Sarah
On a bleary morning in March, four months after the calamity of my
eleventh birthday, I woke to find Hetty missing, her pallet on the floor
outside my room crumpled with the outline of her small body. By now, she
would’ve been filling my basin with water and telling me some story or
other. It surprised me that I felt her absence personally. I missed her as I
would a fond companion, but I fretted for her, too. Mother had already
taken her cane to Hetty once.
Finding no trace of her in the house, I stood on the top step by the back
door, scanning the work yard. A thin haze had drifted in from the harbor,
and overhead the sun glinted through it with the dull gold of a pocket
watch. Snow was in the door of the carriage house, repairing one of the
breeching straps. Aunt-Sister straddled a stool by the vegetable garden,
scaling fish. Not wishing to rouse her suspicions, I ambled to the porch of
the kitchen house where Tomfry was handing out supplies. Soap to Eli for
washing the marble steps, two Osnaburg towels to Phoebe for cleaning
crystal, a coal scoop to Sabe for re-supplying the scuttles.
As I waited for him to finish, I let my eyes drift to the oak in the back
left corner. Its branches were adorned with tight buds, and though the tree
bore little resemblance to its summer visage, the memory of that long-ago
day returned: sitting straddle-legged on the ground, the hot stillness, the
green-skinned shade, arranging my words with marbles, Sarah Go—
I looked away to the opposite side of the yard, and it was there I saw
Hetty’s mother, Charlotte, walking beside the woodpile, bending now and
then to pick up something from the ground.
Arriving behind her unseen, I noticed the tidbits she scavenged were
small, downy feathers. “. . . . . . Charlotte—”
She jumped and the feather between her fingers fluttered off on the sea
wind. It flitted to the top of the high brick wall that enclosed the yard,
snagging in the creeping fig.

“Miss Sarah!” she said. “You scared the jimminies out of me.” Her
laugh was high-pitched and fragile with nerves. Her eyes darted toward the
stable.
“. . . . . . I didn’t mean to startle you . . . I only wondered, do you know
where—”
She cut me off, and pointed into the woodpile. “Look way down ’n
there.”
Peering into a berth between two pieces of wood, I came face to face
with a pointy-eared brown creature covered with fuzz. Only slightly bigger
than a hen’s chick, it was an owl of some sort. I drew back as its yellow
eyes blinked and bore into me.
Charlotte laughed again, this time more naturally. “It ain’t gon bite.”
“. . . . . . It’s a baby.”
“I came on it a few nights back. Poor thing on the ground, crying.”
“. . . . . . Was it . . . hurt?”
“Naw, just left behind is all. Its mauma’s a barn owl. Took up in a
crow’s nest in the shed, but she left. I’m ’fraid something got her. I been
feeding the baby scraps.”
My only liaisons with Charlotte had been dress fittings, but I’d always
detected a keenness in her. Of all the slaves Father owned, she struck me as
the most intelligent, and perhaps the most dangerous, which would turn out
to be true enough.
“. . . . . . I’ll be kind to Hetty,” I said abruptly. The words—remorseful
and lordly—came out as if some pustule of guilt had disgorged.
Her eyes flashed open, then narrowed into small burrs. They were
honey colored, the same as Hetty’s.
“. . . . . . I never meant to own her . . . I tried to free her, but . . . I wasn’t
allowed.” I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
Charlotte slid her hand into her apron pocket, and silence welled
unbearably. She’d seen my guilt and she used it with cunning. “That’s
awright,” she said. “Cause I know you gon make that up to her one these
days.”
The letter M clamped on to my tongue with its little jaws. “. . . . . . . . .
M-m-make it up?”
“I mean, I know you gon hep her any way you can to get free.”
“. . . . . . Yes, I’ll try,” I said.
“What I need is you swearing to it.”

I nodded, hardly understanding that I’d been deftly guided into a
covenant.
“You keep your word,” she said. “I know you will.”
Remembering why I’d approached her in the first place, I said, “. . . I’ve
been unable to find—”
“Handful gon be at your door ’fore you know it.”
Walking back to the house, I felt the noose of that strange and intimate
exchange pull into a knot.
Hetty appeared in my room ten minutes later, her eyes dominating her
small face, fierce as the little owl’s. Seated at my desk, I’d only just opened
a book I’d borrowed from Father’s library, The Adventures of Telemachus.
Telemachus, the son of Penelope and Odysseus, was setting out to Troy to
find his father. Without questioning her earlier whereabouts, I began to read
aloud. Hetty plopped onto the bed-steps that led to the mattress, rested her
chin in the cup of her hands, and listened through the morning as
Telemachus took on the hostilities of the ancient world.

Wily Charlotte. As March passed, I thought obsessively about the promise
she’d wrung from me. Why hadn’t I told her Hetty’s freedom was
impossible? That the most I could ever offer her was kindness?
When it came time to sew my Easter dress, I cringed to think of seeing
her again, petrified she would bring up our conversation by the woodpile. I
would rather have impaled myself with a needle than endured more of her
scrutiny.
“I don’t need a new dress this Easter,” I told Mother.
A week later, I stood on the fitting box, wearing a half-sewn satin dress.
On entering my room, Charlotte had hastened Hetty off on some contrived
mission before I could think of a way to override her. The dress was a light
shade of cinnamon, remarkably similar to the tone of Charlotte’s skin, a
likeness I noted as she stood before me with three straight pins wedged
between her lips. When she spoke, I smelled coffee beans, and knew she’d
been chewing them. Her words squeezed out around the pins in twisted
curls of sounds. “You gon keep that word you gave me?”
To my disgrace, I used my impediment to my advantage, struggling
more than necessary to answer her, pretending the words fell back into the

dark chute of my throat and disappeared.