Great Oak Plantation
South Carolina 1854
Kitty knelt on the floor of Missy Claire’s room, gripping a pencil. She closed her eyes for a moment, picturing the outline and length of a horse’s muzzle, the size and shape of its ears, then sketched what she remembered onto the paper spread out in front of her. Little Kate sat watching from her sister Claire’s bed, her fat white legs dangling over the edge, kicking the feather mattress. “I know! It’s a pony!” Kate said.
“Yep, that’s right.”
“Now draw a cat.”
“But I ain’t finished with the horse yet,” Kitty said. “Don’t you want me to give him a body and legs and a tail?”
“No, draw a cat,” Kate insisted.
Kitty obeyed, even though she longed to finish the horse and then fill the page with flowers and trees and everything else she wanted to make. She loved to draw. Missy Claire had seen her sketching a picture in the dirt with a stick and had let her try using a real pencil and paper. Kitty had been entertaining Claire and her sister with drawings ever since.
Instead of finishing the horse, Kitty reluctantly chose a clean corner of the page to sketch the round head and pointed ears of a cat. She gave it eyes and a nose and whiskers, and was about to start drawing its body when Kate said, “Draw a bird.”
“What kind of bird, Missy Kate?” While she waited for the answer, Kitty quickly gave the cat four legs and a skinny, pointed tail.
“Um … those skinny white birds with long legs that live down by the river.”
Kitty smiled. She loved to draw herons with their slender bodies and graceful necks. But before she had a chance to begin, Missy Claire interrupted.
“No more pictures. Kitty is my slave and she’s going to play dolls with me now.” She snatched up the paper and shoved it into her sister’s hands. Like all of Kitty’s other drawings, this one wouldn’t be hers to keep, either. Missy Claire needed to be entertained every minute, it seemed, and would quickly become bored with whatever game they were playing long before Kitty did. She had been living in the Big House with Missy for four seasons now, but trying to keep up with her made Kitty all tuckered out sometimes.
“Here’s your picture, Katie,” Claire said. “Now go away and play in your own room.” She pointed to the door.
Missy Kate let out a loud wail. Kitty imagined an entire flock of white herons taking flight at the sound. Mammy Bertha scooped Kate off the bed and hustled her out of the room.
“We’re going to play house,” Missy Claire decided. “My dolls are coming for tea. You’ll serve us, Kitty.” Claire had two beautiful dolls with delicate porcelain faces and real hair. Kitty would watch her dress them in their lacy nightgowns or ruffled dresses, fastening rows of tiny buttons, and she longed to hold them and dress them—just once.
“Don’t touch my doll!” Claire had shrieked the first—and only—time Kitty had ever dared to reach for one. “You’ll break it!”
“Oh, please, Missy Claire,” she’d begged. “I promise I’ll be real careful. I ain’t never gonna break your things.”
“No. I don’t want your filthy hands touching her.”
Kitty had looked down at her hands. Her skin was dark, but it wasn’t from dirt. Her hands were just as clean as Missy’s were. But Kitty had learned that day that she would have to be content with keeping Missy company while she played with her dolls. Kitty could watch Missy move the tiny furniture in her beautiful dollhouse, but she could never touch it. She could laugh with Claire as she rode on her rocking horse, but she could never ride on it herself. Kitty had learned to accept the fact that Claire’s white skin gave her these privileges; her own black skin denied them.
“Set the table for tea,” Claire now commanded as her sister’s cries faded in the distance. Kitty hurried to obey. The porcelain tea set was the only toy she was allowed to touch, and she loved the way the smooth, cool glass felt beneath her fingers. It was her job to set the table and serve tea to Claire and her two dolls; Kitty would never dare take a pretend sip from the little cups herself.
“Go tell Cook I want some cookies,” Claire said. “I’ll get my dollies dressed for the party.”
“Yes, Missy Claire.” Kitty had learned to always answer that way—and to hurry as quickly as she could whenever she went on an errand. Missy hated it when she dawdled. Kitty ran down the stairs, through the servants’ door to the warming kitchen, then outside to the big kitchen to tell Cook what Missy wanted. The kitchen smelled like smoked pork roasting with onions, and like apples and cinnamon. Kitty drew a deep breath, inhaling the fragrant air. Her stomach rumbled with hunger.
