CHAPTER TWENTY

WHEN THE SUN WAS just beginning to fall down from its perch, Yasmine placed her last bushels of wheat in the oxcart and nodded to Mrs. Barnes when she passed her in the kitchen. When she walked to the dining room, Penny was already there, sweeping imperceptible dust from the top of the bureau, the bookshelves, and the table. If there was one thing Old Master insisted on, it was a clean house; he could be like a woman in that way.

Lani lay on a small blanket on the floor, sucking on a piece of apple Penny had given her. Yasmine picked her up, hoping that, somehow, being connected to her daughter would remind her of what she had to do.

Penny looked over her shoulder. “Afternoon, Mrs. Yasmine,” she said, a shy grin spreading across her face. Penny was only thirteen, and though her body still resembled a child’s, there was something older in her neck and shoulders. Or perhaps it was her back, the way she held herself—upright, but a little bit fatigued. Like she was already tired of this world and eager to step across whatever pain would last an instant into the gentle oblivion of the next. Lani would never grow up to know that feeling and have that wish. Yasmine would make sure of it.

“Afternoon, Penny,” Yasmine answered back. She walked over to the girl and kissed her on her forehead, just below her head wrap. Yasmine pursed her lips and tasted the bitter saltiness of Penny’s perspiration. She wanted the taste and the sweat itself to be the only things she carried from this place that lasted, save her children.

Penny cocked her head and looked at Yasmine askance. “What you do that for?” She placed her right hand on the same hip. Mirth played at the corners of her mouth.

Yasmine walked past her to the bureau. She pulled out the polished maple case that contained all the silver, which was given to Old Master’s father, who was the first Quaker to start a plantation in Virginia. Old Master had told them the story so many times—usually when he was handing out their measly pittance of a salary every month. “He was a man before his time, my father,” Old Master would say, his palsied left hand pointing at them and shaking with his madness. “All the other white men wouldn’t even call their workers ‘workers.’ They called them slaves—because they were slaves! They didn’t pay them anything for their labor, whipped them, mutilated them, even killed some. But my father would have none of that. He insisted on a more humane manner of dealing with his fellow men. He insisted that they have decent quarters, be fed properly, never be whipped or physically harmed in any way, even if they flagrantly disobeyed orders—and he even paid them! Can you imagine what it meant forty years ago, to have coloreds in your possession in the state of Virginia, and to insist upon their humanity?”

At this point, Old Master would invariably set an invasive stare on whoever was unfortunate enough to be next in line for payment, and they would flinch and look away. But Yasmine never did. She just stood there, and met him where he was. Once, when she was fifteen years old, in the middle of the story—the part about the things that the other white men did to their coloreds—she had interrupted him. “They rape their colored women too?” she asked evenly. His eyes screamed, and his left hand stopped shaking for an instant. Behind her, in the full line of hot, sweaty coloreds, someone coughed. Someone else shuffled their shoes, but mostly what she heard was the collective quiet of held breaths. He grunted some kind of affirmation finally and then handed her a small pouch of coins.

“What? I can’t give my niece a kiss from time to time?” Yasmine asked now, lifting three spoons from their velvet casings and blinking away the memory. She didn’t want to take them either.

Lani cooed in her arms, grabbing at specks of dust in the air illuminated by sunlight.

“No, that ain’t it,” Penny said, turning to face her. “You know I ’preciate anything you got to give me in the way of love. It’s just that you ain’t exactly a whole bundle of affection, usually.”

Yasmine snickered. It was so easy to be with Penny—she would miss that. “Well, I ain’t exactly got a lot to be affectionate about, usually.” She shifted Lani to her hip and scrubbed at the first spoon with the coarse rag vigorously. The silver caught a ray of sunlight and reflected it back in her eye, and her pupil smarted. Although it could sometimes hurt like this, she loved the sun and couldn’t wait to get out in it, moving with her boys and Lani, day in and day out.

Penny sucked her teeth. “You better watch your language, missus. You know God don’t like ugly.” She moved her dustrag onto the gold-flecked frame that contained a painting of Old Master’s father, enthroned in his study, Bible in hand.

Yasmine snickered again and raised an arm toward the picture. “See now, that’s you all’s problem—you think that’s God.”

Penny turned around and faced her, presumably to study her and see if she was being serious.

Yasmine picked up the next spoon and let its coldness ripple up her spine. “That ain’t God. In fact, neither that man nor his son ever had a conversation with God or his son. But yet, they got every colored up in this place thinking that they the very incarnation of all that’s holy.” She shook her head. “It’s a shame. It’s a shame what they done to us.” She put down the last spoon and peered out the window. The light was beginning to fade; she had better finish up in here, quick.

Penny looked at her aunt, befuddled. “There be plenty of worse places to make a home,” she said. “And you ain’t even have to go that far to find them, neither.” Penny shook her head. “You heard what Master Kennedy tell Old Master Scott last spring, right?”

Yasmine knew, but she turned her attention to the last few utensils at the bottom of the case.

“He tell Master he whip any of us what wander to his place, even if we family relations. He tell him he don’t want to see his coloreds getting any strange ideas in they heads about how they should be getting paid, how they should be having nicer quarters and better food. He say every time one of them come back from visiting us, the whole plantation be agitated for weeks—field hands, house help—complaining ’bout unfair treatment and the like. He tell Old Master were it up to him, he like to round up all the Scott people and shoot them. Say they tampering with nature, the way he running things.”

Yasmine set Lani down and then pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. She walked over to Penny and enclosed her in her arms. The intensity of the gesture surprised them both.

“Good night,” Yasmine said, stepping away from her. She wished she could know, know for sure, that Penny would leave one day. She wished she could ask her to come along, but she knew better.

Penny’s eyes were wet, and she searched Yasmine’s. “Why you so . . . different tonight?” She took her aunt’s hand. “Feel like you got something you keeping tight, right here.” She brought her fist to her chest. “Like something got caught there, or caught you.”

Yasmine only smiled, scooped up Lani, stepped into the doorway, and with a last look, tried to memorize the way Penny’s spine curved deeply when she stretched toward items that were out of reach. The sharp point of her nose in profile, the jut of her upper lip, which sometimes made her look stern, when she wasn’t at all. Who would she end up being? Who could she end up being? Yasmine’s eyes smarted, and she walked out of the doorway, into the living room, and out the front door, Lani ever watchful in her arms.