Stealing Freedom (2 page)

“Lord, I remember that!” Her mother's voice was suddenly alive. She laid the shirt she was mending in her lap, and wiped beads of perspiration from her cheeks. “Addison wasn't even walking yet, and Ann Maria up and decided to arrive. It was
corn-planting time, and I was out in the fields with Addison strapped to my back and Ann Maria sleeping in a basket at my feet, and the dust rising like a cloud of hornets with no rain to keep it down.”

Ann kept the movement of her dishwashing a constant plunge, scrub, plunge, hoping that the rhythm would keep the story going.

“And Catharine running between the rows and coughing in that dust like she'd choke to death on it, and—thank you, Jesus—Augustus just old enough to hold her hand and take her back to the house when her coughing fits got real bad.” She shook her head. “We planted, and waited, and it wouldn't rain and it wouldn't rain.” Her mother's words slowed, recalling the sameness of day after day with no hope. “And when the crops came in next to nothing, old Master still had his goose for Christmas, and we had the hungriest winter ever. If it wasn't for my milk feeding the two littlest ones, we'd have starved.” Her mother fixed her eyes back on the torn shirt and attacked it with needle and thread.

“I was born at corn-planting time?” Ann asked. She loved her mother's stories, but not when they grew sad. When they turned sad, she wanted to put the stories in a sack and heave them into the Patuxent River, so Mamma wouldn't have to remember that part anymore.

“Yes, baby.”

The room went quiet except for the splashing of the wash and rinse water, and the faint squeak of Catharine's drying rag on the clean plates.

The first birds hadn't yet begun to sing when Ann awoke the next morning. She sat on the wooden floor of the sleeping loft that served as their bed. Her brothers lay sprawled about, their blankets tangled in wide-flung legs and arms. Catharine lay straight as a tree, her breath rattling softly, her strong jaw and delicate lips relaxed in sleep. There was too much excitement in Ann's blood for her to lie back down: today she would find out her age.

Starting chores early, she reasoned, would give her a chance to slip away to talk to Richard. His birthday celebration had been just up the hill, at the stone house where his older brother, Master Charles—Ann's owner—lived. Richard lived with his parents, Master William and Mistress Mary Elizabeth, in the frame house near the public road. The tavern was on the first floor of the house, and the inn was simply the upstairs bedrooms, which had been vacated by Richard's nine older brothers and sisters when they married and left home. The elder Prices owned all the land and the houses. They also owned Tom and Lizzy and their eight children.

His parents were too tired to give him a birthday celebration, Richard said. He'd heard it all before. They were tired because Mistress Mary Elizabeth had been raising her children for over thirty-five years, and Master William had been running the inn and tavern, albeit with the help of his family, and farming for even longer. Richard said they were also tired of all the folks who hated them just because they were Irish.

Ann climbed down the ladder and tiptoed past her sleeping parents. She carried two buckets to fill at the spring, one for washing and the other for her mother to use to cook cornmeal mush for breakfast. As she trudged back up the hill, the heavy water sloshing, the first bird called out its song, was joined by another, and soon the air was filled with their singing to the brightening sky.

Next, she ran to Master Charles and Mistress Carol's house. She started the fire in the summer kitchen so it would be good and hot by the time Ellie was ready to cook. She scattered corn on the ground for the flock of squawking chickens, filled water buckets for Bob and Sally, the roan gelding and bay mare, sneaked past the hounds without waking them up, and went back to hoeing the peas in the Prices’ garden where she'd left off yesterday. Once the Prices awoke, she would empty their chamber pots and fetch their wash water. If she got enough done before breakfast, she could slip away to talk to Richard without being missed. Later, there would be bed linens from the inn to wash, rooms to sweep, lunch to bring to her father and brothers in the tobacco field, and more tending to the animals and the garden.