“That Missy sure is a spoilt one,” Cook said, shaking her head at Kitty’s request. “She’s thinking I ain’t got nothing better to do than wait on her all day? Don’t she know Massa’s got company coming and I need to be fixing dinner?” But Cook wiped the sweat off her brow with a bandana and waddled over to retrieve the cookie tin. “Missy ever sharing any of these cookies with you?” she asked.
Kitty shrugged. “Sometimes … when she ain’t wanting no more.”
Cook placed three fat sugar cookies on a plate, then handed a fourth one to Kitty. “Eat it quick, and don’t tell her I give it to you,” she whispered.
Kitty grinned. “Yes, ma’am! Thank you, ma’am!” She skipped out of the kitchen, balancing the plate. As she followed the walkway to the house again, she was torn between eating her treasure slowly, savoring every bite, or gulping it down in one or two bites in order to hurry back, as she’d been told to do. She decided to eat one bite slowly, making it last all the way to the house and up the stairs, then hide the rest of the cookie in her pocket for later.
When Kitty returned to the bedroom, swallowing her allotted bite, Claire was nowhere to be seen. It took Kitty a moment to realize that she had ducked behind the folding screen to use the “necessary.” Claire would make her run back downstairs to empty it, next thing. White ladies were very lucky, Kitty thought. They never had to go all the way outside to use the privy the way menfolk and slaves did.
Kitty carried the plate over to the tea table while she waited. Missy had finished dressing her dolls and had seated them on two little chairs. But one of the dolls had slumped sideways and looked as though it was about to fall. Kitty reached to straighten it. The doll felt much lighter than Kitty had expected—and her hair looked so soft that she couldn’t resist stroking it, just once.
“What are you doing!” Claire shrieked. “Don’t touch her!”
Kitty whirled around in surprise. “But she was falling over, Missy Claire. I just sat her up again, and—” Missy raced across the room and slapped Kitty’s hand for daring to touch her doll, then she slapped Kitty’s face—hard. Tears sprang to her eyes. Kitty had often seen Missy’s mother strike the chambermaids that way, but Kitty had never been slapped herself.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!” Claire yelled, pointing to the door.
“I’m sorry, Missy Claire, but I thought—”
“You’re very bad, and you can’t play with me anymore!”
Tears rolled down Kitty’s face as she hurried from the room, her cheek stinging. She didn’t dare cry out loud, nor did she dare go off by herself to lick her wounds. Whenever Missy sent her away she was supposed to go find Mammy Bertha and help her tend Missy Kate or Missus Goodman’s new girl-baby, Mary.
“What’s the matter with you?” Bertha asked when she saw Kitty wiping her tears.
“Missy slapped me,” she said, pouting. “Her doll was about to fall off the chair, and all I did was try and make it sit up again. She told me to get out.”
From the way Mammy puckered her lips and shook her head, Kitty knew she wasn’t going to get any sympathy from her. “Ain’t Missy always telling you not to touch her things?”
“But it was going to fall. I thought—”
“You ain’t supposed to be doing no thinking. Just do whatever the white folks say, and if they say never touch their things, then don’t you dare touch them. Only job you have is obeying. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now turn off them tears and come help me fan Missy Kate so she can take a nap.” Kitty lifted the skirt of her pinafore to dry her eyes, and the cookie she’d hoarded slid out of the pocket. She wasn’t quick enough to catch it before it hit the floor, and it crumbled into pieces. Her tears started falling all over again. Bertha glared at Kitty as she dropped to her knees and scooped up the crumbs. “Are you stealing that cookie from Missy Claire?”
“No, ma’am. Cook give it to me, I swear. You can ask her yourself.” Kitty stuffed the crumbs into her mouth. They tasted gritty with dust.
“You better believe I’m asking her … and you better not be spinning no lies.”
“No, ma’am.”
The long, hot day seemed to last forever. Late in the afternoon company arrived for dinner, just like Cook had said they would. Mammy Bertha said the guests were spending the night, and everyone had to be on their very best behavior—including Kitty. The two older girls, Claire and Kate, had to get scrubbed and brushed and dressed in their finest Sunday dresses, then they sat in the parlor and visited like proper young ladies. With all the fussing and showing off, Kitty didn’t have a chance to eat anything all day except her one crumbled cookie. When the girls were finally in bed, Mammy Bertha told her she could go out to the kitchen and see if there was anything left over from dinner.
