Free Sweetgrass by Mary Alice Monroe Page B

records was through the telling of them. But our family is one of the lucky ones. We’ve got the names written down. Right in here,” she said reverently, passing her strong hand over the fragile, crackled leather.
    “I might not recollect all the names,” Nona continued, “but seven generations of our ancestors labored at Sweetgrass, and not all of them as slaves. After emancipation, we were freeto choose to leave or stay. Most left. But your great-something-grandmother chose to stay on as hired labor. They worked hard and saved smart and bought themselves a good piece of land from the Blakelys for fifty cents an acre. That’s the land that we, and the other heirs, are living on even to this day. This land is where our roots are. This is our history.” Her voice trembled with emotion.
    Nona felt her family’s ancestors gathering close about her as she grew old, closer now even than some of the living. Sometimes at night, especially when the moon was soft, the air close and a mist rolled in from the sea, she couldn’t sleep for feeling them floating around her, comforting her, calling to her from across the divide.
    She slowly sat in the kitchen chair and set the Bible on the wood table. The chair’s worn blue floral cushion did little to ease her pains, but she gave them no mind as she opened up the Bible to reveal yellowed sheets of paper as thin as a moth’s wing. Each page was crowded with faded black ink in an elaborate script. She was proud of the fine handwriting of her kin. She often marveled at their courage to practice the skill, given the life-and-death orders against slaves reading and writing.
    “Most of what I know about our distant kin was passed on orally in stories. I recollect just bits, mostly about a slave named Mathilde who came from Africa. And Ben, who escaped north never to be heard from again. You remember those stories?”
    When the children nodded, she rewarded them with an approving smile. Maize hovered closer, joining the circle.
    “Now, my great-grandmother was Delilah. That’s her name right there. She was the last of our family enslaved at Sweetgrass, and it was Delilah who first began to write down our family history. She was the head housekeeper at Sweetgrass and a fine, intelligent woman. Taught herself howto read and write from the children’s schoolbooks. Had to sneak them, of course, at great peril. It was only after the War Act that she felt safe to write openly. Must’ve been a fine day when Delilah wrote her first entry in this Bible. Look close!”
    The children leaned forward to read the elaborate loops and the even shapes of Delilah’s first entry on February 26, 1865. Freedom Come! The second entry was her marriage to John Foreman, and the third, the birth of her first child, a daughter named Delia.
    “Her child—my grandmother—was the first freeborn in our line. After emancipation come, Delilah stayed on at Sweetgrass, working as a free woman, living in the kitchen house next to the main house with her husband and children until it fell to her daughter, Delia—your great-great-grandmother—to note the date of her mother’s death in this Bible. They buried Delilah in the graveyard on Sweetgrass where many of our kin were laid to rest.
    “Now, Delia had a daughter named Florence. When she married, she didn’t want to live in that kitchen house no more, so she moved here on Six Mile Road and built the house across the street. But she continued working for the Blakely family. Before long, she wrote in the Bible the name of her firstborn.”
    “Nona,” read Gracie. “That’s you.”
    “That’s me. And I’m the last in our line to work for the Blakely family.”
    “There’s my mama’s name,” Gracie said in rote, pointing to Maize’s name. “And mine and Kwame’s.” It was a ritual, this pointing out of their names in the family Bible.
    “You see the names, Kwame?”
    “Yes’m.”
    Nona nodded her gray head. “Good.” She firmly believed that