weeks, he was able to stand on his own two legs. And as soon as he was able to walk down the stairs, he started giving orders again in that squeaky voice of his, just like he’d never been ill. And the very first order he gave was that he was sure as hell not granting any freedom to Samuel, his daughter, or any other uppity niggers with Yankee dreams in their heads, no matter whether they had brought him back to life or not.
You see, Papa had asked him for our freedom in exchange for keeping him out of the arms of death.
A week after Little Master Henry denied us our chance to be free, he took ill again real bad. Papa tried everything on that boy, all sorts of brews and potions that only he and I knew about. But nothing he worked up did any good.
Every evening I brought the Master his lemonade, just like I did his father. By now he couldn’t keep down even a spoonful of Indian mush. He was all bogged up. If you ask me, his refusal to give us our freedom was the cause of that. And there was nothing in any curing book that was going to get that sort of mud-minded evil unstuck.
One night, I carried his lemonade to his door and found it locked. I was afraid to wake him up in case he’d dozed off. So instead of knocking, I stood there like a spider in its web for a time, just waiting and wondering. Then I shuffled off to Mistress Holly’s room. When I told her about her son’s door being locked, she took the key from her drawer and shouted for Crow to fetch my papa. This time, no one ran off for Mr. Johnson the overseer, since we couldn’t believe that so young a man as Little Master Henry might be dead. He was only twenty-four, after all. And he was a white man. By that I mean he had powers over life and death that we didn’t have.
Papa said thank you for being given the key, then clicked the door open. And just like three months earlier, we discovered that our Master had a blade stuck in his neck, right above the collarbone.
The young man died on November the Twenty-Second of 1820 — just in time for Thanksgiving, a few of the more evil among us said.
I guess you might say we aren’t ever prepared for death to come looking for anyone we know. I learned that when Mamma was ill. Though she was feverish for three weeks, I never once let myself think she was about to leave us behind. The shock nearly chased my spirit clean out of my body. Papa’s as well. He didn’t say a word for four months.
You can say what you want about Mistress Holly, but she had a big fondness for her son. I think that he was the only person she really loved. So we reckoned she’d start wailing something awful. Not a one of us expected that terrible silence when she crept on over to her son and lay her head in his bloody lap. His eyes were still open, but she didn’t reach up to close them. She didn’t want him dead forever.
For the first time in my life, I felt bad for a white person. After Dr. Lydell had come and gone, I tiptoed in to Mistress Holly in her room and asked real nice if I might bring her some lemonade with a few of the almond biscuits that Lily had made. She looked up from her bed with eyes so red that I thought she’d rubbed her dead son’s blood into them. I got a fright. She glared at me as if I had laughed at her. In the meanest voice I’d ever heard from her, she said, “You get your black feet out of my room, nigger girl, or I’ll have you peeled, pickled, and quartered.”
When a planter is murdered in South Carolina, all the white folks start shivering nearly all the time, even when they’re sitting right up close to their hearths. Because they know the killing might have been the work of a Negro wanting freedom. Like Mr. Denmark Vesey. He was the preacher who was hanged for trying to start an uprising in Charleston back in 1822. He once even came to River Bend, and you could feel that big power in him. “Like black lightning,” Papa described him, by which he meant a whole lot of things, I’d guess.
So with a few hundred thousand Negroes thinking about vengeance every night, it was no wonder that the white folks didn’t sleep none too peacefully. They figured that once we got started it was only going to stop when the last of their race was lying in a Charleston street in a puddle of his own blood, being picked by vulture birds. And they were likely right.
This death meant something else besides. It was proof of a terrible curse having been put on River Bend. No one said that any louder than Mistress Holly herself. She hardly got dressed anymore. Most of her time she sat in her dressing gown in her room, losing at solitaire and consoling herself with rum.
Life gets stuck repeating itself from time to time, I guess. Mr. Johnson didn’t bother measuring the distance from the window to the ground this time, since the Big House wasn’t made of rubber and couldn’t have gotten much higher or lower. As for the ladder, it was locked in the First Barn and only Mr. Johnson had the key.
Twenty-four feet from the window to the ground … Little Master Henry dead at twenty-four years old … Lily, Weaver, and some of the other slaves believed this coincidence was proof that we were finally getting some divine justice in South Carolina.
Mr. Johnson got powerful furious at us for not knowing who did it, but he didn’t whip anybody. He was waiting to see who the new master would be before working himself up. Maybe he was frightened of the killer ghost that might be haunting River Bend, as well.
Whatever was in his mind, I guess he started making plans right about then to leave River Bend with Mistress Holly. Crow overheard him talking about that with her not two nights after her son’s death.
This time, South Carolina justice found a culprit, though we only knew it three days after the fact. In the story we heard, a runaway slave named Hilton had been caught by a patrol while he was fording the East Branch of the Cooper River near where it meets French Quarter Creek.
The hounds might have lost his scent but his shoe had come off in the mud of the riverbank. You might say that his destiny got stuck with him right there.
We heard the report of what happened from Crow, who got it from Aunt Bessie. Hilton had been dragged nearly drowned out of the river by the patrol. Finding a silver watch in his pocket, they said it must have been Little Master Henry’s. No nigger could get himself such a pretty thing without stealing it.
After they lynched him from a big old oak tree, they cut him down, tied the rope around his legs, and dragged him by horse all the way back to Cherry Hill. They rode across five or six miles of ugly roads gouged with stones, so that by the time they discarded him in front of his poor mamma’s cabin, every last bone in his bloody face had been broken.
I guess you could say that motherhood has got to be the bravest thing of all, since she knelt by his body and tried to put him back together.
I can’t think of anything more evil than to do that to a man and show him to his mamma.
Nobody in the patrol knew or cared that the silver watch had been a present from his father, Papa Lucius.
My papa told me that men like them only listened to Hyena and did his bidding. Papa talked like that sometimes. Most folks at River Bend didn’t understand him, but I did.
A few days later it rained all night, and Papa danced out front of the Big House till dawn. He got so sopped and tired that I thought he’d just fall right down in the mud. He closed his eyes when I held him in my arms and whispered, “I’ve got to make sure they don’t take the dances from us too.”
We all knew there wasn’t any justice in South Carolina, but I still kept thinking there ought to be. I guess thinking like that was the root of all my problems.
After Little Master Henry’s funeral, Mistress Holly moved into her town house in Charleston and never once came back to River Bend. She didn’t invite Mr. Johnson to join her either. I guess she was fond enough of him when there was no one else nearby. Folks said that she was playing cards every night with other widows and winning enough to buy all the rum she could drink.
Mistress Holly would die five months later, from the ague, the doctors said. But the rumors were that she just drank herself to death. I guess no one can live so very long with that much unhappiness in their heart.
Mr. Johnson took his frustration out on us. For three months afterward we were whipped for so much as sneezing at the wrong moment. He cut stripes in me too. For the very first time. Papa was in Charleston doing marketing that day.
Mr. Johnson must have seen my father being in town as his chance to take out all the hate he’d been collecting against me in his old pockets over the years. What got him all in a fit was me telling him that the field slaves would likely work better if their chimneys were made out of brick instead of clay.
“What kind of nigger stupidity you spoutin’ now?” he asked me.
