A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,3
of the situation lay in the fact that matters were better for the slaves in these times. We may have been charged with danger-riddled tasks, but it was because of the unorthodox arrangements in the household that we had the run of the house, for once. For the first time, we had established a homey dwelling downstairs. It lay in shadow more often than not, but the only reason I could miss that hominess when the drapes were drawn was because we had been allowed to develop an uninhibited connection to the place in the first place. For what slave was known to be fond of his home?
I retreated downstairs, where my fellow slaves were huddled seeing to the mending. There was a fire going, a stack of books on the hearth.
Enda – the eldest woman with dark skin – sat by the window, stealing its tentative traces of superior light. The dark children, Dani and Viola, sorted thread in the middle of the floor. Dani, the boy, was ten. Viola was eleven. They had been bought, with their mother, just months before the Masters went into hiding – and when the Masters shut that door against the rest of us, they kept the mother with them. Of all the slaves to designate to waiting on them behind closed doors, I thought disapprovingly – she was in there, separated from her children, when it could have been one of us instead.
Dashsund tended the fire. He was a middle-aged Serbaen. Always stoic, but in an amused way. Quiet but very lighthearted.
Henry was like me – white. But he was old. He had been with the Masters a long time, longer than the rest of us. He was also a very kind soul, but wouldn't tell of how he came to be a slave. It was a curious thing, but I didn't wonder too much. He was likely the same as me.
I was a slave because I was an illegitimate child, and nobody wanted me. A victim of a moment of thoughtless, selfish passion.
In the beginning, the young ones told me I was awfully beautiful for a slave. The older ones didn't see things in terms of physical beauty. They thought everything was beautiful, in its own way. It was a lovely perspective – part of their culture, I assumed, when I saw the sadness (yet agreement) in their eyes when the youngens made these claims; the culture here was rubbing off on them, changing them. I wished they wouldn't call me beautiful, because I didn't like the sadness in those eyes. I didn't want to lend to what was changing them. I liked them the way they were, and wished I could have known them the way they first came to this country. So I rubbed soot around my eyes, hoping to look beaten and bruised, but they said it only made my eyes more beautiful. I left it sometimes, though, because the color likened me to them. Them whom I admired and looked up to, in our arrangement.
The older ones did not resent me being beautiful – they knew it to be true, by the white man's standards. I was well-bred, just scandalously so. Illegitimate by matters of matrimony, but not by blood.
Such a shame, such waste, my people had said of me. I was exquisite, yet I was trash. They might even have kept me around because I was so pleasant to look at, or could have warmed a bed like a queen for someone in their circle, but when they fell on hard times there was no question as to the greater benefit I would be to them as a profit, and a mouth taken off their hands.
Of course, for them 'hard times' meant dusty chandeliers and a lack of the finest wine for their suddenly 'quainter' banquets. I fell below all those things. I was not worth the dust on their chandeliers.
I folded myself onto the ground in the slaves' midst, and picked up an article that needed mending. We worked together in silence today. Sometimes, we took turns telling stories. The Serbaens told wonderful stories. We would sit around with the fire crackling its friendly tune and even get to laughing once in awhile. But today, all of our bones seemed to agree on weariness. Even the bones of the house, creaking around us.
I finished mending my article, and then put it aside. I reached for another, but Enda stopped me: