“That’s why they are so stubborn,” said the Kentucky man, struggling to regain his composure. “You spoil them.”
Once more the Abyssinian Queen was interrogated about the conception. The Owner looked at her appealingly, and his eyes were clearly pleading: Please give us the answers we want. It kills me to see you going through such pain and humiliation.
She was now aware that her answer would determine whether she remained with the Fairfields or was taken over by the Kentucky man and an unknown groom. Although she did not know when negotiations for her marriage were first made and the transaction was finalized, she came up with a date that was a few months back.
“She lies,” said the Kentucky man.
“The child rightly belongs to Fairfield Farms,” said The Owner.
“We can work out a compromise,” said the lady of the house. “We’ll send the woman over to Kentucky soon after the birth. After all, our children here are brought up by nursemaids and not by their birth mothers.”
But the Kentucky man demanded his money back and left in a huff.
The Abyssinian Queen’s status in the household was reduced. She had to vacate her comfortable room for the cabins. She also had to say goodbye to the luxury of having other slaves clean her chamber and wash and iron her clothes. Although her demotion from her aristocratic position as a house slave was supposed to be serious punishment she was much happier in the surroundings she had known so well as a young girl, and enjoyed the communal spirit that existed among the hoi polloi. The place was brimming with life. Family units were formed, even though everyone knew how tenuous they were. Mothers established new connections with those they believed to be their children, even though most of them did not sleep under the same roof. She discovered that she had gained an even greater stature among her peers. People remembered how she made The Owner run around in circles like a mad dog. She was admired even more for standing up to the masters, foiling their evil plans and depriving the Kentucky man of the pleasure of her screams.
The child was born and was named Nicodemus.
As with Abednego, the father was known in the slave community. When he and the Abyssinian Queen started behaving like a family he was exposed as the culprit to the occupants of the big house, particularly to The Owner, who had been smarting for a long time because his favorite concubine had been impregnated by a field slave. It was more that his ego was hurt, because in any event the concubine’s fate had already been determined through the botched marriage, and he was never going to see her again.
Contrary to every gossip’s expectation, Nicodemus’s father was not castrated but was immediately sold to a different plantation in Kentucky. As he marched in the hot sun chained and yoked to other young men destined for the auction houses of Lexington he hollered to the women working in the fields: “Y’all tell my queen that I’m gonna find my freedom. I am gonna come back for her and Nicodemus. We all gonna be free.”
Slave drivers didn’t take kindly to this type of wild talk. They gave him a few lashes on his naked back.
Like all the slave children of Fairfield Farms Nicodemus was brought up by nursemaids at the nursery, and then transferred to the African cabins at the age of about five or so. The Abyssinian Queen made it a point that Abednego, who lived at the mulatto cabins, got to know Nicodemus as his brother. This was achieved with the active assistance of those who were assigned to look after the children as they grew older and to oversee their labor. Right from the beginning the boys hit it off, and with a great deal of connivance at various levels it became possible for them to spend some evenings together.
The Owner was becoming even more compassionate and more liberal with age. The Abyssinian Queen took advantage of this weakness and asked him if she could have the boys stay with her at the cabin she shared with two aging matriarchs.
“How do you know they’re your boys?” asked The Owner.
“It don’t matter whose boys they are,” said the Abyssinian Queen. “I just like them to stay with me.”
“Those boys are marked already,” The Owner warned her. “The black one is gonna be a good stud. The mulatto will be ready for sale soon. In the meantime it makes no never mind to me if they stay with you.”
The lady of the house was dead set against this arrangement. But The Owner, who obviously still had a soft spot for the Abyssinian Queen, prevailed, and the woman lived with her sons in her small cabin. The matriarchs were happy to have young ones under their roof to spoil with treats as grandmothers are wont to do.
The Abyssinian Queen’s main occupation was to sew and mend clothes for the whole slave community. She was one of three women assigned this task. Two of them were the aging matriarchs, who had been saved from the auction block decades before because of their skill as seamstresses. It was from one of them that the Abyssinian Queen learned not only how to sew the most wonderful shirts and dresses from feed sacks, but how to create quilts from scraps of fabric gathered from all odd places, including old clothes from the big house and leftovers from the muslin that the lady of the house occasionally purchased for the Sunday dresses of house slaves’ children.
She spent her nights sewing the quilts. When the matriarchs discovered her interest in and flair for needlecraft they took upon themselves all the sewing and mending tasks, and let the Abyssinian Queen focus on her quilts. She became better by the day, and was voracious in learning new patterns. Soon the matriarchs taught her that the quilts her people made carried secret messages. Beauty that spoke a silent language, they called it. Openly it was there for all to admire, yet its meaning rested only with those who knew the code hidden in the colors and the designs.
Before learning the language of the quilts she used to specialize in crazy patchwork, at least four decades before these constructions of odd pieces of randomly arranged fabric became a fad in that part of Virginia — which had, of course, become West Virginia by the time the crazy quilt flourished. It was in the 1830s, and she did not know she was founding a tradition. Even if she had been conscious of the fact it would not have mattered to her that she would get no recognition for it.
Abednego and Nicodemus learned that there was some rhythm in the madness of her compositions. These were not crazy designs in the true sense of the later tradition. In the seemingly haphazard arrangements, she taught them to identify some landmarks. A hill here. A forest there. A creek. A river. The Kanawha River, the boys later learned. She had painstakingly stitched and knotted the map of the plantation and beyond, using information she had gathered from those who had seen those places. Patches of different colors represented actual landmarks.
She herself had never been outside the borders of Fairfield Farms, yet here she was teaching the boys directions to places that existed only in stories that adventurers and foiled escapees told. It was a rudimentary map, but to the boys it represented a world of dreams out there. It was an attainable world; the mother drummed that into their heads. Dreams could be lived.
“One day you gonna see all them places,” she told them. “One day you gonna cross the River Jordan.”
The boys loved her beautiful voice as she sang to them about the River Jordan and about the Promised Land and about wading in the water. She taught them that there were two promised lands: “One happens after we is dead and gone. But before you get to that one you better reach the Promised Land across the big river.”
This was rather confusing to the boys, but they imbibed the songs and the stories until they were utterly intoxicated by their beauty and promise. It was like the happiness that the preacherman spoke about in the makeshift church on Sundays. But the difference was that the Abyssinian Queen’s promised happiness did not happen after death like the preacherman’s. It happened in this life, in a real Canaan that existed beyond the river.