My Name's Not Friday (12 page)

Mrs Allen works us hard in the weeks that follow, but every minute I ain’t in the fields it seems I have my head in a book. Sometimes I’m at the river with Gerald as he teaches me to read and write, amazed at how quickly I’m coming along. The rest of my time’s spent smuggling myself from one cabin, to another so that I can be the teacher.

Now that Mrs Allen has taken back the passes, Hubbard can’t visit his wife and child and that means changing how I give my lessons. I go from teaching a single big class to teaching in ones or twos. That way it don’t seem suspicious, and Lizzie and I put a rota together in our heads to make it work. Sometimes I arrive at a cabin to sit with Mary or Harriet, before I scuttle across to George and then go back over to Lizzie, who now has her lessons with Gil. We snatch at little pieces of time between work or on a Sunday, but mostly we study late into the night, with someone watching out in case Hubbard might show at his door or Mrs Allen come down from the house.

It ain’t unusual for me to be stopped as I go scurrying between the cabins. It might be little Gil or it might be George. ‘Hey, Friday –’ they’ll catch my arm and bring me
right up close so we ain’t overheard – ‘I been telling Kofi that cotton is spelled with a
K
. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘No, George. You’re not right on that one. It’s spelled with a
C
.’

‘Well, how’s that then?’

‘Ask me again in class.’ I take my arm back and edge away towards my next appointment. ‘We’ll write it down together so you can see.’

Only the little ones still use that first primer with the dog. Everyone else is on the second primer or proper books, all of ’em brought to me by Gerald, who thinks I must be the cleverest Negro he’s ever had the fortune of owning, while the truth of it is that Mrs Allen don’t hardly have a slave on the plantation that can’t say their alphabet, excepting Connie, who says he don’t want to learn, and Winnie, who says she might have done once upon a time, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, so she won’t be doing with it, thank you very much.

And then there’s Sicely. That Sicely sure is high and mighty. Even her own mother rolls her eyes at the things she says: like how the missus told her she couldn’t manage without her, or how the master had promised her a new brooch, as a reward for her devotion to his family. Sicely still can’t read a word, but only because she’s too well-behaved to partake in something the missus don’t allow.

What’s more, she don’t approve of our meeting in the woods either. She’s a Christian herself – she tells me this often, mostly before she starts preaching at me for not doing something or other the correct way – but unlike the rest of us, she puts great store by the visits of Mr Chepstow, who still arrives on the second Sunday of the month to preach to us slaves. Sicely keeps faith with him because he’s Mrs
Allen’s choice and she often tells me that, ‘He’s a proper preacher, teaching the word of the Lord the way it was intended to be and not skulking away in the woods like common vagabonds.’

One day we are alone in the kitchen preparing food when Sicely confides in me that this coming Sunday she will be asking Chepstow to baptize her. That surprises me. ‘I thought you was baptized already.’

Sicely looks uncomfortable, but she don’t lash out at me the way she usually would. Instead she goes a little coy. ‘I didn’t want to do it when I was with Mama at the summer camp. I didn’t like the thought of going in that river so I said no, but I was only young.’

‘Were you scared cos you can’t swim?’

Sicely looks shocked. ‘A lady don’t have need of swimming! It ain’t decent.’

I step away, thinking it’s better to be at a distance, but she chops at a potato till it lies in little pieces and that calms her down, so that when she next speaks to me she’s very civil. ‘Have you been baptized yourself, Friday?’

That makes me smile, remembering Father Mosely standing over me, pouring water from a silver jug and marking a cross upon my forehead with his thumb. There weren’t a boy arrived at the orphanage who weren’t baptized the same day they walked through those gates. ‘Sure,’ I told her. ‘I been baptized, though it was a long time ago and I didn’t have to go in a river. I been nervous of the water myself too. I couldn’t swim when I came here, but I’ve been learning how and I’m getting better since I’ve been practising.’

Sicely gives me a nervous smile. Not much of a smile but I see it. ‘Well, I’m older now.’ She nods like she’s certain of it. ‘I decided I got to be braver, and the preacher will have a
good grip of me. If he agrees to it, I’ll be baptized the month after this one. That’ll give me time to make my dress and get myself ready.’

