The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant Page A

Ruth a story about her life, too, or as much of it as she could and would.
    She always began the same way. “Your poor-dear mother was called Phyllis Brimfield, as I heard it, and she got a sad-sad story, because she didn’t get to love you long-time like Mimba.” Standing between Mimba’s knees while her hair was brushed and braided, Ruth learned that her poor-dear mother had died giving her birth, “up there in the north, on a cold island with a lady name. There was a tall man fetched you to Mistress Naomi and Hiram Smith, Providence-way, and Mr. Hiram give you name of Ruth, to make honor on his wife, I heard.”
    It was their black servant, Nance, who’d done the work of caring for Ruth. The Smiths had set all of their slaves free, but Old Nance refused to go. She said her masters wanted to throw her out because she was too weak to lift the wash kettle. “She say they suck the marrow dry, and wants to throw the bone away.
    “But then Old Nance passed on and them Smiths fostered you over to Queen Bernoon, that big-smart free African lady who sells oysters to eat.”
    Ruth stayed with Queen and her large family of daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren. For three years, Ruth ate, slept, and worked among the Bernoon children, picking through oysters and clams as soon as she was big enough to stand. But after the smallpox sickened all the little ones save Ruth, Queen got a spooky feeling about the quiet foundling, so she sold her to a fellow named Cuff, a half-breed African-Indian peddler who claimed his wife was pining for a little girl.
    “Cuff was a bad ’un,” said Mimba. He took Ruth to Narragansett, where prices for slaves were higher and the law was distant. William Prescott bought the child for a large wheel of cheese and three silver dollars.
    “You got a sad story, Ruth,” Mimba said. “But not sad-sad. You here with me and Cato and all us together now. You have a happy-sad story. Best you can get in this life is happy-sad. But you always gotta remember your own mamma that birthed you. Even though you only got a crumb of her story, you still got to say her name out loud. You always honor your dead, else you get trouble from them, sure.”
    That story would keep Ruth awake at night; she had enough imagination to picture a sad-sad ending to her story, with her sold to some other master. The idea of a life without Mimba or Cato terrified her into nightmares, and Mimba finally stopped telling it to her. Meanwhile, Ruth did everything she could to ensure that she would never be parted from her Mimba. She was obedient, polite, and quick to learn the kitchen work from Mimba. She followed Cato into the fields and studied how he tended the cattle and fixed the long stone fences, too.
    From the first, she preferred the outdoors to life in the house, where the white people kept her always on edge. Cato told her to be grateful for the kindness of owners who rarely struck them and had never sold anyone off. But she heard the false voices he and Mimba used when the master or mistress was near. And she knew that Mimba and Cato had jumped the broom in secret, so Prescott would not know they were husband and wife and hold the threat of separation against them.
    But it wasn’t the master who pulled them apart. Mimba died when Ruth was seventeen, and she cried all the tears she hadn’t cried as a child. She refused to be separated from Cato after that, becoming what Mistress Prescott called “willful.” She refused to stay in the kitchen with Patricia, the other female slave who could not remember Mimba’s recipes as well as Ruth did. Master Prescott tried changing her mind with a switch; that didn’t do it, and neither did a real whipping with a belt. After he threatened to sell her, one of the wheels on the buggy fell off as the family was driving to church, and the cows kept escaping their pen. When the parlor curtains caught fire before dinner one day, Prescott realized what he was up against and told his