The Freedom Maze (20 page)

“Where?”

“Don’t matter. Somewheres with a lock. And tell Ajax to send a horse for Dr. Charles.” And Mr. Akins ran off down the road like the devil was snapping at his heels.

The field hand set out for the yard at a fast clip, jerking Sophie along by one arm, dragging her up when she stumbled, ignoring her tears, and generally making it clear that he had more important things to tend to than a high-yellow house servant who probably deserved just what was coming to her and maybe more.

By the time they reached the stable, the only things keeping Sophie going were the field hand’s strong grip and her own stubbornness. She stood stiffly while he talked to Ajax, then staggered after him as he went to the woodshed behind the blacksmith’s shop, opened the door, and shoved her inside. The door closed, the bar fell, and she was alone.

The dark inside the woodshed was streaked with sunlight leaking through the gaps in the walls and heavy with the smell of cut wood and dirt. Sophie groped around until she found a pile of wood to sit on, took off her glasses, and dried them on her petticoat.

The last time she’d been shut up was her first day at Oak River, when Mammy had locked her into the linen room for being sassy. Then, she’d more or less deserved it — by Mammy’s lights, anyway. She’d been lost and confused, fresh from the steamboat and all the rush and worry of Mr. Robert’s sudden departure for France.

It was odd, that she could hardly remember what her father looked like. She did remember he loved to sing, though. She’d even sung with him, sometimes. Her father hadn’t thought she was a liar and a thief. He used to take her driving down the River Road by the big white-columned plantation houses and the brick refineries, and he’d sent her a pretty dress to remember him by.

Then he’d gone to his new life and left her behind, just like he’d left his dogs.

Sophie picked up a stick, threw it as hard as she could into the darkness.

That’s what she was to all her family — a pet dog. As long as she was quiet, tidy, above all obedient, they’d pat her head and give her treats. Any sign of disobedience brought immediate punishment. She was nothing but a disappointment to Old Missy now, a puppy who had turned out to be a chicken-killer but was too valuable to shoot. She wondered if Old Missy would write Mr. Robert in France to tell him what Sophie had done, what he’d answer if she did. Would he defend her? Would he wash his hands of her? Would he even care?

Would he care if she cut off her leg like poor Henry in the cane fields? Would Old Missy?

Sophie cried then, long and hard. And when she was cried out, she curled up on the dirt floor and went to sleep.

Sophie was awakened by a creak and a crash and a male voice
demanding to know what she was doing in the woodshed.

She sat up stiffly and squinted at the dark shape silhouetted against the door. “Mr. Akins shut me in.”

The man came into the woodshed. It was America, the blacksmith. “You Sophie from up to the house, ain’t you? The one who stole Miss Liza’s earbobs.”

“It was her brush. And I didn’t steal it.”

America laughed. “’Course you didn’t. And I ain’t seen you lying behind that there woodpile, so there ain’t no reason to bar the door.”

As soon as America left with his armful of wood, Sophie slipped out to the outhouse, then dipped a bucket of water from the cistern and washed her face and hands. Brushing the woodchips from the yellow calico dress, she hoped she wouldn’t have to give it back now she was banished to the fields. It wasn’t as nice as Mr. Robert’s parting present, but she’d hate to go to church in homespun.

Canny’s face popped up beside the cistern. “I hear you in deep trouble, Soph. I hear you steal Miss Liza’s pearl necklace and Mr. Akins whup you bloody, but I don’t believe a word.”

Sophie had to laugh. “It was her hairbrush. And I didn’t get whipped, only locked up in the woodshed. But I didn’t steal anything. Miss Liza hid it in Old Missy’s armoire.”

Canny frowned. “Why she go do a thing like that?”

Sophie had been thinking about that. “Dr. Charles scolded her for throwing her shears at me, right in front of me, too. She’s always hated me, especially after what Miss May said about us looking alike.”

“That sure sound like Miss Liza,” Canny said. “What you going to do now?”

Sophie retied her headwrap around her unraveling braids. “Old Missy sent me out to the fields.”

“You can help us bring the food to the field kitchen,” Canny said. “That in the fields. Come on. We doing that now.”

