Authors: Gen LaGreca
Unable—or unwilling—to
find a place in the household, she was returned to the kitchen, where she
remained recalcitrant. To Jerome’s vexation, she liked being near the horses
and gravitated to the stable. No doubt feeling protected—and emboldened—by
Tom’s edict against any physical attack on her, Solo found fault with Jerome’s
care of the animals and argued with him constantly.
“What Jerome gonna do wid
that she-beast hangin’ ’round the stable, sir?” Jerome had complained
repeatedly. “Her don’t like this nor that, tellin’ Jerome how t’do his job.
’Tain’t right, Mr. Tom. She needin’ to git to the fields!”
The problem weighed on
Tom as he reached the big house and brought the seed drill back to the
carpenter’s cabin. He set it on the worktable to make another adjustment. As he
worked, his thoughts wandered to the problem with the girl. It would be unfair
to the others if he allowed Solo to continue shirking work. With cotton
planting about to begin in earnest in a few weeks, now was the time to send her
to the fields. But he couldn’t do it. He had discovered something about the
girl that prevented him from sentencing her to a life of field labor. To his
astonishment he had learned that unlike any other slave at Indigo Springs, this
odd misfit of a girl was
literate
. Although he operated a major
agricultural business engaged in international trade, in the whole of his labor
force he had no job for the literate.
It was by accident that
he had discovered she could read. After her arrival, he noticed late at night
from his second-floor bedroom that a light was burning in the kitchen cabin
behind the big house. That light burned long after the slaves had finished
their tasks and gone to sleep. Then late one night, he went downstairs to use
the library, the great study on the main level that held his parents’ sizeable
collection of books. To his surprise he saw a light filtering out of the room.
From the hallway, he saw the slim figure of Solo at the bookshelves. A lamp
flickered near her on a table. It highlighted her face as she gazed with the
wonderment of a child at the musty volumes.
He thought of classical
paintings of woodland scenes with a huntress whose physical appearance matched
the setting. In the same way, Solo seemed to match the setting of his library.
Her bronze skin blended with the earth tones of the room’s drapery, and her
red-brown hair matched the massive rosewood bookcases in color and luster. The
huntress who forayed into his library seemed to belong there.
She skimmed through
several volumes, decided on one, then extinguished the light and left through
an open window. She carried the book delicately in her arm as if it were a
newborn. By the next morning, he noticed, the empty space left by the book was
filled again. Solo had apparently read it overnight in the kitchen, then
returned it before it could be missed.
The next night he
observed the same scene in the library. This time Solo was holding a little
book he recognized; it was one of his favorite plays, a comedy. As she read a
passage, for the first time he saw her laugh. He walked toward the room from
the hallway. Startled, she looked up at him standing at the door. The soft
radiance on her face vanished, and her eyes filled with terror.
He approached her,
wondering what passage had made her laugh. As he touched the small volume and
leaned toward her to see the page she was reading, she dropped the book into
his hand and reached down for an object strapped to her lower leg, hidden under
her clothing. In the next moment, a knife was pointed mere inches from his
throat.
He recognized the weapon,
a hunting knife from his saddlebag. He stood motionless while his eyes studied
her, the astonishment on his face turning to understanding. He guessed the
reason why she feared his coming so close to her; he could only imagine the
past horrors she had endured to provoke that fear.
For a long moment, he
observed the knife pointing at him. Then, ignoring it, he turned to the book
and read the page she had been reading. He laughed too. “That’s one of my
favorite scenes,” he said.
She remained frozen. The
knife stayed poised at his windpipe. He remained on his spot.
“Where did you learn to
read?”
A hostile stare was his
only answer. Sometimes plantation mistresses taught slave children to read,
despite the laws forbidding it. He wondered if she had encountered a kind
mistress in her past.
“Here, take it.” He held
the book out to her. When she didn’t take it, he dropped it on the table
nearby.
“I came to tell you that
you don’t have to sneak in here through the window at night. You have my
permission to borrow the books you want. And you can come in during the day and
use the door.”
He could read no other
reaction on her face, except a terror that apparently would not disappear until
he did. He turned his back on the knife and walked out.
On another evening, as he
came out of his room and was about to descend the staircase, he saw her
downstairs in the parlor. She was looking in fascination at picture cards,
gazing through the binocular lenses of a stereoscope, a small, handheld device
kept there for viewing photographs. The stereographs presented two slightly
different images of the same picture, side by side, one in front of each eye of
the binocular viewer. The two images when viewed that way were perceived as a
single picture with three-dimensional depth. In the parlor there were a stack
of stereographs showing artwork, famous landmarks, and street scenes from
cities around the world.
He watched her viewing
the cards, holding the device up to the window, straining to catch the last
blue light of the day. He saw her read the descriptions of the scenes given on
the cards. He remembered that he had stereographs of Philadelphia in his
bedroom, and he returned there to retrieve them. He put the cards in his jacket
pocket and went downstairs.
As he reached the parlor,
he could see the stack of picture cards spread out on the table near her. He
knew well the photographs she was viewing—an outdoor market in London, a
railway station in Paris, lively scenes with horse-drawn vehicles bustling down
tree-lined boulevards, shops with windblown awnings and windows filled with
merchandise, sidewalks jammed with busy pedestrians. The human activity
captured in the pictures seemed to represent everything in the world that was
closed to her.
She was unaware of him.
Her back was to the door as she gazed intently at a stereograph that held
particular interest to her. In an effort not to startle her, he spoke softly as
he entered the room.
“Say, I thought you might
be interested in something.”
She whirled toward him.
In her nervousness she dropped the stereoscope. It landed on the table, and the
picture in the viewing slot fell to the floor. He bent down to retrieve it.
When he straightened up, he found the hunting knife pointed at his chest.
