“How you mean, suh?” I don’t much care at all about his gossip of war. Ain’t I fighting little battles every day just keepin’ his slaves alive on his behalf?
But I gotta keep talking. Keep his attention on me and no place else.
“You let me know who ain’t pullin’ his weight, May Belle. If there’s a hunkerin’ down to be done, that’ll be where I start sellin’, you hear?”
“Yes, suh,” I say. It’s a sick power, but it’s a power, ain’t it? Who stays? Who goes? Keep his eyes on me.
Now that Marse Charles has mastered his belt buckle, he shucks off his pants. Leaves them to fall in the shape of him on my floor.
“Come here, May Belle,” he say.
I kneel between his legs, keep my eyes on him, only on him. Can he tell I’m afraid? Scent my fear?
He partway lowers his drawers, just enough so that they choke at his thighs, and I can’t say if the flush that flames his cheek is from bashfulness or exertion. Or shame.
Two weeks back a canker bloomed up like fire, red and angry, on the tip of his prick. Now it’s given over to a blotchy red rash, like I told him it would. Marse Charles come to me too late with the symptoms of this sickness to nip it early. He delayed over the choice: me or the white doctor a county over. But the white doctor’s a relation of Missus’s. And Marse Charles told me that he could not live with the guilt if his wife was to hear of his ailment. More like, he can’t live with her exiling him from her bed once and for all.
“The rash is clearin’ up some,” I tell him, and it is too. It ain’t too proud to say the truth. I do good work.
“I’ve heard passin’ talk ’bout the mercury cure,” Marse Charles says. “Men say after a few rounds, this dang sickness gets all the way cleared.”
I suck wind through my teeth. “Sure, suh. Can’t be sick if the cure done killed you.”
He chuckles, rubs my head like I’m his best dog. I help to get him back into his pants so he don’t go bending over. Eyes on me. Only on me.
“You stay takin’ the rabbit root,” I tell him. I’ve got his cure ground down to a fine powder and always at the ready, thank the Lord, so it’s enough to give him a pouch with one hand and guide him out the door with the other.
“Y’all will keep all I’ve said to yo’self, Belle?” He says it to me sweetly, as if I’m a good friend doing him an easy favor, instead of a bit of good property without even the right to say no when it comes to touching his pockmarked pricker.
“?’Course I’ll keep it hush,” I say, and it’s a lie. There’s a number of his favorite house girls that I’ve already warned after. Little use a warning is. I keep the rabbit root at the ready for them also.
But it ain’t his sores he’s speaking on.
“No sense worryin’ the lot of ’em with talk a’ battles and warrin’.” Marse Charles inclines his head in the general direction of his fields, like to encompass the whole of his three-hundred-odd slaves. “They’ll be afeared over nothin’, get wrong ideas in their heads. They can’t understand, they’re like children. Not you though, Belle,” he says fondly. “You about the smartest nigra I ever did meet.”
He bangs out of my cabin, satisfied. I stand alone, shaking for long minutes, ’til I’m sure he ain’t comin’ back.
“He gone,” I say at the bed. “You can come on out now.”
My man slides his body out from beneath the wooden bed frame in slow inches ’til he’s all the way clear. I try to help him up, but he refuses my hand. It’s afternoon and he’s meant to be in his own marse’s field, working to death and whistling with the glee of it. And I’ve kept him too long already. But at