Free Lazaretto by Diane Mckinney-Whetstone Page A

over Vergie’s screams.
    â€œYou are not! No you are not!” Vergie hollered back at her and managed to push her head far enough away from the woman’s chest so that she could spit in her face.
    The woman slapped Vergie with such force her nose began to bleed. “Yes, you are my daughter now, and you should be grateful I’m delivering you from a nigger’s life.”
    Vergie continued to scream and holler and she clawed at the woman’s face and tried with everything in her to wrestle herself free. She felt like the caught fish last week that had struggled so long on the end of her father’s pole for a much longer time than she thought it ever could. Her father had cut the line and let the fish fall back into the bay. He’d said that anything with that much will to live deserved another chance. She gasped and writhed as she had seen that fish do. She began to hyperventilate, and the woman yelled to her husband to stop. “She is turning blue.”
    â€œWell, calm her,” her husband yelled back.
    â€œShe is too wild. Untamable. We have to let her go.”
    â€œAfter all of this, are you now saying let her go?”
    â€œPlease, yes, she is impossible. This is impossible.”
    He stopped the carriage and Vergie had already pushed the door open and was about to jump, not even caring how far it was to the ground, but before she could, he had caught her. “Are you bleeding? Why is she bleeding?” he asked as he put her down andreached into his pocket for a handkerchief. But Vergie had already taken off at a run. She ran and called for Sylvia. She wasn’t even sure if she was headed toward the fabric store, but it was away from that carriage, so she continued to run. She heard someone call her name, it was Nevada’s friend from Brown’s Livery, whose carriage had brought them to the fabric store.
    â€œWhat happened to you? Where is Sylvia?” he asked, as he leaned down and wiped the blood from her nose. She gasped. She could barely talk, she just cried and called out Sylvia’s name. He picked her up and told her it was okay, he would take her to Sylvia. He asked again what had happened, how did she get a bloodied nose. “I fell” was all she said, when she could talk again. “I came outside to skip and I fell.” She told the same thing to Sylvia, the same thing to her aunt Maze and uncle Levi, the same thing to Nevada, even to her father. “I came outside to skip, and I was skipping and skipping and I didn’t know how far away I skipped, and I fell.” Over and over she told that story because she was ashamed that she had been foolish enough to let a strange man lead her away from the fabric store, from Sylvia, from her life with her family. Ashamed, too, because she thought she’d caused the man to try and snatch her, something about the very essence of her was so flawed that a white man would just walk up to her and try to whisk her away. She didn’t understand it as shame that day, didn’t understand it as shame this morning as she sat in the dirt under the crawl space at Nevada’s house and cut away at her hair. The shame had already begun to be covered up with anger. She was already showing a sassiness toward white people, resentment toward black people who thought her white, disgust toward anyone who treated her as if her appearance was some sort of gift. Already a whiff of vanilla, like the scent rising off of the woman’s skin that day, caused her to vomit, such that Nevada had to withhold vanilla if she was baking cake when Vergie was over.
    A heap of hair had accumulated on the dirt under the steps as Vergie continued cutting. She thought she must be getting close to her edges because she could feel patches of scalp. She heard Nevada calling her, Nevada’s voice coming from deep in the house. Miss Ma’s voice, too, as Miss Ma started with her high-pitched laughter. Vergie moved the