One driver had another flask. The other produced a deck of cards. The practiced way he shuffled them made Frederick leery of getting into a game with him, too. Were there no honest men anywhere any more? Once upon a time, Frederick had read a story about a Greek who’d gone looking for one—and ended up with nothing but a lantern to light the way and a barrel to sleep in. That didn’t much surprise him. The world would have been a different, and probably a better, place if it had.
Carriages kept coming. Before long, Clotilde got tired of going in and out to greet each new arrival. That happened every time she threw one of these affairs. She told Frederick, “You just send ’em on into the house, you hear? I’ll say hello to ’em when they come in.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. She said that at every gathering, too. As long as he could stay in the shade on the porch between arrivals, he didn’t mind.
In their dresses of white and red, blue and green, purple and gold, the women might have been parts of a walking flower garden. Some of them were young and pretty. Frederick carefully schooled his face to woodenness. Helen would tease him about it tonight. He knew that, but it was all right. But if any of those young, pretty white women noticed a black man noticing them . . . that was anything but all right. An incautious Negro could end up without his family jewels if he showed what he was thinking. But when a well-built woman was about to explode out of the top of her gown, what was a man of any color supposed to think?
Whatever Frederick thought, it didn’t show on his face.
One of the housemaids tried to sneak past him to join the colored men under the trees. He sent her back into the big house, saying, “Wait till the white ladies are eating. The mistress won’t pay any mind to what you do then.”
“Spoilsport,” she said. Gatherings like this let slaves from different plantations get to know one another.
Frederick only shrugged. “Don’t want you getting in trouble. Don’t want to get into trouble myself, either.” She made a face at him, but she went inside again.
He watched the sun climb to the zenith and then start its long slide down toward the western horizon. The broad Hesperian Gulf lay in that direction, but Frederick had never once glimpsed the sea. Dinner was set for two in the afternoon. He figured just about all of Mistress Clotilde’s guests would be there by then. Chatter and punch were good enough in their way, but he didn’t believe any of the local ladies wanted to miss a sit-down feast.
When the sun said it was about one, he went back into the house and sidled up to Clotilde Barford. “How we doin’, ma’am?” he asked.
“Everything’s going just the way it ought to,” she answered. She didn’t say things like that every day. The gathering had to be doing better than she’d ever dreamt it could. What juicy new tid bit had she just heard about some neighbor she couldn’t stand?
“Good, ma’am. That’s good.” On the whole, Frederick meant it. If she was happy, everything at the plantation would run more smoothly for a while.
She glanced at the clock ticking on the mantel. It said the hour was half past one. Frederick didn’t think it was really so late, but that clock, the only one on the plantation except for Henry Barford’s pocket watch, kept the official time. The mistress said, “You’ll start bringing in the food right at two.”
“However you want it, that’s what I’ll do,” Frederick said, which was the only right answer a slave could give. He didn’t like playing the waiter; he thought it beneath his dignity. To a white woman, a slave’s dignity was as invisible as air. She’d want to show off to her guests, and a well-dressed slave fetching and carrying was part of the luxury she was displaying.
As if to prove as much, she said, “They’ll be so jealous of this place by the time I’m through, their eyes’ll bug right out of their heads. So you make a fine old show when you lug in the big tray, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Frederick said resignedly. She’d want him to load it extra full every time he brought it in, too, so he could show the ladies he was not only graceful but also a nice, strong buck. One arm and shoulder would hurt tomorrow, but would she care? Not likely! She wouldn’t feel a thing.
In the kitchen, they were straining broth through cheesecloth. More swank. It would taste the same either way. But the mistress wanted it clear, so clear it would be. If that made extra work for the cooks, what were they there for but work?
“You watch those oil thrushes!” the head cook—Davey—called to a scullery maid who was turning the birds’ spits over a fire. “Watch ’em, I tell you! Anything happens to ’em, I’ll serve them fancy ladies a roast nigger with an apple in her mouth, you hear me?”
