The way she said this was different. Her speech seemed to shift between dialects.
“You can talk. I heard you. Whatchyou lookin’ at?”
Lloyd had never felt so lost for words.
“What’s your name?”
This question was delivered with a steeled self-assurance.
“Are you scared?”
She sounded almost solicitous now, with the tone of fine breeding. He could imagine a wealthy white girl fondling the family cat, yet inches away from him was a Negro filly in sooty boy’s garb with grown-up eyes and a soft, full mouth. He tried to look away but could not bring himself to do it.
“Worried ’bout bein’ with a nigger?” she challenged, and her whole bearing seemed to change again.
“Who… are… you?” Lloyd managed at last, and felt reassured to be able to speak.
“Wailll…” she smirked. “Dey calls me Shoofly.” She flashed her white teeth in a mocking way and then, in sharp finishing-school diction, added, “But I call myself Hattie. As in Henrietta LaCroix. That’s my proper name.”
Her posture and tone had shifted again, becoming haughty and cool, educated even. He could not control his gaze. The brassy glint of her high cheekbones, the buttermilk soles of her feet-everything confused him, and the thought of leaping into the river was as lost as something he had thrown overboard.
“That’s… a fine… name,” he gurgled, realizing to his mortification that he was becoming aroused between his legs.
The girl gave a slight snort and rolled her filbert-shaped eyes. “I don’t need the likes of you to tell me that,” she said, as her hands whisked out faster than he could move and zipped the skullcap from his head.
His hair was dirty and matted and, as good as it always felt to take off the cap, he felt naked now and was all the more embarrassed about his incipient erection. What made matters worse was that he had the sudden impression that the girl was drawing some disdainful conclusion about him. He had sensed this attitude from Negroes and mulattoes a few times before, and now the way she regarded him he could almost look back through her eyes, like a reversible lens, to each of those incidents, silent little moments of conspiratorial reckoning- sometimes condescending, other times rudely compassionate, and always happening at the speed of a glance. In her weird honeycomb eyes, he knew that he looked like trash.
“You’re beautiful,” he choked at last, and was instantly sorry he had said it.
The girl made a mute pucker with her lips and her face flared like copper under a flame, but she did not move.
“Like niggers, huh?” She squinted, putting on her poor, shiftless voice again.
Lloyd could feel some violence coiling up inside her. She might have pulled a water moccasin out of her breast- or a blade-but he made no move to protect himself.
“Rub my feet,” she commanded.
“W-what?” he stammered.
“Rub my feet, boy,” she repeated, with a face like a fist, and in one fluid motion she brought her legs up over the lantern and into his lap, so that if she had extended her toes they would have pressed against his straining hardness.
Lloyd gulped and took the right foot in his fingers-and, without being able to take his eyes from hers, he began to stroke and caress the arch and ball, feeling the coarse skin soften with the oil of his palm. The girl blew out the lantern.
His parents did not know where he was. No one on board knew where he was. He did not know whom he was with. She might have been mad, for all he knew-and must have been mad in some way to be hiding down there in that hole, stalking the boat alone late at night, with no family or traveling companions. A girl her age. And a Negro-or half Negro. Yet, plunked down now in complete darkness with her, massaging the calloused flesh of her foot, he was flooded with an unknown calmness. He kept his hands at their task, trying not to breathe.
What seemed like a very long time passed, and at last the girl said, “It’s different in the dark. Some folks is afraid of it. I ain’t-I’m not. Are you?”
“Sometimes,” Lloyd managed. “But not… now…”
“Call me Hattie. What I call you?”
“L-loyd.”
“All right, then. Lloyd. Were you really going to jump?”
Lloyd could no longer picture her firmly in his mind. Just her eyes. He felt as if he were caressing the darkness itself. Her tone was sultry and soothing, but the words were young and white. Southern. Mixed up. Like someone in a dream.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“Someone’s affer you,” Hattie said, again sounding black.
“How do you know that?”
“I can feel it. I can smell it.”
“I thought that was mutton.”
The girl gave a light grunt.
“Well, you don’t have to tell me about it, if’n you don’t want to. Got troubles enough of my own.”
“Are you… running away?”
“Yep,” she answered. “I surely am. Folks affer me for sure.”
“Are you… a… slave?”
The softening foot withdrew, then thrust forward deeper into his hands.
“Not anymore,” the girl replied, her voice whitening once more.
“You don’t act like…” Lloyd’s cracking voice trailed off.
“Thass ’cause I ain’t!” Hattie hissed. “Not for true. I’m from downriver-the Mississippi. Long way. Been sneakin’ on boats and layin’ low and trampin’ for more than two moons. Covered a lot of ground. Gwain to keep movin’.”
“So… you escaped? Were you on a farm?”
“
The last word stalled in the air like a belch.
“W-where?” Lloyd asked, squeezing the other foot.
“They calls it-call it-the Corners. Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louise-y-anna. Down on the line there. Grand place back off the river a few mile.”
“Why-did you run away? Was the master mean?”
The girl’s right hand whipped out like a frightened bat and cuffed his face in the dark.
“The mastah was my papa!”
Lloyd’s cheek smarted from the blow, but he did not stop working his fingers into her other foot, which seemed to him to have taken on a life of its own, like some cave animal he was cuddling. He thought back to the professor’s monkey, Vladimir, and Mother Tongue’s odd cat.
“I was born in the cabin, as they say. But he allas treated me special.
“Then why… did you run away?” Lloyd gasped, confused about why his companion in the dark had thrown away the same sorts of chances that he had.
“His wife hated me! She knew the truth. She saw I waddn’t like the other niggers. She hated my mother, but she hated me more. When I’s younger, it was just mean. But when I got a figure-and she found out I could read and write and do sums-she became a devil. Thought it was a sin that I should know about paintings and novels. Wouldn’t raise a hand to me long as Mama was alive. But when Mama died last year-I reckon she was poisoned! Then the old thing laid for me.”
Lloyd swallowed hard.
“She sent me up to Memphis to be sold away. It was her daddy had the land first. She was older ’n Papa. He married her back when she was still a little pretty. But she got crooked and sick-and evil inside. Lay up in her white bed all day dabbing her throat with cologne and whining for the nigger girls to fan her and shoo the flies. Story was she lost a baby. Wouldn’t let Papa come to her bed after that. So… he came… to my mother.”
“Why didn’t your father… protect you?”
