Chapter 1

Summer 1845, near Port Gibson, MS

It seems necessary to mention that early in morning before the unexpected carriage arrived, the tree that Ghost Baby’s great grandmother had been buried under fell down. (There had been many stories told about why she was buried there under that tree. But rumor had it she had once been a beautiful African princess and she had also been the willing mistress of master Alexander Truth, the present master’s grandfather. Rumor had it that when she died, unwilling to accept the reality of being separated from her until the afterlife or the next one—which ever actually happened when he opened his eyes on the other side—he buried her under a tree he could see every morning as the sun rose, stealing the sky back from the night). There had been no unruly wind, no anything at all out of the ordinary when everyone heard the moaning sound trees make when their roots separate from the ground and begin their descent toward the ground. You should probably also know that young Ghost Baby and young Sam Truth both felt an unexplainable breeze of sadness and experienced déjà vu for the first time in their lives when they saw the tree on its side.

Considering the tree falling, it came as no surprise that everyone froze when they heard the rumbling of an approaching carriage.  It was slow in approaching, and this in itself intensified to the significance of its presence, especially since it was Sunday, and there were never visitors on Sundays. The already odd morning was suddenly one of hushed panic, and Ghost Baby only five years old—with his grey eyes, piercing from his olive colored face—though not quite sure what to think, knew that the sudden paralysis of the slave quarters was due to the slow moving carriage and the train of men shackled together, trudging behind it. The look in his mother’s eyes confirmed his fear, and like all who stood near, he held his breath and waited.

Massa Oliver Truth rushed out the front door of the big house and down the steps to meet the older white man who climbed out to meet him. Ghost Baby watched as their mouths moved wondering what would happen next. He had just noticed how hot it was and was wiping at the sweat that was about to run into his eyes when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and in turning was met by his squatting father. He didn’t understand what his words meant, but the look in his father’s eyes made his heart race.

“You stay hea,” He looked toward Ghost Baby’s mother, pausing briefly as their eyes met one another’s. A tear dropped from her dark, quiet eyes—lips taut and dry; long, thick hair pulled from her almond brown skin; face wet with sweat—before he turned back to Ghost Baby. “You stay hea!” He huffed again as if he knew he would not listen. The sweat on his black cheeks just below his dark, tight eyes reminded Ghost Baby of tears.

Quiet filled the air between them, it seemed.

“Yes suh” Ghost Baby replied, as his father stood tall—black skin clinging to his tight body, gleaming in the beating sun—he, and the other men now watching the white men too. Massa Oliver Truth was in his forties, but appeared to be a bit younger, still having all of his sandy-brown hair with pale blue eyes set in a face that was often tensed, but not yet wrinkled. The older white man, who appeared to be in his early sixties—hair mostly white, and moderately wrinkled, mushy features, dark eyes, stooped only ever so slightly in his posture—talked for a while, pointing out toward individual men standing out in the slave quarter—one of them being Ghost Baby’s father. Mrs. Massa, Mrs. Elizabeth Truth stood at the door of the house with her arms folded, watching too, and their little son—whom Ghost Baby had mostly watched from a distance before—bouncing around, as he always did. Ghost Baby, watching him, mesmerized by his hair that was the color of wheat and eyes—as he also noticed from a distance and up close only once when Mrs. Massa came down to slave quarter to get Ghost Baby’s mother to come back up to the Big house to clean the floor that, as she said, “hadn’t no more been touched than the sky”—were the color of it. Ghost Baby almost forgot what was going on, too busy watching him—who was clearly the only person unaffected by the carriage and its chain of men.

Hell broke loose when Massa started calling names. One-by-one, name-by-name, the silence broke. Muffled gasping-squeals snuck from women’s mouths, and tears flowed as husbands were called to Massa. Throwing confused looks back and forth between Massa were the men whom were being called and the women who were losing control of themselves. None of it began to make sense to Ghost Baby until his father turned to him with intense eyes—all of a sudden darker than night, with a look he would never forget and his mind did not yet understand—and spoke.

“Stay hea… Stay hea!” he said, and when he looked at Ghost’s Baby’s mother, the line between their eyes was severe, but there were no words.

