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Cold Running Creek Excerpt:Summer 1851, LeFlore Plantation, Mississippi Josephine’s baby was swaddled in light cotton, almost the weight of gauze. The days were cool in the morning, but stifling by noon. The baby girl’s skin was honey colored just like her father’s, her cheeks two semicircles that squeezed her tiny nose when she fixed her face to cry at night, but Josephine coaxed her purple nipple between the child's searching lips and kept her quiet. The next day the child slept, having been kept awake all night by Josephine's thump, pinch, tickle. In the day, the blankets were hung over the windows, the baby placed quietly in the little trough crib, and off Josephine went to the fields for early summer planting. Josephine was so tired the next day. Every time she stood from breaking the clumps with the dirt rake, dizziness threatened to lift her up out of her body. She may as well have been a ghost. She did not remember dropping seeds into the last three holes she'd prepared, but she was sure she had as she drifted between dream and awake. She saw her new baby's face in each of the tiny rocks she flicked away from tilled soil with her cracking fingernails. "Mama Josephine." Lula, the young girl who helped with the labor some nights before, spoke into the dream space. "Best wake up, Mama Josephine." "Hush, child, I ain’t sleepin." Josephine's voice was hoarse as if morning had not been driven away by noon. The girl kept poking the smoothed poplar stick into the mounds, and dropping seed from the grain bag. She kept her pace slow and watched Josephine in her side vision. "The baby girl, she feed good last night, Mama Jo?" "Yes, sure ‘nuf." Josephine bent back to the sun and squeezed the tired muscles of her back. "Gonna keep her long as I can." Josephine’s face was chestnut brown against the flawless blue sky. “Sure ‘nuf Mama Josephine,” was all Lula said when she saw the way Josephine’s tired face stretched out against the blue like a soul ready for rest. Josephine took a deep breath and stepped with young Lula in the planting. "Mama Jo, what make you think Massa gonna sell her? She ain’t even been weaned." "Child, I believe he was grievin about somethin awful that night. I believe he meant to lay with me too, but I don’t believe a man of rules like him meant to bring forth no Massa slave baby. I love what God done let me have of my own want, but Sybil is right, once Massa know a baby came of it, he ain’t gonna let that be." “Maybe you can go live in the big house and be his special gal.” Lula giggled. “Hush gal. Shush.” Josephine waved her arms in an attempt to keep the shame away from her; the shame that of all the unlikely women to ever lie with, Master Fox chose Mama Jo. Josephine flailed at the air as if swatting annoying deerflies. “I ain’t studin him.” “What kinda spell he had on you Mama Josephine?” Josephine mumbled, “The kind that say this ain’t none of that breedin stuff; and I don’t care what ya’ll think. That night was mine; that baby mine. I ain’t lying about you need to hush either Lula, so hush.” Little Man came down with the water. He was almost a teen boy, but he wasn't bigger than the little boys. Master Golden had set his tasks as running the water, running the cows back into the barn before a storm, running, because that's something he could put to use within the boundaries of those four hundred acres; a child bred to be a strong field hand, but he couldn’t be sold. He had short legs, big feet, a stout body, could run over the furrowed fields like a bunny rabbit, and all the while keep the water bucket steady. Josephine looked down on his nappy head, which glistened in her dizzy vision as he dipped the water. "You all right Mama Josephine?" They both looked up to see if Master Golden or Master Tchula was riding near. Grey Fox did not know it, but many of the older slaves who went on with Jack Flowers to the new Territory had called him Tchula li, Little Fox, and although they called him Massa Fox in his presence, he was Tchula li in the fields, some compassion still left for the man who was once a sullen little boy, now just the steel-faced man with nothing on his mind but keeping the rhythm of crops and the rhythm of good commerce. Josephine sipped a little from the clay cup, lips cracked, and she spilled the rest slowly down the front of her dress to blend the darkness of sweat around her collar with the leaking milk of her breasts. "She wasn't crying, was she Little Man?" "No ma'am, quiet as a little ole mouse." She waved him on, retied her white head cloth, and went back to breaking the clumps, poking the holes and dropping the seeds that would soon burst through the finely worked soil. In October of 1851, fall weather came early. The men’s eyes danced slow, graceful around