It was very late, but Kitty was surprised to see the kitchen all lit up. A big gathering of colored folks sat around the table, talking and eating roast pork and chicken and a bunch of other goodies from the white folks’ dinner. Four strangers—the house slaves who had traveled along with the white guests—sat among the usual kitchen workers. Kitty fixed herself a plate of food, then sat on a stool near the door, listening to the news and gossip that the newcomers had brought.
“Delia, here, is a storyteller,” the visiting coachman told them after a while. He gestured to a tiny gray-haired woman who was no taller than Kitty. “Delia’s knowing all the old tales about our people before we was slaves,” he said.
Everyone seemed real excited to hear Delia’s stories, and they begged and begged her to tell one. The kitchen grew so quiet that Kitty was almost afraid to breathe. She sat forward in anticipation, watching the storyteller’s every move. The little woman closed her eyes for a long moment, as if looking deep inside herself for the words.
“Back home where our people come from,” Delia began, “folks call a storyteller like me a griot. We’re the ones who’re remembering the old ways and the old stories and passing them on to our children and to their children, so our past don’t get lost. My mammy was a griot, and her mammy was one before her, so the stories I know go way, way back to a time that nobody alive can even remember no more—a time when all our people were free.” She sighed as she said the last word, and it seemed to Kitty that it fluttered from the storyteller’s mouth like a little bird and flew away.
“It’s only in the telling of our story that we’re ever gonna remember who we really are,” Delia said. “And that’s something we ought never ever to be forgetting.” She gazed all around at her listeners, and her dark eyes rested for a moment on Kitty.
“We once lived in a land called the ‘Mountain of Lions,’” Delia said, “in a tribe called the Mende. It’s a big, rich land where every single person has black skin. Ain’t no white-skinned people there at all, back in the beginning. And the whole land’s belonging to us—all the forests and fields and rivers and hills is ours. We can hunt game and plant our own rice and build our own houses and live any way and anywhere we want to with no one but our own leaders telling us what to do. Long before the white men came, our people are learning how to trap the water and making it go wherever we want. We’re making fields that we can flood and drain to grow our rice. Our women are weaving baskets out of sea grass for gathering up the crops and winnowing the rice. We’re a peaceful people, living in our own villages with our own families all around us.”
Kitty listened, fascinated, unable to imagine a land without white people. Delia’s voice was as soothing as a cup of warm milk, and her small, wrinkled hands gestured gracefully as she talked.
“Then one day the white men come,” she said. “They’re seeing all that we have and how hard we’re working, and they’re deciding they want us for their slaves. So they come with their guns and chains, and they’re stealing our people away, catching us in the woods and snatching us from our homes and away from our children. They’re tying our people together with their big chains and forcing us to march a long, long ways. They ain’t even caring that some folks are dying along the way of hunger or weariness or fear. No, them white men take all our captured people to a fortress on an island where we can’t escape. They’re putting us to work there, laboring to crush shells into lime. Our people are thinking life can’t get no harder than this—but it does. Turns out we’re just working to make lime while we’re waiting for the ship to come. And, oh my! One day that slave ship surely does come.
“Seems like the white men just forgetting we’re people, the way they’re packing us down into the belly of that ship. They’re making everybody lay down on hard wooden shelves, one row stacked up on top of the other, so there ain’t even room to sit up. We’re all packed in there so tight that nobody can move. The white men are filling up the whole ship with slaves that way. And it don’t matter to them if folks is sick or needing to use the privy, it just have to run down on top of everybody. My Lord! There’re folks dying of hunger and thirst and heat and grief every single day. That ship’s tossing and rolling on the waves, and you can hear the sound of them waves pounding against the planks day and night. And also the sound of tears. Seem like the ocean’s gonna overflow from all our tears.
“Takes a long, long time for that ship to sail to the white men’s country. The full moon comes around twice, maybe even three times before we’re finally landing here in the Low Country. The new land seems a lot like back home, but we ain’t free no more in this new place. Rice we’re growing ain’t feeding our own families no more. Our husbands and children are getting sold away from us and moving someplace else. We have to work like animals for the white men, digging canals and ponds and growing rice for all of them because we’re their slaves now. Our people ain’t free no more. White men got guns, so they’re capturing us and making us do all their work.”