Eyes enormous, the maid nodded. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. Frederick wouldn’t have been surprised if she thought the cook would really do it. Frederick knew Davey might be tempted, at that. The kitchen was his domain. The mistress might intrude here, but only in the way storms or fires intruded on a bigger domain. Once the storm blew over or the fire went out, the place was his again.
“How soon you be ready?” Frederick asked Davey. “She wants me to start serving at two o’clock sharp—two by the clock.”
The head cook looked outside to gauge the shadows. Then he looked up at the roughly plastered ceiling, adjusting between what the sun said and what the clock claimed. The whole business took no more than a few seconds. His gaze came back to Frederick. “We make it,” he said.
“That’s all right, then.” Frederick asked no more questions. When Davey said the kitchen would do this or that, it would.
And it did. The cooks put chopped scallions and bits of spiced pork back into their marvelously clear broth. The tray Frederick used to carry the bounty into the dining room was at least three feet across. Grunting, he got it up on his left shoulder and steadied it with his right arm.
“Watch the doorway, now,” Davey warned as he headed out. One of the undercooks held the door open for him.
“Oh, I’m watching!” Frederick assured the head cook. “Obliged,” he added to the undercook as he eased by. He tried to imagine what would happen if he stumbled just then. His mind shied away from the notion—and why wouldn’t it? He’d give the white women something new to talk about!
He was similarly careful easing into the dining room. He had no actual door to worry about there, but the doorway was just wide enough for him and the tray both. All the ladies broke off their talk and stared at him as he came in. “That’s a fine-looking nigger,” one said to her friend. The other woman nodded. Frederick felt proud, even though he knew she might have said the same kind of thing about an impressive horse or greyhound.
He went around to the head of the table so he could serve Mistress Clotilde first. He stood a couple of steps behind her for a moment. Did he
want
the assembled white ladies of the neighborhood to notice him, even to admire him? He supposed he did. He never would have admitted it out loud, though, not unless he wanted to hear about it from Helen for the next twenty years.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall
. Frederick often read the Bible. He knew that was the proper line, though even preachers often clipped it. He’d always thought the Good Book was full of good sense. Now he found out how very full it was, but in a way that made him wish he’d stayed ignorant forever.
After posing for the ladies—most of whom, sadly, paid him no more attention than the furniture—Frederick slid forward so he could start serving. And, as he slid, the toe of his left shoe unexpectedly came up against the end of that loose floorboard.
Had he stumbled in the course of his ordinary duties, that would have been bad enough. It would have humiliated him and infuriated his mistress—she would have lost face in front of all her neighbors. She would have found some way to make him pay for his clumsiness. She had her good points, but she’d never been one to suffer in silence. Henry Barford could testify to that.
Yes, an ordinary stumble would have been a mortification, a dreadful misfortune. What did happen was about a million times as bad. Everything seemed to move very slowly, as it does in some of the worst nightmares. Frederick’s foot met the floorboard. He thought it would keep sliding ahead, but it suddenly couldn’t. The rest of his body could . . . and did.
Of itself, his torso bent forward. He tried to straighten—too late. The heavy tray lurched forward on his shoulder. He tried to steady it with his left hand. He couldn’t. He grabbed for it with his right hand. Too late. Instead of the edge of the tray, which might have saved things, his hand hit the bottom. That made matters worse, not better.
A back pillar on Mistress Clotilde’s chair caught him in the pit of the stomach. “Oof!” he said as the breath hissed out of him. And he could only watch as the tray crowded with bowls of soup flew out of his hands and fell toward the fancy lace tablecloth that had been in Clotilde’s family for generations—as she would tell people at any excuse or none.
It seemed to take a very long time.
It seemed to, but it didn’t. Frederick hadn’t even managed to grab at his own abused midsection before the tray crashed down. Bowls full of hot soup went every which way. A few of them flew truly amazing distances. Frederick was amazed, all right. Appalled, too. Some soup bowls smashed. Others landed upside down but intact in well-to-do ladies’ laps—or, in one disastrous case, in a busty lady’s bodice—thereby delivering their last full measure of savory liquid devotion.
