Diamonds in the Rough by Emmy Waterford

Author:Emmy Waterford [Waterford, Emmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Waterford Publishing Co LLC
Published: 2018-06-08T18:30:00+00:00

PART 2: Belle Robinson

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Kentucky, 1858

Belle Robinson had memorized the words, just as her mamma taught her. She didn’t know her letters, but little diagrams in the dirt after the master’s girls had gone to bed helped her remember them. “Follow the drinking gourd, follow the drinking gourd….”

But instead of drawing a gourd, round and fat with a hard, curvy handle, made as if by God for workers to drink out of, Belle drew the gourd as her mamma had taught her to look for it; a series of dots in the shape of a scoop, a dipper, and when it shone brightly in the black sky of nighttime, Belle would look up at it and know what the wicked slave master Taggart and his kind never seemed to understand.

“For the old man’s a-waitin’ for to carry you freedom, follow the drinking gourd.”

Belle looked up at her mamma, Alice, and her daddy, Mo, tired from long days in the fields and in the kitchen. Alice rocked Joseph in her lap, the young boy already asleep in the center of the shack’s rotting wooden floors. At just five years old, Joseph still seemed a toddler, not saying a single word to anyone ever, locked in his own world. Still too young to work but getting too old to baby, Joseph was in danger of becoming useless to the master. But try as they all did, neither Belle nor her parents could rouse Joseph from his silent daze.

Belle’s stomach turned with hunger. She couldn’t help but recall the meals her masters, the Robinson sisters, had eaten that night, while she stood there, waiting to fetch them whatever they might need, sing for them or otherwise amuse them according to their whim. The smell of the roast beef was still clinging to the back of Belle’s nostrils, her mouth watering to imagine how succulent and juicy is must have been, the gravy hot and thick, steaming up from the creamy mashed potatoes, asparagus tips pale green and dripping in the master’s own white sauce.

Her own dinner of baked beans with a hunk of pig fat did little to soothe her, but her imagination could still take her to a dinner table of their own, fine white linens and gold-leafed china like the Robinsons used, the finest steaks still sizzling from the grill presented to them on silver platters with matching domes.

Their voices were low, four in a weary unison, just barely enough for each other to hear. But the shack walls were thin, and the din of the other slaves was hard to ignore. Some cried out to God for release, a woman’s shriek rose up from out of nowhere and vanished just as quickly, Belle and Alice sharing frightened eyes, heads shaking and sinking even lower. Belle’s family, called by their master’s name of Robinson, sang in a muttered hush, “When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, follow the drinking gourd.”

Belle could imagine the morning, any morning, sun rising

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