She leaned forward, her body tense, her eyes bright with tears. “But don’t you ever forget that a long time ago, we was free. That’s the way God created us. The way we’re supposed to be—free.”
When Delia finished, nobody moved. The room had grown so quiet that Kitty could hear her heart beating in her ears. This terrible story couldn’t be true, could it? Missy Claire was old enough to read books aloud to her and Missy Kate, with stories of fairies and elves and animals that talked, but Kitty knew those stories weren’t true. Could this one be?
“That story true?” she whispered, breaking the silence.
“Yes, it’s true!” Delia said, slapping her palm on the table. “Every word I said is just as true as I’m sitting here. Black folks was born free and we was meant to live free. They stole that away from us. And now they’re trying to make us forget that we ever was free. But don’t you ever forget, honey. You remember who you are, and who your family is, and where you coming from.”
That night Kitty dreamed that white men chased her through the woods and captured her and locked her in a dark, fearsome place. When she awoke she felt as though she hadn’t slept at all. The nightmare reminded her of the old dream she used to have when she was very small, and she wondered if she had once lived in the land where there were no white men. But no, Delia had said that story happened a long, long time ago. “You remember who you are, who your family is, and where you coming from,” Delia had said. But Kitty didn’t know who her family was or where she’d come from. She couldn’t remember.
Kitty was still thinking about all of these things the next morning as she opened Missy’s bedroom curtains and saw the Great Oak Tree outside. She was certain that the tree was linked to her past, somehow—part of the dream she used to have when she was very small. But Kitty could no longer remember why the tree was important to her or what it meant. When she and Mammy Bertha were alone in the nursery, Kitty gathered the courage to ask about her past for the very first time.
“Mammy, did you ever know my mama and daddy?”
Bertha closed her eyes for a long moment. “Yes, child. I knowed your mama,” she said softly. Mammy was usually very talkative and full of stories when they were alone, but she suddenly seemed sorrowful and afraid to talk.
“Well, where is she, Mammy Bertha? What happened to her?”
Mammy turned away. “We can’t talk about it now,” she said. “You come see me tonight, after Missy Claire’s falling asleep.”
Kitty thought the day would never end. Claire kept her hard at work until late that night, hauling hot water for her bath and brushing her hair, then making her stay and keep her company until she fell asleep. Every time Kitty sat up on her pallet beside the bed and looked to see if Claire had fallen asleep yet, Missy would glare down at her and say, “Why do you keep staring at me like that? Go to sleep!” But a mixture of dread and anticipation kept Kitty wide awake.
At last Claire slept, and Kitty managed to tiptoe from the room and look for Mammy Bertha. They found a quiet place to sit, outside on the steps of the warming kitchen, and Mammy told Kitty the truth.
“Your mama’s named Lucindy, and she used to be one of Missus Goodman’s chambermaids right here in the Big House,” Mammy began. “She’s a pretty gal like you, always sweet and cheerful to everybody. One day she fall in love with a man named George—your daddy. He’s working as a slave for the preacher man and his wife, all the way over in town. Lucindy’s meeting him while their massas go to church every Sunday, and pretty soon the two of them’s falling in love. Everybody try and tell them it’s gonna be hard for them to be together, but they decide to jump the broom anyways. Every Saturday night when his work’s all done, your daddy George come walking all the way from town just to be with his wife. Then he’s walking all the way back home again. His massa’s a good man, though, and he’s giving George a pass so he can come and go without the paddyrollers bothering him.
“Then one day your daddy’s massa die, and in his will he’s saying that George and all his other slaves can go free. Seems like a real good thing, being free—but it ain’t. White folks hate to see Negroes going free even more than they hate us when we’re slaves. They say free Negroes get uppity, and the whites are always worrying that the freedmen gonna give slaves the notion that we should all be free. So the white men pass a bunch of laws saying that free Negroes can’t be living in town, and they can’t own no property, and they can’t be staying in any one place too long. If the freedmen break that law, the white folks throw them in jail and charge a big fine, then sell them back into slavery when they can’t pay the fine. They’re trying to drive all the free Negroes away from here—or else get them back as slaves again. Either way, they don’t want freedmen like your daddy hanging around.
