a giant loom, the warp threads strung but waiting on the weaving woman to slide the shuttle back and forth, back and forth, making cloth the way the women slaves did before the war. Spinning houses sit empty now that store-bought calico comes cheap from mills in the North. But back in the old days when I was a little child, it was card the cotton, card the wool. Spin a broach of thread every night after tromping in from the field. That was Mama’s life at Goswood Grove. Had to be or she’d have Old Missus to deal with.
This stump—this very one—was where the slave driver stood to watch the gangs work the field, cowhide whip dangling down like a snake ready to bite, keep everybody picking the cotton rows. Somebody lag behind, try to rest a minute, the driver would find them out. If Old Marse Gossett was home, they’d only get a little breshin’ with the whip. But if Marse Gossett was off in New Orleans, where he kept his other family everybody knew about but didn’t dare to speak of, then look out. The whipping would be bad, because Old Missus was in charge. Missus didn’t like it that her husband had him a pla?age woman and a fawn-pale child down in New Orleans. Neighborhoods like Faubourg Marigny and Tremé—the rich planter men kept their mistresses and children there. Fancy girls, quadroons and octoroons. Women with dainty bones and olive-brown skin, living in fine houses with slaves to look after them, too.
Old ways like that been almost gone in these years since Mr. Lincoln’s war ended. The slave driver and his whip, Mama and the field gangs working from see to can’t see, leg irons, and auction sales like the ones that took my people—all that’s a thing in the barely back of my mind.
Sometimes when I wake, I think all my people were just somethin’ I pretended, never real at all. But then I touch the three glass beads on the cord at my neck, and I tell their names in the chant. Hardy gone at Big Creek to a man from Woodville, Het at Jatt…
All the way down to Baby Rose and Mary Angel. And Mama.
It was real. We were real. A family together.
I look off in the distant, wobble twixt a six-year-old body and one that’s eighteen years growed, but not so much different. Still skinny as if I was carved out of sticks.
Mama always did say, Hannie, you stand behind the broom handle, I can’t even see you there. Then she’d smile and touch my face and whisper, But you a beautiful child. Always been pretty. I hear it like she’s there beside of me, a white oak basket on her arm, bound for the garden patch out behind our little cabin, last one down the end of the old quarters.
Just as quick as I feel her there, she’s gone again.
“Why didn’t you come?” My words hang in the night air. “Why didn’t you come for your child? You never come.” I sink down on the stump’s edge and look out toward the trees by the road, their thick trunks hid in sifts of moon and fog.
I think I see something in it. A haint, could be. Too many folk buried under Goswood soil, Ol’ Tati says when she tells us tales in the cropper cabin at night. Too much blood and sufferin’ been left here. This place always gonna have ghosts.
A horse nickers low. I see a rider on the road. A dark cloak covers the head and sweeps out, light as smoke.
That my mama, come to find me? Come to say, You almost eighteen years old, Hannie. Why you still settin’ on that same ol’ stump? I want to go to her. Go away with her.
That Old Mister, come home from fetching his wicked son out of trouble again?
That a haint, come to drag me off and drown me in the river?
I close my eyes, shake my head clear, look again. Nothing there but a drift of fog.
“Child?” Tati’s whisper comes from a ways off, worried, careful-like. “Child?” Don’t matter your age, if Tati