Polly was practicing her scales inside and Mama was resting. The bees buzzed lazily around the jasmine and lavender.
I was too excited by half.
Seeing the tall, wide frame of Togo in the distance, I took off down the track at a fast clip.
No running.
Ladies didn’t run.
Papa was sending a consultant! Though, goodness knew when he would arrive.
This third crop of indigo had reached two feet and looked hardier than anything we had produced before. Still everyone was on alert for any weed or pest that might possibly interrupt our endeavor.
After sharing the news about the consultant with Togo, I sought out Quash to let him know also.
At my request, Quash had asked Sawney to help construct a room for Sarah and her children. We would build an additional two dwelling cabins with a shared chimney. Sarah and the children would have one side. The extra space would be needed if we grew our indigo operation. Sawney had been reinforcing the chicken coop to keep out the foxes, so work on Sarah’s cabin had been delayed. In the meantime, she was staying with Mary Ann and her children, as well as helping out in the house and kitchen. Which, according to Essie, had set Mary Ann to muttering in the kitchen all day long. “Too many what ain’t got no sense ’roun’ here,” Mary Ann would say at least four times a day.
“It’s just until the indigo harvest,” I told Mary Ann. “Then Sarah will be helping outside.”
Mary Ann grunted.
Essie, for her part, had gifted me a small talisman one morning before sunup. A desiccated chicken foot. I squealed in disgust when I saw the thing sitting on my palm, yellowed and scaly, and promptly dropped it.
“Hush up,” Essie had admonished. “It’s for luck and protection.”
“I have a small crucifix and a prayer book for that.”
“A body can’ have too much.”
“What am I supposed do with it? Wear it?” I shuddered.
Essie had shaken her head. “I’ll be leavin’ it under your bed.”
“Is this to do with Sarah thinking she’s a witch?”
“A priestess? None that we ever heard of. But I’m not likin’ her thinkin’ she is.”
Settling Sarah and her children into Wappoo proved difficult. She was surly and caused confused and restless murmuring amongst her peers. Perhaps that was the problem; she didn’t see them as peers. More as underlings.
When I asked her simple questions, her topaz-colored eyes met mine with silent hostility and challenge. Do you recognize the indigo plant? Do you know how long it takes to flower? Do you know the signs that the leaf is ready to harvest for dye? All of it met with mutinous silence.
She expected to be punished, I imagined, for defying me and was daring me to do it. And while my level of frustration grew with every encounter, I simply prayed harder for humility, kindness, and patience. I would wait her out and earn her allegiance.
Now that we had a consultant coming, Sarah’s indigo knowledge might not even be needed, but I was sure more knowledge was better than none.
The honest truth was I admired her grit. And worse, I admired her stubbornness. She held herself in a certain manner I envied. No matter that she was in bondage, it was as if her spirit would not submit to the reality of her position. And she held her power the only way she knew how. In a way, I came to understand how that must have incensed Starrat, causing him to try and break her.
While Sarah found it hard to accept her change in geography, Lil’ Gulla had gravitated immediately to the stables and now shadowed Indian Peter all day long taking care of the horses. After a few weeks he stopped going to sleep next to his mother altogether, preferring to wake up early in the stable.
Sarah’s little girl, Ebba, had joined Mary Ann’s two daughters in the kitchen, but being too young to do anything worthwhile, she was more of a distraction than anything else.
Her chubby tanned hands grappled at Mary Ann’s skirts, causing irritation and muttering, until Sarah would fashion a sling from a piece of sackcloth and tie Ebba into a little cocoon on her back. There, the baby girl would press her cheek against her mother’s shoulders and for a while fall into a wakeful stupor, watching the goings-on around her while Sarah continued sweeping or doing whatever chore Mary Ann had assigned her. Eventually the constant movement would set the baby’s eyes to slow, long blinks until they closed altogether.
Every day, the indigo plants grew taller, the leaves more perfect, the color changing so incrementally to a deeper green that some days I think I imagined a blue tinge. I couldn’t believe this field of chaotic thickets that had no structure, no order, could be capable of so much promise. Indigo was a weed, pure and simple. It was the kind of plant one threw up on makeshift borders or found on the side of well-worn roads to town where the comings and goings of man kept the wildness of nature only temporarily at bay.
