Hunting Midnight (35 page)

I remember he whispered in my ear, “You’re mine now, down to your little nigger soul.”

No,
I
’
m
not,
I thought. And I began whispering a line from Ezekiel as if it could protect me:
Nor
shall
wild
beasts
devour
them
…

Strange, but that’s mostly what I remember about that first time – whispering crazy things, anything I could remember, as if the sound of my voice could save me.

Afterward, he said, “You’re just about the worst I ever had, Morri. You ain’t got no crackle, no spark. You’re dead inside, nigger girl.”

He patted me on my behind and sent me back to my room, but I ran out of the house all the way to Porter’s Woods. I wanted to slip out of my soiled skin so bad I couldn’t stop trembling. I knew I had to put what had happened way behind me or I’d have to tell my papa. I had no control over time, but of distance I had a little, and it was the only thing I had to help me keep quiet. When I was far enough from the cabins and the Big House, I started hollering for Mamma, because I didn’t want to give anyone alive the burden of my truth. I fell on my hands and knees like the ruined animal he’d made me into, and I pleaded with her for help. It was as if he’d cut out the best part of me and left only blood behind. I told her that. And I told her that the worst thing was that I didn’t know who I was now.

I told her it frightened me too, not being myself, and him having my soul. She didn’t answer. Though I know she would have if she could.

When I stopped crying, I cupped my hand in the river and brought the water to where he’d broken me. Then I stepped into the river itself and sat down in all my clothes. Maybe I was just
trying to reassure myself I was still alive and could feel something like being cold. It’ll sound right peculiar, but when I stepped onto the bank again I took some Spanish moss from a low branch of a cypress tree and held it there too. I held it there to me and whispered from Ezekiel that he’d not devour me, and tried to become the wind carrying away my voice and nothing else at all, so I wouldn’t have to feel anything ever again.

A twelve-year-old girl isn’t ready to have who she is taken from her. No one is.

So many times I wanted to tell my papa what the Master was doing, but I could never find the courage. That secret of mine was just about the worst part. It made me believe I was nothing.

The Master seemed to be cutting new things out of me each time he touched me. All I knew was that they were gone and that they must have made me who I was. I was moving further away from the person I’d been every day.

All that bloody moss I made down by the river … Maybe I wanted someone to find it, to leave some trace of what had been done to me out in the world in plain sight.

I read my Old Testament too, by the light of a single candle:
Deal
kindly
with
us,
O
Lord,
for
we
have
suffered
insult
enough
….

I slept with that good book open to Psalm One Hundred and Twenty-Three right on top of where he was hurting me, spine up, like a shield, praying I wouldn’t have his baby. I was thinking, too, that maybe if he cut enough of the deepest things out of me, I wouldn’t be able to have a child and that would be a good thing. So sometimes when he was on me, I admit I was thinking,
Cut
more,
cut
it
all,
leave
nothing
behind
that
can
grow
…
.

After that first time, I saw my papa in the morning. I’d hardly slept, so I couldn’t keep from crying in front of him. But I lied and said it was just me missing Mamma. He hugged me tight, and when I winced he said, “You’re not ill, are you?”

I told him his touch reminded me of her even more, which was true, since love has always felt alike to me no matter who it comes from.

Once Crow heard me hollering in the woods. I told him I’d
nearly been bit by a big old rattlesnake, and he nodded like he believed me. But he knew what was going on. He listened to everything that went on in the Big House. And he knew just as well as I did that we ought not to say anything to my papa, because he might try to kill Big Master Henry and end up getting lynched.

“The woods ain’t safe, Morri girl,” he said, taking my hand.

We walked most of the way home in silence, but near the Big House he held out his arms to me. “Let me hug ya, girl, ’fore we get so close that they can see,” he said. “Don’t be ’fraid a me. I ain’t like him. I ain’t gonna hurt ya evuh.”

