Silent Thunder (4 page)

“A healthy dose of kindness can work wonders for a sickly child. Talk to your boy, Gideon. It sure can't hurt him.”

Parnell shrugged. Doc Bates mounted his horse. Master Gideon gave the horse a gentle hind-slap, and watched the doctor ride away.

All's I could think on then was what I'd seen in
Harper's Weekly
, about black men being allowed to enlist
in the Union army, and gaining their freedom once they did. Even though Gideon had gone on and on about Southern black troops who were not free, the master's protest was the promise of possibilities.

“Imagine it, coloreds to arms!”

September 10, 1862

R
OSCO AND I FINALLY GOT
to starting on our lessons. We met behind the quarters, right before dusk, near the cypress tree. I slid my book from the croaker sack where I'd been keeping it hid. “This here's the best present ever, Rosco,” I said. “You know what the master told me 'bout books when I went to see him on my birthday?”

I was all ready to tell Rosco everything about this year's visit with the master, when he held out a hand to shush me.

“We
ain't
here to talk about
that
,” he said. Rosco lifted the book from my hands. He pushed it back down in its sack. “Put this away,” he said. “We need to start with explaining, before we get to full-out book learning.”

“But, Ros—” A swell of disappointment started to
rise in my belly. I'd been touching on my book's pages—and feeling the hardness of its cover under my head at night—long enough!

“Hold your horses, Summer.” Rosco put a little squeeze on my arm. “Like Mama's always tellin' us, we got to take first things first.” Then Rosco said, “Show me your leg, high up.”

“Ros!”
I was gettin' all up-jumpy. “You playing a trick on me? 'Cause if you are, it ain't no bit funny!”

Rosco's face was serious. “This is no silly foolin', Summer. It's our first lesson in letters. Now, slide your skirt up so's I can see where your leg meets your hipbone.”

I knew Rosco would never wrong me. He was as honest as the sun (well, he was mostly honest, 'cept for when it came to swiping books and tablet paper). And sometimes he had a strange way of explaining things. “All right, Ros.” I agreed. “I'll lift my skirt, but I'm stopping soon as I get to my unders,” I said firmly, sliding my skirt.

“Okay, that's good.” Rosco held up his palms. “Now, what you see there?”

I was truly confused. “All's I see is my leg, sitting out like a prime target for a hungry mosquito looking for some flesh to chew on,” I huffed. “This is a silly way to learn to read, Ros!”

“Keep looking,” was all Rosco said.

I stared down at my knee and started to fidget. Then
Rosco pointed to the old scar up near my hip. He said, “Learning to read starts with letters. You got your own letter right on you. It's the sixteenth letter of twenty-six. The letter
P
.”

I touched the spot on my thigh where the skin was puckered and raised and dark. “I been having that old scar on me since forever, Ros. That don't look a thing like what I seen on young Master Lowell's learning book. Why are you bluffing me so, Ros?” I clicked my tongue.

“You got that scar from the master himself. I got me one, too.” Rosco yanked down the top of his britches to show me a hip scar that looked just like mine:
P
.

Then he yanked up his drawers and folded his arms tight in front of him. “
P
is the first letter of the master's family name—
Parnell
. It's a brand that tells people Parnell owns us. I've had my brand forever, too, Summer. We both got ours when we was babies, too little to remember the sore.”

My skirt was still up to my hip. I studied the scar— the
brand
, the
P
—on my leg. “Sore?” I asked.

“The burn sore,” Rosco said. “White people take a red-hot iron and burn the brands right into us, like we's their animals.”

“Mama got a brand—a
P
—too?” I asked.

Rosco nodded. “Every slave on this place got a
P
— Mama, Clem, Thea.”

My mind was back to racing with all those pretty letters from Lowell's lesson book. I wanted to be looking at
them
, not at some old natty scar on my leg. Even if the scar—the brand—
was
a letter, I sure didn't see the same beauty in it as I saw when I looked at them curlies in my book. I slid my skirt down over my leg, back to where it belonged. Rosco must have sensed my jumpiness. He took up my book from where it had been resting in the dirt and opened it to the front. I could feel my impatience start to ease. As soon as Rosco turned open my book, I let my eyes dance along the curves of them fancy letters on the book's inside cover, the ones made with quill ink. “Beautiful,” I whispered. “What's it say, Ros?”

“Says Lowell Farnsworth Parnell. That's young Master Lowell's full name.”

“All them swirls for
Lowell?
”

“Somebody—maybe Lowell himself—wrote it all out in the finest ink,” Rosco explained.

“It swirls like the pattern on Missy Claire's china.” I was staring hard at Lowell's name, taking it in. “Young master sure is lucky to have his name lookin' so fine,” I said softly.

Rosco turned to my book's first page. There stood that pretty row of letters, staring back at us.

“You see this?” Rosco ran his finger along the bottom of the row.

“It looks like a parade. A happy parade, all lined up for a march,” I said.

“This here's the
alphabet.
It's all the letters that make words.”

Now I was touching the book, but not with just my finger. I was rubbing on it with the whole palm of my hand. “What does all this parade of letters
say?
”

“The alphabet's not a word, Summer. But you can take it apart—take two or three or four or ten letters from the alphabet, put 'em together in all kinds of different ways, and make a whole mess of words.”

I turned through the pages of my lesson book, showing Rosco how the letters, and words, and
alphabet
danced when I fanned the pages real fast. “Let's put some letters together—
now
, Ros.” A bunch of lesson time had gone by already, and I still didn't know one iota 'bout how to read!

