Freedom Stone (2 page)

“Quick!” Lillie would call. “The slowbees is about!” And Plato would come running.

Now, in the just-breaking sun, Lillie could see that the slowbees were everywhere, massing around the garden thick and dark as a rain cloud, as if they too had been drawn by the baking. This many bees could sting a horse to death no matter how slowly they were moving. Lillie didn't want to consider what they could do to a child like her. She took a step back and started to turn away. But at that moment, the door to the cabin creaked open and Bett appeared. She looked as she always did—small, stout, strong. But she looked older and wearier too, as if baking so early in the day were too much for her.

“I reckoned I'd see you this morning, child,” she said with a small smile. “But it's best you not be here now.”

Lillie was surprised. Bett had never turned her away before. “I felt like visitin',” she said uncertainly.

“I know,” Bett said. “I expected you would. But there's matters I have to mind this morning.” Lillie glanced toward the bees, but Bett didn't follow her gaze. “Come later,” Bett said. “Later there'll be cornbread for you.”

Bett closed the door, and Lillie stood where she was for a moment. Then she turned and walked off—thoughts of the slave appraiser once again filling her head, and the low buzzing of the bees filling her ears.

Chapter Two

BETT DID NOT FEEL good about sending Lillie away. The old woman had not been called to the stable yesterday to hear the overseer's announcement—she was never required to do such things anymore—but she'd heard the rumors about the appraiser's visit and reckoned when the assembly horn blew that that was what it was about. This morning was surely the kind of morning Lillie would want to come visit. She was a fool child sometimes—all children were—but she was a good child too. Still, Bett had other matters to tend to and she needed to turn her full thoughts to them.

The tray of cornbread that had been baking in the oven was finished, and Bett took it out and set it aside. It looked fine, and it smelled proper, but it was not up to the job she needed it to do. She'd have to start over with something different. With a sigh, she selected another of her bread pans, carefully scraped off the crust from the last baking and then washed it to a shine. She gathered up nearly all the flour, yeast, salt and eggs she had left and mixed them into a dense, gummy dough—denser and gummier than she'd usually abide. She looked at what she'd made and frowned. This was not the kind of bread she'd eat herself, nor the kind she'd offer to the other slaves. It was, however, suited to her purposes, and when those purposes had been served, she would feed it to the geese around her cabin, who would gobble it up and like it just fine.

Bett glanced out her window and saw that the sun had risen to two fingers above the horizon. Lillie was gone, but when Bett cocked her ear to the tobacco field, she could already make out the sound of two or three slave children laughing and calling out. The youngest boys often came to the fields early to play chasing and hiding games while their mamas made breakfast. Today they'd be especially likely to do so, since the morning horn would be sounding late, but boys—by their nature—would still be awake with the sun. Bett walked to her door, stepped outside and called into the field.

“Boy!” she shouted as loudly as she could. She didn't much care which boy heard her; they all looked to be the proper age. “Boy!” she repeated. The closest child turned and pointed to himself questioningly. Bett nodded a large yes, one the child could see at a distance, and waved him over.

The boy trotted out of the field with an ease Bett remembered from her own girlhood and presented himself to her.

“Yes'm?” he said.

“I'm bakin', child. I need you to taste somethin' for me.”

The boy brightened; if Bett was making sweets it would be a rare treat to taste them before they went into the oven. Bett stepped back into her cabin, and the boy followed. She withdrew a wooden spoon from her apron pocket, dipped it in the fresh dough and presented it to the boy. He looked uncertainly at the gray, sticky blob that stuck to the wood. This wasn't at all what he'd expected.

“Taste it,” Bett said.

The boy hesitated. “Is this conjurin'?” he asked with a frightened look.

Bett smiled at the question. Most plantations did have conjurers—older slaves whose grandpapas and great-grandpapas had remembered Africa well and learned some of the old land's good-luck spells and healing charms. No one knew for sure if Bett practiced any such magic. She did have a keen way of finding things when they were lost, a keen way of spotting liars and a keen way of knowing when folks were coming down sick—even when they didn't know it themselves. She reckoned most of this just came from paying attention, but other folks always imagined there was more to it.

