“Yep. Good ol’ Carolina.” Sophia said this softly, blowing out each word.
“You was a maid to Nathaniel’s wife back then, right?” I asked.
“Wasn’t just any old maid,” she said. “Me and Helen, we were friends. At least we was friends, once. I loved her, you know. I think I can say that—I loved her, and when I think of Helen, I think only of the best times.”
She was wistful as she said this, and I felt I understood how it happened for girls like her, how it began for them as children, when they played together with their one-day mistresses, caring nothing for color, and were told to love them, as they would love any other playmate. They grow together, and as the play hours decline, the ritual changes. They are both weaned on the religion of society, of slavery, which holds that for no particularly good reason one of them will live in the palace, while the other will be condemned to the dungeon. It is a cruel thing to do to children, to raise them as though they are siblings, and then set them against each other so that one shall be a queen and the other shall be a footstool.
“Our games used to carry us off,” Sophia said. “We used to make ourselves up as the grand ladies would in their big dresses. We would play together in the fields back in Carolina. Once I fell and rolled right into some briars. I must have yelled to the devil and back. But she was right there for me. She gathered me up and got me back to the home-place. I am powerfully remembered to her, Hi, and when I see the briars now, I don’t think of the pain, for I am thinking only of her.”
She said this looking straight at the road.
“I am telling you that we were us before we were him,” she said. “We were something to each other, and that is now smoke. The man she loved wanted me. It was not for any love of me, Hiram. I was jewelry to him. I knew it. And then my Helen died, died bearing his child, and I cannot tell you the pain and guiltiness that came over me.”
She stopped there and we rode along and all that was heard was horse and wheels crunching against the frozen road. I had the feeling that this was coming to some terrible revelation.
“Do you know, I still see her in dreams,” she said.
“I ain’t surprised,” I said. “I still see Maynard, though I confess my recollections don’t have half the magic of your own.”
“Ain’t no magic, though,” she said. “Sometimes, Hi, sometimes…it is my feeling that she got away and left me with…”
Now she turned to me, breaking her gaze into the woods.
“He’ll never let me loose till I’m used up, you see? Then he’ll send me out of Elm somewhere, and take up another colored girl for his fancy. We really ain’t nothing but jewelry to them. I always known this, I think. But I am getting older, Hi, and knowing something is a far measure from truly seeing it.”
“Takes some time,” I said.
She was quiet again and for a few moments there was nothing but the gentle clopping of the horse along the road.
“You ever wonder about the rest of your life?” she said. “You ever wonder about young’uns? About any life that might be out there waiting for you?”
“Lately,” I said, “I wonder about everything.”
“I think of young’uns all the time,” she said. “I think of what it must mean to bring someone, a little girl perhaps, into all of this. And I know it’s coming, someday. That it ain’t even up to me. It’s coming, Hiram, and I will watch as my daughter is taken in, as I was taken in, and…I am trying to tell you that this all has me wondering about something else, about another life, past the Goose, maybe past them mountains, past…”
And her voice trailed off and she was looking off to the side of the road again, and I think now that this is how the running so often begins, that it is settled upon in that moment you understand the great depth of your peril. For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors as guardians at the gate, staving off African