she longed to see her mama standing there; vexed, sucking ’pon her teeth and rolling her big eyes; calling July that her porridge was ready upon the stone and the hut needed sweeping for the wind had blown in a mound of trash while she was in the field and cha! July must come, and come now.
With her eyes tight shut, July could feel her mama beckoning her to leave the sweltering heat of the oven in the kitchen, slapping her hand upon her thigh, ‘Hurry, July, hurry before the missus comes for you.’ Or holding out July’s trash doll—with its stiff gingham skirt and one blue bead eye—to sweet-mouth July home to her chores with a, ‘Peg be frettin’ for you to come.’
But with her eyes wide open, only strangers stood yelling, ‘Come, little nigger, you be sent back to the field if you not behave.’ Yet, no matter whom July kick, spat, clawed and cursed upon, she was never sent home. She ran from the great house nearly every sun-up, searching for a path to the negro village—finding herself enfolded by louring trees or adrift in long grass that tickled at her chin. Yet all that followed this offence was to be chased back by Godfrey’s snarling, slathering hounds before being dragged by her hair to stand before that missus.
Hoping to be lost, then forgotten, in the dews of night she hid in the stables with the horses. Stinking of their dung and rolled in so much straw she appeared like her trash dolly the next morning—yet she was not returned.
Soon the trees near the kitchen were stripped almost bare from switches pulled so Godfrey might whip July’s backside—he complaining all the while of a pain at his shoulder from whacking a piece of tree so often upon her.
And July did count the time: one day, two days, three days she had not seen her mama. Four days, five days, six days, and still her mama never came. Seven days, eight days . . . she counted until all the numbers she had learned were gone. And so she began again: one day, two days, three . . . yet still she remained.
Caroline Mortimer had proved doggedly determined to make a lady’s maid of July (or Marguerite as she believed her named); sure as a turkey seized for the Christmas table, July had been raised, caught and stuffed for the task. For the white girl, Mary, with whom Caroline had sailed across an ocean from England (upon her brother’s instruction), had died a few weeks after she had arrived upon the plantation. It was Florence and Lucy whom the massa had charged to nurse this bag-o’-bones servant girl back from writhing with a raging fever and tortuous pain at her stomach, to full curtseying obedience.
But Mary, who had come from a place called Cork to wait upon Caroline Mortimer, was required upon the ship that sailed from England, to shit squatting with her backside dangling over the side of the deck. Now, no one but her mama had ever seen those two cheeks of hers before, and Mary believed no one but her mama ever should. Although careful to tip Caroline’s full pot over the side every morning of that long journey, Mary had contrived rarely to allow her own shit to fall and held it inside her long enough for it to fell her with a mysterious ailment. She finally parted from Florence and Lucy’s careful physic, and her own life, spewing forth a fetid brown waste that should have been falling all the while from that other hole.
She was buried at the same time as the missus, Agnes Howarth, and her short-lived pickney were laid in upon the ground. The missus, who had died giving birth to a son that lived only two days upon this earth, had a trailing line of mourners that so blocked the lane to the churchyard with their carriages and slaves that three of the finer women (new from England and dressed in black wool for the service) were struck down in the midday heat.
Mary, the servant girl, was laid a short walk from the back of the kitchen, near the provision ground of Florence and Lucy. For Caroline decided, on behalf of her grieving brother, that a Christian burial would not be necessary for her erstwhile maid-of-all-work. So the two negro women dressed in their finest red kerchiefs and, arguing all the while whether a white girl would need rum