The Gospel Truth Read online

  T H E

  Gospel

  T R U T H

  Caroline Pignat

  For Peter—who helps so many of us find our voices.

  Whitehaven Plantation

  Virginia, 1858

  according to Phoebe

  Y e l l o w B i r d

  I thought it was done for, that bright yellow bird

  flap-fluttering as Rufus closed his jaws,

  ’til it lie,

  limp

  beneath his whiskers.

  I clap and run at Rufus

  and that old scaredy-cat

  drop it and bolt under the porch

  where he sit whipping his tail,

  watching me kneel over his prey:

  a splash of yellow on the wet green,

  head tilted,

  wing splayed

  and dotted with blood red beads.

  It look dead.

  But I lift it in my cupped hands,

  and I know it ain’t.

  I feel it—

  that tiny heart tap-tapping, strong and true.

  It feel like hope.

  according to Phoebe

  T w o T r u t h s

  Its right wing hangs loose from its shoulder

  like a tattered shawl of yellow.

  “Can you fix it?” Miss Tessa ask me

  as Rufus rub himself around her skirts.

  I don’t rightly know.

  “Fetch the birdcage from the attic,” she say.

  So I do.

  And I put the trembling bird inside.

  It hobble and hunch in the corner

  as I fill the small dishes with water and seed.

  But that yellow bird don’t drink

  or eat.

  She just go real still.

  “Is it dead, Phoebe?” Miss Tessa ask.

  I shake my head.

  That bird just so scared of what is,

  it gotta go on pretending what isn’t.

  Acting dead in the bottom of its cage

  so as it don’t end up that way.

  That’s hope, that is.

  Only not the kind of hope Miss Tessa ever know.

  Yellow feathers tremble in the corner,

  make my heart ache with truth:

  it don’t wanna be in here.

  No bird belong behind bars.

  Rufus slink over,

  rub against my leg,

  lick his black lips with that gritty pink tongue

  and my head know another truth:

  sometimes the safest place to be is

  in a cage.

  according to Phoebe

  T h e W a y o f T h i n g s

  Master call us out to the yard,

  make everyone gather round as Brutus ride in,

  big Will stumbling behind him,

  hands tied,

  clothes torn,

  his many muscles shiny black with sweat and blood.

  Brutus lead him by a rope around his neck,

  like some old hound.

  He pull Will over and kick him down before

  Master standing on the porch.

  And big Will, the biggest slave I ever seen,

  don’t look so big no more.

  I’s happy to see Will alive.

  And sad to see Will here.

  “You think you can run from me, boy?” Master say,

  walking his polished boots down the steps.

  “Trying to run—why, that’s like trying to steal from me.”

  Master tap his riding crop in his hand as he circle

  Will kneeling in the dirt,

  “And nobody steals from Arnold Duncan.”

  He swing that crop, cutting Will’s cheek.

  Once. Twice. Three times.

  Will spit blood in the sand.

  “Peel and pickle him,” Master say to Brutus.

  Shad gasp beside me.

  Will is his older brother, the only family he got left.

  When a slave’s back be all peeled by the whip

  and pickled by buckets of saltwater,

  just to make it sting even more,

  some slaves die from a whipping like that.

  And some just die inside.

  Master go back into the Big House

  with Missus and Miss Tessa

  as Brutus take out a knife,

  cut off what ragged clothes Will got left.

  He turn him round

  and tie Will’s thick arms around the post.

  The whip snap,

  and we all jump like it hitting us.

  In some way, it is.

  Big Will bleeding

  but we all be scarred.

  And nobody ever gonna think of running again.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  I grip Shad’s hand.

  Forty-nine. Fifty.

  Brutus stop for a rest, chest heaving.

  Wipe his sweaty white forehead on his dirty sleeve.

  Then gets back to work.

  Two hundred strokes he give

  while Will grunt, groan, and grit his teeth,

  trying not to cry out.

  But his back weeping for all of us.

  And nobody does nothing but watch

  bloody tears fall in the sand.

  Will belong to Master Duncan.

  We all do.

  It’s just the way of things.

  according to Master

  T r a i n i n g

  Will could get me top dollar at auction.

  $1300, at least.

  But I don’t want to sell him.

  Still, I won’t brand him with the runaway “R”

  much as I’d like to sear it on his skin.

  Why let the buyer know he’s trouble?

  It brings down the value, I say.

  Maybe Brutus can break him this time.

  But I doubt it.

  Will has been a headstrong Negro,

  a problem since the day I bought him

  and his scrawny brother.

  And no amount of whipping,

  or starving,

  or days in the stocks

  seem to help.

