Kedzie Saint Helena Island Slave

2

WESTFALL PLANTATION, ST HELENA ISLAND, SC

SEPTEMBER 1857

In the years that Kedzie had been hired to Mistress Ridley, she had visited Westfall and her grandmother a number of times. She remembered with dismal clarity the many slave quarters made of rough-hewn wood with shingled roofs. The shacks had one window, one door, and a dirt floor. Her grandmother’s cabin was a haze-filled room with one decent chair.

Her grandmother hid her precious things, like ribbons and buttons, in cracks in the mud-and-sticks chimney. The shutters, which closed at angles, leaked in a stormy rain, and when they were opened on warm days, blowflies, mosquitoes, and gnats came inside. If it was a hot night Kedzie had slept on a pallet on the floor and often awoke with bug bites. One time a spider bit her face, and her eye swelled shut.

She thought of Mooey and smiled. Mooey lived with her grandmother and on temperate nights, Kedzie had slept in the small cot with her. Mooey knew where the guineas, chickens, and turtles laid eggs. One time Mooey found a rat snake under the barn and it had a bump so big they squeezed out a dead rat. She knew a root that looked like an alligator and an oak split by lightning. Mooey could find places to swing on vines, eat blackberries, or go swimming. They stole chicks from the master’s hen and pitched bullbay seeds at the peacock. Sometimes the two of them just scouted in the woods, looking for animal tracks or Thor’s rabbit traps. Mooey could smell animals—rats, snakes, and wild cats in particular.

As Kedzie left the village sitting on the wagon bench with Wink, she knew she was in for another big change. The only thing she looked forward to was being with her grandmother and Mooey. She wondered if she’d ever get back to St. Helenaville. They passed few houses and many fields of cotton plants as high as her head with the furry fibers that made the master rich.

A carriageway of live oaks ended at Westfall’s big white plantation house, which dominated the large yard where other trees grew. Chickens pecked in the dirt. Ducks and geese squawked loudly. A drove of guinea hens scurried under the house, built high enough off the ground so that Kedzie could almost stand up under it. As they drove around the big house to the back yard, numerous outbuildings came into view. In the distance the slave quarters stood like a minor settlement. The kitchen house, closest to the big house and dominated by a chimney wide as the wall, smelled of apples cooking.

Wink tugged on the lines and said, “Whoa! Stop your feets, Tootie!” He turned to Kedzie. “Billy will tell you where to put your tick.”

Kedzie recognized “Billy,” the name of the butler. “I should go to the big house?”

“Yessum!” Wink said.

She gathered her duffle, which had fallen between sacks of oats in the back, and climbed down. Wink clicked his lips loudly and ruffled the lines. “Come on, Tootie. You knows where is the barn.” Kedzie strolled to the small back porch, put her ear against the door, and listened for footsteps on the other side.

“That door’s not gonna open by itself,” said the cook as she stood in the doorway of the kitchen house, wiping a plate with a dry rag.

Kedzie knew the cook by reputation. Her grandmother said Puddin got herself a task that excused her from having children. Kedzie was old enough to think she might want to become a cook. “Is Billy inside?”

“Just knock on the door. Billy’ll be there.” Puddin disappeared into the kitchen.

Kedzie knocked.

Puddin returned to the open door with another plate. “You Dina’s girl, ain’t you?”

“Yessum,” said Kedzie, who hadn’t seen her mother since Easter. Years before, when Kedzie had been hired out to Mistress Ridley, the master had sold Kedzie’s mother to his mother in Charleston, the biggest city Kedzie had ever seen. On visits, Kedzie admired the beautiful mansions and began to notice that only white people owned them and only blacks were servants.

Billy opened the door and gave Kedzie an impatient look. “Massuh smell you, he’s gonna send you to the block!” His lips smacked the air as he reared back, seemingly to escape her scent.

People in the quarters scorned Billy, said he acted like white people.

“You know your granny’s quarter?” Billy said.

Kedzie nodded her head.

“Massuh says that’s your quarter. There’s four cots. Yours is the new one the massuh built.”

