Chapter 13 #2
“If she has help. I pray she gets it, too, from someone like Moses.” I picked up my walking stick and fell in step with my sister-women, imagining following the North Star with Moses.
Folks said she’d shoot a runaway on her underground train before letting anyone compromise her mission by turning back to a plantation.
Plantation people loathed her, put a bounty on her head for guiding slaves north to freedom.
“Y’all think she’s real? Does Harriet Tubman truly live?”
“Lovie, she could be real or a myth. Wouldn’t make me no difference.” I tossed a berry in my mouth and tested its sweetness. “Long as these plantation people’re scared of where she might strike next, I’ma thank heaven like she really exists.”
“Amen,” Ella agreed. “May the good Lord continually bless her to put knots in their bloomers, holes in their petticoats, and make a little piss run down their legs.”
We laughed long and loud while heading to the creek for mud for mosquito bites, and to wash berries.
Quickly, we returned to the caravan, where the midday meal was underway.
Food withholding had been lifted. To our normal allotments we added the treat Mother Earth had provided.
The berries were delicious additions to the usual strips of hard, cured meat and cornpone or biscuits left over from last night’s meal.
After everyone was fed, I wolfed down berries and dried beef, hurrying so I’d have time to nurse Hattie before we resumed traveling.
My little bit had gotten so big. She was pushing up whenever I laid her on her tummy. She was determined not to miss anything her curious gazed latched onto, a nosey little something.
“Zinnie, she won’t eat!”
I’d barely finished my meager meal and latched Hattie to my breast when I found the Petersons’ wetnurse rushing towards me, looking as distressed as the wailing newborn she held.
“She won’t take the breast and she’s too newborn for the sugar tit.”
I studied the pale, puckered face of the child in her arms as Hattie nursed contentedly. “Wasn’t she suckling before? Why’d she stop?”
“I don’t know!” The wetnurse shook her head, dismayed.
“Might be colic. Or maybe being outside in this oven is too much, but she’s not latching on and when she does she ain’t getting enough.
” Tears pooled in her eyes. Her voice increased in franticness.
“You’re a root woman. Help me so she don’t sell my child. ”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Miss Peterson thinks I’m starving this child to withhold milk for my own baby. But I’m not!” Her tears flowed in earnest. “I’m trying my best but my milk ain’t coming fast enough… and Miss Peterson says if being rid of mine’ll help hers, so be it.”
“Dear Jesus.” I closed my eyes and inhaled, thinking plantation people a plague on God’s good earth.
“Come with me.” I detached Hattie and propped her on my shoulder for burping while urging the wetnurse to follow as I hurried towards the oxcart, where my herbs and roots were stored.
I felt her anxious energy while searching my supplies for anything beneficial.
Give her blessed thistle.
Like a soft mist about my head, Mama Ruth’s instructions led me to the plant I’d used to protect my children’s water sacs from mold and other impurities.
It was also good for a mother’s milk-producing abilities.
I’d used it myself when recent food deprivations thinned my own milk. “I’ll make a tea for you to drink.”
The Petersons’ nursemaid rocked the bawling infant to comfort her as I ground the seeds. “How long’s it gonna take to make a difference in my milk?”
“Could be a day or two—”
“I can’t wait that long! The more she cries the more upset her mother gets. And the angrier that woman gets the more my baby’s at risk.”
“She won’t sell your child—”
“You don’t know that!”
She was right. I didn’t. I simply wanted to soothe her and get Hattie settled before everyone pulled up stakes and the caravan continued forward.
“These plantation people get some evil in their heads can’t nobody shake it loose or keep it from happening.” She followed as I settled Hattie on my back. “What am I supposed to do if—”
“Give me a minute. Please. I’ll make the tea stronger so it works faster. I’ll send it to you soon as it’s ready.”
“And in the meantime?”
Tell Miss Peterson to nurse her own damn baby!
I walked off knowing that would never happen.
Fed and content, my little one gurgled happily, harnessed against my back. She had quickly become a chunky little something, but I’d missed her earlier and didn’t mind the added weight as we resumed the journey.
The trail wasn’t smooth. Or maybe it was my lack of shoes exacerbating the rockiness of the path beneath my fabric-wrapped feet. The June sun created its own misery.
At least we’re back on the trail and making progress.
The two-day delay caused by Alretha’s disappearance meant our waking earlier and walking longer into the dark of night to make up for lost time.
Our pace had become intense. Relentless.
But it was more than lost time urging us on.
We needed to outrun the possibility of black funnels big and powerful enough to swallow those experienced in Mississippi.
Mister Jessup called Kansas the Tornado King.
I considered the sky for signs of impending change but found it clear and blazing. The top of my head seemed to wiggle with heat. “I need my hat.”
I’d removed it to fan myself and forgotten the floppy straw head-dressing on the oxcart. I hurried towards it, my steps slowing at the sight of Mister Peterson riding his horse against the flow of our caravan. My breath seized when I understood he was headed directly towards me.
“Zinnie, the missus needs you to tend our daughter.”
I didn’t dare make eye contact or challenge his wife’s expecting service from me. My belonging to the Tollivers didn’t prevent my being subject to the commands of any of these Mississippi Mormons. I was a Negro. She was a plantation woman. I was subject to her bidding.
“Yes, sir.” I followed Mister Peterson, face masked in blankness to camouflage my anger.
I know precisely the tending he’s referencing.
I swallowed the dust his horse kicked up, outdone by plantation women shunning the act of nursing their own infants.
To them, doing so was unfashionable. Distasteful.
Some claimed it harmed their figures and impeded their responsibilities.
Nourishing their offspring became one more burden assigned to Black women’s bodies.
Thankfully, the Peterson contingent wasn’t too far ahead, and we reached it quickly despite the sweltering heat.
“Zinnie, Dot made a wonderful suggestion that the baby might take to you better since you birthed her on the river raft and y’all have a special bond of intimacy.”
Walking beside the back of the wagon where the new mother lay convalescing, Miss Peterson’s nursemaid glanced at me, looking torn between apology and defiance.
“Yes, ma’am, but I gave Dot a special tea to help bring her milk in better.”
“My understanding is your tea might not work for at least a week. In the meantime, my daughter needs feeding. Are you saying I didn’t hear Dot correctly?”
Desperate to keep her child fed, the nursemaid had falsified to avoid potential failure.
I understood a mother’s desperation. That didn’t make the lie right.
Neither did it make me want to sacrifice.
I was in the unthinkable position of challenging a plantation woman and Dot knew it. “No, ma’am. I can assist.”
Perhaps it was too hot for Missus Peterson to pay full attention.
Or maybe she was satisfied by my compliance.
Whatever her reason, she lay back on her pallet without contesting that I hadn’t relinquished my own child.
Hattie had been in Alretha’s care just days before, and it nearly ended disastrously with Hattie abandoned on a bed of tree roots near the river.
My heart couldn’t risk that again. Refusing to put her in harm’s way—a shadow of rebellion tinting my actions—I kept Hattie on my back while tending the plantation people’s newest addition.
Our bodies don’t belong to us. They belong to everyone.
Sourness coated my mouth. Sorrow weighed my limbs. Too tired for rage, I was sick of being at their disposal, fulfilling their wants and whims.
Will me and my girls ever have what we want and need?