Outside, the begging and weeping grew more distant. I climbed from my bed and hurried to the window that overlooked our rear garden. It took me a moment to open the shutters because I’d never done it. That was Tessie’s job every morning.
Two strangers tramped down the brick walkway and through the wrought-iron gate, dragging Grady, screaming, out of the safety of our backyard. They were rough-looking fellows, dressed like laborers, and I watched as they lifted Grady into a wagon waiting at the curb. The wagon was packed with Negroes of all ages and sizes, some in chains and leg-irons. The men prodded the slaves with whips, shouting at them until they shifted themselves around on the wagon bed to make room for Grady.
Daddy stood watching near the back gate, his arms folded across his chest. He was already dressed for work, and rain darkened the shoulders of his overcoat and the brim of his hat. Big Eli, our stable hand, stood in the middle of the walk, struggling to hold on to Tessie as she screamed for her son.
“No! Don’t take my boy! He all I got! Please! No!”
I turned away from the window and ran downstairs in my chemise, not bothering with slippers or a dressing gown. As I raced outside into the rain, Esther, our cook, spotted me from the kitchen, which was a separate outbuilding behind our house. She ran outside and grabbed me before I could reach Tessie, then pulled me into the kitchen’s smoky warmth.
“Whoa now, Missy . . . where you going in you nightclothes?”
“I want Tessie,” I said, squirming to free myself. I tried to dodge around Esther and make a dash for the door, but she moved surprisingly fast for a woman her size, blocking my path with her broad body.
“No you don’t, Little Missy. You not be going outside in the rain dressed like that.”
“But . . . but Tessie’s crying. And Grady is, too. Where are those men taking him in that wagon?”
“Massa Fletcher not be telling me his business. Hear, now! Stop you fussing, Missy!”
Esther held me as I struggled to break free, but she cast a worried eye on the ham she’d left frying in the pan for our breakfast. I could hear Tessie’s pitiful screams above the sound of the ham sizzling in the pan, the fire crackling in the hearth, and the rain drumming on the roof of the kitchen. Then I heard the clatter of hooves and wheels as the wagon finally drove away.
A few minutes later, the kitchen door opened and Big Eli trudged inside, carrying Tessie in his arms like a child. She no longer fought against him but lay limp in his arms, her hands covering her face. Rain soaked both of them, streaming from their curly hair and running down their faces like tears. Tessie sobbed as if her heart would break, and I saw that it wasn’t just rain that coursed down Eli’s face. He was crying, too.
“God knows all about it, Tessie,” he soothed as he sat her down in a chair near the fire. “God know how you suffering. They took His son away, too, remember? He know how it feel to lose His boy.”
Esther finally released me and hurried back to her cooking. She flipped over the ham slice with a smooth flick of the frying pan, then shoved the pan back into the fireplace. I was free to run to Tessie, but I didn’t. I backed away from her instead, overwhelmed by her despair. Rarely had her attention been focused on anything or anyone but me. Even when Grady was a baby, she would leave him crying in his basket to tend to me if I demanded it. For the first time in my life, Tessie seemed completely unaware of me, as unaware as my mother was during one of her spells.
“Shh, don’t cry,” Eli murmured. He lifted Esther’s shawl from the nail by the door and draped it around Tessie’s shoulders. “Don’t cry. . . .”
“No sir!” Esther suddenly shouted. She slammed the frying pan down on the table with a
clang
that made my skin prickle. “You let that girl cry,” she told her husband. “I know how she feel and so do you. Isn’t our son sold and gone, too? That pain don’t never leave a mother. Never! I feel it to this day.”
Tessie lifted her head to face Esther, her features twisted in anguish. “Your boy only over to Hilltop. You know where he at. My boy’s gone to auction and I ain’t never seeing him again!”
“Only for this lifetime, Tessie,” Eli soothed. “Then you be with Grady all eternity.”
Tessie wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands and pulled the shawl tightly around her shoulders to stop her shivering. Her gaze fell on me for the first time. She looked me straight in the eye, something she’d never done in my entire life. No servant dared to look a white person in the eye. Tessie’s eyes were cold with hatred.
“This here your mama’s doing,” she said, her voice hushed with rage. “Your mama behind this.”
“Tessie!” Eli said in horror. “Hush your mouth!”
I turned from them and fled, crying as I ran across the yard, into the house, and upstairs to my room.
