The Wedding Gift (12 page)

“When, Mama? When do you think she’ll be home?”

“I don’t know exactly when, but she’ll be coming home soon. The good Lord answered our prayers, and we need to give him thanks.”

We knelt. “Lord, we thank you. Lord, you listened to the prayers of a poor, ignorant wretch and you softened Mr. Allen’s heart and you’re bringing her back. Lord, I know I did wrong before by not praying to you more before they took my child. But I know better now, Lord. Amen.”

About two weeks later, we were preparing dinner when we heard people outside the kitchen. We went outside, and there was Belle with a swollen belly and wearing a filthy tattered dress. Belle did not look like my sister. The Belle who had returned had a scar on her upper lip, dry gray skin, and her hair had been cut short like a man’s. This Belle kept her head down. My mother and I led her to our cabin. She sat at the table and we offered her something to eat and drink, but she took little.

“Just sleep, Mama. I just need some sleep,” she said.

My mother told me to go back to the kitchen to help finish cooking the meal, even though I wanted to stay.

“You’re going to spend time with her come nighttime.”

When we finished cooking and the Allens were eating, my mother came to the kitchen and told us that Belle was asleep. At our suppertime, we returned to our cabin, and I saw that she had cleaned Belle up some and put her in a nightdress. Belle was silent throughout our meal. I could not stop staring at her rough elbows and hands. Afterward, my mother rubbed her shoulders and back, and I put my ear to Belle’s stomach, hoping to hear the baby. That was when Belle cried. My mother embraced her.

“Shush, my sugar. Shush, my baby. Shush.”

I wanted to know what had happened to Belle, but I realized that whatever it was, she was not prepared to tell the tale. After supper, at my mother’s direction, I pumped two pails from the well and took them back to our cabin, where I heated the water and put it in the tub. As we washed her, we could see scars, welts, and scabs on her back, arms, legs, and some even on her belly. We oiled her hair and my mother braided it into neat plaits. When she fell asleep that night, I asked my mother what had happened to Belle.

“She’s all right. She’s back with us now. That’s all that matters.”

My mother, with Miss Mary’s help, prepared special herbs for Belle during the final months of her pregnancy. Her appearance improved and her hair grew longer than before she was sold. Mrs. Allen gave my mother permission to decrease the amount of Belle’s work after Miss Mary said that Belle was having twins.

Belle gave birth in our cabin, with Miss Mary helping my mother deliver the babies. My task was to make sure that there was sufficient hot water. When Emmie was born, my mother wiped her face and put her on Belle’s chest, but Belle looked away.

“Come on, sugar. Look at your baby. Hold her.”

Belle did not respond. My mother wrapped Emmie in a cloth and held her. She rubbed her back until Emmie began screaming and turned red.

“Here comes the next one,” Miss Mary said.

When Ruby was born, Miss Mary did not try to give her to Belle. The babies had fair skin and they looked more like me than they did Belle or my mother.

“Belle, sugar, I know what you’re going through, but you got to….”

“Do you, Mama? Do you know what I’m going through?”

My mother cried.

“I’m sorry, Mama, Miss Mary, and Sarah.”

“You don’t have nothing to be sorry about, baby.”

“Yes, I do, Mama. You all are just trying to help me. I’ll take the babies now.”

They put the babies on her chest but they cried when there was no milk.

“Sarah, go right now, run, and ask to see Mr. Davis. Tell him Belle had the babies but she ain’t making milk. Ask him to send for Edwina down by the washhouse and tell her we need her help. Oh, and stop in the kitchen first and tell somebody to bring me some milk.”

I followed my mother’s instructions. When I returned to our cabin, the babies were sucking milk from a cloth teat that my mother had made. Edwina, with her newborn baby, arrived within the hour.

“Edwina, it’s taking Belle time to make milk for the babies. You mind helping us out until her milk comes?”

“Miss Emmeline, you know I’ll do anything I can for you and your girls, and now your grandbabies, after all you done for me and my husband.”