“No, child,” she said with a laugh. “This ain't conjurin'.”

“Cause I ain't done nothin', so you got no reason to do me harm.”

Bett smiled again. “I know. I just need you to taste somethin' my old tongue can't anymore.”

She held out the spoon again and the boy wrinkled up his nose again, but he tasted a bit of it. It was terrible—Bett knew it would be. “Once more,” she said, sorry that she had to ask.

The boy looked set to cry, but again did as Bett instructed.

“Thank you, child. You done good work,” she said, taking his chin, turning up his face and seeing that his eyes had indeed begun to well. She gave the boy a dipper of water and daubed at his eyes with her apron. “You come back here with your mama day after tomorrow,” she said. “I'll have a proper loaf of bread for her, and see if I don't have a sweet cake for you too.”

The boy smiled at that, turned and bounded out of the cabin. Bett sighed and closed the door. She returned to her work, pressing and mixing the dough with the spoon. Yes, she thought, this sorry loaf would probably serve. It was well suited to what was sure to be an equally sorry day.

Chapter Three

LILLIE RETURNED HOME at a brisk run, glancing all the while at the slowly rising sun and trying to guess whether Mama would be awake by now. When she drew near the large patch of pebbly dirt that surrounded the line of little slave cabins, she slowed. Here she would step lightly, the better to mask the sound of her feet crunching the soil. She tiptoed to the door of her cabin, opened it slowly—thankful that it didn't squeak—and peeked in toward her bed. Plato was still deeply asleep and had not, near as Lillie could tell, even shifted his position since she left. She sighed in relief and opened the door further—then slumped. Mama was sitting at the little eating table, sipping a mug of sassafras tea and looking at her sharply.

“Mama—” Lillie began, but Mama silenced her with an even harder glare. Lillie's brother stirred slightly, and Mama glanced toward him, then summoned Lillie to the eating table with a tick of her head. Lillie stepped quietly across the cabin, trying not to meet Mama's gaze. She did glance up to see that there was a second mug on the table, and this gave her hope. It had always been Mama's habit to make herself tea in the morning, but just in the last year, she had begun making some for Lillie as well. They had never spoken about this new practice; one day Mama was putting out a single mug, and the next day there were two. Lillie still smiled when she picked up her tea each morning. The fact that it was there waiting for her today might mean that Mama wasn't as cross with her as she feared.

“Child,” Mama now hissed, in a voice that said yes, she was surely mad, “where have you been?”

Lillie sat at the table and wrapped her hands around her mug, feeling its warmth. She hesitated. “To see Bett,” she answered. She knew better than to fib now.

Mama rolled her eyes. She'd surely reckoned as much, which explained why she didn't look angrier. She liked Bett, and she had been sorry in the last year when Lillie seemed to have lost interest in the company of the old woman, but today was not the day to go out on adventures without asking first.

“You know what happens to slaves when the appraiser man comes?” Mama asked in a hard whisper.

“They gets sold off,” Lillie answered.

“You know what happens to the ones what misbehaves?”

“They gets sold first.” It was a lesson Lillie had been taught when she was small and had been made to repeat many times since.

Mama nodded. “Bett ain't no help on a day like today, child,” she said. “Mindin' yourself—and mindin' me—is all you gots to do.”

Lillie said nothing and nodded, then picked up her mug and sipped the tea. It was hot and it was good, sweetened with a drop or two of the little bit of honey Mama kept and used only on days when she reckoned they all needed a treat. Lillie glanced up and smiled at Mama. From across the cabin came a small snort, and Lillie's brother rolled over, breathed deeply and stretched. Lillie stifled a giggle.

“Plato's wakin',” she said, and Mama looked toward the boy warmly.

