––––––––
“Mama, I’m hungry,” she whined, wiping her eyes as she fell against her mom’s shoulder. Lucy’s blonde hair was all over the place, and soon enough, dragging inside the room behind her was Charity.
“Mom, I thought you told me that the new slave gal was gonna get us ready today? I overslept, and I wanted to eat early so I can play outside with the baby before it gets too hot.”
“Well, I told you, Charity...and Lucy,” she paused, lifting Joseph into her arms. “Your father went out there to get her, I believe.”
“She gonna get a lashing?” Charity looked up hopeful for the punishment. “She needs a lashing.”
“Well, don’t you worry about that lashing none.” Then, she leaned over into her eldest daughter’s ear and whispered, “Yeah, she needs a lashin’ for leaving you, your sister and your brothers to fend on your own, doesn’t she?”
“It’s just not proper, Mama. She knows better...just like you say, right?”
“Just like I say. When she comes back, you go on in there and she’ll wash you, do your hair and feed you...you and your sister. Where’s your brother?” Sarah asked about her first born son who was his dad’s namesake.
“Still asleep.”
“Well, you make certain that Shelone wakes him and gets him ready, too. I don’t need her in here. Charity, you tell me if she gets out of line.”
“Yes mother!” She enjoyed being in charge so much that it made her stand straight up and walk toward the door so that she could watch Shelone enter. Before she even got to the entrance of the room, Shelone appeared in the doorway. “Why weren’t you here a long time ago? You see we need bathing...all of us?” She turned to her mom for a sign of approval for the way she spoke to Shelone, but she quickly laid all her demanding emotions to the side when she saw baby Abraham on her back. “Let me hold him. I want to play with him,” she begged as she stared into Shelone’s eyes as if she’d just forgotten the way she addressed her.
Shelone didn’t answer the child. Instead, she stared back into the eyes of the woman who was also staring at her – Mrs. Sarah. Shelone didn’t blink, even as she felt Charity yanking on her worn clothing and repeating her name over and over again. This visibly upset Mrs. Sarah, so much so that she placed her newborn down on the bed as she stood to her two feet, and slowly walked toward the doorway, never taking her eyes off of Shelone. As she approached Shelone, Charity backed away and Lucy grabbed her mom’s long pajama gown so that she could hide behind her legs at what she knew was coming next. Shelone just stood there watching until she ended up watching an open hand come to smack her directly on the left side of her face.
“Don’t you ever ignore my children again! Ever!”
As Mrs. Sarah stood there furiously exhaling as if she was at a loss of air, Shelone raised her face back into its original position, to stare her slave owner’s wife right back in the face to the sound of Charity’s giggles.
“Told you to give me that baby,” Charity continued to laugh until Shelone finally looked away from Mrs. Sarah and downward toward the laughing child. “Well, do you want my mother to slap you again or are you going to give us our property?” She stared up at her mother for even more approval, but her mother didn’t look down at her at all. Instead, she kept her eyes on Shelone until speaking once again.
“You’ve always thought you were someone special around here because of all the other niggers, you had your whole family. You stand in here now like you don’t belong to us anymore because those children left here? You’re still mine...until I say you rot!” she yelled, causing even her children to shudder. “Now, it don’t matter how you feel,” she snarled. “You just better get my children ready right now or that child won’t be the only thing strappin’ your back.”
“Come on, Charity. You too, Lucy. I’ll get little massah Jim, too, ma’am,” Shelone uttered softly and calmly, feeling as if time started to go in slow motion as the weight of her child on her back seemed slightly heavier than she recalled when he was alive. She listened for his breathing even though she knew he wasn’t doing any, longing to hear the sound of his blessed, innocent body fighting to stay alive each day, to play with his brother and sisters at night before falling off to sleep.
“I still want the baby!” Charity interrupted Shelone.
“You’ll get him in time. He’s asleep and plus I got to wash you up. So I suppose it’s best that I keep him on me ‘til you ready, Miss Charity.”
“I suppose.” She looked up at her mom and walked off, taking Lucy by the hand, dragging her along. “Let’s go get undressed and get in the pan.”