So Sophie joined Paris and Rome and the other yard children, who were ferrying sacks of cornmeal and vegetables from the storehouse to the stable and packing them on flatbed carts with barrels of salt pork. When all was stowed, she clambered up a wheel to the high seat where Canny was sitting by a man with a face like a shelled pecan and a beard that would have put Methuselah to shame.

“This here’s Uncle Italy,” Canny said. “He the only man alive can make Old Thunder here mind him.” She pointed at the mule, which looked almost as old as Uncle Italy, in a mulish way.

Uncle Italy laughed toothlessly. “Old Thunder don’t mind me, child, not ’xactly. We been knowing each other nigh on twenty years now, and we got an understanding.”

“This here’s Sophie,” Canny went on. “The Big House folk done took against her, so she working with me for a while.”

Uncle Italy turned a rheumy eye on Sophie. “You done anything you ashamed to tell me, girl?”

“No, sir. But I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

Uncle Italy nodded and slapped the reins against Old Thunder’s neck. The mule twitched its droopy ears, sighed windily, and heaved the cart out of the yard.

The sky was clear and the air warm and still between the tall, leafy stockades of ripe sugarcane. Sophie gripped the seat edge to avoid being shaken off her perch as Old Thunder heaved the cart over the rutted track. As they passed Devon Cut, a cluster of cane rats scuttled across the road. Behind them, the cane began to pitch and heave. Sophie saw a dark head appear, a dusty arm grab a stalk, a flat-bladed knife flash once, twice, three times, cutting away the long leaves, and then once again to sever the cane. A moment later, the row was open and Sophie could see clear to where two men were gathering the cut canes and piling them on a cart.

Sumpter Cut, a little farther along, was half-bare, with long leaves carpeting the earth between clusters of sharp cane stumps and groups of three and four hands moving down the unharvested rows like rats nibbling down a row of beans.

There were three field kitchens at Oak River, carefully placed with easy access to shade and fresh water. Old Italy drove to Sumpter Cut, where an old woman with a corncob pipe clamped between her teeth supervised the unloading and stowing of half the sacks in a makeshift wooden shed. Under a tree, Becky and Jane, who Sophie knew from the kitchen, stirred an iron kettle of salt pork and mush and chopped greens on a trestle table. Sophie’s mouth watered at the smell. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday, and she felt very empty.

Across the fields, the noon bell rang and a commotion like an ocean wave swept through the fields. Men came out of the rows, sticking their cane knives through their rope belts and wiping their faces with sweaty bandanas, to collect bowls and cups and stand in line for dinner.

The old woman set Sophie to dipping water into each hand’s tin cup. One man had a gash on his arm bleeding sluggishly through the coating of sticky cane sap and dirt. Sophie soaked his headrag so he could clean it and asked him if he’d been whipped.

“Not today, sister. Sugar-cane leaf mighty sharp, cut clear to the bone if you ain’t careful.” He smiled at her. “Cain’t say but what I’d sooner catch a whupping.”

“I’d sooner catch a crawdad,” said a girl behind him. “Hey, Soph. What-for you ain’t drinking lemonade up to the Big House? You and Old Missy have a falling-out?”

It took a minute for Sophie to recognize Tibet. She had an inflamed cut on one cheek, and looked much older than the girl who’d talked Sophie into joining Old Betsy’s funeral.

Sophie tipped water in her cup. “No, ma’am. I just thought I’d like to have me some of them good times out in the fields you’re always going on about.”

Tibet laughed — not hard, but enough so Sophie felt she’d said the right thing. Then she stepped aside to make room for the next thirsty field hand.

There were very few women among the cutters, but the looks they gave Sophie told her what they thought of pale-skinned house slaves playing at field work. In their place, she knew she’d feel the same.

After everyone was settled in the shade, three old men came up to the table. They were as ragged and dirty as everyone else, but their sugar-loaf hats and whips of knotted cords marked them as gang drivers. Among them, Sophie was shocked to recognize the preacher, Old Guam.

He smiled at her startled face. “I sure surprised to see you here, too, young Sophie,” he said and took his dinner to where the other drivers sat, away from everybody else.

