Never Too Late Read online

“Mama! Mama!” she cried. “What is it?”

  “Hurry, chil’, git on yo feet an’ follow me,” said her mother, snatching her hand and yanking her to her feet.

  The little cabin was full of people. The youngest children, two toddlers and a baby, were crying, and Seffie’s mother and a crippled toothless old woman they all called “Aunt Phoebe” were trying to save what few possessions they had in case the cabin went up in flames.

  Hurrying out into the chilly night air, the cause for the uproar was immediately visible. The woodshed and a large pile of dried chunks of oak waiting to be stacked inside were on fire and sending flames twenty or more feet into the air. Tiny hot glowing cinders sprayed upward and floated on a southerly breeze ominously toward the slave village. All the black men were running with water buckets from the stream and dousing the walls and roofs closest to the blaze. The master and several of his men from the big house were there, boots hurriedly pulled on over nightclothes, shouting out orders to make sure the fire did not spread.

  Early the next morning, while a few wisps of smoke still rose from what had been the pile of split oak and the woodhouse, the overseer shouted for all the slaves to come out from their cabins.

  “That fire last night wasn’t no accident,” he said in a stern voice as soon as they were gathered. “The master gave you permission to have your bonfire and sing your songs and now look what’s happened. Our next winter’s wood supply and the woodhouse—they’re all gone. You’re going to have to cut and haul us a whole new batch of wood, and that’s after your regular work is done. The master’s mighty upset with all of you and he told me to thrash every one of you unless I bring him the name of whoever let that fire spread, ’cause he knows it came on account of that fire of yours and wasn’t no accident. So unless you want whippings all around, he wants to know who it was.”

  He stopped and stared around at the thirty or forty silent black faces with a look that said he secretly hoped no one would speak up so that he could have the pleasure of whipping every one of them.

  A long uncomfortable pause followed. A young black boy of eleven or twelve suddenly stepped forward.

  “Well, speak up, Dominique,” demanded the overseer.

  The boy shuffled his feet where he stood.

  “Speak up, boy, unless you want a taste of my strap!” said the overseer.

  “It was dose two,” said Dominique, pointing. “Dat Mose an’ dat Seffie kid what belongs ter Aunt Phoebe. I seen dem sneakin’ roun’ after everybody lef’ las’ night. Dey wuz pokin’ at dat fire till sparks flew up.”

  The overseer glared at the two accused offenders.

  “So it was you two nigger brats,” he said.

  “No, massa, please!” cried Mose. “I didn’t spread no fire! Dominique done tol’ you a lie!”

  The overseer approached and looked down at the girl.

  “Were you playing with the fire?” he asked.

  “No, suh,” she said, looking up with wide eyes of dread.

  “What were you doing, then?”

  “Jes’ sittin’ watchin’, suh.”

  “Was he playing with the fire?” he said, nodding toward the boy.

  “He wuz jes’ roastin’ nuts, suh.”

  “Was he stirrin’ up the fire?”

  “Not much, suh—jes’ enuff ter git da nuts out.”

  “Did he have a stick?”

  “Jes’ a little one. He didn’t make no fire wiff it.”

  But by now the overseer’s mind was made up. He didn’t care as much for facts as he did that retribution was made. It was the one law of dealing with slaves his boss wanted enforced above all others—that somebody pay for every slightest infraction. It didn’t much matter who. Whether the actual guilty party was the one punished was of but minor concern. Even in a case like this, which was likely just an accident, someone must be punished. Justice didn’t matter, only retribution—that someone suffer in full view of the rest of the slaves. It was the only way to keep fear as the dominant element of rule on the plantation.

  He stared at them all in silence for several long seconds. Then at last he spoke again.

  “Stand up, girl!” he said.

  Trembling in terror, Seffie rose to her feet.

  “Mose, boy,” he growled, “come up here. Come and take your punishment like a man. It will be fifteen strokes for each of you at the whipping post.”

