A shriek tore the early morning quiet into fragments that lodged painfully in seven-year-old Frederick’s mind.
He stirred uneasily in the rough closet that served as his bed.
“Have
mercy!” begged a young woman’s voice. “I won’t do so no more!”
Sounds
like Aunt Esther. What could be frightening her so? Frederick
wiggled out of his grain sack and peered through the cracks between the boards in the closet door.
His tall,
beautiful aunt stood on a bench, her hands bound tightly and fastened to one of the joists where hams were hung. A bloody
welt spanned her smooth brown shoulders that had never known her master’s whip.
Until now.
Captain Aaron
Anthony, known to his slaves as “Old Master,” deliberately adjusted his blue cowskin, a whip made of dried ox
hide that curved in the air like a scorpion’s tail as he swung it again.
And again.
And again.
Frederick
hugged the grain bag, crushing his thumbs into his ears; the agony of his aunt’s screams and Old Master’s curses
clawed at him like the black swamp panther in his nightmares.
“I told
you to leave that Roberts nigger alone. Didn’t I?”
“I won’t
never see him again!”
Crack.
“Master,
please, please. . . .”
Crack.
Profanity
streamed from the enraged old man’s mouth; the more poor Esther pleaded, the angrier he became. Frederick’s
skinny limbs trembled.
I’m
next, he thought. Old Master knows where I sleep.
Days seemed
to pass before the hellish song of rage and pain finally ceased. Frederick
slowly raised his head. Old Master yanked Esther’s limp hands down from the meat hook; the girl’s slim body swayed.
He shoved her out the door.
“Go
work in the field today, whore! I won’t have such in my kitchen!”
The old man
seemed as spent as his victim. Sweat dripped from his stringy hair and sparse gray beard. He wiped the blood from the gaily
colored cowhide and limped back to his own bedroom.
Frederick
lay motionless in the closet long after Old Master left the room. Even when Aunt Katy, the slave who ran the kitchen, began
to fry bacon for her master’s breakfast, the small, golden-skinned boy tried to stifle his shivering breaths. Aunt Katy
would not miss him if he did not appear at the large trough of cornmeal porridge on the floor, where the slave children gathered
like baby pigs. He would stay in his closet until Old Master, the plantation overseer, left to accompany Colonel Lloyd, the
owner of the vast estate, on his morning rounds.
God, who lived
way up in the sky, was good, Frederick had been told. He made everyone; He made white people to be masters and black people to be slaves. He knew what was best
for everybody.1