Dripping women shrieked. They sprang to their feet. They ran here, there, and everywhere. Some of them ran into others, which sent fresh screams echoing off the ceiling. Others swore, at the world in general or at Frederick in particular. He’d heard angry slaves cuss. He’d heard white muleskinners and overseers, too. For sheer, concentrated vitriol, he’d never heard anything like Clotilde Barford’s guests.
His mistress didn’t jump up and start screaming. Slowly, ever so slowly, she turned on Frederick. Soup soaked her hair. Half her curls had given up the ghost and lay dead, plastered against the side of her head. A green slice of scallion garnished her left eyebrow. Another sat on the end of her nose. Imperiously, she brushed that one away. She couldn’t see the other, so it stayed.
She pointed at Frederick. He noted with abstract horror that the soup had made the dye in her almost-up-to-date fashionable gown run; blue streaked the pale flesh of her arm. “You God-damned
clumsy
son of a bitch!” she snapped: a statement of the obvious, perhaps, but most sincere.
“Mistress, I—” Frederick gave it up. Even if he hadn’t had most of the wind knocked out of him, what could he possibly say?
The crash and the screams made slaves from the Barford estate and those gathered under the trees rush into the dining room to see what had happened. One of them laughed on a high, shrill note. It cut off abruptly, but not abruptly enough. Whoever that was, he’d catch it.
And so would Frederick. Veronique Barker fixed him with a deadly glare. “You’ll pay for this,” she said. She wasn’t his mistress, which didn’t make her wrong.
II
The morning after: one of the more noxious phrases in the English language. It must have seemed pretty noxious to Henry Barford. He’d come downstairs the afternoon before to view the catastrophe. Unless you were dead, you couldn’t help coming to take a look at something like that. He hadn’t been dead, but a wobble in his walk said he’d already been tight. He’d looked, shaken his head, and gone back to his bedroom. And he’d finished the serious business of getting drunk.
And now, on the morning after, he was suffering on account of it. His skin was the color and texture of old parchment. Red tracked the yellowish whites of his eyes the way railroads were starting to track the plains of Atlantis east of the Green Ridge Mountains (only a few reached across them; the southwest was the USA’s forgotten quarter). His hands shook. His breath stank of stale rum and of the coffee he’d poured down to try to counter the stuff’s effects. His uncombed hair stood up in several directions at once.
He looked at Frederick with a certain rough sympathy on his face. The Negro felt at least as bad as the white man. But what Frederick knew was fear for the future, not regret for the past.
“Well, son,” Henry Barford rasped, “I am afraid you are fucked.”
“I’m afraid so, too, Master Henry,” Frederick agreed mournfully. He was a year or two older than the man who owned him, but that had nothing to do with the way they addressed each other. The brute fact of ownership made all the difference there.
“Matter of fact,” Barford continued, “I am afraid you fucked yourself.”
“Don’t I know it!” Frederick said. “That God-damned floorboard! Take oath on a stack of Bibles piled to the ceiling, sir, I didn’t know the end had come up.”
“I believe you,” Henry Barford said. “If I didn’t believe you, you’d be dead by now—or more likely sold to a swamp-clearing outfit, so as I could get a little cash back on your miserable carcass, anyways.”
Frederick gulped. Slaves in that kind of labor gang never lasted long. The men who ran the gangs bought them cheap, from owners who had good reason for not wanting them any more. They fed them little and worked them from dawn to dusk and beyond. If that didn’t kill them off, the ague or yellow fever or a flux of the bowels likely would. And even if those failed, the swamps were full of crocodiles and poisonous snakes and other things nobody in his right mind wanted to meet.
Barford paused to light a cigar: a black, nasty cheroot that smelled almost as bad as his breath. He sighed smokily. “I believe you,” he said again. “But no matter how come it happened, what matters is, it
did
happen. My wife, she’s mighty mad at you—mighty God-damned mad.”
Frederick hung his head. “I’m sorry, Master Henry. I’m sorrier’n I know how to tell you. I tried to apologize to Mistress Clotilde last night, but she didn’t want to listen to me. Honest to God, it was an accident.” He hated crawling. If he wanted to save his own skin, though, what choice did he have?