Mrs. Sarah hadn’t moved, and as Shelone turned to walk away, she smiled, satisfied with what she thought of as putting her property back in its place. Then, she glanced back over at her baby boy who was lying snuggly atop her bed, and her heart leaped for joy, causing her to return to the bed in happiness.
As Shelone put the soap onto the white rag, it was Charity that she scrubbed down first as the other two children waited in their underwear, deciding to sit on the floor and play one of their little games. Water splashed down onto the floor as Charity purposely beat the water with her hands in order to have fun wetting Shelone up. Her mother raised her to believe that half of the problem with Negro skin was that they didn’t wash it well, so every chance Charity got, she would want to watch every Negro boy or girl wash their faces and hands to see how much of their dark skin would come off each time. There was even one time she insisted on washing a Negro woman’s child just to see if she could get it off. When she gave up, she ran into the house in tears to her mother because she really wanted that particular Negro child to spend the night in her room. She knew if she was still a Negro she couldn’t. That was when she was a couple years younger, when her heart was more innocent. It seemed that since Charity was only a little older, she was ending up much more like her mother.
Shelone did nothing about the water splashing in her face. She just closed her eyes and imagined it was Seena she was washing, coming in from a long hard day of working the fields. The way she massaged her daughter’s back and in between her sore fingers was as if Seena was a little Negro queen. When it was Sadie’s turn, she did the same thing, but only she massaged her feet more than she did her twin sister’s. Sadie always would complain about her foot hurting after standing in between the cotton all day, so that was where Shelone would focus on more for her.
Then there was Cosah. When Cosah stepped into the basin, he would always grab the rag. It didn’t happen that time, and this caused Shelone’s eyes to pop open and see reality for what it really was. It wasn’t her independent Cosah. Instead it was Mr. Marksman’s son, a boy who never had to do without one thing a day in his natural born life on a count of her own son and the rest of the Negro children bending over backwards to make his life better. Every Negro soul out there alive and buried was going to make his life better while she had to choke back the tears of hers possibly becoming lost forever. She felt her dead son on her back and she began to feel the weight of her other son Cosah on her back as well.
As she turned the boy around to wash his back, she tried to close her eyes again to wipe away the hatred that had already started to suffocate any love she ever had for anyone. She realized what her father once said to her, about it being hard to love in the world but to do it anyhow. Tears poured down her face, and her Negro tears hit the basin of water that wet the white child’s skin as she wiped his back and...
“You know I’m gonna be your master one day. Daddy told me. And all of the children you have are going to be mine and their children after that, and after that and then forever...”
His words brought an abrupt halt to his bath. Shelone was only halfway finished when she uttered so quietly that the boy barely heard her, “You’re done.”
“I am?” he asked but didn’t wait on a response before he jumped out onto the towel and started drying himself off. “Good!” He then pushed the towel down the front of his body and then tossed the towel directly onto Shelone’s face before darting out of the bathroom. She didn’t immediately remove the towel, but instead, stood up from her crouched position. Before taking a step, she slowly pulled the towel from her face and folded it neatly, allowing it to drape across her right arm. Then, she walked out of the bathroom door and into their rooms to be certain they were getting dressed and ready to eat.
There was no talking. The entire house was quiet while the smell of food emanated all the way up to the second floor, and as the children prepared to eat breakfast, Shelone made her way downstairs to let everyone know that they were coming. The first time Shelone ever entered the Marksman’s mansion, she spotted the dining area where there were women polishing all the silverware at the long table which was perfectly set. When she arrived downstairs and turned to look into the same area, there were no house hands busy shining silverware. Instead, the table was completely set, everything spotless. She continued to walk past the dining room, and when she pushed the door to enter the kitchen, no one was there. She had no idea where they were nor did she care, until finally, someone walked back inside.
“Are they ready?”
Shelone nodded.
“Alright. Come on and get these two, and I’ll get these others,” she spoke softly but demanding as she side glanced Shelone, uncomfortable with what she knew as a dead baby on her back. It wasn’t appropriate to say anything about someone’s dead or sold children, especially when their death or trade was fresh. There was usually a moment to grieve given to the slave, but not when it came to Shelone, and that may have been because none of the whites thought to truly inspect Abraham to notice she carried a dead baby on her back. What was obvious to the slave wasn’t obvious to them because they chose to ignore.
