Stand the Storm Read online

  Ridley decided he would get more work from the enterprise if he sent Annie’s girl, Ellen, to join her mother and brother in Georgetown. Becoming known for her exquisite knitted work, Ellen could pick up the slack for her slow mother. Perhaps she might add her own distinctive work.

  Ellen’s coming to Georgetown appeared to be a fortunate turn of luck. So much a fortunate turn that Gabriel and Annie mistrusted it. Most often Jonathan Ridley’s capriciousness frustrated them. This one time his whim had blown a breeze of pleasure toward them.

  They deferred their joy until Ellen arrived.

  Ellen came to Washington carrying the babe called Delia like an appendage to her left arm. She mostly held the twelve-month-old child on her left hip and grasped her as if she feared the baby would be snatched away.

  The baby had a head of hair that was curly and copper-colored, thus her appearance arrested the eye. Ellen, concerned the child’s looks caused curiosity, covered her head with a cloth. This head rag gave the baby the appearance of an old lady. Folk on the place cooed to her, calling “Ol’ Maw, Ol’ Maw, Maw, Maw.” They tickled her and capered, and most on the place came to do it—to call the babe Maw Maw.

  Annie had heard about the goings-on at Ridley Plantation in her usual circuitous fashion. This one and that one told this one and that and the tale was brought to Washington in this one’s mouth.

  It remained to know what had happened on the Warren Plantation though. Right away Annie understood Delia was not the child of Ellen’s body. She had drunk from that well. You can’t make something so by just saying it.

  “There’s not one red-haired Ridley ever been seen,” Favor Brown said knowingly, for she had born three for the master. “All of Ridley’s yard children are sandy-colored with brown hair.” It was true and it was incontrovertible among all at Ridley Plantation. Annie was reassured upon this fact.

  Two seasons previously, a planter nearby the Ridley place had set an abundant crop of tobacco and had hired hands for the operation from Jonathan Ridley. Augustus Warren had wanted a gang of “soft” hands to work at topping off his tobacco plants. Dexterous young women were preferred, girls who could work fast and sure, pulling flowered heads off the delicate plants. Ridley had hired out a gang of five young women, including Sewing Annie’s Ellen, to the Warren Plantation.

  Jonathan Ridley had satisfied his curiosity of Ellen—pulling on her teats and plowing her haunches. He was certain now that he had not missed a delectable within his reach. He had not! Her coldness—her frantic resistance—was a damper on his desire and he regretted the trouble of her. Watching her come up a coddled little thing at the center of her adoring circle—Sewing Annie and Gabriel doted upon Ellen in their way—Ridley had made a plan. He thought she might be a saucy playmate. But Ellen was no comfort, though she was soft from sitting and doing lap work. She was cool and tight and combative and unsatisfactory. He thought to ship her away.

  Warren Plantation was a far larger enterprise than Ridley’s, for Augustus Warren had several crops under cultivation on his several places and had scores of hands under the whip. The Ridley gang was housed in a large wattle-and-daub cabin and worked, slept, and ate together. The arrangement of keeping the Ridley slaves together was satisfactory to the girls as well as to Master Warren.

  The driver of the gang of young women for tobacco topping was an experienced woman called Nancy. She had the technique for removing the flowers from the plant, and she instructed the green girls in how to do the job and save the plants.

  As Nancy kept her gang productive, she was not much questioned in her handling of the girls. She was the undisputed authority and allowed no overseer to interfere with them. Nor was she upbraided for the confrontational tone often taken with the white bosses. She kept the girls at their work from sunup to sundown and well apart from the white men on the place.

  Though they sometimes chafed under her, Nancy kept her authority with the topping gang. She brooked no laziness or insubordination and wasted no sweat on hurt feelings. She toughened them on the work—pushing and goading. The topping gang knew it was lucky to have Nancy to drive them.

  At the complaint of one of the white men that a stick had been used on his back when he followed one of Nancy’s girls into their cabin, Nancy was made to stand to charges. After an hour and a half of threats and one hard slap at her mouth while her gang stood idle and feigned confusion, Nancy was sent back to get them hard at it. The clever girls saved their boss a further beating.