She liked the movement. Sometimes she wished she had patience,
like Catharine and her mother, to sit and shell peas, or snip the ends off green beans, or stitch the fine lace that Mistress Carol liked so much. But for Ann, it was the movement that kept something else quiet—something dark and threatening. The swinging of the hoe, the hoisting of water buckets, the plunge, scrub, plunge of the heavy bed linens against the washboard—it was a comforting rhythm, drowning out a deeper, more ominous one. Even on Sunday afternoons, Ann had no patience to sit with Catharine and Lizzy's daughter Rachel making cornhusk dolls or taking out last week's braids and putting in new ones for Rachel's little sisters. She had to keep running, down to the pond with Addison, Joseph, and Richard to catch tadpoles in their cupped hands, to chase after squirrels with homemade bows and arrows that never once hit their mark, to dig in the soft earth and pull out squirmy worms. The worms she brought to Augustus, who, with Lizzy's son Henry, had the patience to sit and fish and the good sense, her mother pointed out, to do something on Sunday afternoon that would add to Sunday night's supper.

Catharine found her in the garden. “Ann, you got up so early. Mamma didn't know where you were.” Ann's sister shielded her eyes from the sun, which had popped up over the far line of trees.

“Just couldn't sleep anymore, that's all,” said Ann. “Do you and Ellie need help?”

“No, but why don't you come along anyway and get yourself out of this sun?” It already felt like one of those days that would make every living thing droop by the end of it.

In the summer kitchen Ellie was slicing thick slabs of bacon
for breakfast at the tavern. She always sliced too much and almost always got yelled at and slapped for it, but it was the only way she and her small son, Benjamin, would get a decent breakfast from the leftovers. Ellie was a hunched-shouldered woman with a way about her that reminded Ann of a dog that tucks in its tail and runs every time you try to get near it. She and Benjamin slept in the loft over the summer kitchen.

Benjamin ran to Catharine, and she swung him up into her arms. She tickled his round belly and he giggled with glee. He had, as everyone could see but no one dared to mention, his father's soft brown curls and clear blue eyes in a face with African features and honey-colored skin. His existence made the childless Mistress Carol so angry she would just as soon kick him as look at him, but from his mother and the other colored folks he got nothing but spoiling.

Catharine sat Benjamin on the table next to where the potatoes lay, ready to be chopped for frying. He swung his short legs and sucked on three fingers.

Suddenly the door opened and Mistress Carol burst in, tall and sturdy in a pale blue dress that matched the veins showing through her neck. “Where is breakfast?” she demanded. “There are two cattlemen at the inn, should have had their herds on the road by now. They've started drinking rum, and they're liable to be here all day at this rate!” Then she turned and saw Benjamin. “Get that filthy child off my table!” she snapped. In two steps she was behind him, and with one swipe of her arm she smacked him hard across the back of the head. Catharine caught the child as he fell off the table, and whisked him out the door as the first wail left his lungs.

“I want breakfast served immediately,” Mistress Carol commanded. “I don't care if it's raw!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Ellie said, her eyes cast down.

“And you”—she pointed a slender finger at Ann—”were you going to leave the chamber pots all day so the stench would make us ill? In this heat you've got to get up
early
instead of lazing around all morning like I know your kind is fond of. Now
get
.” She gave Ann a shove toward the door.

The sound of Benjamin's crying followed Ann all the way into the stone house.

Ann decided she'd have to skip her own breakfast if she was going to make it to Richard's without being noticed. Not that Mistress Carol was ever in a good mood, but today she was in an especially bad one, and Ann would rather listen to her own stomach growl until noon than be beat about the head by that woman today.

Once the chamber pots had been emptied and cleaned, Ann ran past the tobacco fields and the cornfield to the two-story frame house where Richard lived. The front yard was a circle of dirt and dust because of the frequent traffic of wagons, carriages, horses, and cattle that belonged to folks stopping at the tavern and inn. There, in the dust, under the shade of the big maple, sat Richard with another white boy. Their heads were bent over a circle of marbles.