She takes another potato and chops it up the same as before, and I don’t expect her to say any more since this is the first time she’s said something pleasant to me and it can’t last much longer. I move across to the hearth to check on the fire. I bend down to rake it through, but when I straighten up there is Sicely hovering close to me. She’s pretending to stir the pot in her hands, though I can see she has something on her mind. ‘I was wondering’ – she lowers her voice and I’m all ears, straining to catch every word, wondering what she’s got to say that means she has to be this nice to me – ‘could you teach me my name? I mean to read it and to write it too?’

I hesitate and perhaps she misunderstands, cos I see the temper flash behind her eyes and she says by way of justification, ‘It don’t seem right to be baptized without knowing how to write your own name!’

‘I’ll teach you,’ I tell her quickly. ‘Course I will. Only why stop there? I can teach you a lot more besides. I mean, if you want me to.’ A sudden idea makes my eyes widen. ‘You could join our class!’

Sicely shakes her head. ‘I won’t be doing that. Mrs Allen wouldn’t like it if she knew. Anyway, I only need to know my name. That will be enough. That’s all I need to know.’

‘OK. That’s up to you.’

We make a deal to meet in secret, down in a copse of trees that were girdled the spring before last and are standing dead, ready to be felled. Although it is close to the house, there are plenty of bushes that shield us from view and give us the privacy we need.

Sicely and I sit together on a log. As part of my own lessons, Gerald has made me a copy of the alphabet, written out by hand on a loose piece of paper that I have in my pocket, and I unfold the sheet and lay it on my knee so Sicely can see. We’re sitting real close, but it don’t feel uncomfortable like I thought it would.

I start by getting her to say her name. She says it real fast – ‘Sicely’ – and looks at me like I’m a fool for not knowing. I repeat it back to her. Slowly. Breaking it down into parts and sounds so she can hear how it might be spelled. I hiss the S like a snake and point to the letter. ‘That’s the easy one on account of it both sounding and looking like a snake.’ I take hold of her finger and put it on the page, make her trace the shape of it, slinking to the left and right across the paper.

‘Hissss …’ I say to her.

‘Hissss … to you too,’ she says, smiling.

I point to the letter
I
, tell her it looks like a person standing up straight and she repeats it. She’s doing well. I can see she’s concentrating, and when she smiles again it’s with her whole face, so I know it’s real. She points to the letter
S
again. ‘That’s the next one, the same as last time, that little old snake, coming back for more.’

‘No. That ain’t the one, Sicely.’ I point at the letter
C
. ‘That’s the next letter in your name.’

Sicely never likes to be wrong. ‘They sound the same,’ she objects. ‘Why’d they have a different letter do the same thing?’

‘It don’t do the same thing. Well, it does here but there’s other places where it does its own thing, like the word
cure
. You hear the sound it makes there? It’s all hard. It ain’t soft like a snake when you say
cure
.’

Sicely ain’t happy at all and she stands up off the log.
‘That don’t make any sense. Are you sure you’re a teacher? Do you think I’m some fool that don’t know my own name? My name’s “Sisely”.’ She says it quickly, hissing like a snake, and this time there’s no smile at all.

‘It don’t make any sense – you’re right.’

She watches me impatiently and I know she might walk away at any moment. I can’t explain why it has to be that way. It’s just the way it is, but she’s not gonna like me telling her. ‘Sometimes there are rules that you’ve just gotta learn and get on with.’ She scowls at me, uncertain whether I’m telling her off. ‘Like … like when you showed me how to lay a table. Do you remember? I didn’t understand why it had to be one way and not the other, but you told me that was just the way it was. I think it’s the same thing here.’

Sicely looks back over to the house. ‘Well—’ she smooths the front of her dress and sits back down on the log – ‘I want to make a better job of it than you did with the table.’

‘You’re clever though, so you won’t do it wrong again. It’d help if you could see it written out, but I didn’t bring a board.’

At our feet there are twigs that have fallen from the dead trees and they give me an idea. ‘Help me gather these up,’ I tell her, suddenly all excited. ‘We’re gonna write your name, Sicely. We’re gonna spell it out in big letters.’

I show her what to do, bending down and picking up sticks, kicking away leaves with our feet to clear the space, and we make a letter each, glancing at the paper so she knows the shape of ’em as we write her name upon the ground.

