Once she and William laid Robert down on the floor in the parsonage, Louella took Robert’s shirt off, revealing black and blue bruises on his chest. Louella scraped out the cream from the aloe vera plant and rubbed the liniment on Robert’s face, chest, and back. She was about to remove his pants to see if he needed liniment on his legs as well, but William stopped her. “That’s good enough for now. I need to get you out of here.”
Even though Louella wanted nothing more than to get away from the Montgomery Plantation, her eyes clouded with fear. “Where am I to go? We haven’t made plans yet. Will you come with me, or am I to go on my own?”
William’s eyes were dark with sadness. “I can’t leave Robert right now, but I can’t have Miss Mary reporting you as a trespasser and then have you thrown in the penitentiary.”
“B-but you can’t think she’ll really make me leave. What if I went back to work until we can plan things out? Maybe she’ll forget about her cruel words and let me stay.”
William shook his head. “Miss Mary is different since the war. I think she blames us for her first husband running off to the war and getting himself killed.”
“How’s that our fault?” Louella understood that she lived in a world full of injustices, but to hate a group of people for the folly of one man was beyond her.
“It’s not, but we can’t risk it. You will not deliver our baby in a penitentiary, so pack what you need and go to Robert’s farm.”
Robert turned to his side and moaned, “Elmira . . . I need Elmira.”
Louella pointed to her brother-in-law. “Who’s going to take care of him if I leave?”
William jabbed a finger toward his chest. “I will, but first I need to go down to the general store and collect Robert’s wagon.”
Louella’s eyes grew big. “No! No! Don’t you dare go to that general store. You see how they beat your brother? What you think they’ll do to you?”
He didn’t respond to that. “We don’t have much time to waste. Grab your things and head to Robert’s place while I go get the wagon.”
Louella clamped her hands around William’s wrists. “What if something goes wrong? What if you don’t come back to me?”
William loosened Louella’s hold on his wrists, put his hands on either side of her face, and let his lips touch hers for a fleeting moment. “You won’t lose me, my sweet Louella. I promise you that.”
His lips tasted of sweat and regret, like forbidden fruit hanging from a vine just out of reach. “I’m scared.” William’s safety mattered to her. She wanted him—no, needed him—with her.
“Be strong for me.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “I have to do this for Robert.”
Twisting away, she yelled, “Why? Why? Why do men always think they have to do things that don’t need doing? Why can’t Robert suffer a loss for being so foolish as to think those white folks cared anything about him?”
Robert rolled on the floor and moaned again as he pressed a hand to his ribs.
“I have to. Robert’s horse, Elmira, is special to him.”
Seeing that no sensible words would be able to talk her husband out of his folly, she grabbed her basket and walked around the parsonage, placing items of need in it. She then put her bonnet on her head and tied it under her chin.
William stepped onto the porch with her. He pulled her into his arms. The embrace was like heaven come down to earth.
“I love you. I’ll come see you soon as I can,” he whispered in her ear.
She wouldn’t say those I-love-you words back. They were too dangerous. Loving put cracks in her heart. Respect and admiration . . . those were good words and all she could give.
But even as she refused to return his love, she couldn’t stop the waterfall from coming at the thought of leaving him. Felt like they was still somebody else’s property. Like slavery days was still here, and just like her mama, she wouldn’t be able to have a family same as white folks had.
William went back into the parsonage. Louella started walking toward Robert’s place. As she passed by the cotton field, her wrist throbbed, her heart sped up, and her world narrowed until all she could see was that dreaded oak tree.
Most days she turned from that tree and continued about her way. On this day, her heart wouldn’t let it be. She couldn’t turn away as her mind took her back to the day she got those scars on her back and her wrist . . .
“Louella, gal, didn’t I say I needed two bushels of cotton from you today or I was going to tan your hide?”
“I tried real hard, sir. But it was powerful hot today. I almost fainted from the heat.”
Overseer Brown had been sitting on a stump watching the enslaved people head to the gin house to get their cotton weighed. He stood and snatched Louella off her feet, carrying her all the way back to the oak tree in the cotton field.
Louella was only twelve years old, but she’d seen what happened to enslaved people when the overseer strapped them to the tree, and she wanted no part of it. “No, stop! I’ll do better. I promise.”
But Brown wasn’t listening. Louella wiggled to escape his grasp. He threw her down on the ground and drug her the rest of the way to the tree. All the while, Louella was yelling, “I’ll be good! I’ll do better! Please . . . please don’t hurt me.”
The big oak tree’s branches were thick and sturdy. On the left side of the tree was a long strap, a loop at the end of it. The same type of strap hung from the right side of the tree. Brown pulled Louella close to the tree and grabbed one of the straps. He put her left hand in the loop, tightened it.
“Please . . . please . . . please.” Mama Sue was on the ground with her hands steepled as the enslaved people gathered ’round. “I’ll do anything you ask. Please don’t hurt my child.”
Brown tightened the other loop on Louella’s right hand. Her daddy ran over to him. “Whatever she done, I’ll take the whipping for it. You don’t have to do this to Louella.”
Brown signaled for Oliver, his helper who spied on the enslaved people and toted a pistol on his hip. “Get them out of my way. This gal is getting three lashes, and I bet she’ll get my bushels right tomorrow.”
“You heard him!” Oliver shouted. “Get.”
The enslaved people backed up as Louella’s arms stretched out like Jesus’ when He was crucified on the cross.
Brown tore off her shirt, exposing her to all eyes. He then pulled the whip from around his waist, reared back, and let it dance in the air.
