15 for 15 (June 2012)

June 13 – Wheat

The negroes in the fields sang hymns. Old country spirituals Bessie called them. They sang in code, though she didn’t know what the code was. Freedom songs. With all the wishing in the world she couldn't give anybody freedom. It pained her. Some of house negroes were more family than the family she had.

Last week she forgot herself enough to hum one in the house. Mama told her to hush up and smacked her across the face twice for good measure. Mama always got barking mad when she caught Sarah with the blacks. Mules and negroes were spoken to, not spoken with. It made no difference that without the field hands they’d have no food on the table, no crop to sell. You didn’t speak to a tool, much less copy its mannerisms. She’d asked her mother once why if she wasn’t to consort with negroes Mammy Bess was set to watch out for her. Got nothing but a licking for her trouble.

Nothing about the situation made sense to her. It wasn’t because she wasn't full grown like Mama said. At twelve she was grown enough to understand that fairness and slavery had no truck with each other. An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay is what the factory workers chanted in the city. It made plenty of sense to her. More so at home, since clearing, tilling, planting and reaping was an honest day’s work multiplied thrice over. And work didn’t have a color.

She knew enough to keep those kinds of thoughts to herself. Papa would skin her if he heard such talk, especially in his house. Her father had hotfooted right out of the city without even buying supplies that day. Rabble-rousers and low people he called the workers. Heathens and charlatans he called the abolitionists.

But she'd asked Bessie once if she wouldn’t rather be free, back when she first realized Bessie was a slave. Bessie cried a solid fifteen minutes before she was calm enough to speak. Turned out her husband had escaped from a neighboring plantation. The catchers caught up to him outside of Augusta and "lynched him up but good. Every thing on God’s green earth deserves freedom Mistress Sarah. But not all of us that gets it."

That scared her, gave her nightmares. What if she’d been born black instead of white? That might be her doing laundry or working the fields and having babies snatched away from her to be sold at auction. It was hard to believe that Jesus would approve, although her Sunday school teacher had told her often enough slavery was in the Bible. Word of God shut down all arguments, if not all feelings. She’d read the words herself, soon as she was able.

Then she stopped being scared and got angry. It didn’t sit right with her, no way no how. Mama would call it disobedience. If she got caught, Mama would take the hickory switch and cane her raw. But Sarah couldn't stomach throwing out perfectly good food when their workers were starving. They could be black men, white men, red man, Chinee, what have you. A body had a right to food and shelter.

The hamper was heavy, more meant for a pony cart than hand-carrying. She’d have to ask permission for a cart, and needed none for her own two feet. Walking it was. With luck, she’d make it out to the slave shacks and back before Mama came back home. It wasn't much. She was only twelve. When she got older, there'd be more. And if Papa died before she married, Sarah would give every last one of their slaves manumission papers, and pay the ones that stayed.