We climb the tree easily. We don’t need to go high, just a few feet from the ground and I help her up and she don’t mind holding my hand till she’s steady on the branch. When
we look down, there are the letters of her name, three feet large on the ground beneath us:
SICELY

She smiles. ‘So you’re saying that’s me?’

‘That’s you,’ I tell her. ‘That’s how you spell your name.’

Before Sunday arrives, Sicely has learned the letters off by heart. We have spelled her name to one another, whispering it as we work in the house, right under the noses of Winnie and Mrs Allen, without them knowing a thing about it.

Sicely.

It don’t matter if I fan too slow or the table ain’t been set correctly, cos with sweet
Sicely
on my lips, I am safe from harm. I even think she might like me.

But when I find her alone in the cookhouse on Sunday morning, she’s got a face like thunder and I know we’re back to normal.

‘What’s up, Sicely?’

‘Don’t you whatsup me! There’s plates on the side need going up for lunch. The preacher’s already here, so you better be on your best behaviour.’

No politeness. No smile. Nothing.

I put a sullen hand out to take hold of the platter, but Sicely’s suddenly upon me, seizing my arm and burying her head in my neck. ‘He said he won’t baptize me,’ she sobs. ‘Says I have to be in church to have it done and it has to be at a time that’s convenient to everyone concerned.’

I answer the back of her neck, where the tufts of hair peek out beneath the edge of her white linen cap. ‘Does he expect the missus to bring you in the cart?.’

That makes Sicely howl. ‘I don’t know! I told him it won’t be convenient till the war’s over and heaven knows when that’ll be, but he said I’d just have to wait. He told me patience was a virtue.’

I know to tread carefully, but I ease her off my shoulder. ‘Baptism is something between yourself and God,’ I tell her. ‘It’s personal.’

‘I know that!’ She folds her arms and glares at me. ‘What’s your point?’

‘My point is … well … I know it wouldn’t be the same but … I been doing a lot of the services down at the river … If you want me to do it for you, I think it would still count. I mean between you and God. It would be like it was at the Baptist camp. It wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t in a church.’ I hold my breath, not sure what she’s thinking or whether I even have the right to offer. ‘I can remember most of the right words,’ I tell her, hoping it might help. ‘I’m sure I can. If you want me to.’

And to my surprise, Sicely says yes.

A few days later, Gerald brings a book to the river called
Robinson Crusoe.
‘Hey, Friday!’ he shouts to me before he’s even close. ‘You’re in a book! Look here!’ He arrives at a run and opens it up to show me the bits where the shipwrecked sailor meets a savage on the beach. ‘You’re famous! See here? Crusoe – that’s the poor shipwrecked sailor – he names him after a day of the week. He calls him Friday! Exactly the same as you!’

He thinks I should be pleased, but I scowl. I can’t tell him why, but inside my head I’m screaming the same thing, over and over again.

My name’s not Friday! My name’s not Friday! My name’s not Friday!

‘Ain’t no one ever been called Gerald in a book,’ he tells
me when he sees I ain’t impressed. ‘Not that I can think of. You should be happy about it.’

He smiles at me, all big and generous, but I can hardly bring myself to look at him.

Friday’s the boy that lies to you. Friday’s the boy that makes you steal your mother’s books.

He holds it out to me. ‘Don’t you wanna read it?’

‘I expect it’d be too difficult.’

‘But you got to try. What if it’s all about you?’

It won’t be. My name’s Samuel. That’s the boy you want to be friends with.

‘It’s just a name.’ I tell him. ‘It’s no big deal.’

We lie back in the grass, both of us silent and resentful, and I get to thinking ’bout Joshua and how he always loved his name. He was so proud of it – proud of the stories from the Bible and proud of how he was named after our daddy when he weren’t even the eldest son.

Once, when he’d been caned unfairly, he got together an army of his little friends and made ’em march around the schoolhouse seven times, trying to make it fall to the ground. Sometimes he got the other boys to fight for him, got ’em to hunt out Johnny Bradshaw and his gang in town, cos they were dirty little sneak thieves.

One time he came back with a bloody nose, but I reckon he gave as good as he got and I told him he deserved it. It don’t do to fight. I never seen any good come of it.