Eight

At noon time, the man with the yellow teeth walked into the house. 

“Where’s my dinner?” he asked, leering at me.  “This one is too old for the house.  She should be in the field.  It’s cotton-picking time. ”

The master walked out into the yard.  “Who did this?”  He grabbed the sock ball from one of the children and held it up overhead. 

Everyone else stepped away, leaving me standing alone with the master.  He held up his hand and slapped me in the face.  In one motion, he pulled off his belt with its metal buckle and swung it across my backside, hard enough to leave welts through my thin dress.  I stood there and took it because what else could I do?  He swung again, and I fell hard to the dirt.  He swung a third time and another until Momma caught the belt from him.

“She’s expecting a child,” she said, standing with me. 

She stood between me and the master, stopping him from coming at me again, this time with his fists.  I cowered in the dirt, too frightened even to cry.

“Dinner’s on the table,” Momma told him.  “She fainted this morning.  She’s too weak for the fields.  I need her help with the babies up here.”

The swaddled baby wailed on the floor inside, and I picked her up to bounce her.

“Then get me something to drink,” Master snapped at me.  “At least be useful.”

In the kitchen, Momma told me the baby’s mother was out in the fields but would be back soon to nurse the infant. 

“Her breasts will be heavy when she feels the baby crying.  She will feed the baby, and then you rock her until she sleeps.”  She handed me a drink to give to Master.

The afternoon sweltered, and wailing and screaming erupted again in the other room.  The boys wrestled, fighting over a crooked stick.

“Keep these children quiet, or I’ll send all of you to the fields,” Master shouted at me as he headed back outside to the fields.

Momma scraped the bones from Master’s plate into the pot boiling on the stove and ladled out small bowls for us and each of the children.  The thin oily broth had greens with red stems and fat dirt-colored beans floating in it.  The earthy soup smelled of my home.

Late that night after Master and his wife had supper and all the field hands and children were fed, we cleared up and got ready to start the next day’s meal.  The children were collected by their parents and put to bed up in the bunkhouses. 

That night in the kitchen, Momma showed me how to make hominy.  We worked late into the night by the firelight. She took the ashes from the fire and put them in a barrel with holes in the bottom.  I tipped up the barrel over a shallow pan, and lye dripped out the bottom when she poured water over the hot ashes.  She’d use some of the lye to make soap, but tonight she husked the corn from the harvest and put it in the lye to take the husks off.  She washed the corn in clean water until it was white.  Then tomorrow she would mix the boiled hominy with butter, salt, flour, and eggs and bake it to make hominy cakes.

Momma and I walked up the hill past the vegetable garden where I saw the greens from our soup were growing.  We hadn’t eaten yet, and my stomach tightened.  I felt the baby ball up inside me.  A fire blazed in front of the bunkhouses, and two men turned meat on a spit.

“Whadja hunt?” Momma called out.

“Caught a wild boar and a couple of coons,” answered the younger man. 

I looked at him closer in the dark.  His eyes were serious like a man’s, but in the firelight, I saw light hair on his cheeks.  He saw me and blinked. 

“I didn’t see you after we got off the boat,” Farhani said. “They call me Frank here.”

“And I am Lizzie. You were up with the men, and I was on the women’s side,” I said.

             “Do you two know each other?” Momma asked.

“Yes,” I said.