As Edwina settled her infant on a bed, my mother told me that she and I had to go to prepare the next meal. Miss Mary turned her attention to Belle, and Edwina sat in the rocking chair to nurse Emmie and Ruby. On the way to the kitchen, I asked my mother why Belle could not make milk for the babies.

“She don’t feel ready to be a mother, probably something to do with what happened to her at Master Reynolds’. Miss Mary seen this many times before. Mothers without milk happens a lot more often than you realize around here, especially in the fields. But Miss Mary know what she’s doing. She know what to say to these new mothers to get them to take to their own babies. But there is something you can do. I want you to talk to Belle about what happened to her when they took her. I tried, but she won’t tell me.”

When supper was prepared and served, we wrapped enough food for everyone at home. Emmie and Ruby were asleep, Miss Mary was knitting, Edwina was nursing her baby, and Belle was still in bed, looking outside through the open shutters at a cardinal that was perched on the branch of a crabapple tree. My mother made us tea and everyone but Belle had supper. When we had eaten, my mother asked Miss Mary and Edwina if they would accompany her to the kitchen, where she had to prepare food for the next day. They took all the babies, and I stayed with Belle and persuaded her to eat.

“Belle, what are you thinking about? Why don’t you like your babies?”

She did not reply.

“Belle, won’t you speak to me? Please? We’re worried about you.”

“Look, I’m going to be fine. Just fine. As for the babies, I ain’t got no say in what happen to them anyway. Mr. Allen will do what he want with them.”

“Belle, please don’t say that. You don’t mean it, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

Miss Mary and Edwina returned about two hours later, and they said that my mother needed me in the kitchen. I went there and told her what Belle said. She closed her eyes.

“Dear Lord, please take the pain out her heart so she can love her babies. I can’t take care of them and do my work, Lord, and he will sell them if she don’t want them.”

The next day, we left Belle with Miss Mary. We made a nursery out of a room off the kitchen where we kept the three babies. My mother and I took turns looking in on Belle and taking her and Miss Mary food. The first time Belle saw her daughters that day was when we returned to the cabin at about ten o’clock that night. Edwina had already nursed her own child, and as she was about to nurse Emmie and Ruby, Belle said that she could try feeding one of them. No one said anything. Miss Mary gave her Ruby, the baby wearing a bracelet that my mother made from a green piece of yarn. When Ruby began suckling, Belle smiled. Emmie began crying and my mother put her in Belle’s arms. We watched Belle feed her girls until they were full. Miss Mary and Edwina spent the night and left after breakfast the next morning, Miss Mary declaring that Belle had sufficient experience now to care for her daughters.

My mother obtained permission from Mr. Allen to permit Belle to rest for a month after giving birth. The girls were two weeks old when Mr. Davis, the overseer, arrived with gifts from Mr. and Mrs. Allen: a large bolt of cloth with a floral pattern, two piglets for our pen, a pig ready for slaughter, six large jars of honey, and two sacks each of flour, sugar, and rice. When Belle returned to work, a woman who cared for the small children of the other Hall servants also looked after Emmie and Ruby.

One night, when my mother was with Mr. Allen, Belle told me what happened to her. “I know that one day I’m going to forget most of what they did. I know that because I have to forget. Since the day they took me from here, I ain’t been able to sleep straight through one night. You know how after I go to sleep I cry and wake you? Sometimes it’s because, in my sleep, I think I’m back there. Sarah, I ain’t never going to forget that little girl and how she screamed. Not as long as I live. Sometimes, when I wake you and you see me with my hands covering my ears, it’s because I’m dreaming that I’m back at that place, in the cabin where they put us, me and the other girls from here, when we first got to Master Reynolds’ plantation. In my dreams, I’m trying to make the little girl stop screaming, but sometimes it’s me that’s screaming too, and I want to make us both stop.”

“What little girl, Belle? What happened to her?”

