It wasn’t true, but that didn’t stop tongues from wagging. I discovered later that, even before I was born, Momma had a reputation for going out and buying the worst of the worst at the auctions: the runaways; the dullards; the cheapest, lousiest Negroes you could find. It was how she spent her time, buying up as many folks as she could, and rumor was she damn near bankrupted her and the major doing it. If there was a mother and her children on the block, she would buy the whole lot, cutting a deal with the auctioneers before the family ever went up for bidding. Neighbors would joke, “I’m gonna sell you my girl Bella, she ain’t worth a lick,” and the next thing you know Bella would be in the kitchen baking bread. Momma never let the slave patrols on the property, even when they were chasing down a neighbor’s runaway, and the one time the fellas did trespass she had the kennel master set the dogs on them. It was an all-around curious way of doing business, but Momma was rich enough that the neighbors didn’t say much.
Not long after I was born, everyone in the county pretty much suspected Momma had birthed me, the height of scandal in a place like Haller County, Kentucky. During the beginning of the Years of Discord, Momma made it her business to always help a neighbor in need, especially as Rose Hill flourished, so most folks found Momma’s peccadilloes less important than her willingness to ride out with a team and help clear a field of dead.
And if folks could overlook the rumors of a white woman birthing a Negro, well, they could forgive just about anything, couldn’t they?
It was something I didn’t much know about or understand until I was old enough to read, and to learn how to eavesdrop properly. The first time I ever realized that a white woman keeping time with a colored man was cause for scandal, I was six or seven. And the only reason I ever knew of my mother’s transgressions was because of Rachel, who hated my momma more than anyone else in the world.
Rachel was mad that day she got to flapping her gums because Auntie Aggie had set her to peeling potatoes, a task that she thought was beneath her. In Rachel’s mind, every ill that befell her was the work of someone else. In this case, Momma, who had told Auntie Aggie that she wanted a nice mashed potato with dinner.
“You know the missus weren’t no lady afore she married the major, now don’t you? She ain’t nothing but rabble, she ain’t got no class like Missus Hooper, my first mistress, God rest her soul.” Rachel had no love for my momma; all her loyalty was for the major. The major had bought Rachel from a plantation down the way before he went off to the war, and she always liked to say how Momma wasn’t doing things right. Not enough whippings, not enough discipline, too many Negroes forgetting their place. Rachel had a set way as to how things should’ve been on Rose Hill, and in Rachel’s mind Momma was too soft because she didn’t play favorites and she didn’t hand out nearly enough beatings.
One of the other aunties, Auntie Eliza, once told me it was because Rachel was the major’s favorite before he went to war, and she liked the easy life he gave her. Rachel had adjusted to being owned, to being property, and she didn’t like the new situation, where she wasn’t nothing but a house servant with wages, a servant that had to work just as hard as everyone else. Slavery had been illegal since the Great Concession, that famous day President Jefferson Davis and the remaining Confederate states surrendered so that President Lincoln would issue the Writ of Concession, sending General Ulysses Grant and the Union troops on their famous march across the South, burning every shambler and abandoned homestead they found and saving Dixie from utter ruin. Slavery had come to an end thanks to President Lincoln and the undead plague, but there were still folks like Rachel that didn’t quite know what to do with all that freedom.
At the time, I had no idea why Rachel was so angry, but I figured it was like how Momma always made sure I ate dinner with her and how she taught me how to read in the evenings, while the other kids got to go play or help fix the barrier fences that kept out the shamblers. Rachel had been special when the major was around, and now she wasn’t.
But Auntie Aggie said that Rachel couldn’t help the way she was, that she’d had a hard life before she came to Rose Hill, and the only way she knew how to act was a vicious kind of way. “Surviving can make people right mean,” Auntie Aggie told me. “You stay away from that viper. She don’t have nothing but ill will toward you and your momma.”
But I couldn’t avoid Rachel all the time. The kitchens were where I spent most of my day, since Momma didn’t want me out beyond the interior fence, especially after what happened to poor Zeke. So I got to hear more of Rachel’s gossiping than I cared to.
“The missus was nothing but trash, singing for coin, before the major lifted her up to being something. And look at how she repays him, rolling around with field darkies like the whore of Babylon. There’s an order to things,” Rachel said, giving me a hard look where I stood helping Auntie Eliza knead bread. Rachel thought there was a hierarchy that should be followed: field workers, house slaves, mistress, and master. It didn’t matter that we were all free, that Momma made sure