His eyes traveled from
the knife to her face. Her enchantment with the pictures had turned to terror.
He glanced at the picture he had retrieved. It was a photograph of a painting
hand-tinted to show the vivid colors of the actual artwork. The scene was of a
grand ballroom where beautiful women in bright-colored gowns danced with
handsome men in tails. The artist had captured the lively sweep of their
movements and the laughter on their faces. Tom observed the gaiety of the
scene, then the desperate eyes of the woman before him.
He dropped the card on
the table and was about to reach into his pocket for the pictures he had
brought. But his arm paused in midmotion when she raised her free arm up to
grip the knife with both hands. For a long moment, the two stared at each
other—a tall man with strands of gold hair spilling into his eyes and a petite
woman with yards of wild russet curls—with the silver knife blade flashing in
the twilight between them. He slowly continued with his action and took out the
stereographs.
“I thought you might like
these pictures of Philadelphia.”
He offered the cards to
her, but she declined to take them, her fiery eyes locked on his, her fists
white-knuckled as she grasped the knife.
He dropped the cards on
the table. She didn’t look at them but remained motionless. Then he turned
around so that the knife was pointed at his back, and he walked out.
At other times, he
spotted her reading a weekly agricultural newsletter that he picked up in town.
When she brought trays of food to and from the dining room, she made detours
into the library. She checked the shelf where he stacked the newsletters after
he’d finished reading them, and when a new issue appeared, she grabbed it. But
the articles on planting times, plowing methods, soil preparation, hoeing, and
the like didn’t seem to interest her. Instead, she turned to the back page,
which carried advertisements for farm implements, along with notices of field
hands for sale or hire . . . and rewards for capturing
runaways. He wondered if she was looking for someone.
Once late at night, he
had returned home after another futile search for the invention. As he went
upstairs to his room without having eaten, his despair mixed with his hunger to
form anger. He swore silently at Ted Cooper: the thief, the killer, the man who
was a trespasser in his life.
He approached his bedroom
and was startled to find . . . a trespasser. He had never
before seen Solo in his room, and he sensed this was the one place she would
definitely avoid. But there she stood, leaning over a lamp on his dresser,
reading something he had left in his room. It was the latest issue of the
agricultural newsletter. Apparently, she was so eager to see it that she
couldn’t wait for him to finish his reading and bring it to the library. From
the open door, he saw her face through the dresser’s mirror, her eyes moving
intently across the back page. Hearing him approach, she looked up to catch his
face in the mirror, staring at her.
The image of her in the
looking glass held him. He saw the dark eyes, the wild mane, and the auburn
skin of a grassland filly unbridled. And yet he saw an intelligence that caused
her to devour books, a curiosity that made her yearn to see pictures of the
world, and a pressing need to find something . . . or
someone.
Slowly, he walked toward
her. In a flash, she pulled out the knife she carried with her and whirled
around to face him. He walked closer, until the blade was mere inches from his
chest. Then he walked closer still, till the blade touched his shirt. His
nerves frazzled from his long, fruitless day, in a split-second move he grabbed
her arm with one hand and seized the knife with the other. Roughly, he pulled
her against him and dug his fingers into her arm. She winced.
“If I were what you
think, do you really believe this knife would protect you?”
She stood before him,
trembling helplessly. Her eyes—dark, moist, and filling with stark
terror—seemed to look through him, to an inner horror, a nightmare of her own
that was scorched onto her memory.
He too felt a horror as
he towered over her with the knife. How could anyone stand this? he wondered.
How could anyone want to make someone else feel helpless and afraid? How could
anyone feed off that? He thought of the murder, the theft, the mayor’s words,
the factory owner’s warning—the fear and violence around him that he couldn’t
escape. Her terror seemed to weigh on him in the same way.
She lowered her face,
unable to bear her inner torment, to shake it off, or to hide it from him.
The sight of her plight
drained the anger from him. He sighed. He loosened his grip on her arm and took
her hands in his. He put the knife back into them. He aimed it at his throat.
She looked at him, astonished. He squeezed her hands reassuringly, then
released them.
“There, do you feel
better now?” he asked softly.
She kept the knife pointed
at him, but her face became calmer and her grip on the blade softer.
He gestured to the
newsletter, with its ad page flickering in the light on the dresser.
“Are you looking for
someone?”
There was no reply.
“Someone who might’ve run
away?”
The nightmare was
receding; her composure was returning. Her face was once again becoming
mysterious, her feelings unreachable.
“Can I help you find who
you’re looking for?”
His voice was lost in the
tangle of curls that brushed against him as she turned and rushed out of the
room.
He could still feel the
cool breeze that her whirling hair left in the air. It was still
palpable . . .
He realized it was the
cool wind of the early March day blowing across his face as he left the
carpenter’s cabin. But his mind still lingered on that incident in his room.
Was it just something from a violent past that had resurfaced to frighten her
that night, or was it also something in him . . . in the
way he looked at her? That evening in his room, he had glimpsed his own
reflection in the mirror, and he was surprised to see on his face a feeling he
hadn’t acknowledged to himself—and emphatically didn’t welcome. As he stood
outside the carpenter’s cabin, he resolved to avoid the volatile new presence
in his household.
Just then he heard her
arguing with Jerome.
“You need to brush the
knots out of their manes,” she said, agitated, coming out of the stable with
her adversary, “and wash the mud off their legs, and clean their hooves better.
You keep the horses scraggly, and you groom yourself like a prince, when it
should be the opposite. At least the horses are worth something.”
“An’ you needs to put mo’
molasses in th’ gingerbread, so it be sweet like you ain’t. An’ stew the meat
longer, so it be tender like you ain’t!” Jerome jumped around, pointing an
angry finger at her. “Jus’ ’cause you sour and tough don’ mean yer food gotta
be too.”