“Sarah, you can’t tell Mama any of this, you hear? I don’t want her to feel worse than she already feel. They took me and two other girls, field hands, to Master Reynolds’ plantation. They was about your age. One was tall and looked a lot like you. Her name was Billie, but the other girl, Sippie, was a skinny thing. She looked like she was ten or maybe twelve. Two overseers from Master Reynolds’ took us from here. One of them just wanted to do what they told him to do, to take us to Master Reynolds’ plantation. But the other one kept staring at us, especially at Sippie.

“We went in a wagon. They had some food and pots, and me and the girls had to cook. We slept outside, in blankets on the ground. All of us girls put the blankets next to each other so we could be close, and we put Sippie between us. If any of us had to get up at night, we always went together. We was on the road for about a week. When we got to Master Reynolds’, the overseers took us to a cabin. It had three beds and cooking wares and a chimney and they gave us food to cook. They left us alone for two days. Then a overseer took new clothes for me and Billie. He told us to bathe and change. We did like we was told. That night, when the sun was setting, a overseer and two young gentlemen showed up. The overseer took Sippie outside and closed the door behind him.

“Me and Billie tried to fight them off, and they look surprised, like they wasn’t expecting us to fight back but like they was glad that we did. When he pushed himself inside me, it hurt more than the beating. He said, ‘Oh, a virgin. It’s tighter than a drum.’ Then I just give up fighting him and cried, pretending like he wasn’t doing it to me but to somebody else. He smelled like wood and earth and it made me want to throw up. When he stopped, he just stayed there, didn’t get up right away. I looked over at Billie. The other man was still going at her. She was quiet, just staring, didn’t even look like she blinking.

“They switched places. The second one had a different smell, like spices or something. But this time, me and Billie didn’t fight, because we knew it wasn’t no use. I heard Sippie scream. I tried to push him off me then and Billie tried to do the same with the other one. But they didn’t let us up. They just hit us again. Sippie kept screaming, and the more she screamed, the harder the one on top of me kept pushing it in.

“When they was done with us and left, me and Billie put on our dresses and ran out. We saw Sippie curled up by a tree. We took her inside and cleaned her up and put her on the bed that ain’t had our blood on it. I told Billie to take off the sheets on the other beds and put the blankets on them. I took a lantern and went outside to the garden in back of the cabin. I found St. Charles’s wort and brewed it. All of us drank the tea when it was cool. Then I dipped a clean cloth in it and put the cloth between Sippie’s legs, hoping it was going to help her with the pain.

“They left us alone in the cabin for the next day and then they told us it was time to get to work. They took us in a wagon to the fields. They told me and Billie to get off the wagon. I asked what about the little girl? They said, ‘This ain’t got nothing to do with you. Who you think you is? Master?’ I went for Sippie, but one of the men pushed me away. She wasn’t crying or saying nothing.

“That first day in the fields, me and Billie worked with a gang watering the cotton plants and loading weeds onto wagons that the other hands picked. By the end of the first day, my hands was bleeding because there was sharp twigs on the weeds.

“That night, a overseer took us back to the cabin and there was new clothes waiting for us. He told us to wash up good this time, that the young master and his friend complained that we stink. ‘And clean up this cabin too. There’s new sheets for the beds. And don’t get no ideas. We’re watching you.’

“The next day, the two men went back to the cabin and took turns with us again. When the second one was on me, his smell made my food come up my throat, but I held it in my mouth. ‘What’s wrong with you, bitch? Answer me,’ he said.

“I opened my mouth and the vomit came out. He slapped me. ‘Go clean yourself, you nasty whore.’

“I went to the water pitcher, and he went to the bed where the other one was on top of Billie. He…said, ‘Put her on top.’ He put Billie on top and then the other one pushed inside her from behind. Billie yelled like she wasn’t going to make it through the pain, so with all the strength I had, I kicked him off her. That’s when they beat us again so bad that they busted my lip.

“After they left, we was too weak to do anything and no way tea was going to help us at all. We just stayed there until they came to get us the next morning. We was beat so bad they told us we didn’t have to go to the field that day and they went for a doctor. He cleaned the cuts and put bandages on us. They had a house servant come stay with us for two days.