  My father always said:

  There are no bad dogs, just bad owners.

  Will is just a Negro.

  He can be trained, and tamed, and gentled.

  Just like any animal.

  With the right amount of

  … coercion.

  I’ll do whatever it takes,

  Will is that valuable to me.

  I don’t want to sell him.

  I want to break him.

  And then—

  I want to breed him.

  according to Phoebe

  H u s h , N o w

  I never know’d my age.

  Bea say I’s a year younger than Miss Tessa

  —but numbers don’t matter none,

  except maybe to Master Duncan.

  He always be counting something.

  Days. Dollars. Slaves.

  Marking in his red leather book each night.

  I s’pose one of them scribbles is me.

  Another is my mother.

  I wish I’d known what day it was that he planned to

  scratch her out,

  to move her name to another man’s ledger.

  Maybe I could have done something.

  Maybe I could have stopped him somehow.

  Or at least asked him to move my name, too.

  But I’s only small then.

  How was I to know

  that when she kiss me goodbye that morning

  before she went to bring Missus her tea,

  that that be the last time I’d see her?

  I cried for her all winter,

  no matter how B
ea held me in her big strong arms.

  “Hush, now, Phoebe,” she whisper in my ear.

  “You be a good girl—and, God willing,

  you going see your momma someday.”

  So I hush.

  I stop crying.

  Stop talking.

  I never makes a peep no more.

  But I haven’t seen my mother in ten summers.

  I don’t even know if she alive or dead.

  Some days, I wonder if I is.

  according to Phoebe

  S h a d a n d B e a

  It don’t matter that I don’t talk.

  Bea gots enough to say for all of us.

  Even as she fly about the kitchen, circling from pot to pan,

  she a-buzzing over all she gotta do,

  what with Master’s guest arriving next week.

  “He’s some kind of doctor,” she say,

  “come to see Virginian birds.”

  I never heard of no bird doctor before.

  Bea a real hornet’s nest.

  Only a fool be the stick that poke her.

  In come Shad

  splish-splashing the milk buckets he carrying,

  and I shakes my head.

  Shad be that stick, if I ever saw one—

  all long and lean,

  ready to stir things up.

  “Boy, I swear you going to be the death of me.”

  Bea cuffs the backside of his head.

  “Look at all that milk you wasting!”

  Shad set the buckets on the table and rub his thick skull,

  his devil’s grin tickling his mouth as he watches Rufus

  come in and set to licking the spill.

  “Bea,” he say, “way I see it, I done you a favor:

  I gots you milk

  I fed your cat

  and I washed your floor.”

  Bea swing at him again, but she aiming to miss.

  Me and Shad, we know she’s laughing

  on the inside.

  Bea do all her laughing on the inside.

  Shad take a piece of cornbread I’s cutting from the pile,

  leans on the counter.

  “I ’spect my lunch at noon, Miss Beatrice,” he say,

  like he the Master himself.

  He smile at me then.

  “Unless Phoebe don’t want me to come around, that is.”

  He waits and looks at me with them eyes,

  like two dark pools.

  My face feel like I stuck it over the steam,

  but the kettle ain’t even whistling yet.

  Bea shove him out the door.

  “Go on and stop your lazing about,

  else I get Brutus after you.”

  Shad get to moving then.

  Ain’t nobody want Brutus’s attention.

  And if Bea bring up his name, she ain’t laughing no more.

  She mean business.

  according to Shad

  W h a t I C a n D o

  I can do a lot of things,

  climb any tree,

  whittle a fishing spear,

  turn it into a fishing pole

  —when it don’t work,

  and then a sword

  —when the pole don’t work neither.

  (Fish too bony, anyhow.)

  I can beat Charlie in a duel

  or a race

  or a spitting contest,

  ’til he cramp from trying

  or laughing too hard.

  I can swim—but not in swamp water.

  Nobody can do that.

  I can hit ol’ Rufus ten feet away

  from both barrels of the cow’s udder.

  I can pat juba, clap-slapping a beat

  that make everyone’s feet tap on Saturday night.

  I can juggle three biscuits

  (and eats them all, too,

  if you’s dumb enough to give me yours).

  And I can even make Phoebe smile.

  Nobody else know how to do that.

  And that just fine.

  ’Cause that’s my job.

  But there’s one thing I can never do.

  Understand Will.

  Why he run?

  Why he wanna rile Master?

  Most of all,

  why he leave me?

  according to Phoebe

  M i s s T e s s a ’ s R e a d i n g L e s s o n

  I help Bea in the kitchen and I takes care of Miss Tessa.