When the first lash struck her back, Louella screamed, eyes rolling into the back of her head. By the second lash, the skin was ripping away from her body. She would have to use all the salve she had left to heal the fire that was raging on her back.
Trembling, Louella tried and tried to erase that memory, but it wouldn’t go. Her arms shook as she cried for that twelve-year-old girl who learned the hard way that no one could protect her from the evil in this world. But tears weren’t enough anymore, so she found herself running toward that tree with vengeance in her heart.
The straps that Overseer Brown used to tie enslaved people to the tree—the same straps that put the scar on her wrist—were still hanging from it. Even after slavery, the people on this plantation were too fearful to take those things down. “No more,” she said through clenched teeth. “No more.”
Louella placed her basket on the ground and searched for the pair of scissors she’d put in there. Once located, she took pleasure in cutting through the strap on the left and throwing the part that held the loop to the ground. She did the same for the one on the right. No one else would ever have their arms strapped to this tree while being beaten like an animal.
“Now I’ll go!” Louella shouted those words to the wind as if declaring that she lived and moved by her own volition.
* * *
It took Louella a minute to pull herself together. Walking the three miles down the road to Robert’s place, she stopped several times to breathe in and breathe out, taking in the scent of the magnolias and wet grass.
Louella kept walking, not even once looking back. The farther she moved away from the Montgomery Plantation, the more her breathing settled. Relief at not having to look out her window and see that cotton field anymore overtook her.
Robert had a small farm down the road from the Montgomery Plantation. Before the war, he owned his kind and harvested corn that he sold at the market. The people he enslaved were now free but still living on his farm. There was no planting being done. The farm had been ravaged as the Union soldiers torched all his crops. Robert hadn’t been able to put together the funds needed for his next crop, nor did he have anyone to sell it to.
She’d always hated the fact that Robert owned his own kind. Robert might look white, but his mother was colored, and she had been enslaved, forced to lie down with Massa Montgomery and have his babies. How Robert found no shame in building a farm on the backs of enslaved people, Louella didn’t understand.
She found no joy in the fact that Robert had been beaten for needing credit on food so he could feed himself and the seven workers who were still on his farm. But sometimes what went around came right back around.
“What am I doing here?” Louella said as she entered Robert’s home. She wiped down the table and chairs in his small dining area. She then got the wash bin out and washed the cotton sheets on Robert’s bed. This, too, bothered Louella. She and William didn’t own any sheets for their bed. They had an old blanket that Mr. Montgomery had given to William to wrap around their old mattress. Both the mattress and the blankets had been well used before they were given to William after being discarded from the big house.
But Mr. Montgomery’s other son, who’d been born free and looked as white as his father, had been given a farm and was allowed to travel all around the country, pretending to be white, owning his own kind and having cotton sheets.
Louella wrung the sheet out and then took it outside and hung it on the clothesline. God only knew what Robert did in that bed, so she wasn’t about to sleep in it without fresh sheets. As she headed back into the house, Abigail walked into the yard carrying a basket of folded clothes. She waved at Louella. “Hey, Mrs. Louella. What you doing over here?”
Abigail had long, wavy, brownish-blonde hair. Her skin was a sun-kissed tan, like the Black in her was fighting against the white that Lester Bailey left in her mama when he stole her innocence. After Abigail’s mama died, Mr. Bailey sold Abigail to another owner. That owner then sold her to Robert when she was about fifteen. If Louella recollected right, Abigail was about twenty years old now.
Louella had once seen her on the Montgomery Plantation making eyes at Tommy. But as far as she knew, the two had never courted. “I’m staying at Robert’s house for a spell.”
Abigail’s eyes lit with concern. She squinted. “Why you want to do a thing like that?”
Louella realized that Abigail thought she was staying at the farmhouse with Robert. She shook her head. “Robert’s been hurt. He’s at the parsonage with my husband, so William sent me here.” She didn’t bother to mention that hateful ol’ Mary had thrown her off the plantation.
“Hurt?” Abigail put a hand to her chest. “My goodness. What happened to Massa Robert?”
Abigail’s words rankled Louella, like teeth scraping together. “He’s not your master no more. You’re a worker, not enslaved.”
Abigail lowered her head. “Well, let me get these clothes in the house before Mr. Robert gets back.” She emphasized the word mister and walked inside the house.
Louella followed Abigail, not sure why the young woman seemed bothered about rinsing massa from her tongue. Louella decided to let it go. A lot of formerly enslaved people seemed stuck to her. They were all still in the same condition as they’d been before emancipation, so maybe they couldn’t think past what they saw day in and day out.
Abigail put her wash basket at the foot of Robert’s bed. She glanced around the house, then asked, “How long you think Mr. Robert’ll be gone?”
Louella thought about how badly Robert had been beaten and how weak he looked when she left the house. “He’ll probably be at the parsonage a few weeks.”
Abigail let out a whoosh of air. Her shoulders seemed to relax. Glancing at the basket on the floor, Louella asked, “Is that all you needed to do?”
Clasping her hands together and then letting them swing by her sides, Abigail nodded. “That’s it. I’ll get out your way, but if you need anything, my house is directly across from the farmhouse on the other side of the cornfield.”
“I’ll let you know if I need anything.” Louella closed the door behind Abigail and then began wringing her hands. Her mind hadn’t been on the others at the farm. What if they told Mary that she was here? Would Mary get her thrown off Robert’s farm too?
Placing a hand on her protruding belly, Louella looked up to heaven. “Lord, I done got myself in a pickle. I need You to direct William on what comes next for us. Need to be with my husband.”