HER PLACE IN THE SUN

I's writing this the best I knows how, for I wants the whole world to know how I won my freedom while losing my precious Safara, my one and onliest child. I lost her the first time to my massa', Mr. Samuel Russell. It was 1860 and Massa' Russell-he lost his wife and onliest child in a carriage accident in Durham. That's just down the road a couple miles from his plantation. Old Jacob, the slave coach driver, he let them horses get spooked and-well, what's past is past.

     Massa' Russell moped round a lot after his loss. He was never a hard man to work for-strict, but not hard. However, with the death of his eleven-year-old daughter, Carrie, he started to see us slaves different. I particularly seen him looking at my Safara. Then one day he come to my cabin.

     "Annie," he says in a voice as calm as the evening breeze. "I want Safara to come and live in the house with me."

     Well, you can imagine what I was thinking, having lost his wife and all. We ain't never knowed him to go after one of us slave women before. But, when you's dealing with white folk, there's always a first time.

     "She gonna be a house slave?" I asked.

     "She's just gonna live in my house," he replied. "And she cain't be round you and the other slaves no more."

     Massa' Russell spoke like having slaves was a sin, yet he still owned us.

     "She's just thirteen," I tells him, making it sound like I's begging him to let her stay. Then I decides to let well enough alone. "But you's the massa'. I cain't say no."

     He leads my little Safara out the door, turns round and says, "One day you will, Annie."

     It must have been three months before I see'd my Safara again. I see'd her from a distance, but only for a few seconds. She wore one of them fancy hoop skirts. It was then and there that I knowed the massa' done lost his mind-dressing my Safara up like his own Carrie. The man had found a way to end his grieving over the loss of his own daughter-by taking mines! The onliest thing that kept me from losing my mind was the thought that at least her life was better than mines, better than any African slave.

     Though the war started, things kind of went along the same for the next few years. The slaves kept slaving away, and Safara kept hidden away in massa's house. I kept 'specting there to be a child, but none came. I remembers thinking how maybe Safara was spared that. Maybe God made her barren so's not to suffer indignities.

     The war got to winding down and it looked like we was gonna be freed. Massa' did a fine job of keeping Safara out of sight of everyone. Then, late in the fall of 1864, Massa' Russell really done lost his mind. He throwed a big harvest ball and invited all his neighbors. Many of them come, too, 'cause it took their minds off the retribution them Yankees said they was gonna have to pay.

     Massa' Russell dress me up like a house slave and had me working serving food to the white folks. I thought that was a might peculiar until I see'd what happened that night-the night I lost my daughter for the second time.

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