  He grabbed the boy by the arm and reached for the little girl. “Oh, please, massa, no!” screamed Seffie’s mother. She pushed her way through to the front where the overseer stood.

  “Please, massa,” she said desperately, “she didn’t know what she wuz doin’! She’s jes’ wooly-headed. She don’ mean no harm. She’s neber been one ter start trouble afore.”

  The overseer considered a moment. Then he nodded his head slowly. “You have a point. Trouble of this magnitude merits more than a whipping. I can’t keep slaves who may set fire to the master’s house.”

  “What you gwine do?” cried the child’s mother, clinging to the girl even tighter and suddenly more afraid than before.

  He gave a sudden jerk and wrenched Seffie from her mother’s grasp and pulled her screaming toward the big house.

  “I’ll let the master decide,” he said. “He may just tell me to sell these two monkeys for all the trouble they’ve caused.”

  “No!” wailed the woman behind them as he dragged the girl away. Mose followed, compliant but also terrified at what might be waiting for them.

  STRANGE NEW HOME

  3

  SEFFIE WAS TOO YOUNG TO HAVE TO EXPERIENCE A broken heart.

  Torn away from her mother and the only home she had ever known, could her heart ever heal? Or would a hard scab grow over the wound and prevent her from loving again?

  Mose told her to cling close. He would say she was his sister, and that a master would get more work out of them if they could stay together.

  When Peter Meisner, a wealthy German immigrant, saw the two at the New Orleans slave market, however, it was the girl who attracted his attention. She looked about the right age. She was obviously frightened, but her eyes looked bright and intelligent.

  He walked toward them. The girl glanced down at the ground, but the boy held his gaze.

  “She your sister?” he asked.

  “Yes, suh,” said Mose.

  “What’s your name?” asked Meisner, turning toward her.

  “Her name’s Seffie, suh,” Mose answered for her. “I’s real good wiff horses, suh.”

  “How old are you, Seffie?” asked the man.

  Seffie glanced up at Mose, too scared to speak.

  “Answer me, girl,” prodded the man.

  “’Bout seven, suh,” said Seffie.

  The man knelt down. “Do you know how to read, Seffie?”

  Again she glanced toward Mose and hesitated.

  “Don’t worry,” said Meisner. “I won’t make you leave your brother. If I decide to buy you, I’ll buy you both. Now . . . can you read?”

  “No, suh,” said Seffie timidly.

  “Would you like to learn?”

  Again Seffie looked at Mose, wondering what she should say. He gave an imperceptible nod. Already he could tell this man would be a good master to them.

  “Yes, suh,” said Seffie.

  “Good, then—I will see what I can do.”

  Neither of the two black youngsters knew it yet, but Peter Meisner had come to the slave market hoping to find a companion for his eight-year-old daughter. He and his wife had been in Louisiana for only a few years. Two years before, their daughter Grace had contracted scarlet fever. The long battle for her life left her blind and with a weakened heart. But Grace knew how to read and loved to learn. If she could not read for herself, she could be read to. They hired a governess, but the woman, though a good enough teacher, did not have a nurse’s compassion. Grace gradually quieted. Her governess grew distant, and the schoolroom became quiet and depressing. Grace’s father had gone to the sla
ve market in hopes of finding a bright young slave girl for Grace to play with and learn with and hopefully bring some cheer back into his daughter’s life.

  It did not take long for both Grace’s parents to realize they had made a wise choice. How different it might have been had Grace been able to see her new friend’s dark brown face, none of them would ever know. As it was, the two girls hit it off immediately. Seffie’s aptitude for learning proved as much a boon for the governess as her presence was for Grace’s spirits. Not that she had been hired to teach a slave girl, but, as she read to Grace, Seffie came in for her own share of the learning. Within six months, and much to Grace’s delight, Seffie was reading to Grace herself. Trying to model her own speech after Grace’s—with occasional correction from the other two—gradually Seffie began to lose some of her slave dialect. Listening and paying attention and asking questions as Miss Walker tutored Grace in the subjects her parents had set, within another year Seffie knew how to write and had begun to learn mathematics.