“Richard,” she called as she ran, “I've got to talk to you.” She stopped in front of them, panting.

“Who's that?” the other boy asked with a grimace.

Richard looked right at Ann, but with a strange dullness in his eyes. “Just some nigger belongs to my brother.”

His coldness hit her like a slap.

“What do you want?” he asked her gruffly.

She stood there, her mouth open slightly, unable to speak. All of a sudden she saw the whole thing as if she were a bird sitting on a branch in the wide, shady maple: two white boys in their homespun shirts and neatly patched britches, sitting in the shade, and her standing there with sweat running down the sides of her face, her dress of the roughest brown burlap hanging on her skinny shoulders like a sack, mud from the garden caked between her toes, and straw from the barn in her hair. This was not the Richard who sneaked off on Sunday afternoons to join her and her brothers to dig and swim and skip rocks across the wide part of the Hawlings River. This was Richard playing with a white friend.

“What do you want, girl?” he demanded again.

“I—I want to know how old you are,” she said softly.

Richard hooted, and both boys nearly fell over laughing. “You ran all the way over here to ask me that?” They laughed some more. “Go on back to work,” he said, and leaned over the marbles.

Dull stare or not, Ann knew he was the same old Richard inside. She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “I want to know how old you are, because my brother Joseph says he's bigger than you.”

Richard hopped to his feet. “That scrawny boy thinks he's bigger than me? You tell him I turned eleven last night.”

Ann turned without another word and ran back the way she'd come. She grinned and laughed out loud. Next to the cornfield she stopped and flung her arms open to the blue, steamy sky. “Did you hear that, Lord? I'm eleven years old!”

That evening after supper there was a quiet knock. Then the door opened a crack, and a fat walking stick protruded into the room. Ann looked up from her dishwashing and smiled.

“Uncle Abram!” Joseph cried. He ran to the door, threw it open wide, then jumped up, and hung on his uncle's neck.

“Get down, boy, can't you see I'm a cripple?” Uncle Abram said, laughing.

Behind him came his wife, Aunt Mimi, moving slowly because of her plumpness. Her head was wrapped in faded yellow gingham and she was wagging one finger in disapproval. “He's as crippled as a healthy racehorse, if you ask me,” she said.

“Old Master said I was limping so bad, I'd better come see my sister Arabella to get some good doctoring.” Uncle Abram laid a hand on one of Ann's mother's cheeks and kissed the other one.

“Is that leg not healed
yet
?” Arabella put aside her mending.

Uncle Abram sat in the chair Ann's father offered him. His thick black hair was bushy all around his head, so that his hat seemed to float atop it. “You're the doctor,” he said. “Why don't you tell me?”

Aunt Mimi sat heavily on the dinner bench, and Ann sidled up beside her. “There's nothing wrong with that leg,” Aunt Mimi said, wrapping her arm around Ann's shoulders. “He just doesn't want to work, that's all—not for the master and not for me. I have to bring in my own wood, fetch my own water….”

By now Arabella had pulled up Uncle Abram's trouser leg
and begun to unwrap the rags that bandaged his calf. The room filled with the faint, warm smell of new skin and old wounds.

Ann, Catharine, and Joseph all bent to take a closer look. The leg was scarred, scabbed, and slightly misshapen, as if the muscles and skin hadn't quite found their rightful places.

Uncle Abram tapped Joseph on the shoulder. “It'll cost you a penny to take a look that close, young man.”

Joseph took a step back and grinned. “Tell the story again, Uncle. Tell us how those hounds tore you so bad you could see the white of your leg bone shining under the moon.”

“Hush, Joseph.” Arabella examined the rags she'd pulled off the leg. “The bandage is clean and I don't see any festering.” She pressed gently around the edges of the scabs. “That hurt?” she asked.

“No, ma'am,” said Uncle Abram.

Joseph danced from one foot to the other. “Tell us again how the blood spurted when you stabbed the two lead hounds and killed 'em.”