  Rather than break the whole crew for the noon meal, Nancy sent one girl to fetch the basket for the gang directly at the kitchen door. It was no honor or privilege or light work to fetch the gang’s dinner. It was necessary to walk from the tobacco field, hoist two large baskets of the vittles, and carry both all the long way back to the field. The one who fetched would suffer the heated displeasure of the gang and of Nancy if she were too slow or too careless of the meal. Though the fetching was drudgery it was a change from the punishing tobacco work. The gang went to the field in dark and returned to their cabin in dark. This fetching afforded the briefest opportunity—on the way to the kitchen—to swing the arms freely at the sides of the body, to feel them dangle there, and to let the ache of fieldwork run off like an oil. When it was Mattie’s turn, the food came quickly. She and Nancy drew off together and the others tittered over a hotter, longer supper.

  On the hot afternoon that Ellen took her fetch day, the cook had ridden to town to have her tooth pulled. Ellen came into the kitchen as she was accustomed to and was no more surreptitious than was usual. They should have heard. Ellen saw the girl called Katharine who helped the cook. The cook herself never bothered with dishing up vittles for the gangs. Her grimy assistant handed out portions to the fetchers.

  The girl certainly should have heard Ellen coming. She should have done something to hide the picture from view. But there they had been as plain as the nose on Ellen’s face: Katharine with her bodice askew and holding Esau’s hand against her breasts.

  Because of the heat Ellen had thought momentarily that it was cool relief Katharine was after. But Ellen had seen the black hand on the girl’s naked white skin. Esau had turned dead-calm eyes toward Ellen where she’d stood in the doorway. His face expressionless, his fat fingers continued to mash Katharine’s untidy breasts.

  Ellen froze. She put her eyes to the floor and did not move. She resolved to remain in this state brought on by the great fear in her until one or the other of them moved away. Lord in heaven! What will happen? What has happened? What have I happened upon? was the dialogue in her brain. She reflected upon what Jonathan Ridley had taught her when he’d come to the loom room while his wife was at her afternoon rest. He had grasped Ellen by the wrist and brought her to a corner of the barn. He pinched her face and pulled it toward a lamp. He pulled at her breasts and watched her face. He handled her so swiftly that his thrusting was not as painful as her mother had prepared her to expect.

  Katharine broke the impasse when she snorted disdainfully. Who was a gal like this gal to be pretending she don’t know nothing about what you do with menfolk? Katharine slapped Esau’s fumbling hands away from her breasts and slapped his face. She adjusted her bodice and pushed out of the pantry past Ellen turned to salt. Katharine stopped abruptly, turned, and slapped Ellen across the face. The blow jogged Ellen from her shock. She assembled the vittles and hoisted and hauled the gang’s meal back to the field.

  It got to be a regular thing that Katharine and Esau went into the back pantry or the root cellar when Mrs. Clover, the cook, was gone for her rest and it was Ellen’s turn to fetch for the tobacco girls. Ellen became complicit. She looked at them. And the looking fascinated and shamed her and caused her to feel she must stand on the secret. She feared if anybody found out about these goings-on there’d be a big ruckus and she’d be pulled into it. She knew that just knowing about this and not telling could earn trouble.

  Katharine Logan was a girl who had been working on the Warren place for
five years. She worked in the kitchen as a cook’s helper and she served at the table. She was the oldest in a family of ten hungry young ones. Her mother had said gently but clearly that Katharine would have to go out to earn her bread. There was no help for it. The second oldest girl would stay and help Mama. Katharine was pushed out. Mother had arranged for her indenture to the Warren family to secure her meals and board and some useful instruction. And the family would receive credit at the Warren stores to get some blankets and mattress ticking.

  Katharine Logan was on her own from that time. She considered herself fortunate. The Warrens were rich people—the richest of the rich from Katharine’s point of view. For the first time in her life she had meals to count on and bedding not wet with the urine of some small child.

  Katharine was brought on to assist the Warren cook, who was Irish like Katharine’s own people. The cook, a stern, uncharitable woman, decided that Katharine was a low-class slacker as soon as she laid eyes on her.