“So, poor George was free now, but he’s wearing himself out trying to help your mama, especially after you was born. He gets himself a job on a steamboat in Charleston, loading wood and coal and such. He’s working hard as he can so he can earn enough money to buy Lucindy. But even when he’s saving up all his money, Massa Goodman ain’t selling her. Poor George finally decides ain’t nothing left to do but take his wife and child and run away. That’s because your daddy’s wanting your mama and you to be free, just like him.
“Everybody try and tell them they’re making a big mistake. Things gonna go real bad for them if they’s caught. ’Course they ain’t listening. Your daddy’s trusting Jesus to help him, and one night, he and Lucindy steal away. Soon as Massa Goodman find out that Lucindy’s gone, he’s calling the paddyrollers together and they’re sending the dogs out after them. Your folks never even make it out of South Carolina, poor souls, before they was caught.”
Kitty’s dream came back to her, vivid and strong. She knew, then, that it had really happened. The dogs had come tearing at mama and papa’s legs until they couldn’t run anymore. Then the white men came on horseback with guns. But what was the end of that dream? She never could remember the end. Her mouth felt so dry she could barely speak.
“What happened after they was caught, Mammy?”
“Oh, child … you don’t want to know,” she said, shaking her head. “Some stories is best left untold.”
Kitty shivered even though the night was warm. “I do want to know, Mammy Bertha. Please tell me.”
Mammy sighed. She hesitated such a long time that Kitty was afraid she would never tell. When Mammy finally spoke, her voice was very soft. “They whipped your poor daddy and hanged him for a thief, right out there on the Great Oak Tree.”
For a long moment Kitty couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow. That tree had always seemed like her friend, her place of refuge. Now she felt betrayed. The Great Oak Tree had helped them kill her papa. She closed her eyes at the thought of him hanging from its branches.
Bertha wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. “Massa Goodman’s saying your daddy stole his property when he’s running off with your mama and you—which I suppose is true. They make all us slaves stand out there and watch so we’d learn what would happen to all of us if we try and run off. Whipped your mama, too, then they sell her to a slave trader. She’s begging and pleading with Massa to sell you along with her instead of leaving you here all alone. You was still just a little thing, toddling all around. But Massa Goodman ain’t listening.” Bertha slipped her arm around Kitty’s shoulder and pulled her close. “That’s how you come to be all alone in the world.”
Kitty slumped against Mammy Bertha and wept, pouring out years of loneliness and loss and a deep grief she hadn’t known she’d had. She was sorry she had asked for the truth, sorry she knew. The Great Oak Tree would be an emblem of horror and death to her from now on, instead of comfort and refuge. And she would never be able to look at Massa Goodman the same way again, either. Why wouldn’t he sell Lucindy to George? He had plenty of other slaves. It was Massa Goodman’s fault that her father had died, his fault that her mother had been sold, leaving her all alone.
And Kitty knew she could never look at Claire the same way, either. Claire still lived with both of her parents. They gave her everything she needed or wanted. Kitty’s parents had loved her, too, but they had been punished for trying to be free—trying to live the way all of the Negroes in Delia’s story had once lived.
Mammy held Kitty tightly, rocking her. “It don’t pay to be falling in love, child. Only leads to heartbreak if Massa’s selling you or the man you love or taking your children away from you. I seen it happen over and over again too many times—way too many times. Slaves are put here on this earth to work, not to be loving somebody.”
Kitty’s tears gradually died away, but she stayed in Mammy’s warm arms, needing to be held.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Mammy said after a while. “As hard as this here life is, folks have to be fools to try and run away. They say you can follow the North Star to freedom, but that land’s way too far away from here. And the price you pay is much too high when you’re caught. And folks is always caught. Them paddyrollers are the devil’s own horsemen.”
When Kitty finally left the comfort of Bertha’s arms and returned to her pallet, nightmares filled her sleep. In the morning she carried her sadness and loss like a huge burden that she couldn’t seem to lift from her shoulders. The grief Kitty felt didn’t fade with time, either, but grew stronger each day, especially when she happened to glimpse the Great Oak Tree. And she couldn’t avoid seeing it. The tree dominated the view from Missy’s bedroom windows.
