But Delia didn’t hesitate at all as she hobbled over to Grady and hugged him tightly. “Lord, Lord, honey! I hardly recognized you. You driving Missy Claire’s wagon for her tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “I’m all through with being her slave,” he said quietly. “Me and the others are stealing away to the woods tonight. Once we get to where the Yankees are, we’ll all be free.”
His words sent a tremor of fear through Kitty. “You can’t run away, Grady! They’ll send the dogs out after you if you run!”
“Who will? Ain’t nobody left to chase us but the overseer. He can’t catch all of us, can he?” He folded his arms across his chest and raised his chin. “You don’t have to go with Missy Claire, you know. She can’t make you go with her.”
“What do you mean? She’s our missy. We have to do what Missy says.”
“No you don’t,” he said in a low, harsh voice. “We don’t have to do nothing she says no more, now that the Yankees are coming. Y’all can come hide in the woods with us tonight … unless you think house slaves is too good to run off with field hands.”
“Nobody’s thinking that,” Delia said.
“Then come with us,” he urged.
Kitty gazed toward the south, the direction the Yankee soldiers would be coming from. The sky above the distant trees seemed a deeper shade of gray, as if darkened by smoke. “Missy says the Yankees ain’t our friends,” she told Grady. “She says they gonna have their way with all the women and—”
“Don’t you know them white folks is lying?”
“Missy Claire don’t lie! I been with her just as long as I can remember, and she—”
“Go on with your fancy white missy, then, if you’re wanting to be her slave so bad.” He spat on the ground near his feet, as if the words had left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Kitty gazed toward the woods again. It scared her to death to think about hiding in that terrible place. Snakes and spiders and alligators lived in those swamps, and the paddyrollers would chase after you with their baying dogs. When they caught you they would whip you until the blood ran. She remembered what had happened to her own parents, and she longed to run to Grady and beg him not to go. Kitty had seen the scars on his back from when they’d whipped him before.
Delia stood beside the wagon, not saying a word. But they all looked up a moment later when one of the second-floor windows slid open with a loud scrape. Missy Claire leaned out of it. “Kitty! Get back up here this minute!”
Kitty turned and ran straight into the house. Halfway up the stairs she realized that she hadn’t said good-bye to Grady. She hurried to gather another load, but by the time she brought it down to the wagon it was too late. Grady was gone. She wondered if she would ever see him again.
Delia came down with two more satchels a moment later. She paused to catch her breath, leaning against the wagon.
“What are you gonna do, Delia?” Kitty whispered. “You gonna run off with Grady tonight and hide in the woods?”
“Never mind what I’m gonna do, honey. You got to be deciding for yourself what to do. Can’t nobody tell you which way to go except the Lord.”
“Decide? How?” Kitty had never made up her own mind before. She always did whatever Missy said and wasn’t allowed to have any ideas or wishes of her own. Making up your mind was something you had to learn to do, like reading and writing—and she’d never learned those things either, only how to obey. “I don’t know how to decide,” she told Delia. Her words came out in a whisper, as if she were too scared to say them out loud.
“It ain’t so hard,” Delia said. “Just think of your life as a story. As if you’re telling it around the fire someday to your children.” Delia was a storyteller herself, well known among all the slaves in the area, so she knew a thing or two about spinning a yarn. She gave Kitty a minute to ponder the idea, then said, “Now, how are you wanting that story to end? What would be ‘happy ever after’ for you?”
Kitty didn’t even have to think about it. The best ending would be to wind up in Grady’s arms and finally hear him say that he loved her as much as she loved him. They would be together forever, with Grady driving Massa Fuller’s carriage again and Kitty tending Missy Claire like she always had, and both of them knowing that Massa would never sell them apart.
But then Kitty remembered Grady’s bitter words and she knew it was never going to happen:
“Can’t nobody love you, girl, until you learn to love yourself. You obey that white woman like you were her dog— like you’re dirt under her feet and she can walk all over you. Think a man can love dirt? Think a man wants a dog for his woman?”
Kitty knew what he meant. Hadn’t Missy lashed out at her just this morning, pulling Kitty’s hair and slapping her? Grady said she needed to respect herself before he could respect her. But how was she supposed to do that? Would he admire her for disobeying Missy and running away?