“Where is everybody?” Shelone asked, picking up the plates full of food that were kept warm over the stove.
The female shuddered at the words of Shelone as if she’d seen and heard a ghost. “They went out to eat something before time. I get ‘em ‘fore the family gets down here. They be right outside there, listening. Maybe you ought to go get you a biscuit, and...” she continued, about to mention baby Abraham until Shelone stopped her.
“I already fed him.” She placed the two plates on the table and turned back toward the kitchen, leaving the other female standing there, without any ideas how to help the new house hand with her troubles.
As Shelone entered the kitchen area once again, there was still no one around. She stared around at what she saw as a place bigger than the small cabin that she once lived in with her children, and how she would have to go back one day soon without anyone. What prevented the tears from welding back up inside her soul was the object on the kitchen counter. With the towel still folded on her arm, she slid the object from the counter and pushed it inside the fold of the cloth, hiding it from plain view. When she turned around, the same lady that she helped set the dining room table stood there quietly looking at her.
“Is that all?”
The young lady appeared severely disturbed, but she didn’t react to Shelone in that manner. Instead she stood there, her fingers drifting down the side of the wall, until she abruptly replied, “Yes...that’s all.”
At that, Shelone walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. She’d already felt her baby’s head droop lower, down into the sheet she used to cradle him on her back, and just that feeling drained her of any hope while she shoved her pain down into her gut, causing it to radiate untamed throughout her entire body. Her feet climbed the stairs heavier as any happiness she’d ever felt in her life became worse than a distant memory. She couldn’t remember any form of happiness at all.
There was a large window at the front of the house that if one peered from it, her cabin would be in plain view. She turned to see it, and for the first time, her cabin appeared rotted out and void of anything but death. A Negro family learned to find joy in small spaces, but in Shelone’s case, there was no more joy to search for. Just that fast, the little joy she had in a world that hated her was taken in the blink of an eye. Breaking her attention was the sound of children coming from the master bedroom. Finally, she walked inside.
The little girls were singing a song and holding each other’s hands while the boy was on the bed with his baby brother, but Mrs. Sarah was nowhere in plain sight. Shelone reached for the door handle and lightly pushed it ajar, and as she stood silently, she rubbed the white towel that comforted her arm. She then walked toward the joyous children.
“Will you come over here Miss Charity and the rest of you?” she requested as she walked toward the open window that faced the towering trees in the distance and the rows of cotton that were only a couple yards from the house. “I need you to see something. Come look,” she summoned them with a smile. She watched their small feet move toward the window in curiosity, something that she could no longer see her children do. Then, she moved toward newborn baby Joseph. The towel fell upon the bed as the children continued to wonder what was so wonderful to see outside.
“Shelone, what is it?” asked Lucy.”
Shelone didn’t turn around as she lifted Joseph with her left hand from the bed. “I’m about to show you, but keep your eyes there on the cotton. It’s about to change. Keep lookin’. You’ll see.”
The handle of the knife shown from in between the towel, and Shelone pulled it out, admiring the sharpness of the shiny blade. She wanted Mrs. Sarah to know what it felt like, just once, how to lose and lose with no choice, just like she had – with no choice but to watch. Suddenly, she heard footsteps coming down the hall, walking slowly, complaining about where her slave hand was. That was when she walked back by the window to stand behind the children who busily searched for what was about to happen before their very eyes.
As Shelone heard the bedroom door move, she leaned over the three children who were standing, pressed in between her and the open window and said, “Look,” as she pointed toward the cotton with the huge knife in her hand. The children became startled as they saw the knife and heard their mother’s voice call for them simultaneously. It was then that Shelone brought the knife in front of the throats of all three of the children, slicing through them one at a time, from left to right, as the strength of her legs held their weak bodies in place.
