Thirty

Thirty

Not yet wanting to begin the agonizing night of waiting that lay ahead of me, I stayed outside the barn, a little ways away from the place where Ethan stood watch, keeping hidden in the shadow of the building.

Roy appeared only minutes after I left. He threw an empty bottle into the bushes next to me before muttering something to Ethan and going inside. I pressed my ear to the wall, trying to tell what was going on.

All was quiet for a long, suspenseful minute. Then Roy began to yell, though I still could not tell what he was saying. Each outburst ended with a silence as, I assumed, Isaiah refused to answer him. After a minute or two of that, the yells gave way to a muffled thumping. I knew what was happening, and I couldn’t stand it.

As I turned to go, I heard Roy yell again. Feeling that I had to know what was really going on, I turned back to the barn, peeking through a hole in the wall and listening as hard as I could.

Roy had brought a lantern, casting a dim glow on the scene in front of me. Isaiah was kneeling at Roy’s feet, doubled over in pain, coughing and spitting blood. “You love her!” Roy’s enraged voice echoed through the room. “How could she love you? She could never love someone like you!”

It took all I had not to burst in there. But Isaiah just looked up at him, his face twisted into a snarl. “You say so,” he seethed, “but you don’t know anything.”

Both Roy and I gaped. I had never seen Isaiah stand up to him like that. Then Roy kicked him again and Isaiah groaned. I did not want to see anymore.

Though I was not sure it was where I wanted to go, I returned to Eli’s cabin. I found them sitting at the table again. Both Eli and Hannah stood nervously when I entered.

“Is he all right?” Hannah asked anxiously at the exact same moment that Eli said, “How did it go?”        

It took me a minute before I could answer. “He’s all right, for now. We… we’re going to try and get away at dawn, when Roy takes him.”

“Why?” Hannah cried. “He should leave now! He doesn’t have a chance if Roy has a gun!”

I looked down. “I know, but we couldn’t have gotten away. And he didn’t want to run yet. Roy…” I flinched away from the image in my head. “… Roy is in there now.”

There was a silence. “I should help him,” Eli said suddenly. “He and I, we could beat them. We’ve done it before. We could do it again.”

“No,” Hannah said angrily almost before the words were out of his mouth. “It won’t do any good.”

“He’s my best friend, Hannah. I can’t just let him die in there!”

“He’s my brother,” she cried. I could tell she was close to tears. “I can’t lose you both…”

I did not want to see them fight, not now. “He doesn’t want to go, Eli,” I insisted gently. “He wants to face Roy at dawn.”

“But…”

“Eli!” I said, more firmly now, “Believe me, no one wants to help him more than I do. But there is nothing we can do now. He has to do this on his own.” As much as I hated to say it, it was true.

He still looked unconvinced. “Eli, please…” Hannah pleaded, eyes misty.

Eli took a few deep breaths. “All right,” he said. Hannah smiled at him and he kissed her on the forehead. I tried to fight back the jealousy, the part of me that wished Isaiah and I could be in their position.

Hannah looked to me. “You should try to sleep, Adeline,” she advised. “Dawn is a long ways off.”

I shook my head. “I can’t. Not while…”

“She’s right,” Eli said, “if you are going to run in the morning, you need to be ready.” He motioned to the mattress not occupied by Jordan, the one that once belonged to Ruben. “We’ll wake you if anything happens.”

Though I knew there was no way I would sleep tonight, I also knew that they were right in saying dawn was far away. Pretending to sleep would be better than sitting around in agonized silence, waiting for the morning. So I nodded and went to the bed.

I lay with my back to them, trying to fight off the awful, terrifying, thoughts that had found their way into my mind. I imagined every possible thing that could go wrong, and what would happen to me afterword.

After a long enough time, when they probably thought I was sleeping, Eli and Hannah began to talk again.

“Do you think he’ll make it?” Hannah asked fearfully.

It took a moment for Eli to answer. “I don’t know,” he said hopelessly. “He’s always made it before.”

“I know,” Hannah said, “but it feels different this time. Like… like this one could really get him.” Her voice broke and I heard Eli’s chair scrape the floor as he got up to comfort her.

“Now, don’t think like that,” he said quietly. “If anyone can make it through this, it’s Isaiah.” Then the conversation faded into Hannah’s sniffles and Eli’s half-hearted words of comfort.