  “All right, girls,” said Miss Walker one morning, “today we shall practice our sums again. Grace,” she added, “do you think you can visualize the numbers in your mind like we did yesterday?”

  “I will try, Miss Walker,” said Grace.

  “It be all right if I’s write—”

  “Will it be all right if I write them,” corrected Grace.

  “Thank you, Miss Grace,” said Seffie. “Will it be all right if I write dem on dis paper, Miss Walker?” asked Seffie.

  “Certainly, Seffie. You write them and try to do the sum with the pencil while Grace does it in her mind. But you mustn’t say anything until Grace has a chance to say the answer. Then you can see if it is the same as what you have written down.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “All right, here are the numbers I want you to add together—sixteen plus three plus eight.”

  “That’s easy,” laughed Grace, “that’s . . . let me see . . . it’s twenty-seven.”

  “Very good. Is that what you got, Seffie?”

  “I didn’t get nuthin’ yet.”

  “Let’s do another one. This time, Grace, give Seffie time to get her answer too.—Eleven . . . plus thirteen . . . plus ten.”

  It was silent a minute. Seffie wrote the three numbers on the paper and then began to add up the first columns as Miss Walker had taught her. When she had the sum completed she glanced up.

  “I think I got it,” she said.

  “How about you, Grace,” said Miss Walker. “What is your answer?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “That’s what I got too!” exclaimed Seffie.

  “Very good, girls. Let’s do a few more. Then I have a surprise for you.”

  “What surprise, Miss Walker?” asked Grace excitedly.

  “Let’s do our sums first, then I shall tell you.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the governess set aside the sheet of arithmetic problems.

  “Now for the surprise I promised. Your parents want you to begin learning another language, Grace.”

  “What language?”

  “They said I could let you decide. Since there are only two languages other than English I know, you can choose either Latin or French.”

  “Say something in them so I know what they sound like.”

  “All right . . . hmm, let me see . . . Salve—si vales optime valeo. Meum nomen est Marie Walker. And then . . . Enchanté de faire votre connaissance. Je m’appelle Marie Walker.”

  “Which was which?” giggled Grace. “I liked the second one much better. It sounded soft and nice.”

  “That was French.”

  “Then I want to learn to speak French.”

  “It sounded like I used to hear people talk on the plantation where I come from before,” said Seffie.

  “That was probably Cajun French,” said Miss Walker. “Many people in Louisiana speak it.”

  “What is that?” asked Grace.

  “It is a dialect of French, brought here in the 1700s by the French Acadians when they were deported from their homeland, which is now a province of Canada.”

  “May we begin today, Miss Walker?” said Grace excitedly. “I want to learn to say what you just said.”

  “In a little while, Grace, my dear. But right now, you look a little pale. I think perhaps you should take a rest. Come, Seffie, help me get Miss Grace to her bed.”

  Unfortunately, the fever had taken a greater toll on Grace’s strength than the doctor had realized. Slowly its effects began to return. They had not progressed but two or three months with the new French lessons, which Seffie seemed to have more aptitude for than Grace, before lessons had to be suspended for two weeks.

  Seffie was told nothing except that Grace was sick and there would be no more lessons for a while. She was kept busy around the house doing other jobs. When Miss Walker returned and they resumed lessons, Grace looked thinner and more pale than before. She could hardly sit up in bed.

  This time the lessons lasted only a week and were discontinued again.

  Again Seffie was told nothing. But from the whispers and worried expressions and silences, the coming and going of the doctor, and the look of sadness on Mrs. Meisner’s face, she knew the situation was serious.

  Then came a day of closed doors with sounds of crying behind them. People she had never seen came to the house. Everyone was solemn and sad.