“Children?” Mrs. Sarah called once again, concerned as to why her children were bucking at the open window, until Shelone moved back, allowing her to watch her beloved children fall one behind the other. “My babies!” she screamed in destructive agony, bolting toward them until Shelone turned to face her with baby Joseph in her arms and the knife to the baby’s chest. “No!” she cried, reaching out for her newborn baby. “No!” Mrs. Sarah fell to the floor, spreading her arms out as far as she could, begging and pleading, nearly able to touch the toes she forced Shelone to scrub in order to even walk on the floors of her home. “Don’t kill my baby! Oh God, my babies! Somebody help me!” She slammed her hands multiple times against the floor which was directly above the kitchen in order to get the attention of the kitchen hands.
“Now you see, Sarah. How it feel now...to watch your children be taken from you?”
“I didn’t kill your children!” she scowled back at her with all her might. “I didn’t kill your children!” she continued to scream, insanely shaking her head viciously. “They’re alive!”
“I heard what you did. You did it to hurt me, and now look how you slapped me, laughing at me, even with my dead baby on my back. I done worked for you all my life, Sarah, and you hate me more and more the years come.” Then, Shelone started to smile. “You think you can just have more...replace ‘em like that like you tell me to do? One can’t replace another, Mrs. Sarah. Don’t you know that?” she questioned her mourning owner as she placed her brown foot on the arm of Charity, shoving her just a bit to watch Sarah flinch at the death of her child before her. It wasn’t long before Lucy stopped moving and her son. “You got me raising children who plan on killin’ me, Mrs. Sarah. Don’t you? There’s no sense in ‘em being raised like that because that would mean they were already dead, just like you are now. Just like me.”
It wasn’t two seconds later that three or four Negro women and men appeared at the room door to find Sarah sprawled out and the children all dead and bleeding on the floor. The women fell against the wall with their hands on their chest, and the men walked on inside, their mouths gaped open saying something that Shelone couldn’t even hear. Instead of trying to hear what they were saying, she aimed the knife directly at baby Joseph’s head, looked downward at Sarah who was still shouting and screaming for her child, and the last thing Shelone said was...
“He’s mine now.” Then, she turned toward the window, held on tightly to the small innocent, white baby in her arms, and shouted as she positioned the knife at her own chest. “We’re free!” Then, she threw herself from the window, landing on a pile of wood below, crushing herself and the living baby to death as her dead baby Abraham remained intact and dead on her back. The knife tore directly into her chest, and the onlookers immediately began to cry out and mourn.
Shelone’s head bled with the blood of both her and the child trapped beneath her. As Shelone fell the short yet powerful distance to her death, she looked out into the cotton fields that stared back at her and watched as her children waved with smiles on their faces before death shut the vision. The troubles of slave life escaped her body as those same horrors entered the body of her massah’s wife, Sarah. It was the worse type of curse believed to be left to a soul that continued to walk on the earth. Hardly anyone ever dared to use it because the old people would say that once that curse started, it never stopped, but carried on from generation to generation. The first time it ever started on this land of cotton was with Mrs. Sarah, and every Negro on the land knew it. That was the reason they feared touching her body.
Screams ridden with despair and misery plummeted from the window above as Mrs. Sarah fought to wake her own children from their death on the wooden floors of her bedroom, and when she couldn’t wake them, she was held from throwing herself from the window to save her newborn by the Negro men and women who understood exactly what happened. It frightened them to their core, and even the Negro men shook at the thought of what was coming.
From the ground, as the screams continued endlessly from Mrs. Sarah, it was the lady who set the table with Shelone that walked around to the side of the house and fell to the ground at the sight of the pile of bodies. She knew exactly who it was, and when she saw the white baby underneath Shelone’s body, crushed to death, she vomited all over the ground. Before she even looked up, all the Negro women and children began to run. They knew...they just knew.
“Run back, chu’ren! Get away, far away! Go to the edge of the fields, chu’ren.” yelled an older lady who knew the horrors to come. All of the women ran to their huts to collect food and began to bury it in a hole they had dug in the woods while the men began to drink plenty water, as much as they could. Even the house help began to take food from the kitchen out of the things they’d already made and handed it off to each other until it made it to the edge of the woods.