I tried not to listen to them. What they said did not give me any consolation. It merely proved to me that I was not the only one who believed that it could all end in the morning.

With everything that I was trying to avoid thinking about, one thing floated to the surface of my mind, blocking out everything else. I began to slip into a dreamy half-sleep as I gave myself over to the memory.

I was seven years old, and I had just escaped from under the nose of my prying mammy. I was bounding across the yard towards the garden, towards the flowering tree where I would sit and imagine I was a princess instead of a little girl who hardly knew anything outside of the plantation.

Mama did not like me going to the garden by myself. “The slaves live just on the other side of those gardens, Adeline,” she would say. “I don’t want you getting too friendly with them.”

But I loved the old tree too much to listen to my mother’s lectures. Whenever I could, I would try to make it to the gardens, if only for the sheer pleasure of doing something naughty without getting caught.

On that particular day, I had been sitting on the side of the tree that faced the house, weaving the pink flowers into my hair, when I got the sudden, unmistakable feeling that I was not alone. Slowly, cautiously, I tiptoed around the trunk to see who it was.

I was shocked when I saw the beautiful dark-skinned boy. He sat leaning against the tree, his arms wrapped around his knees. He was looking sadly at the cabins. I was a little afraid, as I had no experience with the slaves save for my mammy, but I could not fight the curiosity that overtook me.

“Hello,” I said in a very small voice.

The boy turned with a start, jumping to his feet. He looked nervous, like he had been caught doing something he should not have been. “You’re the master’s daughter,” he said, sounding frightened, his black eyes darting back and forth.

For some reason I did not know, I smiled at him. “Adeline Dupree,” I said proudly, extending a hand. He gave me a strange look and I quickly took the hand away, feeling rather foolish. “Um, what’s your name?”

The boy looked at me with a very odd expression on his face, “Isaiah.”

“Just Isaiah?” I asked, finding his lack of a last name very curious.

He kept his eyes on the ground and nodded, “Just Isaiah.”

I studied him for a moment. “Glad to meet you, Isaiah,” I said cheerfully, mostly because I had nothing better to say. He did not answer, but looked down at the ground. “You look sad,” I ventured.

He paused a moment, then nodded. “My old master, he just sold us here, away from my family. All I have now is my sister, and she already met some boy she likes,” he said bitterly.

For some reason, I felt sympathy towards the boy, though I had always been told that what the slaves felt did not matter, that they were only property. I wanted to make him feel better.

“Well… maybe we could be friends,” I said, a little hesitant “Then you would have someone.”

He looked up at me, a glint of hope in his eyes. “But you’re the master’s daughter. They won’t let us see each other.”

I thought about that for a minute. “We could meet here!” I said, suddenly incredibly proud of my plan. “We could signal when we want to see each other. We could leave notches in the trunk.”

Isaiah looked at me curiously while he thought about it. “We don’t even know each other,” he said finally, a tiny smile playing at his lips.

“I guess… but I want to find out, if you do…” I offered shyly.

We smiled at one another for a minute, but then I heard my Mama call from the house. “Adeline, where did you get to, now?”

“Oh no,” I groaned. “I have to go.”

Isaiah nodded and I ran off before he could say anything more.

I blinked and opened my eyes. I had not thought about that day in a very long time. Even then, we had known that what we were doing was dangerous, but we somehow managed not to care. I had run to the tree the next day to find Isaiah waiting for me.

How had time gone so quickly? How was it that two days without Isaiah could feel like a lifetime, but that far gone day, when we were barely older than Jordan, seemed like yesterday? Was I really twenty two already? Was Isaiah twenty three?

Twenty-three. It seemed impossible that the little boy I had met that day could have grown up. But he was already a fugitive, a soldier. He was a father. When I thought of it that way, he seemed younger than ever, too young to those weights on his back.

It still wasn’t enough time. We had never had enough time. Isaiah was twenty-three. He was too young to die.

I would have thought about it more, but another memory began to appear in my half-conscious mind before I could.

I was ten years old, dipping my toes into the stream in front of our house as the sun set over the plantation, when I heard someone come running up behind me. I turned and saw, to my surprise, Ruben standing over me.