I didn’t see Tessie again for the rest of the day. Luella came up with my breakfast tray a little while later and helped me get dressed and brush my hair. But Luella didn’t hum or sing like Tessie always did, and she brushed too hard, snagging my hair in the bristles and bringing tears to my eyes.
“Where’s Tessie?” I asked her as she made my bed. “Why did those men take Grady away?”
Luella shrugged her bony shoulders. “Don’t know, Missy. Don’t know nothing about all that.”
I sat alone in my room all morning, gazing through the windows, watching the rain gather in puddles in the street below. Our house on Church Hill stood on the corner of Grace and Twentysixth Streets, and from my bedroom in a rear corner I could look down on our backyard and the street. The gate stood open, swinging a little in the wind. I stared at the spot where the wagon had stood, willing it to return, willing the men to bring Grady home so our lives could all return to normal. But the carriages and wagons that splashed past our house never even slowed, much less stopped. Grady didn’t come back.
Around noon, my mother’s maidservant came to fetch me. “You mama asking for you,” Ruby said. “She’s wanting you to eat lunch with her today. In her room.”
It was the first time I’d seen Mother since her latest crying spell had begun, several weeks ago, and I had no idea what to expect. I was very nervous as I approached her suite down the hall from my room—especially since Tessie wasn’t with me to prod me along and give me courage. As soon as I entered the room, I saw that Mother was in one of her cheerful moods. Ruby had drawn her curtains back and thrown her shutters open, and even though it was still rainy and gloomy outside, her room was not the dismal, depressing place it usually was during her sad spells.
“Hello, Sugar,” she said, smiling faintly from her chair near the window. “Come on over here and give your mama a kiss.”
I crossed the floor and brushed my lips on Mother’s cheek. She looked painfully thin, her bones sharply defined beneath her pale skin. But my mother was still a very beautiful woman, one who stood out among her peers. I’d inherited my wavy brown hair from her, but not my dark eyes. They came from my father. Mother’s eyes were a soft, faded gray, like spring storm clouds. I wondered if the many tears she had shed had washed the color right out of them.
Mother motioned for me to sit across from her at the little table by the window. She had a frenzied intensity about her, as if a relentless, pulsing current raced through her veins. While Ruby laid out all the food, Mother chatted excitedly, hopping from one topic to the next like a little bird flitting from branch to branch. I barely listened. Instead, I studied my mother’s perfect, moonshaped face, her graceful movements, watching the sweep of her small, round hands as she spread her napkin across her lap.
Her breathless voice and rapid words made her sound as though she were running up flight after flight of stairs to the very top floor of a building, where a thrilling view awaited her. Once she reached that place, where all the world lay spread at her feet, I knew that her days would be filled with laughter and happy conversation. She would make glorious plans for all the things she would see and do: shopping in Richmond’s finest stores, ordering fancy silk dresses and bonnets imported from England and France, attending balls and parties and elegant dinners. I’d been to the top with her before, and I knew what would come next. Inevitably, she would begin to descend the stairs once again. The pleasant conversation and laughter would gradually die away as she trudged downward, until one day she would finally reach the cold, dark basement, where she lived with sorrow and tears.
I remembered Tessie’s bitter tears earlier that morning and summoned all my courage. “Did you send Grady away?” I asked when Mother paused for breath.
“Hmm? Did I do what, Sugar?” she asked absently.
“Did you send Grady away . . . my mammy Tessie’s boy?”
“Now, Caroline, you know I don’t have anything whatsoever to do with those servants—except for Ruby, of course. She has belonged to me ever since I was just a little girl like you. Did I ever tell you that? Ruby has been my own dearest mammy for just as long as I can recall. My daddy gave her to me for a wedding present when I got married because he knew I wouldn’t be able to get along for a single day without her. Just like you and your mammy. But Tessie and all the rest of them are your daddy’s property, not mine. It’s his job to see to them, and—”
Suddenly she stopped. Mother frowned at me, and for a horrible moment I was afraid she was angry with me. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked her about Grady. What if she decided to send me away, too? But a moment later she said, “Who made that awful mess of your hair, Caroline? Why, your part is as crooked as a country lane—and it’s nowhere near the middle of your head. And the rest of your hair is sticking out of your net like . . . like an old bird’s nest.”
