“How I passed the time on the journey,” she said. “Took a line of yarn with me and weaved it the whole way.”
Mama looked very pleased at that, and Madame Elizabeth beamed. Miss Hannah was a steadier hand than Ben Daisy could ever hope to be.
Miss Hannah was impatient to see her brother, but Mama asked her to stay for a moment, to drink a cup of tea. “You’ll see him soon enough,” she said.
“But my brother,” she kept saying, even as she clung to Lucien’s arm, her legs still soft from lying down for so long. “He made it all right? He doin’ fine?”
Mama would only say, “I’ll take you to him.” Her voice was even, but she would not look Miss Hannah in the eye. I had never seen my mama ashamed of anything before, so I did not know to recognize it. I stayed close, eager to hear what Mama would say to Miss Hannah.
“Ben Daisy is—”
“Ben what?” Miss Hannah said.
Mama reddened. “It is what the children sometimes call him here.”
“Why would they say that?”
“He, well—”
“He has a good Christian name.” Miss Hannah kept talking. “We was gonna choose ours together, when we got free. We was gonna be the Smiths, on account of our mama saying our daddy always wanted a smithy someday. Why you call him by that woman’s name?”
“Then you know her?”
Miss Hannah sniffed, in distaste. “Before we agreed to run, he fell hard in love with that woman. I thought it would be good for him. He was just beat something awful for trying to run, and after that I thought he was lost to us. He only stared at the wall. But then he found Daisy, and she liked him enough. I hoped it was a good thing. Have a little fun, remember what sweetness this world can hold, so he’d want to stay here in it. He was talkin’ ’bout drowning before he met Daisy. But he met her and he was happy. For a while. He turned sick with love. That Daisy, he’d do anything for her. She didn’t deserve him. You know, he’d save up what little money he could and buy her butter to lick.
“And you know how that little girl repaid him? Three springs ago she ran away without him, even though she knew me and him was fixing to run, too. That little girl didn’t even warn him or nothing, just up and disappeared. They found her body a few miles away, with the man she run with, both of ’em torn apart by the paddyroller’s dogs.
“And every spring like this, he pines for her worse and worse. I thought he’d do better when we made our escape. That’s why I had him go first, even though it was risky. He didn’t even want freedom anymore. He says she’s his love. Says she’s all he’s ever had. Easier to love a haint than this broken world. For him, anyways. And if I have to hear that Daisy’s name one more time, I’ll scream.”
Miss Hannah set down her mug and glared, back and forth, at Mama and Madame Elizabeth, her chest heaving.
“We’ll take you to him, then,” Mama said, her voice low.
And the five of us—me, Lucien, Madame Elizabeth, Mama, and Miss Hannah—put our cloaks on to walk through the dusk to Culver’s back room.
I did not understand then. Can a child, who has so few memories, no history of her own, know what it is to be haunted? To understand a ghost is to have an understanding of time that is not possible for a child. Children can feel spirits, but they do not discriminate between the living and the dead the way adults do. For them, it is all the living. And so I did not understand the look of anguish on Mama’s face as we got closer to the reunion, and I did not understand why Miss Hannah was so angry at a dead woman, and I still did not understand why I felt so sad around Mr. Ben.
But I was about to learn.
The only people allowed in Culver’s back room were newcomers. More and more often, new people were appearing—not just the ones brought by Madame Elizabeth, but those who found us on their own. If you saw an unrecognizable face in town, someone new walking down the roads, who tried to stay close to the underbrush so that they could run, we all knew to send that person first to Culver’s. In those days, you did not ask about the past of the newly arrived. They’d stay for a few nights, and then they would find a room or take a lot from one of the deacons of our church and put together a home of their own.
It was not families who arrived like this. It was mostly men. We welcomed them, of course, and most of them eventually settled in. But a few of them, maybe four or five, never fully joined us. Even after they’d found places to live and women to love, they still returned to the back of Culver’s pharmacy to meet up with those most like themselves.
The back-room visitors would sit and watch Culver work. It was where Culver mixed up the different-colored remedies of his shop. He poured each one into the saltmouth and tincture glass bottles, as tall as a child.
Culver sold the back-room people beer and rum, even though we were a dry town. But the deacons and Reverend Harland pretended not to know Culver’s back room, only obliquely mentioning it in their sermons, and Culver was careful that only colored people drank there. The few times white men tried to come and sit, they just saw Culver painstakingly measuring out the granules and liquids that turned the remedies their necessary hue.
Like every child in our village, I knew the people of
