Free Blue Asylum by Kathy Hepinstall Page B

will not forget.”
    Wendell was silent. Suddenly the doctor felt a bite and then a terrible itch inside his ear. The bastards had found his ear canal. He probed it with his pinkie finger as he added, “And I’ll also give you a quarter.”
    “What would I do with a quarter?”
    “You can buy licorice from the Cubans. My God, son, I’ll give you a dollar, just get the hell down out of that tree, please please please!”
    The branches quivered above his head. A bare foot slid down out of the foliage, then another, and the battle was done.

13
    Iris lived in the big house with her husband and a retinue of slaves who did the housework and the cooking. If she walked out the front of the house, she would find the grid of apple and peach trees that made up the orchard, as well as the vegetable and herb gardens. A walk to the west down a path of crushed stones would take her to the stables, the drying house, the storage, and the barn. The overseer’s house and the slave cabins sat at the back of the property. Beyond that stretched the tobacco fields. In the early years of her marriage, it was easy for Iris to believe that the flourishing plantation was halcyon even at crop level. Sun level, sweat level, dust level. But over time she discovered what being a slave meant, slowly and with starts and stops, in the same manner she had learned, long ago, to read and write.
    She was given a set of keys to wear around her waist. The keys opened every door to every outbuilding and storage area on the property. She was charged with supervising the slaves of the household, overseeing a small garden, managing the smaller business affairs of the plantation, and entertaining guests. This last duty filled her with dread, for nothing in her simple upbringing in Winchester had prepared her for the life of Haughwout crystal and long candles and English scones with her tea. The other plantation wives seemed haughty to her. Remote. She remembered one gathering in particular, after the men had gone out on the front porch to smoke and the women were left talking among themselves.
    Delores Spears lived out on Gabler Plantation, named for her grandfather and twice the size of Robert’s. She told a story that night, inside by the fire, in her gauzy dress whose daintiness made the story more atrocious. “The overseer had to whip one of our slaves yesterday. He tried to escape. Peter called me out to the yard and Barney had his shirt off and was tied up to a poplar tree. Peter handed me the whip. He said the slaves thought I was too soft, too easy to manipulate. I had to make a point, he said.”
    Iris didn’t know what kind of expression to wear on her face. The other women looked fascinated. “Go on,” one of them said. “What did you do?”
    “I took the whip. It was heavier than I thought. The slave looked around and saw me and he just looked at me. My husband said, ‘Go ahead, Delores. Hit him.’”
    “And then what did you do?” another woman asked.
    “The overseer showed me how to hold the whip and snap it back, then forward, and I tried and I didn’t even touch him. Knocked a twig off the tree, that’s all.”
    Loud laughter rang in Iris’s ears. She was very conscious of her own pose, awkward in it. Her smile felt strange, and so did the frown she replaced it with.
    “So you didn’t even hit him?” asked another wife.
    “I missed. That whip is so heavy. It hurt my wrist.” The women leaned in, hanging on her every word. “The overseer told me to try again. I closed my eyes and snapped the whip and it made the loud popping sound. I heard a sound. Not so much a scream but more a gasp. I opened my eyes and his skin was laid open, and the gash was filling up with blood.”
    Iris felt horror and revulsion. The women looked awed. One held up her glass. “To respect,” she said. The others raised their glasses. All except Iris. The others gave her frozen looks. But she would not toast to a slave’s blood.
    Word about her actions