groom like me up in the high part of the barn.
'Breshin' the horses,' I said lamely.
'There ain't no horses in the top'a the barn,' she said, pointing an accusing finger at me. 'You're malingering up there, ain't you, boy?'
'I's sorry,' I said, near tears from the fear in my heart.
'Come down here,' Eloise said in a very serious tone.
I climbed down the ladder from the roof and ran through the barn and to the yard, where the young white girl stood. She wore a yellow bonnet held under her chin by a red ribbon, and a yellow dress with a flouncy slip underneath the skirt. She was eleven years old and pretty as a child can be.
I came up to her with my head hanging down and my eyes on the ground.
'Yes'm?' I said.
'Were you spyin' on me, boy?'
'I was jes lookin', Miss Eloise. I didn't know you was down here.'
'Why you lookin' at your feet?' she asked. 'You know it's rude not to look at someone when you're talkin' to 'em.'
'I ain't s'posed to look at you, ma'am. You's a white lady an' niggers ain't s'posed to look at white ladies.'
It was true. Even Fred Chocolate, Master Tobias's butler, was not supposed to look at a white woman straight on.
'You were lookin' at me from up in the barn,' she said.
'No, ma'am,' I lied. 'I mean I looked out but I didn't know that you was there.'
'That's not true,' she said.
'I swear it is,' I said, still looking at my feet.
'Look up at me this instant, you insolent boy,' she said
then.
I raised my head slowly. I had to look up because Eloise was elevated above me, on the porch. When I saw her face there was a big smile on it.
'Don't be scared,' she said. 'I won't tell.'
My heart skipped at her kind words. I felt as if she were saving me even though it was her threats that I was afraid of.
'Do you want a molasses cookie?' she said.
'Yes, ma'am,' I replied.
From a tin can on the swinging chair she brought out a big brown cookie. She knelt down in her pretty dress and handed it to me.
'Now run along,' she said. 'And don't worry, I won't tell that you were lookin'.'
I ran back into the barn and up to my crow's nest. Mama Flore had let me taste the crumbs from cookies before but I never had a whole one, or even a proper piece. I sat up next to the window and ate my cookie, thinking of young Eloise.
I was hoping that somehow she would remember me and make me her page. That way I could always be near her and eat sugary cookies every night of the week.
That was all before I met Tall John and learned that no man or woman should serve another because that made them a slave.
Time went by and I stayed pretty small. But even still Master Tobias one day told Flore that he reckoned I was old enough to begin the lifelong chore of picking cotton.
'Maybe a few months out workin' will make him grow into a man,' I heard him say to Flore.
He told her that the next day he would send Mr. Stewart up to the barn with orders to drag me out to the slave quarters. I knew that I had to go, and Big Mama Flore had spent the night before talking and singing to me so that I wouldn't be so scared. But when that mean-eyed, rat-faced, red-necked Mr. Stewart came to take me I went into a fit of kicking and screaming. The whole time I kicked and shouted I worried that Mr. Stewart was going to take me out to the killin' shack for being so unruly. But as much as I was afraid to be stretched I was even more scared of the slave quarters.
Nothing I had ever heard about the slave quarters sounded good. It smelled bad in there and it was too hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. And every night they chained your feet to an eyebolt in the floor. The men out there were mostly angry and so they were always fighting or crying or just plain sad. But the worst thing they said about the slave quarters was that once you were there you stayed there for the rest of your life. You either worked in the field or you stayed chained in your bunk. And so I knew that once I went out there I'd never spend any time with Mama Flore again.
Mr. Stewart would get hold of my wrist and drag me half the way across the yard and then I'd twist one way or t'other until I slipped from his grasp. Then I made a bee-line back for the big house, screaming bloody murder and for Big Mama Flore to come and save me.
Three times the evil overseer dragged me into the yard and three times I broke away and tried to make it back to Big Mama Flore's skirts. The white men who worked for the plantation were all around the pigsty laughing at Mr. Stewart, which made him start to curse me.
