March Read Free Page B

with aggression, and friendship with fine humor. By the time I reached the big house those two beasts were gamboling beside me, nuzzling their big drooly muzzles against my thighs.
    A young servant stood atop the steps, looking surprised and perhaps a trifle annoyed by this. She whistled sharply, and the dogs’ ears flattened as they sidled off “Those two would more likely have a chunk each out of your hams before you’d got a halfway up the drive than be fawning like that.” Her voice was unexpected: refined, and resonant as a bell. She stood with arms akimbo, her long-fingered hands, dark brown on top and pale pink under-which contrast still surprised me-resting on the waistband of a starched skirt striped cream and gray, which she wore with a spotless, high-necked bodice. Around her head was knotted a rigolette, dyed the color of beet, that made a handsome effect against her copper-colored brow. Her appearance was an excellent omen: a household that got its slaves up so neatly was likely to be liberal-handed.
    As she came down the steps to where I stood, I set down my tin trunks, swept off my hat, and affected what I hoped was my most ingratiating smile. Manners matter in the South; I had met even field hands, half-naked and barefoot, who comported themselves with more grace than the average educated New Englander. I had learned, too, that winning over the upper servants was the first object for a gentleman of the road in pursuit of a sale. It was they, after all, who presented one’s suit for admission to the master-or, of keener interest to me, to the mistress-and they could do that in any number of more or less helpful ways.
    Since I stand more than six feet in my stockings, being eye to eye with a woman is not something that I have grown much used to. But that day, my pale blue eyes gazed into her dark ones, which were lit with a faint amusement. Even now I remember that I was the first to look away.
    “Thinking to charm me, as well as the dogs,” she said, in that silvery voice. “Yankee, are you? From Connecticut?” She raised her chin sharply and made a slight clicking sound with her tongue. “The last peddler through here was a Connecticut boy, too. Sold the cook ajar of wooden nutmegs.”
    “For shame!” I said, and meant it, though I’d seen many a likely fake whittled in the idle campfire hours of my competitors.
    “I don’t believe the household will be interested to see your notions, but we’d be remiss if we did not offer you a cold draught on a warm morning.”
    There you are, I thought. A Negro slave, probably not even as old as I, yet with a style of address that would not shame a great peer. No one I knew at home talked like that, not even the minister. Spindle Hill, a thousand feet high and with only one narrow road leading up to it, was a terse place, where people spoke a spare dialect that even the folk in Hartford, not twenty miles distant, could not readily understand. I was, at home, a “loping nimshi,” rather than an idling fool. The plural of “house” in our thinly settled hamlet was “housen” and my father, when he wished to assert something, would end his declaration with the words “I snore.” Not even a century separated me from the great-grandparents who had wrested our fields out of pine and stone and oaken wilderness; our home, built by my father in a clearing made by an Indian deerhunter’s fire circle, was just three rooms of wide, unpainted board already falling into ruin. I hoped to help my father find the funds to build a new house, and I had used to look forward to the day I would return with profits from my peddling in hand. But somewhere along the York or the James, I had ceased to long for that day. Now, to my shame, I would find myself gazing at the planters’ idle, silken wives and blushing at the memory of my work-worn mother, her clay pipe perched on a chin that bristled with errant hairs, her hands engaged in ceaseless toil, from the time they