“Adeline,” he breathed. “You oughta come quick. The overseer caught Eli and Isaiah sneaking out of the fields before sundown, and he gave them a whipping!”

I clapped a hand over my mouth. “Oh no,” I gasped. None of my friends had ever been whipped. Daddy was always so good to the slaves. His overseers were not nearly as brutal as most.

“Come on,” he said, taking my hand and helping me to my feet. “They really need some help.” Together, we ran across the grounds to Isaiah and Hannah’s cabin.

Inside, Eli sat backwards on a chair as Hannah rubbed a salve on his back. Even then, they had been sweethearts. Isaiah lay on his stomach on the mattress, his face pressed into the pillow.

“Ouch! That hurts, goddamn it!” Eli exclaimed.

“Oh hush up,” Hannah said, unsympathetic, already ridiculously mature for her age, “it’s your own damn fault. Just stay in the fields next time and this won’t happen.” He opened his mouth to protest, but Hannah got there first. “Adeline, thank God you’re here. I need another set of hands for these boys.” She handed me a jar of the salve. “Go on rub this on Isaiah’s back. It will hurt him, but it makes the scars heal up. Got it from Auntie Celia.” Auntie Celia was the third in a series of slave women who took care of the three of them.

I took the jar and walked over to Isaiah. I could barely bring myself to look at his back. He had been whipped eight times with the overseer’s switch. Eight angry, red cuts crisscrossed over the dark skin of his naked back.

I had never seen him without his shirt before, and it made me blush. I took a handful of the sticky salve and started rubbing. Isaiah winced and hissed through his teeth, but otherwise said nothing.

I did not know how to talk to him like this. After much careful thought I said the only words that seemed right. “I’m so sorry, Isaiah. I’m sorry this happened.”

After a long minute, he spoke. “I can’t take this anymore, Addy,” he said. “I don’t want to be an animal that’s only good for picking cotton. I don’t want to get whipped for not doing a job. It’s not worth it.”

I did not know what to say to that, so I remained silent. He waited a minute before speaking again. “Addy? If… if I ever left…”

I wanted nothing more than to hear what he had to say, but we were interrupted. “What are you two chattering about?” Hannah asked loudly, then turned to Eli. “Why can’t you be more like Isaiah? Look at him. Is he complaining? Not a word!”

We listened to them argue for a minute before Isaiah started again. “Is there somewhere we can go, so I can talk to you… alone?”

I thought about it, looking at the cuts and wondering why he would want to put himself in any more danger. But I was too young to realize exactly what I would be risking by going along with this. All I wanted was to talk to my friend. “I just found out there’s an attic above my room. Do you think you can make it up there?” Isaiah paused thoughtfully then nodded.

“How about midnight?”

That was the first night we had ever spent in the attic. It was that night, I remembered, that Isaiah had first asked me if I would leave with him, if he ever did leave. I had told him I would and we had imagined what our lives would be like once we were free. But never for a second did I really believe he would go. At that point, he still had seven years to wait.

I had a million more of these memories. As I slipped further into subconscious, they became hazier and faster paced, but still real enough to hurt.

I am eleven. Mama tells me I’m not to be seen with the slaves. I start to cry when I have to tell Isaiah. He refuses to give up on our friendship.

I am twelve. I realize Isaiah is starting to look at me differently, but I am too shy to bring it up.

I am thirteen. Isaiah starts flirting with a pretty slave girl. For some reason I’m jealous. When I ask him he says I’m still the prettiest girl he’s ever seen.

I am fourteen. My first suitor snubs me for another girl. Isaiah holds my hand and lets me cry into him.

I am fifteen. I tell him my hopes of going to England and he fights me on it. We argue in the attic until we both apologize and I fall asleep on his shoulder.

Then I am sixteen. I am in the attic, packed, prepared, and pestered into readiness. I was supposed to be sleeping, and probably should have been.

But I couldn’t leave yet. I had to say goodbye.

Suddenly, I am tossed back into reality as Hannah shakes me awake.

“Come one, Adeline. It’s almost dawn.”

Reviews

[C. Porter]

AWW!!! Isaiah!!!! Now I REALLY feel bad for you...why, oh why, do you do these things to me??? I was perfectly happy being angry at him. HUMPH!