal Act in May of 1830.
Tribes in the east were forced to relinquish their homelands with a promise of land west of the Mississippi River.
Pawnee. Osage. Kanza. Comanche. The four great original tribes of the Kansas territory we were now nearing had lands granted to them by the U.S.
government. I knew such things because enslaved folks didn’t have ears.
At least plantation people conducted themselves as if we didn’t—discussing business with us present like we were mere furnishings, mute and deaf, and without opinion.
Or as if our ability to hear, think, and speak were no threat to them in our perpetual position of dutiful enslavement.
Well, they’re certainly threatened by the natives!
Assimilation. Christianization. Forced removal.
Reservations. White folks used insidious weapons to diminish and control Indian nations.
Removed them from their homelands with a promise of protection only to defend white settlers afraid for their wellbeing with the increased arrival of more dislocated natives.
Forts were built. A military presence was established.
All in the name of land possession, white rights and progress.
Now, decades later, the military had abandoned those forts, leaving relocated Indians subject to the encroachment of white settlers, which inevitably led to distrust, confrontations, and tension.
There we were mere days from Kansas territory. Only God knew the possible encounters and their outcomes.
The closer we got the snippier and surlier the plantation people became.
They took their anxious uncertainty out on us with constant criticisms, impatience, and discontent.
Their commands were exhausting and seemingly endless, their instructions redundant.
As if lives of servitude hadn’t been savagely beaten into our instincts.
We were accustomed to having our intelligence demeaned, but now we, enslaved, were suddenly inept.
Burdensome. My serving supper after versus before milking Tessie one evening (despite her painful lowing) caught me a fist and a promise to pass me off to the first slave trader we encountered from Master Ryland.
“And definitely those brats of yours if not you.”
Nearing Indian territory might’ve been the source of his heightened vexation, but I was nobody’s fool. A threat from a disgruntled plantation man was nothing to take lightly or dismiss.
“Mama, what were you and Hattie doing?” My Annabelle’s question ended my dark thoughts as she skipped to us, delighted at being free from the constrictive oxcart.
“Having a nature lesson. I’m teaching her about birds and the color red.”
“Is she remembering everything?”
I tugged one of Annabelle’s long, thick plaits, playfully. “Ask her and see.”
“No, lemme ask first,” Abigail insisted, catching her breath from running the short distance. At times there was a little rattle in her chest that concerned me after her near-drowning but today was a good day with little to no coughing so I pocketed my worries.
Annabelle rolled her eyes but tolerated Abigail’s request like a dutiful older sister. “Fine. Go ‘head. But don’t hog up all the questions.”
Abigail smacked her lips in response to Annabelle’s bossiness. “Baby Hattie, what color is a blue jay?”
Hattie bounced happily against my back as Annabelle and the older children giggled wildly.
“What’s so funny?” Abigail demanded, hands on her nonexistent hips.
“You put the answer in the question.”