My man nodded. He don’t even know what I’m fixing to say, but already he nodded.
“Promise me if ever they let you get a musket in yo’ hand you shoot yo’ Marse John. That’s freedom.”
I could deserve to die just for saying it. I expected my man to cuss at me for being so foolish. But he didn’t. He nodded just once, then he disappeared into the woods like he was part of it, so easy that even I couldn’t keep track of him.
* * *
—
White folks won’t say they scared in our hearing but they show it in their actions. Marse Charles one day gets himself three new slaves just like that. We been as we were for so long I forget what it’s like to change. See, Marse Charles proud that he don’t need to buy new when he got me to make sure all his nigras putting out babies every season and that all his old black folks stay living and living and living whether they want to or not.
The new souls come to me in a wagon from somewhere, fit with hay for easy cleaning and chains for binding. A woman, a girl, and a boy about to be a man, and I’m bid to look them over for sickness and for louse bites or for some reason why Marse Charles might be able to barter after the price of them even though the sale is already done, the goods delivered this one hot day with nary any word of the bodies to be added to the expanding plantation.
The woman and girl are ordinary, two sisters, dark and heavy and good for the field. I take them inside, bid the boy to wait a spell. Up close they smell sweet, almost sickeningly so, and I guess rightly that their used-to-be master had them work at sugar kettles making molasses. I try to smile at them because I know they scared, and as I feel through their hair looking for nits I tell them to come to me if they find themselves bothered by a man, any man, if they need a remedy. Next I inspect the full of their bodies, my hands moving on Marse Charles’s behalf, seeking out defects, roaming gentle but persistent inside the slick wet of their low-down fear. The older one I can tell has the kind of chest that’s known a child, that’s grown engorged by wasted milk. I don’t ask her where the baby gone. They both clean and worth their price, and I’m glad at least they have one another, that rare threadbare gift you might pass off as benevolence.
I send them on their ways. Their new home is a cabin of single women, three to a bed, and I don’t feel guilty that I don’t offer them a place in my own bed. I’ve earned the whole of my greed.
Next the boy. The boy is near a man, and as men and boys often do he’s thinking how to look at me, mama or whore or both, and when I meet his eyes he holds on to my gaze a moment then looks down and that’s how it’s going to be between us. I cross to him and feel the strength of his arms. I do it not like a master but like a mama. Lifelong hunger’s done battle with years of hard work on his body, and I can tell he’s just escaped thin by growing into lean.
“What they call you?”
He don’t answer me at first and I think, Lord, don’t tell me he slow. But finally he look up and give me his name, and you can see the smart in his eyes. Nah, he ain’t slow. He too smart for his own good, and I don’t have to wonder too long what Marse Charles was thinking when he brought this young cock to our hen house. I only have to think—why now?
“Y’all come from the same place?”
“Yes’m. We from Marse Avis Payne’s place,” he say. “Out west a ways. ’Bout five days’ ride it took us.”
He was paying attention then. And he know his directions.