Mama had not been happy about giving her son an odd name like Plato, but Lillie's papa had insisted upon it for reasons he held dear but didn't much discuss. Mama herself had an unusual name. She was known as Phibbi, which was an African name for a girl child born on a Friday. The overseer and the Master forbade anyone to use the name and addressed Mama instead as Franny, so the other slaves did as well—at least when they were in the company of white folks. In private, they used Mama's true name, and Mama was grateful to them for that. Lillie too had a proper African name—Quashee, which meant a girl child born on a Sunday. Papa had given her the name, told her about it as soon as she was old enough to understand it and explained that she should never use it outside of their cabin until the day she was free, when she could carry it with the pride she should.

As slave cabins went, Lillie's family's was a good one—particularly to Lillie and Plato themselves, who had been born here and knew no other home. It had a strong plank floor; a good chimney that Papa had built of oyster shells, sand and lime; and enough dishes, mugs and spoons to fill the cupboards Papa had also built. There was a small table where the family took their meals and there were two chests of drawers for the clothes Mama made. A curtain down the center of the cabin separated the children's bed from Mama and Papa's, but now that Papa was gone, Mama mostly kept it open. The only times she'd pull it shut were on those nights, which still happened now and then, when she would slip into bed and cry till near sunup—something Lillie and Plato learned not to ask her about, since she always answered the same way.

“Mind the things what're yours to mind,” she'd say, and Lillie would know to do as she was told.

It had been four months now since Papa had died—on the twenty-second of May, the dispatch had said, in the siege of Vicksburg, in Mississippi. Only last week, Mama had removed the black mourning rag she'd nailed to the cabin door—and only then because the overseer had ordered her to.

“It spooks the other slaves, Franny,” he snapped. “Take it off or I'll take the rag and the door along with it.”

Lillie herself still cried most every day for Papa. The pain at first had been like a solid thing—a hot stone inside her belly. Now it was more of a terrible, heavy everywhere-ache. She could stand it until something would remind her of Papa—a slave's laugh that sounded like his, a whiff of pipe tobacco that smelled like his. Once she'd even cried at the rough touch of a hog's bristly back, because it reminded her of the rough feel of Papa's unshaven face when he gave her a kiss. And when anyone on the plantation spoke of freedom, she thought of Papa most powerfully of all.

Freedom for all the slaves—but mostly for his own family—was something Papa had talked about all the time. And for a while, it seemed that it was coming. It was late in 1863 now, and at the beginning of the year, word went'round that even as the war between the armies of the North and the South raged on, Mr. Lincoln had signed a paper—a proclamation, Lillie's mama said it was called—ordering freedom for all the slaves in all the Rebel states. The news crept slowly from plantation to plantation and everywhere was met with scowls from the white folks and secret smiles from the black folks. But smart people of both colors knew the paper didn't change much.

“This mean we can pack up our things and walk North tonight?” Lillie's papa asked her when she and Plato had jumped and whooped enough over the news.

“No,” she answered.

“Does it mean I can earn my own livin' and work my own land?”

“No,” she repeated.

“Just so,” he said. “The South is a weasel, and we is the chickens. Weasel don't let go of a bird when you read him a rule tellin' him to. He lets go when you shoot him.”

Papa soon decided that he wanted to help out with that shooting himself. Just last spring, word was sent out that the Army of the South, desperate for more men, had begun accepting slaves as soldiers, assigning them to battlefield jobs like cooking, nursing, horse-shoeing or digging. All able-bodied male slaves over sixteen would be accepted with the promise that if they survived, they would be freed. When not enough family men volunteered in the coastal counties of South Carolina, the promise of freedom was extended to their wives and children too—even if the men themselves were killed in the fighting. And when a plantation owner complained that he'd paid good coin for his workers and didn't want them shot up in the war or freed by the Army, the Army just threatened to confiscate his other male slaves too, which quieted the objections fast.

Going to war in exchange for his family's freedom was an idea that appealed to a sensible man like Papa, and one evening after work was finished and dinner was done, he announced that that was what he planned to do. The family argued, the children cried and Mama even threatened to stand and block the door. But they knew that Papa had made up his mind, and the next morning he was gone. Before he left, he hugged Lillie tight.