“Now, are you seeing that ending?” Delia asked, interrupting Kitty’s thoughts. She closed her eyes and imagined herself in Grady’s arms.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you needing to do right now to get there? Beginning of that story has already been told. Can’t change the ‘once upon a time.’ But you can be making up the middle part that will take you to the end.”
Which path led to Grady? Kitty tried to picture herself running away with him, not answering Missy when she called, hiding in the woods until the wagon drove away. Then what? The only thing Kitty knew about disobeying white folks was that you got whipped for it. No, it was much easier to do what she’d always done—obey Missy, follow along behind the wagon, take care of her mistress and the new baby. But wasn’t that what Grady got so mad at her for? For bending her back and thinking like a slave?
All of a sudden a scary thought shuddered right through Kitty, as if somebody had walked over her grave. How would she ever find Grady again if he ran away into the woods and Kitty went with Missy? What if she never saw him again?
“But, Delia,” she said, “how will Grady and me ever find each other if he runs off and I don’t?”
“Is that what you’re worrying about?” Delia let out a big sigh. “Listen, honey. Maybe you’ll find that boy again someday and maybe you won’t. But first Grady has to find hisself. And so do you, child. So do you.”
Everything went blurry as tears filled Kitty’s eyes. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how to find myself,” she said. “Can’t you just tell me what to do, Delia?”
“Go back to the beginning,” she said gently. “How’d you get to this day? If you know where you’re starting from, and if you know where you’re wanting to end up, then maybe you can find the path in between.”
Kitty knew the beginning—of Grady’s story as well as her own. She knew where they both had started out from. She wiped her tears and gazed toward the woods, remembering a time when her name had been Anna… .
I
cried out to God for help;
I cried out to God to hear me.
When I was in distress, I sought the Lord;
at night I stretched out untiring hands
and my soul refused to be comforted… .
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?
Psalm 77:1–2, 8
NIV
Great Oak Plantation
South Carolina 1849
Anna stood on the cabin’s top step, peering into the distance. It was no use. Even on her tiptoes she could see only the top of the Great Oak Tree. She was too small. And the carriage house blocked her view.
Behind her the other children squealed and giggled as they played in the muddy yard outside Slave Row. Last night’s rain had pooled in shallow puddles, and her playmates had made a game out of squishing the mud between their fingers and toes and smearing it on their bare, brown skin.
Anna didn’t want to play in the mud. And she didn’t want to draw pictures in the dirt like she always did, either. She’d had the dream again last night, but it was growing as worn and faded as threadbare calico. If only she could touch the Great Oak Tree again and gaze at the vivid green woods beyond it, maybe she could keep the dream from fading altogether.
The tree seemed miles and miles away, up near the Big House where she was forbidden to go. Old Nellie had threatened to use the hickory switch on Anna if she went up there again. But Nellie was old and couldn’t see very well. She’d gotten too tired and bent over to work in the rice fields with the other slaves, so now she took care of their children all day.
The Great Oak Tree’s top branches swayed in the breeze, and they seemed to be waving to Anna. She suddenly decided that she didn’t care if she got switched; she had to go. When Old Nellie carried one of the babies into the cabin, Anna saw her chance. She crept quietly away from the colorless slave yard, staying close to the row of weathered cabins, hoping no one would notice her. She turned up the driveway when she reached the carriage house, walking faster now that she was out of sight. Stones and crushed oyster shells dug into her bare feet; knots of buzzing flies warned her where the horse droppings were.
She reached the edge of the lawn at last and saw the tree up ahead, its massive trunk and spreading branches a dark silhouette against the blue sky. Pale silver moss entwined with the leaves and swayed gently in the breeze. Anna stepped off the driveway onto the warm, prickly grass and began to run.
The Great Oak Tree that gave the plantation its name stood on a rise overlooking the Edisto River, a sentry marker for ships that ferried the plantation’s rice crop down to Charleston. Anna ran to it as if for shelter, resting her small palms against the bark. She felt dwarfed alongside it yet somehow very safe. She gazed up into the canopy of branches and leaves above her head, and the memories stirred.
