Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
ZINNIE
Pennyroyal proved frightening with its power of life or death wrapped in purple beauty.
Uncertainty didn’t prevent me from harvesting more of the plant and tucking it safely in my root cache despite not knowing exactly how—other than making tea—to properly administer it, the appropriate amount or precisely when.
Every day we remained in Winter Quarters, I stole away to visit the stream and its surrounding brush, hoping the Native healer woman would reappear.
She never did. When those efforts failed, I prayed to Mama Ruth for root woman guidance but was met with uncustomary silence, leaving me to my own judgment as if a test of my wisdom.
Just a pinch. Never an inch.
I determined that was best to test its efficacy.
Even while making such determinations my mind wandered to what I hadn’t voiced before the Native root mother disappeared. Was this gift of God’s earth capable of affecting a man’s manhood, keeping plantation men from ensnaring enslaved women in lustful atrocities?
“You gonna drink that stuff without knowing it’s safe, Zinnie?”
I looked at Ella looking tight about the mouth, face full of distaste as she located foodstuffs for the evening meal.
A superior cook to Lovie and me, Ella’s magic touch made these wayfarer meals more than palatable.
“I haven’t drunk any yet. I’m just testing it.
” I sniffed the brew and swirled it about my cup before taking a tiny sip.
“Well? What’s your opinion?”
I grimaced and answered Lovie, who was perched uncomfortably on the tail end of an oxcart. “Kinda minty. A little bitter. And smoky.”
“That’s a lot of different tastes. That herb is confused.”
I grinned at my sister’s pronouncement and tossed the remainder of the brew onto grass parched brown by the July sun.
Our departure from Winter Quarters had been delayed by the unexpected arrival of a band of four additional Mormon families—one of which included a crop of red-haired children.
Like the plantation people in our caravan, the new arrivals had been unaware of and disheartened by the closure of the settlement.
With the same destination out west, they’d quickly accepted the invitation to join our plantation people, finding safety in numbers.
Now the caravan exceeded three hundred wagons, including twenty-six more of them and seven more enslaved.
We’d spent the past two days camped in Winter Quarters, allowing this new contingent to rest and replenish what food sources they could.
I was in no rush to resume our trek in broiling heat, but I also had an overall restlessness.
Or maybe it was these new notions about pennyroyal.
Perhaps I needed the motion on the trail to help them settle.
“Maybe so, Lovie, but if it can help a woman from getting caught when she doesn’t want to be, the taste is worth it.”
“Sounds to me like you playing God.”
I turned to address an older woman from the Carters’ homestead who sat plucking feathers from the quails we’d caught that day.
She often looked after the children as Miss Tandy had, but without Miss Tandy’s patience.
“No, ma’am, I know God and I ain’t the same.
” I’d had similar thoughts initially but had reconciled them.
“I also know those that ain’t given much in life gotta keep an open hand to accept a gift however one comes. ”
“How’s kicking a child out your womb before it gets a chance to be born a gift?”
“The gift might be drinking that tea’ll keep an unwanted situation from even happening.
” Ella’s comment earned her the sucking of teeth and prayers for deliverance from several of the women preparing the midday meal.
Others remained quiet with what seemed to be thoughtful curiosity.
For me Ella’s opinion aligned with mine and made me think.
Looking at the dregs in my cup I questioned if this concoction was something to drink before or after subjection to unwanted attention, to catch and kill the seeds of plantation men. Or could it prevent it happening by serving it to them?
Shielding my eyes with a hand, I looked at the oxcarts parked beneath towering trees providing shade to our little bits.
Even in the shade it was too hot to play, and they simply waited to be called to eat.
Annabelle and Abigail engaged Hattie as she lay on her back showing off her ability to grab whatever they were dangling over her head.
I shuddered at the possibility of my daughters not being here had I possessed pennyroyal before their existence.
My girls’re my purest gifts. Doesn’t mean I gotta have more children.
Living enslaved was too precarious an existence.
Only grace had prevented me from losing any one of them.
That didn’t negate threats. Sickness. Death.
Or that they could be bartered or sold to pay a debt.
Or even settle a bet. I’d been threatened by Ryland Tolliver more times than I cared to remember with the dispensing of one or another of my girls when displeased with me or my work.
