47

"We fell asleep," John said to Tobias. "We were tired from searching for the medicines your girl needed."

"You can break her fever?" Tobias asked. His voice was lower now. I could hear the sorrow and exhaustion in his words.

"Yes, sir," John said, as serious as a hangman.

"Then come on upstairs before it's too late," Tobias said.

"Number Forty-seven has to come with me," John told Tobias, and I really wished he hadn't. All I wanted to do was to get back out in the cotton fields; back to where I was just a slave and nobody white talked to me or worried about my whereabouts.

"I can't let two filthy niggers in my little girl's room."

"You'd rather let her die?" John asked.

He was no longer acting like a downtrodden slave. Tall

John was talking to Tobias in just the same way he spoke to me. As a matter of fact I believed that everything John was doing and saying was for my benefit. He wasn't worried about the Master or the plantation boss or stuffy Fred Chocolate. He was showing me something. And maybe I would have understood his lesson if I wasn't scared down to the wood beneath my bare feet.

Tobias was shivering with rage at the impudent slave and also in fear for his daughter's life. If John would have listened to me I could have told him that the slave master held a grudge longer than he'd remember any good deed. I could have told John that talking like a white man to a white man was the quickest way for a slave to meet the Lord.

"Come on!" Tobias shouted.

He ran back into the mansion and John followed. I fell back, hoping that I could get away, back to the cotton fields, but Mr. Stewart pushed against my shoulder and I was thrown into the doorway of the big house.

We ran along through the sitting room, with its posh couches and chairs. My dirty bare feet scuttled over the soft carpeting. And even though I was soothed by the feel of the fabric beneath my feet I thought that it was not nearly so elegant as the bed of leaves beneath that great tree where I slept the night before.

We ran up the stairs: Mr. Stewart, Master Tobias, Tall John, Flore, Fred Chocolate, and I. There we came to a big double door that was open. The walls of that room were

lined with large windows and everything was covered with yellow lace. The curtains were lace and also the canopy over the bed, even the walls were painted like the creamy material.

Under the canopy, in the center of the room, in the oversized bed, lay the girl-child Eloise. She looked frail and pale with her eyes closed and sounds of distress coming from her lips.

"The fever is taking her brain," John said in an offhanded ma

Next to the bed was Eloise's light-ski

Nola was crying over her white half-sister's agony. It was plain to see that she loved Eloise as much as I did.

Many slaves loved their masters. Looking back on it now it seems odd loving someone that keeps you in chains and runs roughshod over your life. But back then the only rule we knew was the white Masters' rule, and so if the Master were ever kind many of us felt grateful because we didn't know any better. And if somebody like Eloise, who never said a harsh word, was somewhere for us to catch a glimpse of now and again, we felt a swelling in our hearts, hoping that such a kind soul would somehow ease our sufferings. That's because the human heart is always filled with hope and the need to love.

So Nola loved Eloise. She would have happily died in her stead.

"Shall I save your daughter, Tobias?" John asked arrogantly.

"Out of the way, Nola," the defeated slave master said.

"No!" Nola shouted.

Mama Flore took the unwilling girl by the shoulders and pulled her away from the dying white girl's bed.

"Come, Forty-seven," John said as he moved toward the girl's side.

Grabbing me by the arm, Tobias said, "Wait a minute. You ain't said what you need this nigger for. He's been on my plantation since he was baby. He don't have no healin' in 'im."

"Where I am from," John replied, rather impatiently, "we ca

Tobias released me and John unfolded his napkin on the bed.

Even now, over a hundred and seventy years later, in the twenty-first century, I remember the feelings I had in that white girl's bedroom. I was afraid for Eloise because she looked so drawn and deathlike. I was afraid for myself because John had made me part of his haughty procedure. And even while all that fear was in me I was aware that the

Master had lost all of his high-minded ways. He was giving in to a mere slave because that slave might be able to do what they could not. This was possibly the most important lesson John ever taught me; that our so-called masters were not all-powerful, that they were also weak and vulnerable at times. But at the moment I was too frightened to understand the significance of that knowledge.

Upon his open napkin there were various leaves, mushrooms, and twigs. There were also two smaller versions of the soft-glass tubes that he had used to heal my hands and brand. These tubes were so small that they might have been seeds.

John put his hand on Eloise's brow. Nola screamed at him to stop touching her mistress. Flore then dragged the child from the room. John was busy crumbling up the vegetation and mixing it with oil from the capsules he'd gotten from the yellow bag. Then he rubbed the paste up under her upper lip.

"What are you doin' there, Twelve?" Tobias said in a threatening tone.

"Saving your girl if you let me be," he replied.

John crushed another tube and then ran his fingers under the unconscious girl's tongue.

This intimacy was too much for the white man. He grabbed Tall John by the shoulder and threw him nearly across the room. The youth hit the floor with a loud grunt and reached back to rub his head.

I didn't know what to do. John was my friend. I wanted to protect him, but I couldn't stand up to that white man. He could have killed me with just one blow.

Tobias advanced on the prostrate boy. There was death in every gesture of the white man's body.

"Master!" Flore shouted. "Her eyes."

Tobias turned to see his girl looking at him. She held his gaze for a moment and then looked away as if something else had captured her attention. I looked in the direction of her gaze but all I saw was a bare wall.

Tears sprang to my eyes. Eloise was alive and so John and I would be spared. We saved the Master's daughter. He might even grant our freedom. Defeat and death turned around in a flash, like lightning.

"Thank you, Lord," Flore cried.

"She's cured," Tobias said.

"Not yet," John a

"What else do you have to do?" Tobias asked warily.

"I can only show you," said the slave in the voice of a free man.

I could see the two feelings in the slave master's face. He had never had a Negro speak to him thus. For such a slight he was duty-bound to punish the offender. But on the other hand he loved his daughter more than anything-I could see all that in Tobias's visage as plainly as I could see the fingers on my own hand.

Finally Tobias said, "Go on then."

"Come, Forty-seven," he said to me. "This is the hardest part."

Together we went back to the girl's side.

John leaned close to me and whispered, "You have to show her the way back."

Before I could ask him what he meant he took a step back and held out one hand to me while placing the other on the girl's brow.