CHAPTER 3
Days passed in the way days tend to do. Emily worried some over Nathan’s arm, but contented herself with having kept a family together. The heat clung to everything with an unrelenting dampness. Seeking some relief from the stifling afternoon, Emily entered the library to find Ginny engrossed in one of the many books collected there, by both the judge and her mother, who by all accounts had been an avid reader. Emily loved to come upon Ginny reading and felt a surge of gratitude to her father for including Ginny in their household tutoring, for setting up a school for all his slaves in spite of their education being illegal. Emily tilted the corner of the book to see the title: Jane Eyre, one of her childhood favorites. She identified with the orphan girl and remembered weeping inconsolably at the death of Jane’s only friend, Helen.
“What do you think of it, Ginny?”
“I think I wished I knew a woman that strong.” Ginny laid the book aside and picked up the feather duster. “I think I wished I was one.”
“Yes, I wish the same. Now leave that, Ginny. Take some time to read.”
“No, ma’am. I’m gone finish up this here library right now. I gots a heap to get done today.”
Emily studied Ginny’s back for a moment. “Ginny,” she said, “there is something I keep wondering about and maybe now is the time to ask. You studied with me, with my tutor. You spent most of your life in this house. Why do you not speak correctly?”
Ginny took several swipes at a high shelf before answering. She lowered the duster and turned. “Yes, Miss Emily, I have studied and I have learned almost everything that you have, though I began somewhat later than you did. Was that correct enough?” She turned and pushed the duster into the back of a shelf.
“Yes, of course, Ginny. I know you can speak as well as I do, and yet you persist in speaking the slave dialect.”
“And do you know what speaking as well as I know how to, as well as you do, speaking better than lots of white folks around here, would make me? An ‘uppity nigger,’ that’s what. Do you know what happens to ‘uppity niggers’ around here, especially women? Rape? Lashings? Things you couldn’t protect me from in spite of owning me.”
“I’m sorry, Ginny. I didn’t mean—” Emily stumbled on her words. “What I mean is your education makes you special. You shouldn’t waste it.”
Ginny pulled the duster through her other hand and shook her head. “No, Miss Emily, I ain’t special. I tell you who special. Them black folk breaking they backs out there in the sun trying to make a life for themselves out of leftovers, they the folk who special.” Ginny straightened to her full height and laid the duster beside the closed book. “Education does not make a person special,” she said, her face clear and open. “Courage and fortitude and perseverance, self-denial, and any number of other admirable qualities, like Jane Eyre, like your papa going up against slavery—those things make a person special. And as to dialect, I don’t know what that is. I do know this. What I am speaking so correctly now is ‘white’ dialect. It sets me apart from my own and I choose not to be set apart. What we speak is a language, black language, slave language, one forged out of the most impossible conditions: seized from all parts of Africa, speaking hundreds of different languages, unable to understand even one another, chained up by slavers speaking multiple other languages. And out of that, Miss Emily, these tortured people made a way to communicate with one another and with their enslavers. That is history you have not studied in your books. And those are my people whose language I will not dishonor by failing to speak it. You asked me plain out, Miss Emily, and I answer you plain out. And I ain’t saying nothing about that subject again.”
Ginny returned Jane Eyre to the shelf, picked up the duster, and left Emily alone in the room full of books.