The Kitchen House (17 page)

Mama Mae lowered herself onto the nearest chair.

Marshall snatched the letter from his mother’s lap. There was a hollow silence while he scanned the paper. “He’s taking you to Philadelphia. I’m to go to Williamsburg.”

Miss Martha looked up at her son’s face. “What? What did you say?”

“Read the rest.” Marshall handed back the letter and pointed to the information. As she read, Miss Martha’s face began to show color again.

“Marshall!” she said excitedly. “You’re right! He has found a school for you—in Williamsburg! And he’s made arrangements for me to visit my father in Philadelphia. I am to see Father again! We shall stay the whole summer!” Tears began to slide down her face, and I watched them drip onto the bodice of her blue brocade dress.

Marshall abruptly left the room, but the strain on Mama’s face remained.

C
HRISTMAS CAME AND WENT WITH
little celebration, although there was a dance down at the quarters. Ben was the only one to attend, and when he returned, drunk, he woke us by knocking on Belle’s kitchen door and calling out for her. He made such a noise that Papa came to get him. Papa spoke urgently to his son, and I thought I heard Ben crying when they walked away. Belle was crying, too, so I climbed into her bed and tried to comfort her as Mama might have done, but I fell asleep before she stopped weeping.

T
HE MISTRESS WAITED TWO LONG
days before deciding that she was in the mood to open her Christmas gifts.

“Can Beattie and Fanny watch with me?” I asked.

“I suppose that would be all right,” she agreed reluctantly. When I ran to find them she called after me, “See if Marshall will come, too.”

The girls and I went to find Marshall, but Papa, cleaning out a stall in the barn, told us that he was out riding with Rankin. The twins and I ran back to the big house, filled with excitement at the prospect of watching Miss Martha open her gifts. I told Miss Martha of Marshall’s whereabouts, and she frowned. “What does he do with that man?” she asked. I didn’t have an answer, though I don’t suppose she expected one. “Oh well, he’ll soon be away
from here,” she answered herself. “We’ll go ahead, then. He has already opened his gifts.”

Beattie, Fanny, and I watched, awestruck, as Miss Martha lined up her packages after a note instructed her to open the gifts in sequence. From the first parcel, Miss Martha withdrew two dolls. She read aloud, “‘I have been assured that these moppets are wearing the very latest in London fashion. I am having both of these copied for you by an excellent dressmaker here in Williamsburg, and I will bring the finished product to you in the spring. It is my heart’s desire to see you wear them in Philadelphia. I am hopeful that you approve of the fabric and color selection. Yours, as ever, James.’”

We girls had never seen such delightful beauty. The moppets were wooden dolls with painted faces, and their human hair was done up in elaborate curls. Their dresses were of a gossamer fabric: one was an empire style in blue, the body and train trimmed in elegant silver embroidery; the other, similar in style, was a pale cream trimmed with white embroidery and ivory ribbons.

The next two packages each held a pair of shoes. One pair of delicate slippers was made of blue silk satin trimmed in silver embroidery, the low heels covered in ivory satin. The other pair was of ivory silk trimmed with pink ribbon rosettes and had heels covered in pink satin. I simply couldn’t imagine something that beautiful was to be worn on a foot, and I told Miss Martha so. She laughed and pulled off the brown leather shoe she was wearing, then slipped her slender foot into the blue satin slipper and held it up for us to see. She turned her ankle in a circle and pointed her toe, then laughed again when we all exclaimed at the perfect fit.

Furthur packages included elbow-length silk gloves and two pairs of embroidered stockings. Miss Martha explained that these accessories were to complement the dresses.

Finally, from the bottom of the last box, Miss Martha removed a flat brown envelope and studied it. My reading had advanced enough for me to recognize Belle’s name printed boldly across the top. Miss Martha frowned, turned it over a few times, then
rose. Telling us to stay seated, she carried the package to the study. I thought I heard the desk drawer open, and when she returned without the envelope, I guessed that she had placed it with her letters, those wrapped in blue ribbon.

“Was that for Belle?” I asked.

She looked startled for a minute. “No,” she said, “that is for me to open later.”

I knew from her tone that the subject was finished, and I thought then that I must have misread Belle’s name. Dory called for me soon after, needing me to care for Campbell, and I forgot all else but the beauty of the gifts that I had seen unwrapped that day.

Belle

N
EVER BEFORE DO
I
SEE
Mama Mae worked up like this. Rankin is nosing around, talking about how he’s gonna find out what happened to Waters before the cap’n gets home. Then, too, Rankin’s bragging all over the place that he got orders from the cap’n that if he finds Ben fooling with me, he’s to sell him off. Mama Mae tells me over and over again to make sure I don’t have nothing to do with Ben, that if he comes to see me, I got to send him away. Mama says to keep praying that the cap’n gets home quick.

Then, don’t you know, the cap’n sends a letter saying he’s not coming back until the spring, when he’ll take Miss Martha to Philadelphia. That night when Mama comes to give me the news, I ask Mama what’s gonna happen to me when the cap’n comes home. Is he gonna take me along back to Philadelphia? Is he thinking that he can put Miss Martha and me in the same carriage all that way?

Mama says she don’t know when the cap’n’s taking me, but it’s best I get away from here soon as I can. When she says that, I jump up, yelling, “Well! It’s easy to see that you don’t care about me and that Ben is the one you’re looking out for!”