  Katharine was a physically developed girl who had not had the benefit of much advice, attention, or wardrobe. What clothes she had to cover herself were threadbare. Siobhan Clover complained against the poor girl to the mistress and said Katharine stank to high heaven. Mrs. Clover further huffed and snorted that she was above sleeping in the same quarters as this stinking slacker. She took it upon her own authority to banish Katharine from the sleeping quarters meant to be shared by the kitchen workers. The girl was left to hole up in a tiny slip adjoining the pantry.

  As a rule, Mrs. Clover distanced herself from the distasteful supervision of the slaves. So she exercised her supervisory privileges on Katharine. The woman set Katharine to fetching and toting water, peeling vegetables, and carrying supplies. Katharine became skilled at avoiding Mrs. Clover. Eluding the woman was something of a proof against boredom for the girl.

  Esau was a boy who’d been stunned by a blow to his head as a child. His dullness was confirmed by the expression he bore ever since. His face was as if suspended between a dull angry scowl and an attempt to smile. It was a perplexing visage and taken by most as a sign of Esau’s idiocy.

  Katharine kept her condition to herself right up to the time she was ready to deliver. Ellen, who’d been in on the situation from the beginning, pretended she didn’t know about what was coming. Katharine hid herself under wide skirts until Mrs. Clover finally caught sight of her sleeping with her cheek resting in her palm, propped against a small apple tree in the backyard. Her wide skirts had fallen away from her stomach and the outline was plain to view.

  It followed that Siobhan Clover berated Katharine for being an ignorant Irish whore—a slut. She threatened to tell the mistress to turn her out. Katharine mumbled to Mrs. Clover that an itinerant tinker had done the deed and begged to be allowed to stay to work out her term of service.

  Mrs. Clover and the mistress weighed the trouble of discharging this girl and breaking in another hardheaded, redheaded whore of a kitchen worker. Self-interest won out and they allowed Katharine to remain at her job with the proviso that her term of indenture would be extended to cover the period of her lying-in and any expenses related to the inconvenience of the babe.

  Mrs. Clover had doubts about the story of the itinerant tinker. She represented to Mistress that she believed the father of Katharine’s bastard was one of the overseers, Jonas Kelly, a drunken adulterous lout whose manner was not sufficiently respectful toward the cook. Mistress and Mrs. Clover brought forth to Master that Katharine’s pregnancy was evidence of Jonas Kelly’s villainy. He was discharged upon their word.

  Mrs. Clover ruminated on the true paternity of this babe. She didn’t remember a tinker or any such, and figured she would have. She was more observant than the girl suspected. She had developed eyes in the back of her head as a child ducking blows from her own vicious family people. The cook had seen Katharine and Esau together and had caught the temper of the relation.

  Ellen worried that Mrs. Clover had found out the true paternity of Katharine’s baby. For Mrs. Clover sealed Katharine’s punishment by arranging for her lying-in to be in the shacks used by the bondwomen working the tobacco. Her labor was to be attended by Meander, the slave midwife, a further insult arranged by Mrs. Clover. Could she have guessed? The ramifications of this birth worried Ellen mightily.

  “She’ll be seven years in the workhouse do this come out. Look at that child! It ain’t no ways white! This a colored baby child! Look at her head!” the midwife brayed like a mule. “Dis why she brung her down here!” Ellen was frightened that the woman wouldn’t keep her mouth closed. If word spread through the colored community and then to the white folks that a white girl had given birth to a colored baby, Katharine would be sent to the workhouse. The child would simply be taken and sold south to the first trader who had the price.

  “How this come about? You know ’bout who she been screwing to bring a colored baby?” Meander interrogated Ellen. “What all is going on here, girl?”

  Ellen looked at the copper-colored corkscrews on the babe’s head. The child’s hair color was similar to its mother’s hair, though it was not slick and straight. Her skin was butter-colored—a color often seen among colored folks. She’d never pass for white, and Katharine would never be allowed to stay a white woman and be her mama.