The Master was getting pretty fed up with my lying still as death beneath him and might have stopped his wickedness all by himself, but one day he got one of his spells of weakness real bad and had to leave me alone. Then that ugly giant got so ill that he couldn’t move. He just lay there and moaned.

Die,
I thought,
because
no
one’s
going
to
regret
it,
not
even
your
wife.

After a few days of suffering like that, he got himself the kind of burning fever that brings demons. He was so misty-minded that he started asking questions that made no sense at all.
Who’s
inside
the
lantern?
Where’s
the
river
riding
to
today?

This is September of 1820 that we’re talking about.

He’d always recovered before from his spells, so we weren’t too concerned. Not that it was Dr. Lydell who ever once pulled him back from death. No, sir. It had always been my papa and his curing work. He knew just about everything about herbs and potions. He was famous for that – even among the Indians, because he once cured a deathly ill medicine man who came with a group of Creek braves to River Bend when I was only five or six. He began teaching me most of what he knew about that same time. Though I wasn’t born to it, like him.

Papa told me years before that he’d studied curing in Portugal. He’d lived with a family there and worked with a Jewish magician who had his own apothecary shop. He learned all about which European plants could be used to cure most
anything
. He’d even been to England to see a man named Jenner who’d discovered a way of preventing smallpox.

Mistress Holly was counting on Papa to save her husband once again. Even though this time he was worse off than ever. I remember her saying in that breathy voice of hers, “Ahm
a-cantin
’ on ya, Samuel, no wun aylse.”

That was my father’s name – Samuel. In Africa, they called him Tsamma, which is the name of a melon that grows there. His master in Virginia was the one who changed it.

With the Master out of the way in his sickroom, the air of the plantation had lost its bite. We almost believed we weren’t being watched, but we were, since the overseer and the black foremen were always waiting for one little sign of tiredness to call us just plain nigger-lazy, then drag us off to the whipping barrel. Even so, I’d begun thinking nothing would bother me again if the Master would just let me be from now on.

On the night of the Twentieth of September, when the
tea-room
clock rang its nine o’clock bells, I knocked on Big Master Henry’s door, just like I was supposed to, to bring him his glass of hot lemonade. Lily the cook had made it for him every day for the past decade, just as my papa had told her to. It was made with lemons grown right on the plantation down by Christmas Creek, with honey that my father collected from his hives in Porter’s Woods and Wilson’s Meadow. He had special
permission
to wander the plantation to collect his honey.

One time the Master told me that the Israelites lived on honey and lemon in the desert, so that was why he drank it. Big Master Henry supposedly knew these things because his papa had been a minister in Charleston. But I’d read the Old Testament from front to back by the time I was ten and never saw any such claim. It was then that I knew for sure that he made up the Bible as he went. Nearly all the white people do, even when they get their quotes right.

“You can remember the words and still not know anything about the meaning hidden underneath,” Papa used to tell me.

So after I’d knocked on his door and been ordered in, I put his glass down on his table – not looking at him because I didn’t want him to notice me ever again. I could hear him wheezing though. Then I slipped out of his room. An hour later, when his wife came to wish him sweet dreams, she found his door locked.
She called to him, but there was no answer. He had one of the two keys to the room in his possession. The only other one was in her night-table drawer.

Frantic, she rushed off to get the key. She was powerful afraid to use it though. She didn’t want to find him dead, with his ghost lingering over the body. Mistress Holly was mighty afraid of the dark – because her mother had seen a ghost once rise from her crib and float right out the window – so she shouted to my papa to come up from the larder and open the door. By that time, Mr. Johnson the overseer had been told by Lily the cook that something was wrong in the Big House.

Papa took a long time getting to Mistress Holly, because he couldn’t walk so well. Not since after both his heel-strings were cut by Big Master Henry in the year before I was born. But she wasn’t about to trust anyone else.

Just as he opened the Master’s bedroom door, Mr. Johnson barged into the Big House and came bounding up the stairs. “Get your skinny nigger hands away from there, Samuel!” he shouted, and grabbed the key from Papa’s hand.

