Suddenly, the captain turned, and his voice boomed. “Fanny! Beattie! Slow down, you’ll blow us out of the room.”
It was then I noticed the two small dark-skinned girls and remembered them from the first day when they had been seated on the steps of the cabin. Through kitchen conversation, I had learned that they were Mama Mae’s six-year-old twins. Now they stood on the other side of the table, each pulling a cord. The cords were attached to a large fan suspended from the ceiling that, when pulled, flapped over the dining room table like the wing of a gigantic butterfly, thereby creating a draft. With the excitement of the laughter, their enthusiasm was overventilating the room, but after the shout from the captain, their dark eyes grew solemn and their pulling slowed.
The captain turned back. “Belle,” he said, “you’ve done well. You’ve kept her alive.” He glanced down at some papers before him and spoke directly to me after skimming a page. “Let’s see. You’ll soon be seven years old. Is that right?”
I didn’t know.
In the silence, Sally chirped up, “I’m four years old.”
“That will do, Sally,” Martha said. She sighed, and the captain winked at his wife. When he removed his spectacles to better study me, I felt faint under his scrutiny. “Don’t you know your age? Your father was a schoolteacher, didn’t he teach you numbers?”
My father? I thought. I have a father?
“When you feel stronger, I want you to work in the kitchen,” he said. “Can you do that?”
My chest ached, and I was finding it difficult to breathe, but I nodded.
“Good,” he said, “then we’ll keep you here until you’ve grown.” He paused. “Do you have any questions?”
My need to know surpassed my terror. I leaned closer to him. “My name?” I managed to whisper.
“What? What do you mean, your name?” he asked.
Belle spoke quickly. “She don’t know her name.”
The captain looked at Belle as though for an explanation. When none was forthcoming, he looked down again at the papers before him. He coughed before he answered. “It says here your name is Lavinia. Lavinia McCarten.”
I clung to the information as though it were a life raft. I don’t remember leaving the room, but I surfaced on a pallet in the kitchen to overhear Uncle and Belle discussing the captain. He was leaving again in the morning, Belle said, and she was expecting a visit from him that evening.
“You gonna ask for those papers?” Uncle Jacob questioned.
Belle didn’t answer.
“You tell him that you needs them now. Miss Martha got her eye on you. The cap’n know she take the black drops, but he don’t know that she drink the peach liquor with it. You gettin’ more pretty by the day, and after all that drinkin’, when Miss Martha pick up that mirror, she see that she lookin’ more than her thirty years. She out to get you, and time goes on, it only get worse.”
Belle’s usual determined voice was subdued. “But Uncle, I don’t want to go. This place my home. You all my family.”
“Belle, you know you got to go,” he said.
Their conversation ended when Uncle Jacob saw my open eyes. “Well, well, well. Lil Abinya wake up,” he said.
Belle came over to me. “Lavinia,” she said, pushing my hair from my forehead, “that name sounds like you.”
I stared at her, then turned my face away. I was more lost than ever, for I felt no connection to that name.
THE NEXT EVENING I WAS sent home with Mama Mae. I didn’t want to leave the kitchen house, but Belle insisted. Mama said that her twins, Fanny and Beattie, the two girls I had seen working the fan, would be there with me. On the walk over, Mama Mae held my hand and pointed out how the kitchen house was just a short distance from her own small cabin.
Fanny and Beattie were there to greet us. I hung back, wanting to stay next to Mama Mae, but the girls were eager for a new playmate. They drew me into a corner of the small cabin to a shelf that had been carved into one of the logs, where their treasures were kept.
The taller of the two, Fanny was the leader, with her mother’s quick eyes and direct speech; her arms and legs were like those of a colt. Beattie was short and plump, pretty already, with a broad smile emphasized by two deep dimples.
“Look,” Fanny instructed me as she withdrew toys from the shelf. She handed down a doll-size table with two chairs, constructed of small twigs held together with bits of animal sinew. Beattie showed me her doll, then offered it to me to hold. I grabbed for it with such hunger that Beattie hesitated until her generous spirit won out and she released it. “Mama make her,” she said with pride, looking back to Mama Mae.
I gripped Beattie’s prize, my heart pierced with longing. The doll was made of rough brown cloth; her eyes were stitched in black thread, while black wool stood out in braids. I fingered the doll’s shirt, styled like the one the twins and I wore. She wore a red apron, and I recognized it as the same fabric as Mama Mae’s head scarf.
As dark descended, Dory and baby Henry joined us. They had frequently visited the kitchen house, where I had learned that Dory was Mama Mae’s eldest daughter. I liked Dory well enough, for she left me alone, but I wasn’t fond of the baby with his harsh cry.
Although distracted by the girls and their play, I kept a close eye on Mama’s reassuring presence. When the door suddenly opened, a huge dark bear of a man stood framed against the even blacker night sky. I flew to Mama’s side. Fanny and Beattie scrambled to their feet and ran to the man, who scooped them up. “Papa!” they cried. After he released them, they went back to their play, and with Mama’s encouragement, I joined them.
“Evenin’, Dory.” The man’s voice was so deep, he might have been underground, and when he paused by baby Henry’s mama, his large hand covered the top of her head. “How your lil one doin’?”
“Not so good, Papa,” Dory answered, not looking up from the bench where she sat nursing her infant. The child fussed when she gently pulled his swollen hands out to show her father. “When his hands get big like this, he cry all the time,” she said.
Her father leaned down and, with a knuckle, gently stroked the baby’s cheek. When he straightened, he sighed and then took a few giant strides across the floor to Mama Mae. The girls giggled and hid their eyes when their father reached for Mama, pulling her to him and playfully nuzzling her neck. “George!” Mama laughed, then shooed him off. When he stepped back, he caught my eye and nodded at me. I quickly turned away.
Belle was expecting a visitor, Mama Mae said to the man, as though to explain my presence, and the pair exchanged a look before Mama Mae turned back to the fireplace. She scooped out stew from a black pot that hung over the open fire, and Papa set the filled wooden bowls on the narrow table. Then she brushed the coals from the top lid of another black iron pot that was nestled in hot ash, and from it she removed a steaming round corn cake, browned to crispness around the edges.
The three adults pulled up small stools to the table, and Fanny and Beattie had me stand between them as they began to eat. But everything felt strange, and I wanted the familiarity of the kitchen house. With no appetite, I studied the food, and when Mama instructed me to eat, I began to cry.
“Come here, Abinia,” she said, and after I went to her, she hoisted me onto her lap. “Chil’, you got to eat. You need some meat on them bones. Here, I dip this into the gravy for you, and you eat so you get strong as Mama.”
The twins laughed. “You treatin’ her just like a baby, Mama,” Fanny said.
“Well,” Mama said, “maybe she my new baby, and I got to feed her. Now you open your mouth, lil baby.” I so wanted her mothering that I ate the corn bread she dipped into the thick ham gravy. She continued to feed me as she spoke of the captain leaving and how Miss Martha’s nerves were running over again.