Massa Goodman’s guests finally departed, leaving Missy Claire grumpy from all the excitement and Kitty exhausted from the extra work and restless nights. Tears she couldn’t control filled her eyes at unexpected moments, and she could no longer find the energy to amuse Missy Claire and Missy Kate with her antics.
“What’s wrong with you?” Claire demanded to know when she caught Kitty wiping her eyes one afternoon. Kitty should have known that it wasn’t concern that had prompted the question, but irritation. Claire wanted her to snap out of it and be happy, again. Kitty should have known better, but she made the mistake of telling her the truth.
“Oh, Missy Claire, I can’t help feeling sad when I think about my mama and papa. They’re both gone, and now I ain’t got no family.”
“Why are you thinking about them? You’re supposed to be playing with me, not pouting about people who aren’t even here.”
“But … but I can’t help wishing I had a family like you do.”
Claire’s face went rigid with anger. “You don’t want to be with me? You want to be with your own kind? Fine! Then I don’t want you moping around here, either. Go back down to Slave Row where you came from.”
Kitty’s knees went weak with fear. “But my family ain’t down on Slave Row, Missy. They—”
“Too bad. I don’t want you in my house anymore. Get out.”
“You don’t mean that. Who’s gonna play with you and—”
“I’d rather play alone than look at your stupid droopy face. Get out right now. Go live with all the other darkies since that’s what you want.”
“But Missy Claire, that ain’t what I want.” She dropped to her knees to beg. “Please! I got no family down there, and no place to sleep, or—”
“That’s your problem, not mine. Go on, you heard me—get out!” Claire’s voice had risen to an angry shout, and Mammy Bertha hurried into the room with the baby in her arms.
“Hey, now. What’s all this shouting about, Missy Claire?”
“I’m sending Kitty back down to live with all the other darkies. I don’t want her up here anymore.”
“No, please!” Kitty begged. “I promise I’ll be happy again. I promise!”
“Well, it’s too late,” Claire said. She smiled, as if pleased with the power she wielded. “Daisy will be my maid from now on. And I don’t want Kitty to help you, either, Mammy. She’s a crybaby, and I don’t want her in my house.”
Mammy gripped Kitty’s arm with her free hand and pulled her to her feet, then steered her out of the room. Claire slammed the door behind her. “You heard what Missy say. You best be doing what you’re told, girl.”
“But, Mammy—”
Bertha shook her head. “Go on, now.” She turned her back on Kitty and shuffled away to the nursery. Mammy couldn’t help her. Neither could any of the other house slaves. There was nothing Kitty could do but obey.
She cried all the way down to Slave Row, barely able to see where she was going through her tears. Nor did she know what to do once she got there. It was early in the afternoon, and the other slaves hadn’t come home from the fields yet. The yard was deserted except for three small children digging in the dirt. Kitty found Old Nellie in her cabin, fanning four little babies who were sleeping crossways on the bed.
“What do you want? What’s wrong with you?” Nellie asked when she saw Kitty’s tear-streaked face.
“Missy Claire send me away. She don’t want me working for her up in the Big House no more.”
“What’d you do wrong?”
“Nothing! She said I was moping around and she didn’t want to be playing with me no more.”
“If you’re crying and carrying on like that, I can see why. I don’t want you around here, either. Got enough crying babies to take care of.”
Kitty struggled to get a hold of herself, drying her tears and drawing a deep breath. She knew that slaves were never allowed to be idle, and that she would have to find some kind of work to do to if she wanted to avoid being sent into the rice fields. “I been helping Mammy Bertha take care of the white children up in the Big House,” she said hopefully. “I can help you, too, if you want.”
“Ain’t up to me where you work, and you know it. I’ll let you help me today, but you’re big enough to work the rice fields tomorrow. I reckon that’s where they gonna send you.”
Kitty’s eyes filled with tears. “I got no place to live, Nellie. I got no family down here.”
The old woman eyed her silently for a moment. “Your name’s Anna, ain’t it?”
It took Kitty a moment to remember that it was. She hadn’t been called by that name in a year. “That’s the name my mama, Lucindy, gave me,” she said. “But Missy Claire’s been calling me Kitty.”