Mama gives me a look like I hit her in the face. She stands up. “That what you think, Belle? You think I don’t want you here?” Her mouth is moving like she’s gonna cry. “You think I don’t want you to stay? You don’t know that when you go, it like I’m losin’ my own chil’?” Then Mama starts to cry.

I go to her, put my arm around her, and sit her down beside me. “I’m sorry, Mama,” I say. “I know you care about me like you do your own family. Mama, please stop crying.”

She pulls out a rag, blows her nose, and looks at me, her dark eyes scared. “Belle, you got to get outta here. That Rankin’s gettin’ more worked up every day. He can’t stand it that he don’t find out what happens to that tutor. My nerves can’t hardly take it when I see him nosin’ around. He won’t stop till he gets Ben. That I know.”

“Mama,” I say, and this time I know I got to stand by it, “you don’t worry about Ben and me. I don’t have nothing to do with him no more.”

After Mama goes, it takes me a while to settle down. This is the first time I see how this is all getting to her. I see that even Mama got limits of what she can take.

One more thing. Papa’s saying how Marshall’s spending all his time with Rankin. He’s letting that boy drink liquor, and young as he is, Papa says, Marshall’s already got a taste for it. Papa says Rankin got it in for Miss Martha and he doing everything he can to turn her boy against her.

I don’t see nothing but trouble coming every way I look.

Lavinia

T
HE SPRING OF 1793 CAME
early. One afternoon at the beginning of May, the twins and I, celebrating our ninth birthday, sat outside the kitchen house fashioning honeysuckle wreaths. The white and yellow heady-scented blooms permeated the air as our nimble fingers worked quickly to see who could finish first.

“Mama say one day you live in a big house, maybe even that you have the house servants workin’ for you,” Fanny said, placing her completed wreath on her head.

“No,” I said, quite happy with the arrangements as they were. “I want to stay with Belle.”

“No.” Fanny shook her head. “Mama say that Miss Martha teachin’ you to be the white girl.”

“I don’t want to be the white girl,” I said, fear rising in me. “I want to live with Belle, and then I’m going to marry Ben!”

Fanny, who had been resting back on her elbows, sat up straight to look at me. “You best get over that idea right now,” she said. “You never gonna be cullad like us, and that mean you a white girl and you goin’ to live in a big house. Anyway, you can’t marry Ben. He cullad.”

“Fanny right about that,” Beattie agreed.

I began to cry. “I can marry Ben if I want to. You can’t make me be a white girl.” I tossed my wreath aside. “And you can’t make me live in the big house.”

Mama came to the door. “Abinia, that you cryin’? You nine years old and still cryin’ like a baby?”

“She wantin’ to marry Ben,” Fanny explained. “She not wantin’ to live in the big house, she not wantin’ to be a white girl.”

As Fanny spoke my truth, I began to howl.

“If that don’t beat all!” said Mama. “This the first time I hear a somethin’ like this. Come here, chil’.”

I went to her, hiccuping between sobs. She sat on a bench, took her pipe from her mouth, and lightly tapped my chest with it. “So you think that you wanna be cullad?”

I nodded.

“Why that be?”

“I don’t want to live in the big house. I want to stay here with you and Belle and Papa.”

Mama’s voice was tender. “Chil’, there things in this world you don’t know about yet. We your family, that never change. Even when you find a white boy and gets married, we still your family. Mama always your mama, Belle always your Belle.”

I stopped crying. “What about Papa and Ben?” I asked hopefully.

“They watch out for you just like now. Abinia”—Mama looked into my eyes—“you on the winnin’ side. One day might be you lookin’ out for us.”

Her words calmed me, but that day I was awakened to a new realization and made aware of a line drawn in black and white, though the depth of it still had little meaning to me.

T
HROUGHOUT THAT SPRING,
M
ARSHALL SPENT
most of his time with Rankin. The mistress had lost control over her eldest son; he was as removed from her as she was from Campbell.

Miss Martha continued to include me in many of her routine activities. She read daily from the Bible and stopped occasionally to give me her interpretation of certain passages. She continued to teach me to read and write and, to my great delight, to play the harpsichord. Some days, at my request, she allowed Beattie and Fanny to observe, but she was always hesitant to include them. One afternoon, after watching the three of us laugh together, the mistress took me aside. “You must not become too friendly with them,” she said. “They are not the same as us.”

“How?” I asked. “How are they not the same?”

“You will learn.” She sighed deeply. “When I come back from Philadelphia, I will teach you your proper place.”

C
AMPBELL WAS MY LOVE.
I
N
the mornings following his feeding, Dory bundled him and sent him in with me to Miss Martha. Compared to Sukey, Campbell was still a sober little fellow, but I knew how to make him smile. The mistress watched his happy response to my games, but she seldom joined in.

“Why doesn’t she want him?” I asked Dory one day when I brought him back.

Dory’s reasoning was that the mistress was afraid to love another baby the way she loved little Sally.

“Doesn’t she love Marshall anymore?” I asked.

“I think she blamin’ Marshall for pushin’ Sally off the swing.”

“But Marshall didn’t mean to hurt Sally.” I was sure of that.

“I know, but it seem like his mama don’t know,” she said. “And now Marshall goin’ wild, sassin’ her and spendin’ his time with Rankin.”

“Where do they go?”

“To do bad things.”

“What bad things?” I asked.

“You learn about that soon enough,” she said, ending the conversation.