Slavery I Was Five Years Old When

Slavery

I was five years old when Mary died. I heard her screams from my bedroom window. It was a hot summer's day, one of those breezeless ones when the air felt thick filled with mosquitoes. The window was open so her cries found their way easily to my little ears. My sweat made the bed sheets damp but I didn't care about that. I was too young to care about little things like that. Mary's screams woke me up in the night. They infiltrated my dreams. In my dreams Mary was a cow being led to the slaughter. When I woke up I expected the screams to go away like most of my dreams disappeared. But this was no dream. Her screams filled the already heavy air and lingered there like a fly on the bedpost. For five minutes I lay there in bed, on my damp sheets, alone, afraid, listening to my nanny's cries until they suddenly, abruptly stopped. Just like that they stopped and the silence they left in their wake was worse than the screams themselves. The silence was like ether and soon lulled me back to sleep.

The next day my mother woke me up.

"Jude!" she cried out. "Time for breakfast, hon!"

Usually Mary sat with me at breakfast, sometimes feeding me, sometimes wiping me up. My mother said nothing that morning, nothing to indicate anything was wrong. She shoveled griddle cakes into her mouth and exchanged eye contacts with my father, who sat on my right. Josephine, our kitchen servant, came around and filled our glasses with milk.

'Ma? Where's Mary?"

Her table silver clanked on the plate and mother chewed her bite. Not once that morning did she look me in the eye.

'Awe, Jude! Ain't you hungry?"

"Naw, not really. Ma, I heard noises last night."

"Oh you been having those bad dreams again, hon? You should let me sit with you at night! I'll tell you some really good stories, any kind you want! About knights or fairies, or ghosts, even!"

Ma smiled at me gently, but her eyes remained downcast, as if they could see no farther than her plate. Pa said nothing. He got up from the table and left the house. Before I was finished with my breakfast, Pa came back inside the house with a young black girl. She must have been no older than ten or twelve. She seemed shy. Her face was rounder than Mary's and her lips twice as full. Her head was bowed and her hands were clasped behind her back.

'Son, this is Francine. She'll be with you now. She take real good care of ya, won't ya, Francine?"

My father rubbed Francine's left shoulder, lingering longer there than he ever lingered on my shoulder.

I headed up to my room and began playing a pretend game I made up. I was a soldier in a far-off country in Europe. I rescued men all day long. They were hiding under the bed or in my closet. I would drag them out and run them to safety.

"Oh hi." Francine's silhouette in the doorway startled me.

"Hi," she said shyly, head tilted down, eyes on the hard wood floors.

"Want me to clean your room?"

"Nah," I responded simply.

Francine sat down on my bed. I stopped playing my game and looked up at her. She was pretty, as pretty as Mary was.

"Mary done die last night," she said.

"I know. I heard her screaming," I said sadly.

"Mary was my sister," she said without suppressing her tears. I didn't know what to do. I just sat there.

I haven't thought about that day for years. I'm twenty-two now, and about to be head of my household. Father is ill. He'll die any day now. At church yesterday I met my first abolitionist. Her name is Joann. Joann is lovely. I would like to see more of her. She's the kind of girl I should like to marry. Joann told me she believes slavery is evil and un-Christian. I listened to her for an hour after Church services were over. We talked in the yard. In fact, the hot air today reminded me of that day just as much as Joann's words did. She told me about how her father raped their slave girls and that three of them had mulatto babies. I couldn't think of anything but Mary's cries when she told me that. I took out my diary immediately after I got home.