say I was like a daughter, but claimed out and out I was his. Susan grumbled about it, but she was good to me, too.
I found her in her kitchen house, shoveling the corn cakes from the skillet to the plate. She said, “Where you been? We haven’t seen you in over a week.”
“You can’t do with me and you can’t do without me.”
She laughed. “I can do with you all right. The one I can’t do with and do without is in his workshop.”
“Denmark? What’s he done now?”
She snorted. “You mean beside keep women all over the city?”
It struck me best to sidestep this since mauma had been one of them. “Yeah, beside that.”
A smile dipped cross her lips. She handed me the plate. “Here, take this to him. He’s in a mood, is all. It’s about that Monday Gell. He lost something that set Denmark off. Some sort of list. I thought Denmark was gonna kill the man.”
I headed back toward the workshop knowing Monday had lost the roll of draftees he’d been collecting for Denmark out on the Bulkley farm.
For a long time now, Denmark and his lieutenants had been recruiting slaves, writing down their names in what he called the Book. Last I heard, there were more than two thousand pledged to take up arms when the time came. Denmark had let me sit there and listen while he talked about raising an army and getting us free, and the men got used to me being in there. They knew I’d keep it quiet.
Denmark didn’t like the wind to blow unless he told it which way to go. He’d come up with the exact words he wanted Gullah Jack and them to say when they wooed the recruits. One day, he had me pretend like I was the slave he was courting.
“Have you heard the news?” he said to me.
“What news?” I answered. Like he told me to say.
“We’re gonna be free.”
“Free? Who says?”
“Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
That was the way he wanted it said. Then, if a slave in the city was curious enough, the lieutenant was supposed to bring him to 20 Bull to meet Denmark. If the slaves were on the plantations, Denmark would go to them and hold a secret meeting.
I’d been at the house when one of those curious slaves had showed up, and it was something I’d take to my grave. Denmark had sailed up from his chair like Elijah in his chariot. “The Lord has spoken to me,” he cried out. “He said, set my people free. When your name is written in the Book, you’re one of us and you’re one of God’s, and we’ll take our freedom when God says. Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid. You believe in God, believe also in me.”
When he spoke those words, a jolt traveled through me, the same one I used to get in the alcove when I was little and thought about the water taking me somewhere, or in church when we sang about the Jericho walls crumbling and the drumsticks in my legs beat the floor. My name wasn’t in the Book, just the men’s, but I would’ve put it in there if I could. I would’ve written it in blood.
Today, Denmark was pegging the legs on a Scot pine table. When I stepped into the room with the fritters, he set down the claw hammer and grinned, and when I pulled out the sorghum to boot, he said, “If you aren’t Charlotte all over.”
Leaning on the work table to take the heft off my leg, I watched him eat for a while, then I said, “Susan said Monday lost his list.”
The door to the back alley was open to let the sawdust float out and he went over, peered both ways, and closed it. “Monday is a damn fool idiot. He kept his list inside an empty feed barrel in the harness shop on Bulkley farm, and yesterday the barrel was gone and nobody knows where.”
“What would happen if somebody finds it?”
He sat back on the stool and picked up the fork. “It depends. If the list rouses suspicion and gets turned over to the Guard, they’d go through the names with a whip till they found out what it was about.”
That raised goose flesh on my arms. I said, “Where do you keep your names?”
He stopped chewing. “Why do you want to know?”
I was treading on the thin side