part of me and left only blood behind. I told her that. And I told her that the worst thing was that I didn’t know who I was now.
I told her it frightened me too, not being myself, and him having my soul. She didn’t answer. Though I know she would have if she could.
When I stopped crying, I cupped my hand in the river and brought the water to where he’d broken me. Then I stepped into the river itself and sat down in all my clothes. Maybe I was just trying to reassure myself I was still alive and could feel something like being cold. It’ll sound right peculiar, but when I stepped onto the bank again I took some Spanish moss from a low branch of a cypress tree and held it there too. I held it there to me and whispered from Ezekiel that he’d not devour me, and tried to become the wind carrying away my voice and nothing else at all, so I wouldn’t have to feel anything ever again.
A twelve-year-old girl isn’t ready to have who she is taken from her. No one is.
So many times I wanted to tell my papa what the Master was doing, but I could never find the courage. That secret of mine was just about the worst part. It made me believe I was nothing.
The Master seemed to be cutting new things out of me each time he touched me. All I knew was that they were gone and that they must have made me who I was. I was moving further away from the person I’d been every day.
All that bloody moss I made down by the river … Maybe I wanted someone to find it, to leave some trace of what had been done to me out in the world in plain sight.
I read my Old Testament too, by the light of a single candle:
I slept with that good book open to Psalm One Hundred and Twenty-Three right on top of where he was hurting me, spine up, like a shield, praying I wouldn’t have his baby. I was thinking, too, that maybe if he cut enough of the deepest things out of me, I wouldn’t be able to have a child and that would be a good thing. So sometimes when he was on me, I admit I was thinking,
After that first time, I saw my papa in the morning. I’d hardly slept, so I couldn’t keep from crying in front of him. But I lied and said it was just me missing Mamma. He hugged me tight, and when I winced he said, “You’re not ill, are you?”
I told him his touch reminded me of her even more, which was true, since love has always felt alike to me no matter who it comes from.
Once Crow heard me hollering in the woods. I told him I’d nearly been bit by a big old rattlesnake, and he nodded like he believed me. But he knew what was going on. He listened to everything that went on in the Big House. And he knew just as well as I did that we ought not to say anything to my papa, because he might try to kill Big Master Henry and end up getting lynched.
“The woods ain’t safe, Morri girl,” he said, taking my hand.
We walked most of the way home in silence, but near the Big House he held out his arms to me. “Let me hug ya, girl, ’fore we get so close that they can see,” he said. “Don’t be ’fraid a me. I ain’t like him. I ain’t gonna hurt ya evuh.”
The Master was getting pretty fed up with my lying still as death beneath him and might have stopped his wickedness all by himself, but one day he got one of his spells of weakness real bad and had to leave me alone. Then that ugly giant got so ill that he couldn’t move. He just lay there and moaned.
After a few days of suffering like that, he got himself the kind of burning fever that brings demons. He was so misty-minded that he started asking questions that made no sense at all.
This is September of 1820 that we’re talking about.
He’d always recovered before from his spells, so we weren’t too concerned. Not that it was Dr. Lydell who ever once pulled him back from death. No, sir. It had always been my papa and his curing work. He knew just about everything about herbs and potions. He was famous for that — even among the Indians, because he once cured a deathly ill medicine man who came with a group of Creek braves to River Bend when I was only five or six. He began teaching me most of what he knew about that same time. Though I wasn’t born to it, like him.
Papa told me years before that he’d studied curing in Portugal. He’d lived with a family there and worked with a Jewish magician who had his own apothecary shop. He learned all about which European plants could be used to cure most anything. He’d even been to England to see a man named Jenner who’d discovered a way of preventing smallpox.
Mistress Holly was counting on Papa to save her husband once again. Even though this time he was worse off than ever. I remember her saying in that breathy voice of hers, “Ahm a-cantin’ on ya, Samuel, no wun aylse.”
That was my father’s name — Samuel. In Africa, they called him Tsamma, which is the name of a melon that grows there. His master in Virginia was the one who changed it.
With the Master out of the way in his sickroom, the air of the plantation had lost its bite. We almost believed we weren’t being watched, but we were, since the overseer and the black foremen were always waiting for one little sign of tiredness to call us just plain nigger-lazy, then drag us off to the whipping barrel. Even so, I’d begun thinking nothing would bother me again if the Master would just let me be from now on.
On the night of the Twentieth of September, when the tea-room clock rang its nine o’clock bells, I knocked on Big Master Henry’s door, just like I was supposed to, to bring him his glass of hot lemonade. Lily the cook had made it for him every day for the past decade, just as my papa had told her to. It was made with lemons grown right on the plantation down by Christmas Creek, with honey that my father collected from his hives in Porter’s Woods and Wilson’s Meadow. He had special permission to wander the plantation to collect his honey.
One time the Master told me that the Israelites lived on honey and lemon in the desert, so that was why he drank it. Big Master Henry supposedly knew these things because his papa had been a minister in Charleston. But I’d read the Old Testament from front to back by the time I was ten and never saw any such claim. It was then that I knew for sure that he made up the Bible as he went. Nearly all the white people do, even when they get their quotes right.
“You can remember the words and still not know anything about the meaning hidden underneath,” Papa used to tell me.
So after I’d knocked on his door and been ordered in, I put his glass down on his table — not looking at him because I didn’t want him to notice me ever again. I could hear him wheezing though. Then I slipped out of his room. An hour later, when his wife came to wish him sweet dreams, she found his door locked. She called to him, but there was no answer. He had one of the two keys to the room in his possession. The only other one was in her night-table drawer.
Frantic, she rushed off to get the key. She was powerful afraid to use it though. She didn’t want to find him dead, with his ghost lingering over the body. Mistress Holly was mighty afraid of the dark — because her mother had seen a ghost once rise from her crib and float right out the window — so she shouted to my papa to come up from the larder and open the door. By that time, Mr. Johnson the overseer had been told by Lily the cook that something was wrong in the Big House.
Papa took a long time getting to Mistress Holly, because he couldn’t walk so well. Not since after both his heel-strings were cut by Big Master Henry in the year before I was born. But she wasn’t about to trust anyone else.
Just as he opened the Master’s bedroom door, Mr. Johnson barged into the Big House and came bounding up the stairs. “Get your skinny nigger hands away from there, Samuel!” he shouted, and grabbed the key from Papa’s hand.
My papa said thank you to him, because he was always thanking folks at the strangest times.
The house slaves, me included, were all standing at the bottom of the stairs listening to the hellish caterwauling of Mistress Holly. Lily and her grandson Backbend, who used to help serve supper, were praying that nothing had happened. But don’t be fooled — if they prayed for the Master’s heart to still be beating, it was only