“Hurry hea boy!” Massa called after him, and quickly his father turned from them while panicking, Ghost Baby watched him, staying, as his father had told him. Massa called three more men to him and looked them over. Ghost couldn’t make out his words, but he watched as his father and other men turned in circles in front of the white men, and the white men looked them over, still talking. Suddenly, his mother gasped. Ghost had again looked away, toward the little blue eyed boy, who had now hopped down the steps, and was near the white men and Ghost’s father, and his mother’s gasp made him redirect his attention to his father who was now standing off to the side beside the white man who had climbed out of the carriage. His mother’s gasp became a muffled cry. It didn’t begin to register that something was terribly wrong until the white man began to lead his father toward the group of men chained behind the carriage. Immediately, his heart began to race again. Something told him to move, and he did.

“Fa!” he screamed, racing up the hill toward his father.

“Ghost!” His mother screamed as she took off after him.

“Fa!” Ghost screamed again when the white men turned to him.

“Stay!” Ghost’s father finally yelled as Ghost was approaching. The white men began to laugh. Ghost failed to notice the men—more specifically the older white man, who had a shot gun in his hand. He didn’t know why he ran so quickly. Something that he did not yet understand made his race urgent.

“No! No!” his mother screamed. Ghost didn’t see the shot gun.

“No!” his father began to rattle in his chains, in attempt to get to stop him. One of the other men standing near Massa broke into a sprint toward the woods behind the big house. A huge commotion broke out in the slave quarters, unbeknownst to Ghost who was determined to reach his father whose eyes were fixed on him alone. A female screamed, “No! Stop!” There was a loud explosion, more commotion, females screaming. Ghost ran faster, ignoring the distress in his father’s face. “Oh, Lawd! He dead!” a female voice screamed. Suddenly, as Ghost passed the two white men, there was a heavy, blunt blow to the back of his head, and then everything was gone.

#

When Ghost opened his eyes, he was staring deep into blue eyes; the white boy was so close, Ghost could smell his breath. He jumped, making the already-throbbing in Ghost’s head ring red with pain. He squinted to bear it. “He alive! He Alive!” The little white boy screamed toward the door sending another bolt of pain through Ghost’s brain. He said nothing, though, as he searched his surroundings to see where he was.

“Chile, keep down dat noise.” Ghost’s mother hushed him, entering the door. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Massa came into the room.

“What’s going on in there?” She asked searching the two boys then the little white boy. “Sam you have to keep that noise down! She’ll never have dinner ready in time, if she keeps having to come in here to tend to him. You go on outside and play.”

“Ain’t nobody to play wit. I wanna stay here ‘til he get up. Then I can play wit him.”

“Well, he won’t be getting up to play anytime soon, now gone! The doctor will be here soon, and he will be needing to rest,” She stop an looked over at Ghost with a hint of disgust in her eyes and continued, “if he’ll ever be able to play with you.”

“I’m gonna stay… I’ll be quiet. He’s my friend, and I want to stay wit ‘em.”

Ghost’s mother had stood silently watching the entire time, and after he said this, Mrs. Massa looked him over.

“Well, alright, but you need to keep quiet, ya hear me? His mammy can’t keep coming in here to tend to him.”

“Ok, I promise.” Sam replied with a smile.

#

“What’s your name?”

The whispered question woke Ghost baby up to the throbbing in his head, and clutching it, as if to control the pain, he realized it was bleeding. Sam did not notice. “What’s your name?” He whispered again—a little louder this time—kneeling over Ghost, who was lying on the floor in Sam’s room, head wrapped with a piece of cloth his mother had ripped from her dress to control the bleeding.

“Ghost, Ghost Baby.”

“Why they name you that?”

“Don’t know”

“I wouldn’t wansta be no ghost.”

Ghost baby was quiet. He didn’t know why.

“Why not?” He asked.

“You know what a ghost is?”

They were still whispering.

“Naw”

“You don’t know what a ghost is?” Sam asked with disbelief.

“Naw”

“It’s all dats left when you die.”

Ghost Baby would have been afraid if he had the energy to be scared. He still didn’t know what a ghost looked like, or what it was; it was just the dead part that made him uneasy, and almost made him forget the throbbing in his head. The tear that squeezed itself from the corner of his eye made Sam think he had scared him.

“You not a ghost!” His whisper was loud. “You ain’t got nothin’ to worr’ ‘bout.”