Sometimes he used such threats to increase productivity, or to cancel resistance when abusing my womanhood.
He had yet to enact such threats. That didn’t make the terror or the sleepless nights that accompanied them any less real.
Sometimes terror left me hypervigilant and anxious for days. I wasn’t sure I could take the weight of a fourth child when my heart was already spread three ways.
“Well, it’s too late for me to be thinking about Zinnie’s new tea. But you know what I do think about?”
I considered my sister. “What, Lovie?”
“This baby being born free.”
A blanket of silence descended over our group of working women, delicately covering any secret longings of freedom for ourselves and our beloved.
“Sis, that Wyoming territory can’t be too much farther.” I lowered my voice. “I overheard the drivers talking about there’s no slavery there.”
Lovie smiled and caressed her belly. “Stay put until then so you can be the first of us born free.”
I studied my sister, knowing she was doing her best to mask her misery.
She remained our stowaway only because she was no match for Ella or me physically.
Neither was she in any condition to be walking.
Her backaches were ruthless. There was intense swelling in her ankles and feet.
She found it difficult to sleep. Had to relieve herself frequently.
Most of what she ate didn’t sit right with her belly.
Such were the trials of a woman in a family way, yet Lovie’s seemed excessive and caused me no small degree of worry.
Nothing but the effects of the heat and this daggone pilgrimage!
I’d gone through all four of my sister’s previous pregnancies with her and didn’t recall her being so listless, fatigued, or afflicted by frequent headaches.
Give her some of that red raspberry leaf to build up her strength.
Mama Ruth’s reminder was a soft breeze, gentle and uplifting. It lightened my worries.
“I never aim to be a rain cloud over nobody’s head, but I don’t think that’s the way it works, Lovie.
” Ella’s voice cut my reverie. She paused her preparation of the evening meal, tone apologetic, tinged with sadness.
“When I was younger, I knew a woman who accompanied her mistress on a trip up north and had her baby there. When it was time to return down south, she resisted.” Befriended by abolitionists, the woman took the matter to court, arguing that her child—by virtue of being born in a free state—should be free.
“What happened?” One of the other working women beat me to the question.
“That old judge must’ve been a southern transplant living in the north.
He said her time there was never meant to be permanent.
She was a visitor. Not a resident. The condition of the mother was the condition of the infant.
She and her baby were sent back home to slavery ‘to be productive’ for the mistress. ”
Sounds of disgust and disappointment spilled from the mouths of the working women.
“Well… maybe out west it’ll be different.” Lovie held her head high despite sounding defeated. “But if not, maybe in a new place the Almighty’ll untwist his heart and make Massa Marion be fair to this child… to all our children.”
“They ain’t children to him! They ain’t nothing but free labor on two legs.
” My words felt mean, like the storm cloud Ella didn’t want to be.
But I was tired of us and our children being nothing but slave labor in a godforsaken system with all its ugly ways of wealth-getting.
“Nothing but workers. Breeders. Beasts and baby makers.” I spat the despicable descriptives I’d heard all my life like poison from my lips.
“To him and his, our offspring ain’t even human. ”
Our children were parts of our hearts, not Ryland Tolliver’s. Despite their origins.
Don’t waste time fixating on the ways they wander into your womb. Babies are heaven’s treasure. Focus on that truth.
Mama Ruth’s sentiments echoed those of the older woman who’d spoken earlier.
“You think if he passes before she does, Miss Norene’ll do the godly thing and set us free?”
“Honey, one can pray.” I helped my sister down from the oxcart, wanting to hush her and to hug her.
To tell her to stop tormenting herself with impossible dreams, but her slow, determined movements as she went to aid Ella wouldn’t let me.
Instead, I asked heaven for a miracle of miracles. Even if only for Lovie.
“Zinnie.”
She was foreign to me. This otherworldly woman whose long skirts billowed on a strawberry-scented breeze.
She was the stars and the moon, midnight, and dawn.
Recent yet primordial. A fascination. The forbidden.
She was everything I wanted and needed to be in one celestial being.
When she extended her arms towards me, I ran into her open embrace, knowing she held all healing.
“Aunt Zinnie!”