  The next day a wagon came, all draped in black. Some men carried a long thin box into the house. The mistress and most of the slaves were crying. At last Seffie knew that she would never see Grace again.

  Her heart broke in a second place, and another scab grew over yet another wound of loss.

  FRIENDS

  4

  A SLAVE GIRL OF TEN WALKED SLOWLY FROM THE kitchen of the large plantation house to a vegetable garden which stood at the edge of a planted field. In her hand she carried a large basket full of the carrots and beans she had been sent to fetch.

  In the distance, at the far end of the field, two dozen Negro men and women worked bent over under the hot August sun, hoes in hand, whacking out weeds from the soft earth between indescribably long rows of growing cotton. As the girl went she glanced toward the workers. No feelings of kinship arose in her heart as she did. She had no mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles at this place where she had been for three years. She had one friend, but no family. That one friend had made her uprooting three years earlier, if not bearable—what in a slave’s life could be said to be bearable—at least tolerable. They saw each other only occasionally over the years, since she lived in the big house and he in the slave village. But still, that they chanced to be here together was nothing short of a miracle. But no one she saw in the field caught her eye with feelings of kinship or affection.

  Mercifully she had been attached to the kitchen after Grace’s death, mainly to wash dishes. So she had not had to endure the fields under the hot sun, but had recently grown accustomed to the hot, sweaty, endless, thankless work of a kitchen slave, laboring so that a privileged few might never have to lift a finger for any provision they might want. Now at the mere age of ten, her intuition with food and baking had already begun to manifest itself. She was occasionally told to make a batch of bread or mix up a fresh pot of soup on her own. Neither her white master, nor any of his family, nor the Negro house mammy had yet been disappointed.

  She reached the garden, opened the wire gate, went inside, and proceeded to gather the vegetables she had been sent for.

  Twenty minutes later she left by the same gate, closed it carefully, and headed back toward the house. She was not exactly a dreamy sort of girl, though she often gave the impression of being lost in faraway thoughts, for she said but little. The fact was, she had never recovered from being cruelly ripped away from her family at the tender age of seven, nor the death of her young mistress a few years later. Since then her life had been a dull, mechanical tedium of work for which she had little interest, amo
ng people she did not care about and would never care about and who did not care for her. Some were kinder than others. But no one really cared who she was or where she came from or probably whether she lived or died. To care brought pain in the life of the slave. Though she had not stopped to think about it, and was too young to do so anyway, the pain she had already suffered had scarred her too deeply to care much about anything. So she kept to herself. Even the threat of the whip, which she had felt at her previous home, was not sufficient to arouse her from lethargy. She had been torn from her mother. Death had torn her from Grace.

  She cared for nothing anymore . . . except her one friend.

  Lost in the uncaring boredom of hour that followed hour, day that followed day, she did not hear the pounding hooves coming toward her. Even had she glanced up and seen the horse, she would not have known it to be a runaway from the stables, and no sense of danger would immediately have registered itself in her brain.

  But at length she did hear the pounding, paused, and glanced toward the sound. A horse was coming straight for her along the narrow road from the house to the field. Behind it ran three or four men, yelling. Maybe they were yelling at her—she couldn’t tell.

  Her legs froze in panic. It was the same fear she felt when getting a whipping or being on the slave block. Her mouth went dry and she might as well have been mute, for she could not utter a word.

  By now the words coming from the men were plain enough.

  “Get away . . . get out of the way . . . get off the road!” they continued to shout at her.

  But she could run no more than she could speak. She was frozen to the spot as the huge black horse with fire in his eyes charged straight toward her. Ever since that day after the fire, fear had been capable of paralyzing her into a statue of stone.

  The basket fell from her fingers to the ground. But still she stood unmoving.

  From out of the corner of her eye there was a swift movement. She was not even capable of turning toward it, yet was somehow vaguely aware of it. A figure was sprinting at a speed unseen on the plantation before that minute. He was just a boy, but he was running faster than any of the men about the place, white or black, could have run.