Rosco said, “Words'll come, Summer.” Then he turned back to the place in my book that held the parade of letters, the alphabet. “You see anything here that looks like your brand scar?” he asked.

I studied the letters from front to back, and back again. Some letters were tall and lean, others round and fat. One was sharp and pointed, like the tip of the paring knife Mama used to peel apples for a pie. I didn't see nothing that looked like my leg scar—like mine and Rosco's scar.

“It ain't here,” I said.

“Keep looking,” Rosco encouraged. “If you ever gonna learn to read, you first got to learn to stick with it when it starts gettin' hard.”

I nodded. “
All right
, Ros, but I just don't see nothin' that looks anything like—” and before my impatience got the best of me, I saw the letter—the
P
—standing right up in the middle of the alphabet parade. “There it is, Ros!”

“What I tell you?” Rosco said.

That
P
was just as proud. It was nestled between two circles; one of the circles had a line poking out from it. “That's how my leg must've looked sticking out to the right, from my dress, ready for a mosquito to bite it,” I said, pointing to that round, one-legged letter.

“That's
Q
comes after
P
, in the alphabet,” Rosco explained.

“Q”
I repeated, tracing the letter with my finger.

“What words can you make with a
Q
and a P?” I wanted to know.

“Ain't no words you can make with just a
P
and just a
Q
. You need other letters woven between the two of them before they can be turned into a word.”

Fireflies had begun to spark the darkness. “We best get back to the quarters, Summer. Thea's gonna be starting evening prayers soon.”

“But I don't know nothin' 'bout reading yet, Ros,” I protested, turning through the pages of my book a
second time. “All's I know is what a
P
and a
Q
look like, and them two letters together don't even make no words.”

Rosco clapped his hand onto my shoulder, same way I seen him do to Dash when Dash gets riled up. “Girl, you jumpin' past the gate too fast,” Rosco said. “Remember, it took me a long time of studying that book before I could even know a few little bitty words.”

“But—” I began.

“But nothin',” Rosco interrupted. “Tonight at prayers you need to ask whoever it is Thea prays to to put some kind of patience in you.” Rosco stood and held out a hand to help me up off the grass. “And pray to calm that flutter-bug that's batting at you.” Rosco started to walk toward the quarters. I followed after him quickly.

“There ain't no flutter-bug batting at me, either! I got me plenty of patience,” I snapped.

As we made our way back to the quarters, Rosco promised me that we'd stick with our lessons, that we'd meet under the cypress tree every time we could both steal away without anybody knowing we were gone. I could see the glow of Mama's prayer candle coming through the burlap that hung at the door of our cabin. The burlap was there to let in any little bit of night breeze that might float by, and to keep the bugs outside, away from where we slept. Mama's candle grew brighter as we walked.

Rosco and I each drifted into our own private thoughts. I was still itching to know more letters, but the two that I had just learned were enough to ring inside me like a happy little play-song:
P~Q~P . . . Q~P~Q . . . P~Q~P . . .

September 11, 1862

I
T WAS GONNA TAKE A MIRACLE
to teach Summer to read. She was so eager to get letters and words in her head all at once that she wasn't paying full attention, and she wasn't learning nothin'. If she wasn't my sister, I'd have told her that I didn't have no time to waste trying to teach an addle-head.

And Summer talked way too much. After our lesson, soon as we got back to the quarters, she was all set to start bragging to Mama about her
Q
's and
P
's. She was ready to announce to every slave on Parnell's place that I was giving her book lessons. But I shushed her with a single cut of my eyes, and she swallowed back her excitement. It was a good thing I had taken her book from her. She'd have been waving it right up under Master Gideon's nose if I'd let her keep it. My backbone went cold just to think about
the trouble Summer could have brought with her restlessness.

This morning I was at the blacksmith shack with Clem, helping him keep the irons' fire alive. “You know anything 'bout coloreds fighting in the war?” I asked cautiously.

Clem looked at me sideways. “Maybe so, maybe not,” was all he said. Clem was good at not letting on that he had know-how about certain things. When he didn't want to let go of what he knew, he said stuff like, “Could be.” Or, “It's possible.” Or, “That's a question for the heavens.” Sometimes, Clem didn't answer at all; he just shrugged. That's when I knew to back away from badgering him.

But when Clem answered me with a “Could be,” or an “It's possible,” it was because he wanted to see how much
I
knew before he committed himself to sharing any information he had tucked in his back pocket.

Clem hadn't always been as short on words as he was now. Just last summer he was serious in love with Marietta, a girl who lived nearby on the Johnston plantation. I never saw a man more giddy than Clem when Marietta came to Parnell's with her mistress to visit Missy Claire. Clem even got dreamy-eyed when he
talked
'bout Marietta (and he talked 'bout her— 'bout her pretty honey-colored skin and her true understanding of how to grow flowers and harvest berries—all the time). Talked about Marietta like she
was some kind of queen. He even used to call her Queen Etta, a nickname he let roll off his lips every chance he got. Heck, whenever I was fetching water from Parnell's well, I secretly wished that when I got to be Clem's age—he was sixteen, three years more than me—I'd be lucky enough to find me a Marietta of my own.

It didn't take long for Marietta and Clem to decide they were truly matched in the eyes of God. But they wanted to make their match official, so Clem went to Master Gideon and asked to get hitched. He asked if Parnell would purchase Marietta, so's the two of them could live together as husband and wife.

I wasn't there when Clem asked to marry, of course, but I hear tell that Parnell didn't even consider it. He said no almost before Clem got the words out.

Gideon is said to have told Clem, “I got enough womenfolk among my slaves.”