that’s got me. It’s Jep Loach. I ain’t being carried to the block. I’m being took to the devil wagon. I’m the one he means to sell at the someplace farther on.
I tear loose, try to run back to Mama, but my knees go soft as wet grass. I topple and stretch my fingers toward the beads, toward my mother.
“Mama! Mama!” I scream and scream and scream….
* * *
—
It’s my own voice that wakes me from the dream of that terrible day, just like always. I hear the sound of the scream, feel the raw of it in my throat. I come to, fighting off Jep Loach’s big hands and crying out for the mother I ain’t laid eyes on in twelve years now, since I was a six-year-old child.
“Mama! Mama! Mama!” The word spills from me three times more, travels out ’cross the night-quiet fields of Goswood Grove before I clamp my mouth closed and look back over my shoulder toward the sharecrop cabin, hoping they didn’t hear me. No sense to wake everybody with my sleep-wanderings. Hard day’s work ahead for me and Ol’ Tati and what’s left of the stray young ones she’s raised these long years since the war was over and we had no mamas or papas to claim us.
Of all my brothers and sisters, of all my family stole away by Jep Loach, I was the only one Marse Gossett got back, and that was just by luck when folks at the next auction sale figured out I was stole property and called the sheriff to hold me until Marse could come. With the war on, and folks running everywhere to get away from it, and us trying to scratch a living from the wild Texas land, there wasn’t any going back to look for the rest. I was a child with nobody of my own when the Federal soldiers finally made their way to our refugee place in Texas and forced the Gossetts to read the free papers out loud and say the war was over, even in Texas. Slaves could go where they pleased, now.
Old Missus warned all us we wouldn’t make it five miles before we starved or got killed by road agents or scalped by Indians, and she hoped we did, if we’d be ungrateful and foolish enough to do such a thing as leave. With the war over, there wasn’t no more need to refugee in Texas, and we’d best come back to Louisiana with her and Marse Gossett—who we was now to call Mister, not Marse, so’s not to bring down the wrath of Federal soldiers who’d be crawling over everything like lice for a while yet. Back on the old place at Goswood Grove, we would at least have Old Mister and Missus to keep us safe and fed and put clothes on our miserable bodies.
“Now, you young children have no choice in the matter,” she told the ones of us with no folk. “You are in our charge, and of course we will give you the benefit of transporting you away from this godforsaken Texas wilderness, back to Goswood Grove until you are of age or a parent comes to claim you.”
Much as I hated Old Missus and working in the house as keeper and plaything to Little Missy Lavinia, who was a trial of her own, I rested in the promise Mama had spoke just two years before at the trader’s yard. She’d come to find me, soon’s she could. She’d find all us, and we’d string Grandmama’s beads together again.
And so I was biddable but also restless with hope. It was the restless part that spurred me to wander at night, that conjured evil dreams of Jep Loach, and watching my people get stole away, and seeing Mama laid out on the floor of the trader’s pen. Dead, for all I could know then.
For all I still do know.
I look down and see that I been walking in my sleep again. I’m standing out on the old cutoff pecan stump. A field of fresh soil spreads out, the season’s new-planted crop still too wispy and fine to cover it. Moon ribbons fall over the row tips, so the land is