Chasing the North Star by Robert Morgan Page B

couldn’t stand for Mama to be mad at me. If Mama was mad at me, then the whole world seemed twisted to the side and empty.
    After I brought her the switch, Mama made me go outside. I had to stand in the yard where everybody could see the whipping. She made me hold her left hand with my left hand and she whipped me on my legs and on my butt. The hickory stung my skin like a hot wire.
    â€œHow many times do I have to tell you to mind me?” Mama said as she swung the switch.
    â€œI do mind,” I said.
    â€œDon’t you sass me,” Mama said and swung harder.
    â€œI mind you, I mind you,” I said and started to cry.
    â€œYou sass me, I cut the blood out of you,” Mama said. She was so busy whipping me and my eyes were so full of tears, neither of us saw the master standing nearby, watching. His sleeves were rolled up like he was on the way to the field. When the crops needed tending, the master sometimes worked right alongside the help.
    â€œDon’t whip that girl—she didn’t mean to do nothing wrong,” Master Thomas said.
    Mama stepped back and dropped the hickory to her side.
    â€œAngel’s too pretty to whip,” Master Thomas said. “Her skin’s too perfect and her face too pretty. What has she done?”
    â€œShe don’t mind me,” Mama said. “She sassed me.”
    The master put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. I shivered at his touch, yet I was pleased by it at the same time. I could feel the power in his hand, which is not the power of muscles and calluses.
    â€œAngel don’t mean to be bad,” Master Thomas said. “Besides, she’s almost a young woman.” He looked me in the eyes and smiled and I tried to smile back through my tears.
    â€œWould you like to work in the big house?” the master said. “I think you’re grown up enough to work in the big house. Would you like that?”
    I nodded, forgetting the sting on my legs.
    That was how I came to live in the master’s house, before I was grown up. Mama didn’t say anything; she washed me up and had me put on my clean dress. Other women in the quarters gave me looks, and Jessie Mae who was a little older than me, said, “If Master want to fiddle with you, you better let him.” But I didn’t answer her.
    I didn’t look back at the folks watching me as I went into the big house, by the back door of course. Sally the cook said I would sleep in a little room in the attic. The room was hot in summer, but I could lie in the breeze from the window. She said I would have a new dress and a new petticoat, too.
    Mrs. Thomas was an invalid, and stayed in her room on the second floor. She stayed in bed most days or sat in a chair by the fireplace and read her Bible or some other book. Her room always smelled like medicine. The mistress made me feel backward and shy, like I didn’t belong there. She wore a cap tied around her head, and her face was as pale as paper. She patted me on the head, but looked hard into my eyes.
    â€œAngel, you have come to help us out,” she said.
    â€œYes’m,” I said.
    â€œThis house needs all the help we can get,” she said. Then she asked me if I prayed and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I pray at the meeting Brother Evan has down in the quarters.”
    â€œDo you pray to be a good girl?” the mistress said.
    Then she sent me up to my room in the attic, a place no bigger than a closet with a cot and a scratched-up chest of drawers and a tiny mirror on the wall. But there was a blue dress lying on the cot and I knew it was there for me. It was a fine old dress the mistress might have worn. Now it had been cut down for me. And I looked out the tiny window; I had a view to the front yard and its row of boxwoods and the cornfields beyond the white gate, and the blue mountains across the French Broad River rising up into the clouds. And when I lifted the window, the