“Massuh didn’t build nothing,” Kedzie corrected him. “Some nigger built everything on this place.” Everybody knew white people credited themselves with work the slaves did, and in this particular instance, the houseman especially irritated her because her stomach growled with hunger and she stank of pee.

Billy looked at her as if she had sprouted horns. “Watch your mouth, girl! Massuh’ll put you in his pocket before you get shucks in your tick.”

“I don’t have no tick,” Kedzie said. “I had to leave it.”

“Git one from Farley,” Billy said haughtily. He shut the door.

Kedzie, who tried to be worried about being put on the block, found she was more disappointed that she’d have to stuff her tick with corn shucks rather than cotton.

Kedzie knew Farley, the driver turned overseer. He lived in the nice cabin with a wood floor and a porch. He wore shoes and rode a horse. Just about everybody hated him.

As Kedzie clutched her duffle on the way to the quarters, a certain dread overtook her, which only increased as she neared her grandmother’s shanty. Children ran around like chickens, squawking and chasing one another. From time to time, they raced in front of her, squealed loudly, and scampered away. They wore grubby shirttails and had sores in their hair and knobby bones for elbows. They begged for piggy rides and fought over peacock feathers.

Except for the children, the quarters seemed empty. Obviously the hands were still working in the field. Kedzie stepped inside the shanty’s open door. A chicken rested on a chair, and Kedzie chased it outside. “Go on,” she said. “If I can’t live with Missus, you shore can’t live in here.”

The meager wood chairs and cave-like light made her homesick for Mistress Ridley’s colorful carpets, glazed window panes, curtains, padded chairs, and upholstered settees. Most of all, she missed having her own room. Some kind of trash from the overhead timbers sprinkled on her head rag, and she brushed it off. Three cots already had ticks, so she threw her blanket on the bare wood frame with narrow slats attached to the far wall. When she got her tick, it would cover the slats. Her grandmother always slept by the door. She knew Mooey’s bunk by the rose petals on the tick but had no idea who slept in the other one. A large basket with a baby blanket inside rested on the floor between two cots. Somebody was a mother.

Kedzie sat on a stump-like stool and stared. Children giggled at the open door and when she looked at them they disappeared. Plank walls and rough timbers surrounded her. So woody and earthy were her surroundings she felt like a squirrel living in the knot of a tree. A mound of cold ashes in the fireplace scented the room. The open shutters allowed light inside, as well as a view of children’s little heads bobbing up and down. She had to figure a way to get out of this place.

She took off her smelly clothes, washed herself in the wash pan, and put on her clean visiting dress. The fancy bodice and shiny buttons cheered her. The fine dress didn’t belong in such a spare room, which gave Kedzie hope that her situation was just a step on the ladder to somewhere better.

After some time, she found a piece of lye soap and walked the path to the creek to wash her stinky dress. Several children skipped behind her. From the quarters, somebody called out to them, “Come back here!” and though they seemed to pay the voice no mind, they eventually turned back.

After Kedzie returned to the quarters and hung her dress on a chair to dry, she wandered the streets and came to the chillun house. Mammy Livy, who kept the babies and children during the day, stood at the fire stirring a pot that smelled of hog meat. Her face, wrinkled and pinched, glistened from the heat. Sweat soaked her head rag. Everybody seemed to know and love Mammy Livy, but Kedzie felt ill at ease in her presence. Unlike other children, as a tyke Kedzie had been kept by her mother.

“You got something I can eat?” said Kedzie.

“Is you a new hand?” Mammy Livy looked from Kedzie’s eyes to her dress to her feet, shod in leather shoes.

“Yessum. I’m a new hand. Auntie Nell is my granny.” Kedzie expected Mammy Livy to know who she was. Everybody knew everybody in the quarters as well as relatives living on other plantations.

“Where you get them shoes?”

Kedzie looked at Mammy’s bare feet and swallowed a bolt of resentment. She didn’t want to live with people who only put on shoes when the water bucket froze.

“And that dress?”

Kedzie’s fine visiting dress with ruffled sleeves appeared so out of place here she realized she never wanted to become like these people. After she ate corn pone with hog gravy, Farley, the overseer,...