“See,” Belle said again to Winifred. “Now I don’t want you spoiling her, Mrs. Skiffington. Spoiling has been the ruination of many. And, sweet Winifred, I just will not have it.” Belle laughed and picked up the hem of Minerva’s dress again.
“Yes,” Counsel said, winking at John his cousin, “my wife is the best evidence of the ruination that spoiling brings.”
The morning after their wedding night Winifred turned to her husband in their bed and told him slavery was not something she wanted in her life. It was not something he wanted either, he said; he and his father had sworn off slavery before they left North Carolina, he reminded his bride. That was how his father had interpreted the final dream, as well as the ones he had been having for weeks. Wash your hands of all that slavery business, God had said in his dreams. The death of John Skiffington’s mother was just God’s way of emphasizing what he wanted. Don’t leave your wife in North Carolina.
Skiffington sat up on the side of his marriage bed. He and Winifred were whispering, though Minerva, the wedding present, and his father were way at the end of the hall. Counsel and Belle would be leaving that day, but even with them gone Skiffington saw no way to rid themselves of the girl. Selling her would be out of the question because they could not know what would become of her. Even selling her to a kind master, a God-fearing master, did not ensure that such a master would never sell her to someone who did not fear God. And giving her away was no better than selling her. Winifred sat up in bed. They had both gotten up after their lovemaking the night before and put on their nightclothes, so unaccustomed were they to each other. She pulled the gown’s collar tight around her neck and placed her hand over the collar and her neck.
“I had almost forgotten where I was,” Winifred said, meaning the South, meaning the world of human property. She looked over at the window where even the heavy curtains could not hold back what was promising to be an extraordinarily beautiful day. Right then, she recalled the woman and her handsome husband in Philadelphia who had been thrown into jail for keeping two free black people as slaves. They had been slaves for years, confined to the house, and all the white neighbors knew the slaves by name, but people just thought they were part of the family. They even had the white people’s last name.
“That was just Counsel,” Skiffington said, a bit defensively. The South was home, and not at all the hell some in the North wanted to make it. “Not everyone can afford to give away a slave like that. They’re expensive, Winifred. That was just Counsel, pokin at me. He can afford to take pokes at me. And they really wanted to please you. Make you happy.”
“It hurts me to think about it,” she said and began to cry. He turned round in the bed and pulled her to him, placing his hand on the back of her head. “Please, John…”
“Shhh,” he said. Then, after a while, he kissed the top of her head and put his mouth to her ear. “She might be better off with us than anywhere else.” He was thinking not only about what would happen if they sold her into God only knew what but what their neighbors might say if they gave her to Winifred’s people for a life in the North: Deputy John Skiffington, once a good man, but now siding with the outsiders, and northern ones at that. Skiffington asked his wife, “Are you and me not good people?”
“I would hope so,” Winifred said. She lay back in the bed and Skiffington got up to dress, for he was still the deputy, newlywed or not. There were still tears in her but she held them and busied herself watching her husband. Then he was gone. She started back crying.
Three rooms away, the wedding present, Minerva, heard her master leave and she came silently out of her room and studied the bare window nearest her and the hall and all the doors along the hall. The sun came full through the window and made most of the glass knobs on the doors glow. Then before her very eyes, bit by bit, the sun rose and the glow was gone. Minerva was barefoot, though Belle had more than once warned the child never to traipse around without her night slippers. Minerva had, though, remembered to put one of Winifred’s shawls around her shoulders. “You will be in a proper house,” Belle had instructed her, “and you must not go about with your shoulders bare. Now repeat what I have just told you.”
Minerva went to the window nearest her and looked out to where the sun was still rising. She had an older sister back in North Carolina and every morning back home she could look down where the sun was coming up to the neighboring farm where her sister was a slave. They had been able to visit with one another about once every three weeks. Minerva, though she had traveled for days and days to get from North Carolina to Virginia, looked down to where the sun was rising, believing with a heart that had a long reach that she could see the farm where her sister was. She was disappointed that she could not. Though just a shout and a holler away from Belle Skiffington, the sister back in North Carolina would escape the devastation that was to come to Belle and almost all that God had given her. Minerva wanted to raise the window, thinking that the farm with her sister was just a little look-see beyond the windowpane, but she dared not touch it. Minerva and her sister would not see each other again for more than twenty years. It would be in Philadelphia, nine blocks from the Philadelphia School for Girls. “You done growed,” her sister would say, both hands to Minerva’s cheeks. “I would have held back on growing up,” Minerva would say. “I would have waited for you to see me grow but I had no choice in the matter.”
Minerva stepped away from the window and took one step down the hall and stopped. The child listened. She took two more steps and was near the staircase going down. She was not brave enough to go down the steps where she thought the rest of the household might be. In less than a week she would be brave enough, brave enough to even go to the front door and open it up and take a step onto the morning porch. The child now took more steps, passing her own room, and came to a partly opened door. She could see John Skiffington’s father on his knees praying in a corner of his room. Fully dressed with his hat on, the old man, who would find another wife in Philadelphia, had been on his knees for nearly two hours: God gave so much and yet asked for so little in return. Minerva stepped on and finally came to the end of the hall where Winifred was still crying in her bed and did not hear the little girl knock once and then once again on the door that was ajar. Finally, Winifred heard. “Yes. Yes,” she said. “Who is it?” Minerva touched the door with her baby finger and it opened some more. The child peeked into the room and looked about until she found Winifred. She took an innocent measure of the whole room and then stepped slowly up to the side of the bed. Minerva was more afraid than she had been out in the hall. She was even now missing Belle because Belle was a certainty she knew about and Winifred could see all that in her face. She touched the girl’s shoulder, recognizing the shawl she had brought from Philadelphia in what she had joked to Skiffington was her “dowry trunk.” Winifred lightly touched Minerva’s cheek, the first and last black human being she would ever touch.
“I heard you cryin,” Minerva said.
“A bad dream,” Winifred said.
Minerva looked about the room some more, half expecting to see Skiffington. She was trying to remember all she had been taught about the proper decorum with a mistress. Concern about her well-being was certainly one thing Belle had told her about. “It a really bad dream?” the girl asked.
Winifred thought. “Bad enough, I suppose.”
“Oh,” Minerva said. “Oh.” She looked around again.