Nellie shrugged. “Don’t make no difference to me what you’re called. Here, you fan these little ones for a while,” she said, handing Kitty the palm branch. “I could use a little rest.”
Kitty worked as hard as she could for the rest of the day, hoping Old Nellie would put in a good word for her and that she’d be allowed to help her again tomorrow. When the other slaves came in from the fields at dusk and gathered around for their rations, the black foreman noticed Kitty right away.
“Where’d you come from?” he demanded. He was a huge, towering man with a scowling face. His massive arms and shoulders seemed to burst out of his homespun shirt. Kitty was so afraid of him she couldn’t reply.
“She been working up at the Big House,” Old Nellie said. “She been sent down.”
“What’d you do wrong?”
“N-nothing!” she stammered. “Missy Claire got mad ’cause she said I was moping. That’s all, I swear!”
“Guess you have to work like the rest of us now,” he said with a grunt.
Kitty ate the meager supper she’d been given and went to bed hungry. Nellie gave her a threadbare blanket and she slept on the dirt floor of the cabin with mice scurrying around her all night. The horn blew in the morning, just as the sky was growing light, and the foreman himself took Kitty out to the rice fields and assigned her a row of plants to hoe. The two girls she labored alongside had once played with her in Old Nellie’s yard, but they seemed much older than Kitty and already worn out from hard work. Kitty’s lack of experience with a hoe didn’t matter; she was expected to keep up with the others as they worked their way down the rows, making sure she didn’t overlook any weeds or accidentally chop a rice plant. Blisters had formed on her hands by noontime and had begun to bleed and ooze long before dusk. Kitty felt the sting of the lash, falling harder and more often across her shoulders as the day wore on, punishment for making a mistake or failing to keep up.
But as each day merged with the next, it wasn’t the hunger or fatigue or constant fear that made Kitty’s life unbearable—it was the drab hopelessness of her new surroundings. Everything seemed devoid of color: the dingy cabin, the dirt floor, the slaves’ faded clothes and lifeless faces, their dusty bodies aching with toil. She wasn’t allowed to gaze up at the blue sky and white clouds or off into the distance at the green forest; only down at the dirt, at the endless row that must be hoed, her view a monotony of rice plants and weeds. At night she curled up on the cabin floor, too exhausted for nightmares, let alone dreams.
By Sunday afternoon, her only day of rest, Kitty felt close to despair. She decided she would rather jump into the river and drown than face a lifetime of such hopeless labor. She left the barren slave yard and walked to the edge of the plantation yard, intending to cross the broad swath of green grass and just keep on walking—down to the pier, off the end of it, and into the water. But as she neared the Great Oak Tree, Kitty saw Missy Claire and Missy Kate seated on a blanket beneath it, playing with their dolls. They were alone. If Daisy had taken Kitty’s place as Claire’s chambermaid, she was nowhere to be seen.
Kitty dropped down on her hands and knees and crawled across the lawn toward the girls, meowing loudly. When she reached the tree, Kitty rubbed against Claire, purring, trying to smile as she fought desperate tears. More than a year had passed since the summer day when Missy had adopted Kitty, and she hoped Claire would remember.
At last she stole a glance at her face. Claire was trying not to smile, but Kitty could tell she was amused by her performance. She took hope.
“Of course, some folks would rather have a dog,” Kitty said, forcing a wide grin across her face. She pretended to be a puppy, barking, sitting up on her haunches to beg, her tongue lolling happily. Missy Kate began to giggle.
Kitty hated what she was doing, but she had nothing to lose. The alternative was so much worse. She would never survive as a field slave, especially when fall arrived and the rice had to be cut and threshed and winnowed. The foreman would expect her to do as much work as the adults, day after day, and anything less would mean a whipping. Her life was little more than an animal existence as it was. It was better to live as Missy Claire’s house pet than to die as a beast of burden from overwork and slow starvation.
“Woof! Woof!” Kitty repeated bravely, trying not to think of the dogs that had attacked her parents.
“No, I think I’d rather have a kitty-cat,” Claire said with a smug smile. Kitty dropped down on all fours and meowed. Claire laughed. “Come on then, Kitty. Time to go inside.”
Kitty knew she should feel ashamed and degraded. But as she made her way inside the Big House, still crawling on all fours, she felt only relief.