5
Things were happening too fast for me. I was almost glad to find myself put back to work with Sarah and Carrie, ignored by Rufus. I needed time to catch up with myself—and catch up with life on the plantation. Carrie and Nigel had three sons now, and Nigel had never mentioned it to me because the youngest was two years old. He had forgotten that I didn't know. I was with him once, as he watched them playing. "It's good to have children," he said softly. "Good to have sons. But it's so hard to see them be slaves."
I met Alice's thin pale little boy and saw with relief that in spite of the way she talked, she obviously loved the child.
"I keep thinking I might wake up and find him cold like the others," she said one day in the cookhouse.
"What did they die of?" I asked.
"Fevers. The doctor came and bled them and purged them, but they still died."
"He bled and purged babies?"
"They were two and three. He said it would break the fever. And it did. But they … they died anyway."
"Alice, if I were you, I wouldn't ever let that man near Joe."
She looked at her son sitting on the floor of the cookhouse eating mush and milk. He was five years old and he looked almost white in spite of Alice's dark skin. "I never wanted no doctor near the other two," said Alice. "Marse Rufe sent for him—sent for him and made me let him kill my babies."
Rufus's intentions had been good. Even the doctor's intentions had probably been good. But all Alice knew was that her children were dead and she blamed Rufus. Rufus himself was to teach me about that attitude.
On the day after Weylin was buried, Rufus decided to punish me for letting the old man die. I didn't know whether he honestly believed I had done such a thing. Maybe he just needed to hurt someone. He did lash out at others when he was hurt; I had already seen that.
So on the morning after the funeral, he sent the current overseer, a burly man named Evan Fowler, to get me from the cookhouse. Jake Edwards had either quit or been fired sometime during my six-year absence. Fowler came to tell me I was to work in the fields.
I didn't believe it, even when the man pushed me out of the cookhouse. I thought he was just another Jake Edwards throwing his weight around. But outside, Rufus stood waiting, watching. I looked at him, then back at Fowler.
"This the one?" Fowler asked Rufus.
"That's her," said Rufus. And he turned and went back into the main house.
Stunned, I took the sicklelike corn knife Fowler thrust into my hands and let myself be herded out toward the cornfield. Herded. Fowler got his horse and rode a little behind me as I walked. It was a long walk. The cornfield wasn't where I'd left it. Apparently, even in this time, planters practiced some form of crop rotation. Not that that mattered to me. What in the world could I do in a cornfield?
I glanced back at Fowler. "I've never done field work before," I told him. "I don't know how."
"You'll learn," he said. He used the handle of his whip to scratch his shoulder.
I began to realize that I should have resisted, should have refused to let Fowler bring me out here where only other slaves could see what happened to me. Now it was too late. It was going to be a grim day.
Slaves were walking down rows of corn, chopping the stalks down with golf-swing strokes of their knives. Two slaves worked a row, moving toward each other. Then they gathered the stalks they had cut and stood them in bunches at opposite ends of the row. It looked easy, but I suspected that a day of it could be backbreaking.
Fowler dismounted and pointed toward a row.
"You chop like the others," he said. "Just do what they do. Now get to work." He shoved me toward the row. There was already someone at the other end of it working toward me. Someone quick and strong, I hoped, because I doubted that I would be quick or strong for a while. I hoped that the washing and the scrubbing at the house and the factory and warehouse work back in my own time had made me strong enough just to survive.
I raised the knife and chopped at the first stalk. It bent over, partially cut.
At almost the same moment, Fowler lashed me hard across the back.
I screamed, stumbled, and spun around to face him, still holding my knife. Unimpressed, he hit me across the breasts.
I fell to my knees and doubled over in a blaze of pain. Tears ran down my face. Even Tom Weylin hadn't hit slave women that way—any more than he'd kicked slave men in the groin. Fowler was an animal. I glared up at him in pain and hatred.
"Get up!" he said.
I couldn't. I didn't think anything could make me get up just then—until I saw Fowler raising his whip again.
Somehow, I got up.
"Now do what the others do," he said. "Chop close to the ground. Chop hard!"
I gripped the knife, felt myself much more eager to chop him.
"All right," he said. "Try it and get it over with. I thought you was supposed to be smart."
He was a big man. He hadn't impressed me as being very quick, but he was strong. I was afraid that even if I managed to hurt him, I wouldn't hurt him enough to keep him from killing me. Maybe I should make him try to kill me. Maybe it would get me out of this Godawful place where people punished you for helping them. Maybe it would get me home. But in how many pieces? Fowler would take the knife away from me and give it back edge first.
I turned and slashed furiously at the corn stalk, then at the next. Behind me, Fowler laughed.
"Maybe you got some sense after all," he said.
He watched me for a while, urging me on, literally cracking the whip. By the time he left, I was sweating, shaking, humiliated. I met the woman who had been working toward me and she whispered, "Slow down! Take a lick or two if you have to. You kill yourself today, he'll push you to kill yourself every day."
There was sense in that. Hell, if I went on the way I had been, I wouldn't even last through today. My shoulders were already beginning to ache.
Fowler came back as I was gathering the cut stalks. "What the devil do you think you're doing!" he demanded. "You ought to be halfway down the next row by now." He hit me across the back as I bent down. "Move! You're not in the cookhouse getting fat and lazy now. Move!"
He did that all day. Coming up suddenly, shouting at me, ordering me to go faster no matter how fast I went, cursing me, threatening me. He didn't hit me that often, but he kept me on edge because I never knew when a blow would fall. It got so just the sound of his coming terrified me. I caught myself cringing, jumping at the sound of his voice.
The woman in my row explained, "He's always hard on a new nigger. Make 'em go fast so he can see how fast they can work. Then later on if they slow down, he whip 'em for gettin' lazy."
I made myself slow down. It wasn't hard. I didn't think my shoulders could have hurt much worse if they'd been broken. Sweat ran down into my eyes and my hands were beginning to blister. My back hurt from the blows I'd taken as well as from sore muscles. After a while, it was more painful for me to push myself than it was for me to let Fowler hit me. After a while, I was so tired, I didn't care either way. Pain was pain. After a while, I just wanted to lie down between the rows and not get up again.
I stumbled and fell, got up and fell again. Finally, I lay face-down in the dirt, unable to get up. Then came a welcome blackness. I could have been going home or dying or passing out; it made no difference to me. I was going away from the pain. That was all.