Edward then scoffed at my insistence on paying for my stay, saying he’d never allow it. He called for Crow, who had waited at the parlor door, and instructed him to help me move my bags into Mistress Anne’s old room. Before heading upstairs, I went outside to rejoin Luisa. I told her that all was well and returned with her to the gig to fetch my bags. I whispered that I had seen Midnight’s daughter and that her name was Morri.
Luisa gripped my hand, then thought better of showing her feelings. Looking around to confirm we’d not be heard, she said, “Oh, I’m so glad, John. Did you speak to her?”
“I could not. I shall try later.”
“You will convince her, I’m sure of it.”
“If only I had your confidence.”
“Confidence doesn’t cost anything,” she said with a grin, “so I’ve got bales and bales.”
I thanked her and Isaac for their help.
“I’ll not kiss you here,” she whispered. We shook hands. “Now, you be careful, John. I’ll leave you with what my mama used to tell me whenever I was up to something risky. I don’t rightly know what it means, but it used to encourage me.” She placed her hand against my chest and pressed. “You eat the night, child. Eat the night deep inside you.”
Later that day, I took my sketchbook outside, then rushed around the perimeter of the tea room toward the kitchen building, which was joined by a walkway to the main house. I could hear soft voices coming from inside. I knocked, and an elderly black woman wearing spectacles, in a loose white tunic, came to the door and bowed deferentially.
She soon told me she was Lily, the cook. When I asked if there was someone who might wash and iron a shirt and trousers, she hesitated for some time, rather as though deaf. Then, when I repeated my request, she said, “I get Morri right on it, sir.”
“And might I talk to Morri herself?”
“Yes, you shawly can, sir. Ya jes’ wait right here, please.”
Morri appeared after a minute or so, her eyes filled with alarm, holding one arm straight down, her other hand grasping it at the elbow. She remained two long paces from me, wary. “Morri, I have a favor to ask you,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“The clothes I left on my bed are very, very soiled. Would you please make the shirt … you make it as white-white as the sky.”
“White as the sky? I’m ’fraid I don’ und’stand, sir.”
“I have been told that that was the color of the sky at the time of the First People.”
She took a step back.
“We are the First People,” I added. “You and I … and everyone else. Though that is a secret only few people know.”
Before I could explain myself further, she fled, groping her way along the kitchen wall as though blinded.
XLVII
When the stranger came to the kitchen door asking for me, Lily fetched me jumping like a toad, because she couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. Sure enough, there he was at the door, all six foot of him, trying to trap me inside those blue-gray eyes of his.
He asked me in a real careful voice to do some washing for him — like I could refuse without risking a whipping. Then he said some peculiar things: that his clothes were
That sure got me muddled good. Then the obvious came to me: The bastard already had my father prisoner! This was his devilish way of telling me. Likely, he and his kind were torturing Papa in some secret location. Maybe they’d had him there for years.
What he was doing here at River Bend, I couldn’t say. Though being a white man, he probably just wanted to see me suffer with knowing that my papa was a prisoner.
But then why had he been asking in Charleston after my father like he didn’t know where he was? And if Papa had been captured, why hadn’t they returned him to Master Edward, his owner?
Looking at that man standing just outside the kitchen doorway made it hard to breathe. I felt my way out of the room and ran. I didn’t know where I was heading, but I had to get out of the Big House before it choked me to death.
I dashed away as fast as I could and found Weaver fixing the chicken run. “Whoa, slow on down, girl. Wha’s goin’ on wid you?”
“We have to cancel what we planned,” I whispered. Then I explained about the stranger who’d caught my father.
“No, baby, i’s way too late to stop what we duhn started.”
“I think he’s kidnapped Papa.”
I started to cry then, because I’d been hoping so much that my father had got away and was up North. If he hadn’t been able to escape, then what chance did we have?
“We’re going to die, Weaver! They’re going to catch us.”
“Calm yousself, girl. Calm yousself down. Tell me wha’s goin’ on in dat head a yaws.”
I said that I couldn’t understand why the visitor was asking about my papa when he must have taken him prisoner already. Weaver considered that while chewing on a stalk of rice, then said, “He’s gonna find out who done helped him escape. Yaw papa ain’t sayin’ and he wants to know real bad.”
That made good sense. “If he talks to you, just say you never knew my father,” I instructed.
“I can’t likely say dat, girl. I been here all mah lahf.”
“Then say you weren’t here the day he disappeared. You were down in Charleston.”
“Whatevuh ya say, Morri. Where ya dink he got yaw papa?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, but I knew then that I had to find out.
I stayed away from the house for a few hours, walking in Porter’s Woods, hoping real hard that the stranger wouldn’t stay too long. If he was here when Beaufort left his signal that the boats were at the landing, waiting to take us to freedom, then we were going to have to do some big killing at River Bend. It made me sick thinking about that, and I didn’t know if I could really do it, but I figured that I’d only know for sure when the time came for me to squeeze the trigger.
On the way back to the Big House, I stopped by to see Weaver again, and he told me he’d had a right pleasant conversation with the stranger. He’d even taken him to see the slave cabins.
“Well, I sure as hell hope you didn’t go showing him my room. And you better not have told him anything about Papa.”
“I didn’ say nuttin’. You in one of yaw ebil dispositions, ain’t you, chile?”
“Well, I got a right to be.”
I marched back to the house, determined to find out what kind of secrets this visitor was keeping. Crow told me that he was outside somewhere, so I snuck up to his room.
I found his leather travel bags sitting on the bed. I opened them up and discovered two things that got my heart jumping: a long white feather and a homemade arrow in three sections, each fitting perfectly into the next.
I sat there, stunned. Because the arrow was just how my papa had described the way his people made them back in Africa. The feather … well, it might have been plucked from any old hen, except that it was longer than any I’d ever seen. It made me remember that mysterious white bird Papa told me about, the one he’d tracked for years
