BEHIND THE DARK VEIL
Magnolia Hill Plantation
River Road, St. John the Baptist Parish
New Orleans, Louisiana
(1748)
A night owl’s portentous hoot and the piteous moans of a slave left to die in the hot box chased the weary slave woman from the Big House. The light of a full moon presented her face in sharp relief as she ran. She had once been very beautiful, but now her face was marred by two long disfiguring scars resembling permanent tears, one on each cheek.
She hurried on bare feet to the plantation kitchen which was housed in a separate building up-wind of the main house. This was where the plantation cook, Mother Ethel, was watching her three-day-old baby and where she slept on a thin straw pallet on the kitchen floor.
The rag she had carefully packed herself with earlier that day was soaked clear through with blood and clots. Warm blood trickled down her leg with every step. She could smell the stink of it. She could also smell the cloying shroud of Mistress Felicity’s blood. It attached itself to her clothing like a clinging vine and followed her like a storm cloud chasing the moon.
The slave woman’s name was Abayoni, but her mama and everyone else who knew her called her Sorrow, because that was all she was ever gonna know.
Sorrow was not yet healed from birthing her own baby but a few short days ago, yet she’d been up all day and into the night working like a pack mule to bring Mistress’s child into the world. It had been an extremely long and difficult labour which ended badly for both mother and child, just as she prayed it would.
Praise be to the goddess, Felicity Etienne and her baby are now both dead. Sorrow silently prayed the devil was sticking a pitchfork up both their asses.
***
A blast of heat from the kitchen cooking fires confirmed Sorrow’s belief that she was indeed in hell on earth. When she reached for her baby, the old cook Ethel’s rheumy eyes surveyed her sorry condition as a thick drop of blood plopped onto the dirt floor.
“Did the mistress have that baby yet?” Ethel asked while stirring the stew that would be served for the evening dinner. Sorrow bit into one of Ethel’s hot buttery biscuits before answering.
“The baby dead,” she said without emotion. “And soon, if it ain’t happened already, Mistress Felicity gon’ be dead too.”
“Lord have mercy,” Ethel said, dropping her fulsome arthritic figure down heavily on a nearby stool.
Sorrow held her newborn on one hip while she steeped some herbs to make a tea she would drink to heal her insides from the recent birth.
“Masta Claude stood at the foot of the birthing bed like he was betting on a racehorse. When the baby came out dead, he screamed at me to git’ out the birthing chamber. He wouldn’t even let me pack her to stop the bleeding. She bled out before I turned my back to open the door.” Sorrow handed Ethel a cup of the tea. It wouldn’t do the old woman any harm.
“Thank you, baby,” Ethel said, blowing on the tea to cool it off before taking a sip of the steaming brew. “You know how white folks is, child,” she opined with the wisdom that comes from a lifetime in captivity. “Now that Masta Claude got himself an heir and a spare and Mistress Felicity’s money, he don’t have no more use for her. I ‘spect he’ll just go out and get himself another victim.”
Sorrow nodded in agreement. “Now both of them been through two wives,” Sorrow said, then added in a more sombre tone of voice, “I only wish the angel of death had plucked the two of them up along with the mistress.”
Sorrow never met a white person she didn’t hate, and she never hated one more than she hated Clidamont Etienne. It didn’t much matter that he was her daddy.