My papa said thank you to him, because he was always thanking folks at the strangest times.

The house slaves, me included, were all standing at the bottom of the stairs listening to the hellish caterwauling of Mistress Holly. Lily and her grandson Backbend, who used to help serve supper, were praying that nothing had happened. But don’t be fooled – if they prayed for the Master’s heart to still be beating, it was only because they were worried they were going to be sold to someone even more mud-minded if he died.

As for me, I was hoping real hard that he was as dead as a headless catfish, and I was squeezing my eyelids so tight I might have drawn blood.

Whether my wishes had anything to do with it or not, Big Master Henry was gone as gone can be. Since his drinking glass was empty and had fallen on the floor from out of his big cold hand, I might have been suspected of poisoning him and would likely have been hanged that very night, but there was also a wood-handled knife buried in the side of his neck. That blade saved me from swinging from a tree, I’m happy to say. And Lily
too, since she mixed the lemonade. Not that we poisoned him. Lily believed in God’s retribution and wouldn’t have risked His vengeance. As for me, I confess I wanted to. I’d thought of it every time he stuck his broken glass up inside me.

How the killer had stabbed Big Master Henry and escaped through a locked door was the mystery everybody wanted to get to the bottom of. It was a twenty-four-foot drop to the ground from Big Master Henry’s window, so nobody could climb up or jump down without using a ladder.

As for the two keys to the room, one was found by Mr. Johnson in a pocket of Big Master Henry’s dress coat, which was folded on a chair in his bedroom. The other had been in Mistress Holly’s night-table drawer. She’d been playing solitaire on her bed for two hours previous to finding her husband’s body. If the killer had taken the key earlier, then how did he – or she – return it to the night table where Mistress Holly had found it?

The ladder was found safely locked away in the First Barn. There was no blood on it. And none of the field slaves had seen anyone climbing up the side of the house. So Mr. Johnson had the foremen tie Crow over the whipping barrel. Then he raised his cat and let it fall, because “that damn careless nigger” had been the Master’s personal slave and ought to have protected him.

Crow wept like a baby under his ten lashes, since the skin that had been flayed from his back years earlier had grown over the bones with thick scars that were sensitive as burns. Mr. Johnson kept spitting out tobacco juice onto the black man’s legs to humiliate him.

The next day Crow told me, “Ya know, Morri, I was so ashamed to let go like that, but it was like I was bein’ cut open with a rusty saw.”

I hugged him and said we were all proud of him. I promised myself I’d see them all pay one day. I just didn’t know how yet.

We all kept our mouths shut during the whipping except to count the strokes and pray for Crow. The overseer then picked out Lily’s grandson Backbend from our line. He was only eleven
and his mamma was dead. He had big dark eyes and the softest lips of anyone at River Bend.

“I’m gonna whip this boy ten good strokes too,” Mr. Johnson said, “unless you niggers tell me what happened last night. And I’m gonna keep pickin’ out your children till one of you speaks the truth.”

Lily shrieked and fell to her knees and begged him to be kind to her boy.

Most likely any one of us would have stopped his suffering by calling out the name of the culprit if we had truly seen him.

“Shame, shame, shame!” I yelled. “You is payin’ yer toll to hell right here, right now, Mr. Johnson.”

“You next, Morri!” he hollered back. “I ain’t gonna suffer your big mouth. And you’re getting twenty strokes!”

I was too angry to be scared. And too lightheaded with the truth of the Master being dead. I figured that the worst had happened to me already.

My papa then said he would not let anyone hurt me, but Mr. Johnson said, “Shut up, nigger, or I’ll give her thirty!”

“Thank you, Mr. Johnson, sir,” Papa replied real nice. “But if you whip my daughter, I can promise you some very, very serious consequences that you are not going to find agreeable,” he added, smiling.

“You can, can you?”

“Indeed, I can. Mistress Holly will need me should either of her children take ill. And I shall need Morri with me. And healthy. Just as I need Backbend in one piece as well.”