Mother set down her teacup as if she couldn’t possibly take another sip with my hair in such a state. “Ruby!” she called. “Ruby, come see if you can do something with this child’s hair. What in the world has gotten into your mammy that she would make such a mess of it like that?”
“Tessie didn’t do my hair. Luella did.”
“Luella! But she’s only an old scrub maid. Whoever heard of such a thing—a common scrub maid brushing my daughter’s hair? Why, it’s disgraceful.”
“Luella had to help me today because they took Grady away and Tessie was crying, and—”
She put her hands over her ears. “I told you, Caroline, I don’t want to talk about those people. Proper young ladies don’t concern themselves with such unpleasant subjects as slaves. I’ve warned and warned your father that you were becoming much too familiar with them, and see here? I was right. This is exactly what I was talking about. It isn’t good for you at all. Ruby, don’t just stand there gawking; fix the child’s hair.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ruby guided me out of my chair and seated me at my mother’s mirrored dressing table. I watched as she took off the net that Luella had clumsily pinned on and began brushing my hair with my mother’s silver hairbrush. The soft bristles caressed my head the way Tessie’s gentle fingers did when she stroked my temples to soothe me to sleep.
“She have your hair, ma’am,” Ruby said. “So thick and nice. She look like you when she grow up . . . see?” Ruby deftly twisted my hair into a little bun and held it up on the back of my head like a grown-up lady’s. Somehow she had made it puff out on the sides, too, so that my face looked fashionably moon-shaped, like my mother’s.
“Can Ruby pin it up like that, Mother?” I begged. “So it looks like yours?”
“Heavens, no. You’re much too young.”
“Please, just for fun?” I don’t know what made me so brave. I was usually too timid to say a word to anyone, especially to my mother, who was a virtual stranger to me. But I missed Tessie, and I took courage from the fact that Mother seemed to be climbing her way up from her sad spell again. As I watched her face, reflected in the mirror, she finally smiled.
“Oh, all right. Pin it up for her, Ruby. Then Caroline and I can sip our tea like two Richmond belles.”
Ruby expertly parted and pulled and twisted my hair, sticking hairpins in the back and tucking a pair of Mother’s beautiful ivory combs on the sides. My head felt strange and wobbly. I stared at myself in the mirror and barely recognized the grown-up girl who stared back.
“Missy Caroline gonna be beautiful, just like you, ma’am,” Ruby said as she worked. “And she have your skin, too. Just as white as milk.”
“If only we can keep her from running all around in the backyard from now on, it just might stay white, too,” Mother said. “I told her father she’s twelve years old now, and it simply won’t do to have her pretty white skin all freckled from the sun. Or worse still, to have her looking as brown as a Negro. Honestly, it’s disgraceful enough that she plays with one of them all day without her looking like one of them, too.”
Grady
.
I suddenly recalled the feeling of warm sunshine on my hair and my face, of cool grass beneath my bare feet, and the sound of Grady’s rippling laughter as we chased each other around the backyard. High above us, I remembered my mother standing behind her curtained window like a shadow, watching.
Tears filled my eyes. Grady was gone—my playmate, my friend. They’d thrown him into the back of a wagon full of Negro slaves wearing chains.
Mother didn’t seem to notice my tears as she rattled on and on. “Goodness, you do look all grown up, Caroline. Why, before long you’ll be too old to wear short-sleeved dresses. We’ll be sewing hoops to your petticoat instead of those girlish cords you’re wearing. But I really must remember to tell that worthless cook of ours to give you more to eat. Honestly, you’re thin as a willow.”
I was fine-boned and very small for a twelve-year-old, but it wasn’t Esther’s fault. She did her best to try to fatten me up, complaining that I didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. She swore that a good, strong wind would pick me up and blow me clear to Washington, D.C.
“Now, come back over here and sit down, Caroline. We have some very important changes to discuss.”
Mother’s words sent a shiver through me. I slipped into my place at the tea table, but I was suddenly too nervous to eat. I hated change of any kind. Other girls my age went on afternoon social calls with their mothers, visiting the homes of their friends, learning the art of polite conversation. But my mother, once the belle of Richmond, hardly ever left our house. I’d pieced together the reason why by listening to the servants whispering and by watching the family doctor come and go from my mother’s room. Her spells of deep sadness, which made her weep for days on end, were caused by the fact that she hadn’t been able to give my daddy a son.