  Ellen held a washbasin and pitcher for the old attendant and the woman scrubbed away Katharine’s bloody particulars from her hands and arms. The foul pail was given to Ellen to pitch. She was reluctant to turn her back on the old woman. It would be easy enough to smother the babe and be rid of the trouble. She sloshed the refuse out back of the cabin.

  Ellen didn’t know what to say to the midwife so she said nothing—only looked at the woman and squinted a bit, as if fending off a foul breeze of questions. She didn’t have to do much talking. Mrs. Clover soon swooped in the cabin and took over the situation.

  The first task she fell to was to upbraid the midwife for opening her mouth to croak at all. Mrs. Clover threatened to throttle the woman if she talked to anyone. She put her arms akimbo and convinced the other woman she was well up to the task of beating her senseless. The midwife took low. She stood back from the pallet where Katharine lay and calculated the value of her silence. She recognized Mrs. Clover as a white woman, but one who was surely scared. Only a dullard could miss that the cook held herself culpable in this pregnancy. And Meander was no dullard. Siobhan Clover’s fears were palpable. Mistress considered Mrs. Clover, because of her longevity on the place, to be the de facto supervisor of the white women who worked under her. She was to train them and keep her eyes on them for trouble. It was her responsibility to ensure that Katharine did not fall into just such a hole as she was peering out from. Mistress would see it that Mrs. Clover had shirked her duty. And the blame might splash upwards to soil the mistress’s skirts if the master got wind of what had really gone on beneath his nose.

  Katharine Logan returned to the kitchen within a day of her delivery of the babe. Mrs. Clover instructed Katharine in wrapping her milk-swollen breasts and gave her a clean dress.

  For the first two or three days after the birth, Katharine sniffled and wept. The cook berated her. She harangued that a worthless slacker like Katharine should be relieved that she’d been saved the trouble of raising a bastard child. Mrs. Clover said plainly that Katharine’s tears were unseemly, worthless, and tiresome and would not be tolerated.

  The twisting, serpentine plot that Siobhan Clover concocted unfolded beautifully for her purposes. The disgusting lout Jonas Kelly was further accused in absentia of fathering a baby on the Ridley slave gal, Ellen. That explanation would silence all talk about color. Kelly’s reputation for drinking insulated the accuser from the bother of substantiating her claims. He was getting his payment for his profligate eyes.

  Mrs. Clover reasoned that though a series of lies such as these could not be easily excused, they did prevent the more extreme necessity of infanticide.

  Ellen was told to take the babe and to tell
no one of the child’s true origins. Mrs. Clover threatened to knock her head off her shoulders if she raised an objection. And though Ellen did not object to taking the baby, Siobhan Clover did cuff her at the ears for standing stock-still with her mouth open in disbelief. Ellen was too shocked to utter a peep. She put her arms out and took the child.

  Ellen squeezed goat’s milk into the baby’s mouth from a pouch, for there was no suckling woman to feed the child. When judged sturdy enough to travel, Ellen and the babe were sent back to Ridley with the attitude that the Warrens were washing their hands of the trouble of them.

  On the morning she was to be packed off, Ellen narrowed her eyes, then lowered them beseechingly at Mrs. Clover and begged to be allowed to take the goat with her and the child.

  On the road back to Ridley Plantation, the goat was more trouble than the baby girl. The child did not cry. She accepted her milk rag and slept. The goat balked at trailing behind the wagon, so Ellen pulled it in the wagon and held it tightly with a rope to keep it from bolting.

  Master Ridley was told that Ellen was given a child by a former overseer. The Warrens as much as said that any idea that Ellen had been ruined during her time at the Warren place was compensated by the boon of the baby. Ridley was thought to be coming out ahead in the deal. The queer circumstances, however, made Ridley suspicious.

  Suspicious he was, but nervous, too. He toted up the time that Ellen had been at the Warren place and wondered if she were bringing back something that had begun with him. But the cap of copper rings on the babe’s head convinced all that this babe was not a Ridley. As well, the timing did not suit. Ridley chuckled to himself at sight of the young woman returning.

  “Aye, this Ellen is a cold bargain. I credit the man who would tup her and give her a prize.”