Before they started again, Canny charmed bowls of mush out of Jane for herself and Sophie and Uncle Italy. To Sophie’s surprise, it was thick with pork and vegetables and clabber and filled her fuller than she’d been in weeks. Canny licked her bowl. Sophie did, too.

The remaining provisions had to be delivered to the sugarhouse. Blinded by the high walls of cane, Sophie smelled it long before she saw it: a combination of bitter wood smoke and a burned sweetness like caramel. Two plumes of gray smoke smudged the blue sky, the chimneys rose above the sugarcane, bit by bit, and then Old Thunder pulled them out of the cane and up to the door of the real heart of Oak River Plantation.

It looked like a cross between a factory and a town hall, Sophie thought, bigger than the Big House, with brick colonnades all around the first floor. At one end, women spread stalks of cane on a jointed wooden belt that ran up to the shiny metal jaws of the rollers, set high in the wall above.

Even outside, the noise of the sugarhouse was deafening. The workers eating their dinners by the kitchen tent looked even more wrung out than the cane cutters. The men were stripped to the waist and gleaming with sweat; the women’s dresses clung wetly to their bodies. There wasn’t much talking.

While the provisions were being unloaded, Canny grabbed Sophie’s hand.

“You want to come see inside?”

Nervous of the noise and meeting Mr. Akins, Sophie hesitated.

“We got the bestest sugarhouse in the parish,” Canny coaxed. “Popi the sugar boss and Poland, he tend the boiler. Ain’t nobody in the parish know more about sugar than Popi and Poland.”

Sophie laughed. “Well, if your pa’s running the sugarhouse, of course I have to see it.” And she followed Canny through the nearest arch.

A wall of heat and noise and burned-caramel smell hit her like a giant hand.

Before harvest started, Old Guam had preached about the pains of Hell. Sophie had listened, wide-eyed, as he described the scorching heat, the sullen, red-black glow of hellfire, the screeching of the devils, the moaning of the shadowy damned, and wondered how he knew so much more about hell than she’d read in the Bible. Now she knew.

The sound of her name caught her attention. “Hey, Miz Sophie! How you liking the Biggest House?”

It was Ned, waving from a platform crowded with a forest of metal pipes and tubes and huge iron cylinders.

Mr. Akins appeared, looking thunderous, and pulled Ned back among the machinery. Canny dashed through a maze of rattling wooden belts and troughs toward the platform and up the stairs. Sophie scrambled after her, catching her just in time to keep her from barging into Akins’s conference with Ned and making things worse.

Judging from his voice, Mr. Akins was not happy. “You’re a damn-fool,” Sophie heard him say, “if you think I’m going to take your word. I read a book ’bout this here apparatus, which is more than you can do.”

Somewhere out of sight, Ned spoke urgently, too soft to hear over the hissing and clanking of the vacuum evaporator. Sophie caught the words “gauge,” “pressure,” “Dr. Charles.”

“Well, Dr. Charles ain’t here. Just you remember, boy, I’m still the white man around here, or I might just forget, temporarily like, how Miz Fairchild feel ’bout the whip.”

Canny stiffened. “Mist’ Akins the damn-fool,” she said. “Popi know that machine like he know his children.”

“Is that so?” Mr. Akins face appeared, his hat pushed back to show the white crescent of his untanned forehead. “He doing better than me, if he can keep track of y’all. Which one are you? Timbuktu, maybe?”

Canny stared up at him, her mouth an “O” of terror.

“What you doing here anyways, Timbuktu?” Mr. Akins’s hand was on the little whip of knotted cords tucked into his belt. Ned peered around his shoulder, white-eyed with fear. Sophie dearly wanted to run. But Ned would be whipped bloody if he interfered, sugar boss or not. And Sophie was grown-up now — fourteen years old, with her women’s courses started. She licked her dry lips and said, “We just leaving, sir. Come on, Canny.”

“And who in tarnation are
you
?” Mr. Akins grinned like a ’gator. “Well, if it ain’t the little New Orleans octoroon that likes silver hairbrushes. What you doing, minding the picanninies?” Reaching past Canny, he grabbed Sophie’s upper arm and squeezed it painfully. “Soft as cotton. Well, don’t you fret none. I got a nice easy job all ready for you.”