Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi Page B

asked. He chewed the chaffy end of a wheat stalk and spit.
    “You ask too many questions,” Ness said. She turned away. It was her turn to receive water from Margaret, the head house slave, but the woman poured only enough to fill a quarter of the glass.
    “We ain’t got enough today,” she said, but Ness could see that the buckets of water on the porch behind her were enough to last a week.
    Margaret looked at Ness, but Ness got the feeling that she was really looking through her, or rather, that she was looking five minutes into Ness’s past, trying to discern whether or not the conversation Ness had just had with TimTam meant that the man was interested in her.
    TimTam cleared his throat. “Now, Margaret,” he said. “That ain’t no kinda way to treat somebody.”
    Margaret glared at him and plunged her ladle into the bucket, but Ness didn’t accept the offering. She walked away, leaving the two people to stew. While there may have been a piece of paper declaring that she belonged to Tom Allan Stockham, there was no such paper shackling her to the whims of her fellow slaves.
    “You ain’t gotta be so hard on him,” a woman said once Ness resumed her position in the field. The woman seemed older, mid to late thirties, but her back hunched even when she stood up straight. “You new here, so you don’t know. TimTam done lost his woman long while ago, and he been taking care of little Pinky by hisself ever since.”
    Ness looked at the woman. She tried to smile, but she had been born during the years of Esi’s unsmiling, and she had never learned how to do it quite right. The corners of her lips always seemed to twitch upward, unwillingly, then fall within milliseconds, as though attached to that sadness that had once anchored her own mother’s heart.
    “Ain’t we all done lost someone?” Ness asked.
    —
    Ness was too pretty to be a field nigger. That’s what Tom Allan said to her the day he’d taken her back to his plantation. He’d bought her on good faith from a friend of his in Jackson, Mississippi, who said she was one of the best field hands he’d ever seen, but to make quite sure to only use her in the field. Seeing her, light-skinned with kinked hair that raced down her back in search of her round shelf of buttocks, Tom Allan thought his friend must have made some kind of mistake. He pulled out the little outfit he liked for his house niggers to wear, a white button-down with a boat neckline and capped sleeves, a long black skirt attached to a little black apron. He’d had Margaret take Ness into the back room so that she could change into it, and Ness had done what she was told. Margaret, seeing Ness all done up, clutched her hand to her heart and told Ness to wait there. Ness had to press her ear to the wall to hear what Margaret said.
    “She ain’t fit for da house,” Margaret told Tom Allan.
    “Well, let me see her, Margaret. I’m sure I can decide for myself whether or not somebody’s fit to work in my own house, now can’t I?”
    “Yessuh,” Margaret said. “I reckon you is, but it ain’t something you gon’ want to see, is what I’m sayin’.”
    Tom Allan laughed. His wife, Susan, came into the room and asked what all the fuss was about. “Why, Margaret’s got our new nigger locked up in the back and won’t let us see her. Stop this nonsense now and go fetch her here.”
    If Susan was like any of the other masters’ wives, she must have known that her husband’s bringing a new nigger into the house meant she had better pay attention. In this and every other southern county, men’s eyes, and other body parts, had been known to wander. “Yes, Margaret, bring the girl so we can see. Don’t be silly about it.”
    Margaret shrugged her shoulders and went back to the room, and Ness pulled her ear from the wall. “Well, you bess come out” was all Margaret said.
    And so Ness did. She walked out to her audience of two, her shoulders bared, as well as the bottom halves of