The heat of summer pressed into autumn. Overdue for rain, the afternoons had started swelling and emulsifying with humid weight even beyond a normal Carolina summer. Each day I’d look west and see the dark iron of swollen clouds, but they never came close enough to break our heat.
Thinking of the late frost that had killed our first crop, and news from my brother George about how it had been so bitterly cold in London as to draw a snow in May, I realized the scales of justice would mean this summer would drag by and extend well into fall, roasting us slowly at the spit. I told myself it did not matter as long as the indigo continued to flourish.
Then one day, the reality that we were missing our chance hit me. This crop might go to seed without our ever getting a chance to try.
I sent for Sarah, asking Essie to please dispatch her to my father’s study.
Wiping damp palms upon my skirt, I waited at the window until I felt her sullen presence enter the room.
I turned and was struck once again by Sarah’s presence.
Proud bearing, I’d already noticed, eyes lighter than usual and gleaming with a thousand emotions, but also smooth brown skin over perfectly symmetrical features. It was funny. I had never looked at a Negro in terms of attractiveness. But part of me recognized this woman’s beauty, and it was intimidating.
She stared at me, wordless.
I stared back at her.
“Sarah,” I finally said. “I know you have no reason to trust me. I moved you away from Waccamaw because—”
Sarah spat on the floor.
I jerked. Shocked.
I told myself to think and to school my expression. Charles’ noting that I wore my emotions clear on my face rang in my ears.
Tilting up my chin, I refused to look down at the product of her disdain pooling up in a globulous mess on the floorboards. Instead, I picked up my skirts and walked forward, careful to avoid her spittle. I kept coming until I was a foot away. And a foot smaller than she. Then I stepped up even closer.
The smell of her skin was meaty and tinged with musk and salt. Heat wafted up from her person.
“I can see you are not afraid of me. I’m not afraid of you either.”
Her gaze was dead and unwavering.
“Now, I’m sure it wasn’t quite the same between you and Starrat.”
As I said his name, I saw the most fleeting movement in her eyes.
I stepped to the side and walked around her. “No, in fact, I believe that—”
“I’m no’ fear of him,” Sarah snarled, her words clipped and underlaid with a French patois. Essie still had a tinge of the same. She was here via the islands and had obviously been resold into the Carolinas.
I finished my circuit and again stood in front of her. Our eyes locked. “I was going to say that I believed he was afraid of you.”
Surprise registered for a moment before it was replaced again with her impenetrable glare.
“You don’t agree?” I asked and was met with continued silence. “Men do not like strong women.” I let that sink in for a moment, then put my face close to hers. “Starrat does not like me either.”
She remained quiet.
“I would like your help harvesting the indigo. I know Lil’ Gulla is happy here. He is learning a skill with horses that will make him very valuable. But if you would prefer to be at the mercy of Starrat, I can send you back to Waccamaw.”
“Do you sell my chil’en? Do you give my son skill and sell him?”
Her question surprised me.
“Was that the nature of the deal you made with Starrat? That he would not sell your children? His children?”
She was quiet. Some of the fire had dimmed from her eyes, but her body emanated a rigid defensiveness, as if she had constructed weaponry around herself that would be set off at the slightest threat.
Perhaps that was the deal she’d made, but the truth was he would have taken what he wanted anyway.
“Did you know that he has no right to sell slaves that do not belong to him?” I asked. But my mind whirled. How many children had been born on that plantation who had never been reported to an absentee landlord? An easy matter to sell them then and make an extra penny. That man’s audacity knew no bounds. I felt sick.
Sarah made a snorting sound of disbelief.
I went through the reasoning in my mind. Slaves were a commodity. I knew my father, no matter his sympathies, believed so. There was nothing to be gained by us selling any slaves at present. Certainly not while I was trying to up production from all of our land.
I made a decision then and there. If I had need of extra hands and moved Negroes from one plantation to another, it would be on a temporary basis only. “While I am in charge here, no children will be sold from any Lucas plantation, nor separated from their mothers.”
She stayed silent. Perhaps she didn’t believe me.
“You have my word.”
I would have to earn her trust. Somehow. But I sensed her spirit was broken and defiant in a way that might never be fixed.
She said nothing.
“You may go,” I finished eventually, knowing that day wouldn’t be the one I’d win. She was insulting and insolent, but I chose to overlook it. I’d be the same in her position.
I prayed again for patience with her.