missing slave flies like brush fire. When I heard the news, my heart dropped to my knees. Missus used her bell and gathered everybody in the yard, up near the back door. She laid her hands on top of her big pregnant belly and said, “If you know Charlotte’s whereabouts, you are duty bound to tell me.”
Not a peep from anybody. Missus cast her eyes on me. “Hetty? Where is your mother?”
I shrugged and acted stumped. “I don’t know, missus. Wish I did know.”
Missus told Tomfry to search the kitchen house, laundry, carriage house, stable, storage shed, privy, and slave rooms. She said comb every nook in the yard, look down the chute where Prince sent hay from the loft to the horses’ trough. If that didn’t turn up mauma, she said Tomfry would go through the house, the piazza, and the ornament garden, top to bottom.
She rang her bell, which meant go back to work. I hurried to mauma’s room to check the gunny sack. All her money was still at the bottom under the stuffing. Then I crept back outside and set the pail next to the cistern. The sun was coming down the sky, turning it the color of apricots.
While Tomfry did his searching high and low, I took up my spot in the front alcove on the second floor to wait. At the first shade of dark, lo-to-behold, I looked down through the window and there was mauma turning the corner. She marched straight to the front door and knocked.
I tore down the stairs and got to the door the same time as Tomfry.
When he opened it, mauma said, “I gon give you half of a dollar if you get me back in there safe. You owe me, Tomfry.”
He stepped out onto the landing, me beside him, and closed the door. I threw my arms round mauma. She said to him, “Quick now, what it gon be?”
“They ain’t nowhere to put you,” he said. “Missus had me search every corner.”
“Not the rooftop,” I said.
Tomfry made the coast clear, and I led mauma to the attic and showed her the ladder and the hatch. I said, “When they come, you say it was so warm you came out here to see the harbor and lay down and fell asleep.”
Meantime, Tomfry went and explained to missus how he forgot about the rooftop when he was searching, how he knew for a fact Charlotte had been up there one time before.
Missus waited at the foot of the attic steps with her cane, huffing from climbing the stairs, big as she was. I lurked behind her. I was trembling with nerves.
Mauma came down the ladder, shivering, telling this cockamamie story I’d come up with. Missus said, “I did not think you were as naturally dumb as the rest, Charlotte, but you have proved me wrong. To fall asleep on the roof! You could have rolled off onto the street. The roof! You must know such a place is completely off-limits.”
She raised her cane and brought it down cross the back of mauma’s head. “See yourself to your room, and tomorrow morning after devotions, you are to sew the rosettes back on my new dress. Your sloppiness with the needle has only worsened.”
“Yessum,” mauma said, hurrying to the stairs, waving me in front of her. If missus noticed how mauma didn’t have her cane or her limp, she didn’t say so.
When we reached the cellar, mauma shut the door and threw the lock. I was winded, but mauma’s breath was steady. She rubbed the back of her head. She set her jaw. She said, “I is a ’markable woman, and you is a ’markable girl, and we ain’t never gon bow and scrape to that woman.”
Sarah
The idea of a new sibling didn’t strike me as happy news. Shut away in my room, I absorbed it with grim resignation. When pregnant, Mother’s mood became even fouler, and who among us would welcome that? My real dismay came when I took paper and pen and worked out the arithmetic: Mother had spent ten of the last twenty years pregnant. For pity sake!
Soon to be twelve, I was on the cusp of maidenhood, and I wanted to marry—truly, I did—but such numbers petrified me. Coming, as they did, so soon after my books being taken away, quite soured me on the female life.
Since Father’s dressing-down, I hadn’t left the four walls of my room except for meals, Madame Ruffin’s class three mornings a