Once there had been a tall, strong man she’d called Papa, a man she could run to for refuge. His voice was very deep and he sang to her sometimes, humming a tune that had no words. The oak’s dark branches reminded her of his ebony arms, strong and muscular with corded sinews and tendons. Anna looked up at the outstretched limbs and remembered how Papa’s arms had reached out to her, lifting her, carrying her.
She closed her eyes and listened to the swishing leaves and heard her mother’s soothing whispers, the rustling of her skirts. Mama had been soft and sweet smelling, like the breeze that blew from the nearby flower beds. Whenever Anna had gazed into Mama’s dark eyes she’d seen tenderness and love and a fierce protectiveness that made her feel very safe.
Then everything had changed.
One day the place where they lived and ate and slept was no longer surrounded by whitewashed walls but by trees—trees and bushes and tangled vines that were so tall and gnarled and thick they blotted out the sun. Anna remembered the sound of palmetto saplings brushing past her legs, rustling like her mother’s voice: “Shh, Anna … shh… . You can’t make a sound.” Papa hummed his song very softly to her in that place.
Now Anna opened her eyes again, summoning the courage to peer into the distance beyond the Great Oak Tree, beyond the last swath of cut grass to where the woods began. She needed to soak up the lush green colors of the forest, memorizing them. But some deep fear kept her from ever venturing into that terrible place.
The woods she had lived in with Mama and Papa had been just like that distant forest—wet and green and sticky-hot, yet rich in the rainbow of colors she loved. There had been emerald blankets of thick moss coating the sides of the trees. Anna still remembered how fuzzy the moss felt beneath her hand. The trees wore long gray beards of Spanish moss.
Sometimes Papa carried her on his shoulders through the maze of green, his arms burdened with the quilt that held their bundled belongings. Sometimes Anna walked, following along behind Papa’s creamy homespun shirt, the cloth dark with patches of sweat beneath his arms and down his back. The earth felt wet and soft under her feet, and tiny green frogs zigzagged across the path.
Papa carefully steered around the king snakes and rattlers that slithered across the trail or lay coiled in patches of dappled sunlight, but he hadn’t been afraid. “They won’t bother you none, if you don’t bother them,” he’d told her.
The sound of croaking, gulping frogs filled the thick air along with the harsh drones of cicadas and
whirrs
of insects. Anna swatted at the huge metallic-green dragonflies that swooped around her head. Mosquitoes and gnats and midges swarmed around her in a humming cloud, biting and stinging her arms and legs. Mama had tied a red bandana around Anna’s head, just like the one she always wore, to keep the bugs out of her thick hair.
Once, as she rode on Papa’s shoulders, they’d passed beneath an arch of tree branches and she’d felt cobwebs on her face. She looked up to see a huge spider, its outstretched legs as broad as her mother’s hand. Anna had cried out in fright, and Papa had quickly dropped his bundle and swung her down from his shoulders, clapping his hand over her mouth to silence her. His movements had been swift and rough but his eyes were gentle and kind as he whispered, “Hush, now. Them spiders ain’t gonna hurt you. They’re big, but they don’t mean you no harm. They’re the Lord’s creatures, too.”
Papa and Mama walked a long, long time, it seemed, barely pausing to sleep or eat. Whenever Anna had grown hungry, Mama would pull a piece of corn bread or bits of smoked pork from the bag she carried, saying, “Thank you, Jesus, for this food” before they ate it. At dusk they sometimes saw white-tailed deer. Owls hooted in the darkness at night as Anna dozed on Papa’s shoulders or in his arms.
They passed cypress trees with bell-shaped trunks that reminded Anna of hoopskirts. In places, the path grew so marshy that Papa’s feet sank, and sometimes the path disappeared completely in the swamp. All that remained of it were tiny islands of trees surrounded by brackish water. Papa hopped from one island to the next until they grew too far apart, then waded through the knee-deep water. He put Anna high on his shoulders, and he unsheathed his knife, alert for alligators. He’d shown her one, floating in the water like a fallen log with only its eyes and snout peeking above the surface.