The sudden pang of pain, made Ghost clench his eyes shut, and grit his teeth as more tears flowed. He was past the ghost part. “Don’t cry!” Sam hushed him, but Ghost Baby’s crying became more intense.  Sam bent down closer to him, and cradled Ghost’s head in his arms. “Don’t cry,” he whispered. The spasm of pain began to subside and Ghost Baby opened his eyes. Again, his met the blue of Sam’s.

“How you get dem eyes?” Sam asked. Confusion covered Ghost. What eyes? He thought. He had never seen them, and as far as he knew they looked like everybody else’s.

“What’s wrong wit ‘em?” he quickly replied, again, forgetting his pain.

“Nothing wrong, they’re jus’ grey… and you a nigger, and I ain’t never seen a nigga wit dem kinda eyes.”

Ghost Baby still didn’t know what this meant; he didn’t know what grey was, and wondered if his eyes were why his head hurt so badly—if all the stuff he couldn’t remember had caused his eyes to look like they did, however they looked.

“Ou!” Ghost Baby moaned as another pain rocked his brain. Tears again ran from the corners of his eyes and he closed them. Sam bent over to comfort his head again, almost grimacing in pain with him when Mrs. Massa walked back into the room. A look of shock lit her face, and she gasped for air before she moved swiftly across the room and lifted Sam away.

“What’s wrong with you?” She rasped in his ear. “Don’t you touch that nigger blood.” Ghost Baby’s mother now stood in the door when Mrs. Massa looked up. “Get back to work! We’ll never be ready in time if you keep stopping!” She screamed as she barged past her holding Sam’s hands away from them both as if the blood on them were toxic.

            As Ghost Baby’s mother was turning to leave, he spoke to her.

            “What’s wrong wit my eyes?”

            She looked at him as if she were trying to understand his question.

            “Nothing wrong wit yo eyes.” She finally answered

            She again turned to leave, but he stopped her again.

            “What’s a ghost?” He asked. She looked at him, as if she had seen one. Silently, she stood as if unable to move then she quickly turned and left. He was more confused than ever, but it was short lived because as soon as she disappeared down the hall, another explosion of pain rocked his head, and he closed his eyes—hoping that with them closed, the pain might stop.

A nudging at his arm woke him, bringing back all the pain that had gone while he slept. The room was now dimmer than before, and he could hear that there were many people in the house. He noticed all this after he noticed the old wrinkled face of the white man standing over him. He stood off to one side and then he noticed on his other side that he recognized an old woman who too lived in slave quarters, whom he had always seen sitting on a small stoop beside the door of the flat next to his, moaning—whom as his mother had bluntly told him one day when he asked what was wrong with her, “She talkin’ to God.” The old man’s face brought back some of the things he couldn’t remember from back when his head didn’t hurt.

“Lift his head up so I can see it.” The white man told her and she lifted. Ghost Baby screamed as the pressure she applied to his head in lifting it sent another hammer of pain through his eyes.

“Hush ni chile.” She hissed at Ghost Baby.

“Unwrap it so I can see.” The white man directed.

“Where’s my Fa?” Ghost asked. “Ou!” He yelped in pain, as she removed the rag from his head and twisted it for the doctor to see. They both ignored his pain and his question.

“Tilt it a little further.” The doctor ordered. She did. “He’ll be fine.” He added looking at it briefly from a distance, never touching it. “He’ll need to remain in bed and keep it clean. If he gets fever, he may die.”

She exhaled deeply. Fear again made Ghost Baby forget his pain.

“What’s a ghost?” He asked. He had directed his question toward the old lady.

“What you’ll be if you don’t shut your mouth, and rest.” The doctor told him, and that ended his questions. Though he had more, they would have to wait until it was safe.

#

Ghost didn’t know if his eyes were open or if he were dreaming. Time seemed to stand still. But there was his mother, Mrs. Massa, Massa, Sam, and the Doctor all around him. He was freezing. Shivers made his teeth chatter, and aside from the faces over him and the orange glow dancing on the walls around him in the otherwise dim room, other details of his surroundings escaped him.

            “We have to cool him off,” he thought he heard the doctor say. And just after he closed his eyes, another wave of  chills covered him as a cold something was laid on his forehead and a cold liquid ran off of his forehead and down behind his ears. No, he wanted to scream but he could not make his body turn the thought into words, and before he even knew it, another chill washed over him and all in the room was gone again behind his eyelids.