the room. From across the hall, lush piano chords resounded, played by the twin servant Emma, who had been told several times to dust the keys without making music. The men were busy positioning themselves in the room and did not mind the music for their political dance. Only six years before, these same men discussed long into the night the conquests that led to the American-Mexican War. A thin, sweet layer of cigar smoke just above their heads drifted from the window and out to where one slave carried the news of the day to another. The information wafted down the hill to where the adult slaves were comforted by the damp smell of tightly wrapped tobacco, which meant news soon to come. Grey Fox held to his father’s tradition of hosting the meetings, a way to always take the pulse of pending conflict. The uniforms; gray against the pale skin of the bearded ones, the pale skin of the young blond ones and dark-haired ones. Most of them were Grey Fox’s age when he was gifted with the burden of this property. They laughed and lit the cigars as they settled into embroidered, upholstered chairs with cherry wood legs; their eyes danced, slowly assessing the comradery of the pack. Outside, an evening fall rain fell gentle at first, but heavy now that they were settled into the circle. The first ceremonial brandy burned in their guts, but Grey Fox’s snifter of brandy was still half full, and that was the first sign of his neutrality. General Thorpe spoke first and a leader was established. “The vote. We must influence the vote. Every good Democrat will be necessary in securing our seats in the Congress.” His uniform, tight across his chest, bound his shoulders and held him secure in the chair like a body after the passing, wrapped for anointing. He somehow managed to bend his arm and stroke the new beard; its first streaks of gray lay down straight like slumbering quills. He and Grey Fox were both forty, both approaching the conversation about slavery with territory to protect; General Thorpe’s being the territory of Mississippi, of the South, of commerce, the ports to the east where trade of barrel upon barrel of brandy had been stopped, where the shipment of brown shiny-skinned Africans had been stopped, where one day killing would result over an attempt to arrest the shipment of the king’s white crop. General Thorpe’s territory was the territory of the South, where he had grown up hunting, skipping rocks in the creek, and staying within the parameter where white men guarded against the wild spaces that had not yet been tamed. For Grey Fox, conversations about slavery were conversations concerning the territory he must guard, keep, watch, the land where his home had always been, where his demons and saints sat quiet inside the smoke-tinged walls of the sitting room where the men, including the esteemed newly appointed governor, John Isaac Guion, heralded by the Mississippian and State Gazette as a true Southern leader, smoked the finest cigars. Each man was to speak his opinion, to vow his commitment with upstagings of outrage. The governor spoke up when all had been said. “Be damned the North, Yankee thieves benefiting from our struggles and our ingenuity. Their textile mills run on our cotton labored in our fields, by our slaves. They depend on it, the French depend on it. I say we threaten trade and force more slave states. They’ll buckle. They wouldn’t risk annihilating the source of their wealth.” Then he proclaimed, after gulping his drink, “If war should come, I’ll burn my cotton fields to save them.” He turned to Grey Fox. “What will you have us do, good man? What would a man of white blood and Indian blood have us do? Speak to us as a man who has held his own through storms of change.” The governor’s theatrics threatened to rip the seams of his tight-breasted suit coat. Grey Fox sat expressionless, not listening to the chatter until now. He had been contemplating the painting above the mantel again, imagining his form sinking into the same place his father once sat in this chair, in this room, wielding power and gaining allies with the lie of loyalty. How had his father known what to do at every turn of white politics, when it seemed that to merely keep one’s affairs in order and survive was task enough? Grey Fox replayed the question, his face sober, the other faces loose, leaning in. “Tell us, half-blood.” Outside the window, the moonlight reflected in the cold raindrops as they slid down the wavering panes of glass. “Have your brandy, man; and speak,” General Thorpe said with a spray of spit flying from his lips. “I would say that we must fight for what is ours. For what we have worked hard to build.” ©2005 Zelda Lockhart. All rights reserved. Do not republish without permission from the author. |
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