Freedom Stone Read Free Page A

didn’t much discuss. Mama herself had an unusual name. She was known as Phibbi, which was an African name for a girl child born on a Friday. The overseer and the Master forbade anyone to use the name and addressed Mama instead as Franny, so the other slaves did as well—at least when they were in the company of white folks. In private, they used Mama’s true name, and Mama was grateful to them for that. Lillie too had a proper African name—Quashee, which meant a girl child born on a Sunday. Papa had given her the name, told her about it as soon as she was old enough to understand it and explained that she should never use it outside of their cabin until the day she was free, when she could carry it with the pride she should.
    As slave cabins went, Lillie’s family’s was a good one—particularly to Lillie and Plato themselves, who had been born here and knew no other home. It had a strong plank floor; a good chimney that Papa had built of oyster shells, sand and lime; and enough dishes, mugs and spoons to fill the cupboards Papa had also built. There was a small table where the family took their meals and there were two chests of drawers for the clothes Mama made. A curtain down the center of the cabin separated the children’s bed from Mama and Papa’s, but now that Papa was gone, Mama mostly kept it open. The only times she’d pull it shut were on those nights, which still happened now and then, when she would slip into bed and cry till near sunup—something Lillie and Plato learned not to ask her about, since she always answered the same way.
    â€œMind the things what’re yours to mind,” she’d say, and Lillie would know to do as she was told.
    It had been four months now since Papa had died—on the twenty-second of May, the dispatch had said, in the siege of Vicksburg, in Mississippi. Only last week, Mama had removed the black mourning rag she’d nailed to the cabin door—and only then because the overseer had ordered her to.
    â€œIt spooks the other slaves, Franny,” he snapped. “Take it off or I’ll take the rag and the door along with it.”
    Lillie herself still cried most every day for Papa. The pain at first had been like a solid thing—a hot stone inside her belly. Now it was more of a terrible, heavy everywhere-ache. She could stand it until something would remind her of Papa—a slave’s laugh that sounded like his, a whiff of pipe tobacco that smelled like his. Once she’d even cried at the rough touch of a hog’s bristly back, because it reminded her of the rough feel of Papa’s unshaven face when he gave her a kiss. And when anyone on the plantation spoke of freedom, she thought of Papa most powerfully of all.
    Freedom for all the slaves—but mostly for his own family—was something Papa had talked about all the time. And for a while, it seemed that it was coming. It was late in 1863 now, and at the beginning of the year, word went’round that even as the war between the armies of the North and the South raged on, Mr. Lincoln had signed a paper—a proclamation, Lillie’s mama said it was called—ordering freedom for all the slaves in all the Rebel states. The news crept slowly from plantation to plantation and everywhere was met with scowls from the white folks and secret smiles from the black folks. But smart people of both colors knew the paper didn’t change much.
    â€œThis mean we can pack up our things and walk North tonight?” Lillie’s papa asked her when she and Plato had jumped and whooped enough over the news.
    â€œNo,” she answered.
    â€œDoes it mean I can earn my own livin’ and work my own land?”
    â€œNo,” she repeated.
    â€œJust so,” he said. “The South is a weasel, and we is the chickens. Weasel don’t let go of a bird when you read him a rule tellin’ him to. He lets go when you shoot him.”
    Papa