“What’s wrong? What’s going on? Sarah! Oh my God, that’s my Sarah...Sarah!” Mr. Marksman shouted. The sound of the screams jolted him back toward the house, and he arrived as fast as his legs could carry him to find his wife being held by Negro men at the window which made him infuriated...until he saw the sight directly in front of him. “What happened here?” he stared onto Shelone’s dead body stunned. Immediately, he angrily kicked the dust from the ground, but when the dust settled, his eyes focused in on his newborn son Joseph crushed to death under Shelone’s body. It was within seconds that he rushed to throw Shelone’s body off of the wood, causing it to fall face first into the dirt as the onlookers shrieked in horror as the knife jutted out from her body. Baby Joseph was still in her arms as baby Abraham was on her back. That was when Mr. Marksman tore his bloody son from the arm of Shelone, causing her body to roll over on her own dead son.
“My boy! My son! What happened to my son?” he cried, falling to his knees, no longer able to hear his wife screaming, as he concentrated on patching his son back together again, however, absolutely nothing worked. “Joseph!” he cried until he suddenly stood back up and rushed his bloody child upstairs, partially stepping on Shelone’s head as he made his way to the side door between a few men and women. “Did you do this? Huh? Did you...” he hollered, grabbing a Negro man by the shirt with one hand and tossing him to the ground before he raced inside the house to clean his son off.
He ran upstairs as fast as his legs could carry him, all the while sobbing like his own life was taken from him, and when he arrived at his bedroom, he fell back into the wall, only to slide down until he hit the floor in horror. “Oh dear God, my babies! All my children,” he called out, shutting his eyes and shaking his head back and forth. Finally, he leaned over with his newborn still in his arms and crawled over to his daughters and other son who lie there in pools of blood as Sarah jolted back and forth like her body was being electrocuted.
The Negro women ran from the room while the men stood there, uncertain of what to do. If they stood there, they would possibly be blamed for it all by not only him but his wife, but if they ran, they would surely be blamed anyway for something they weren’t at fault for, leading to a hanging. Every Negro family on the plantation knew that trouble had already brewed, and it wasn’t going to stop until it was time. When that time was, however, no one knew.
“My babies...she killed my babies,” Sarah whined. “She took ‘em. She cut ‘em up, and I can’t stop the bleedin’, I can’t,” she panted to her husband whose hands were already soaked in the blood of his children.
“Shelone...she did this? Is that the her you talkin’ about, Sarah? That slave gal out there did this?” His eyes lifted up at her in a rage she’d never before seen.
“She jumped clear out the window with Joseph and that knife at her chest.” Then, she started laughing, completely distraught. “And she said that’s what I get. She said...” Her eyes opened wider and stared at him. “It was you! You told her I wanted her long ago! You did it!” she attacked him with all her force.
“Get her off of me!” he called at the men in the room, but they hesitated to touch her, so he shoved her back. “I did nothing! You asked me for her countless times, and I finally got the opportunity to get her for you, your own personal help, but I didn’t tell her that you asked for her one time! What is this, Sarah? My children are in here dead on a count of your nigger gal and you blame me? You blame me!”
“She said she knew about me, and how did she know anything? How? Just how?” she hollered, pulling each one of her bloody children into her arms. “She did this on purpose, you know? I slapped her in the face,” she laughed. “She spited me...spited us. She had this all planned out. All of it!” Then, she suspiciously glanced at the two men who stood near the wall awaiting orders from Mr. Marksman. Immediately, they got scared and began to utter negatively toward the remarks that they knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, were going to come from Mrs. Sarah’s mouth. “Y’all helped her? Y’all concocted this massacre...this uprising!”
“No ma’am, Mrs. Sarah! We had nothin’ to do with it. We just here to help is all. Been working for you, a long time. We ain’t run. We here. We ain’t done nothin’.”
“Don’t you stand there with your smutty skin and tell me that you don’t hate me and all I have!” She then spit on them both. She stared in horror back at her husband who was pacing around his dead children. “Do somethin’! Do something now!” she growled. “I want them all dead! All of ‘em!”