  Miss Tessa, she seventeen,

  she old enough to do most things herself,

  but she always wanting me doing them for her.

  Comb her hair.

  Lay out her clothes.

  Fetch her lemonade.

  I make sure Miss Tessa dress nice and eat proper.

  And when she don’t have some job for me,

  I wait in the corner until she do.

  I can disappear like a tree in a forest.

  Stand so still and quiet-like,

  even a chickadee might land on my head

  and get to nesting.

  When Mr. Cooke, her tutor, come by

  on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

  I stand by her side and wave the big feather fan

  to keep them cool.

  If it weren’t for that whisper of wind,

  I’d say they’d never even know I was there.

  Miss Tessa always do what Miss Tessa want.

  And none of them other tutors is smart enough

  to make her want to learn.

  She never going to read, they say.

  But you can’t never say never to Missus.

  So she hire Mr. Cooke right out of college last spring,

  paid him double his teacher’s salary to tutor Miss Tessa

  if he could have her reading by the harvest.

  For weeks now,

  Miss Tessa bat her big blue eyes,

  ask him to go over it one more time.

  Mr. Cooke, he sit right next to her

  and run his finger slow-like under the words.

  “Ahhhh,” he go.

  “Ahhh,” she say.

  “Oooooo,” he go.

  “Oooooo,” she say,

  her pink lips all puckered up near his.

  Sitting right up close with no air between them—

  No wonder they’s getting all hot.

  according to Phoebe

  L e s s o n s L e a r n e d

  I know’d Miss Tessa better than anyone.

  She ain’t no fool.

  There is a lot going on behind them big blue eyes.

  You ask me,

  she know how to read.

  But Miss Tessa also know how to get what she want—

  and she want young Mr. Cooke’s attention.

  She like the way he lean in beside her.

  And he like his paychecks.

  And I like how we all keep it secret.

  ’Cause if anybody know

  I learned how to read by listening to him

  and that I practice my letters

  on her old speller that she throw away,

  the one I keep in my hollow tree—

  Brutus be teaching me a new lesson.

  And that’s one I surely don’t want to learn.

  according to Phoebe

  I f

  If Miss Tessa gonna throw out that speller,

  maybe I’ll just take it.

  If Mr. Cooke gonna dish out his lessons,

  maybe I’ll just learn it.

  And if Master Duncan ever leave out

  that big red leather book,

  maybe I’ll just read it.

  ’Cause if I do,

  Maybe, just maybe,

  I can find out where Momma been sent.

  according to Phoebe

  T a s t e o f H o m e

  A week now, I been watching Yellowbird

  wasting away

  in her cage in the corner of the dining room.

  I know she hungry.

  But
not for what seed be in them little dishes.

  So I go out to the woods to where I seen some yellow birds.

  And when I’s still enough,

  bright ones just like her

  flit-flutter from limb to log,

  their yellow heads cocked as they skip-hop,

  pick, pick, and peck.

  Prize wriggling in their beaks,

  they swoop back to the honeysuckle

  where hidden nestlings calling out,

  the ones that can’t feed theyselves yet, I s’pose.

  I peel a strip of bark off that rotted log,

  pick my own tiny caterpillar from its wet underside,

  and run to the Big House

  as it curl and wriggle in my fingers.

  I gots my own bird to feed.

  And when I put it in the cage,

  Yellowbird turn her black bead eye from me—

  from what she fear—

  to what she want.

  Dragging her limp wing,

  she skip-hop over to pick-peck that bug.

  I smile.

  Shad spying on me from the kitchen door.

  He smile, too.

  “All it needed was a taste of home,” he say.

  He think about something for a moment.

  “Phoebe,” he say, “for a girl, you real smart.”

  But I ain’t.

  Any fool can watch and learn

  like I do.

  The birds,

  they’s the smart ones.

  according to Shad

  C u r i n g B a r n

  I slide the lock on the barn door.

  Come harvest, all the tobacco leaves get cured,

  dried by fires, in here.

  Ghosts of woodsmoke and tobacco

  still haunt and whisper in the rafters.

  But the barn empty now.

  Except for Will.

  He lying on his stomach in the corner,

  ankles in chains,

  flies buzzing at where his back soaked through his shirt.

  Like he dead already.

  Like he gonna be if he don’t smarten up.

  I get him a scoop of water from the bucket in the corner.

  Pour it in his mouth.

  Pour another on his fevered face.

  He been in here a week now.

  And by my reckoning,

  if he be testing his will against Master’s,

  he losing.

  Any fool can see that.