Midnight Rose by Patricia Hagan Read Free Book Online

then to stare at Letty and wonder once more if she should tell her about that awful night, then decided it was best to keep it locked inside. As long as she didn’t put it into words, it seemed more like a nightmare than reality. Forcing a smile she didn’t feel, she said, “Enough about me. Do you realize since I’ve been home, we haven’t had one serious conversation about you and what’s happened to you these past five years?’
    Letty couldn’t help snickering at such a ludicrous question, couldn’t hold back the cynical retort, “What could change in five years for a slave? Oh, I don’t have to work in the fields anymore, and that’s nice. Lord knows, I hate pickin’ cotton, draggin’ those big sacks behind me while the stickers keep my hands raw and bleedin’, and the sun beats down to fry my skin. Now I get to work in the kitchen out back, or here in the big house, ’cause Mastah Zachary says I’m breedin’ age, so it’s time for me to do some lighter work, leave the fields to the younguns and the bucks, and the older ones. Hmph!” She gave a bitter snort, then leaned to whisper, instinctively fearful, even though they were alone. “I ain’t breedin’ with just anybody, no matter what the mastah says. The truth is, I love somebody, Erin, and he loves me, and that’s who I want to breed with, have a baby by, and marry!”
    Erin was delighted, sat up once more to hug her knees against her chest and cry, “You see? Something has happened in your life since I’ve been away, and you’ve got to tell me all about it. Who is this wonderful young man that has fireflies dancing in your eyes?”
    Looking absolutely blissful, Letty told her about Ben, one of the grooms at the stable, how they’d fallen in love during the past year. Then the happiness left her face and voice all at once, as she angrily told how they weren’t allowed to marry. “Mastah Zachary says he don’t want none of his slaves gettin’ married, ’cause he wants to choose who we breed by, and he also says it just causes more trouble when he separates a husband and wife by sellin’ one of ’em.”
    Erin was struck with fury and sympathy at the same time. “That’s wrong. It’s also sinful, and—”
    Letty interrupted, anxious to finish venting her rage. “That’s not all the evil that goes on around here. It’s got worse while you were gone. He’s awful, Erin. Just awful. He even beat my momma, and you know how good she is, how she minds and never gives nobody no trouble. But one night, the mastah, he came home drunk, and he got mad ’cause she didn’t have his supper waitin’, and she tried to tell him it was way past suppertime, nearly midnight, and Miz Arlene, she said he won’t comin’ in, and to put all the food away, but he’d dragged her out of the bed anyway, but he was so crazy drunk he wouldn’t listen, and he throwed her down in the floor of our cabin and beat her with his belt then and there. If he hadn’t been so reelin’ drunk, hardly able to stand up, he’d have hurt her real bad, but he didn’t have the strength, thank Jesus.”
    Erin sucked in her breath, felt the cold shiver in her spine as she tightly asked, “Does my mother know all this?”
    Letty hesitated, not wanting to say more but knew she’d said too much as it was. “Yassum,”she regretfully answered, falling back into the slurring speech of the colored and forgetting everything Erin had taught her about carefully pronouncing all the syllables in a word. “She knows. But she ain’t gonna say nothin’, cause she’s prob’ly scared of him too.”
    Erin clenched her fists, suddenly rigid with fury. She knew if she ever saw Zachary strike her mother, she’d want to kill him. Once upon a time, she’d been ready to anyway, but pushed back that horrid memory as she focused on the present misery.
    Maybe she was being foolish and unrealistic to think she could actually meet a man with whom she could fall in love and live happily