#

Ghost Baby was running, sprinting as quickly as he could. Only he didn’t know where he was going. And then he saw him. That’s why he was running—his Fa, in the chains, by the carriage. Then again, there was the laughing white man, who looked like the doctor, and Massa Truth. Then mysteriously, all of a sudden his father vanished, and he was standing in the field alone. Actually, everyone was gone.  Only the house was there. The sky was grey. It was windless. Then he heard laughing—laughing that he recognized. He turned to see, but there was no one anywhere. His heart began to race; panic gripped him, and before he could stop the tears he was crying. “Fa!” he screamed. “Fa!” He had never been so alone. “Fa!” he screamed again. Then, again, he heard the laughter, and turned to find its source. It seemed to be right over him. Then suddenly, there was a tugging at his arm, but there was no one there. He screamed. There was more laughter. He searched again, but there was no one. Then, as if blossoming out of darkness, as voice arose—his father’s voice.

“Ain’t no sense in screaming,” he said. There, again, was the laughter. And suddenly, again, there was a tugging at his arm, and then more laughter.

“Ghost?” Another voice arose out of the darkness—one he didn’t immediately recognize. “Ghost!” The voice became louder. He screamed again, feeling as though he were being suffocated by the darkness and the laughter.

“Ain’t no sense in screaming,” again, his father’s voice reemerged. And suddenly, he was face to face with his father, just as he had been just before he had headed up to carriage, surveyed like a piece of livestock, shackled and sold. Eye to eye, they were when Ghost’s father spoke again, “Ain’t no sense in screaming, no sense in talking at all. No sense in saying a word cuz no matter what you say, it don’t count no way.” Suddenly a hand shook Ghost’s face, sending a bang of pain into his head. And just before he screamed, just before he snatched his eyes open, his father put his finger to his lips and hushed him before disappearing into the black.

#

An entire week passed before Ghost Baby opened his eyes. Sam had been standing over him as he regained consciousness, but embarrassed to be caught standing over him, Sam quickly left the room before Ghost could make out the figure that had been looking down at him.

#

            “The dumb nigger won’t say a word,” the doctor said more to himself that Massa Truth. Sam stood in the doorway looking at the backs of his father and the doctor, feeling unexplainably sorry for the little boy laying on the rags organized into a pallet on the floor in the back room. Fleetingly, an image of his own soft bed entered and left his mind … lingered for a second … why couldn’t they just put him in his bed he almost thought, and then the thought was gone.

            “He appears to be okay aside from that,” the doctor said to Massa Truth who then gave Ghost a look over. When he got to his eyes, he was met unexpectedly by the grey iris’s that he had for years avoided, and quickly looked away.

            “So that’s all?” he asked the doctor.

            “That’s it.”

            “Well, I’ll be … Don’t know what the hell I’m to do with a mute nigger, but, alright,” his voice trailed off.

            “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” the doctor inserted before he and Massa exchanged looks and headed for the door.  Not long after the door closed behind them and Massa walked the Doctor out to his horse, did Ghost’s mother, who had been eavesdropping the entire time, take a quick break from her nightly cleaning to glance into the room before rushing back into the kitchen before Massa noticed.

#

            “You gonna be sleeping here from now on,” Ghost’s mother told him as she led him into Sam’s room. “You to do whatever he say … ya hear?” Her eyes glistened with intensity, black face glimmering with the golden flicker of candles.

            If he could respond, he would have said okay, but the blank look in his eyes told her that he understood.

#

            “Naw, he don’t talk …. ain’t talked since they sold his daddy …. Some say it was the fever …. Some say it was the pain …. Nobody really know though,” was the whispered story passed around the slave quarter. The sentiment up at the big house was  a bit different. Massa Truth didn’t say much about Ghost baby’s inability to talk and neither did his wife because talking about that would have required them to address issues both of them meant to ignore.

#

            Ghost Baby lay on the floor in Sam’s room. He was only there because Sam had begged his mother to let him stay, and again torn between having the little nigger sleep under her roof, and dealing with the whining of her son, she gave in. When she had   husband Oliver about it, the glossy look that glazed his eyes—the journey to someplace in his mind in the middle of their conversation before he finally brushed it off and changed the subject—left her more worried about where he had gone and why than whether or not the little nigger could stay. Her discontent with his staying was deeper than his skin color. Though no one knew that she was aware, she had been there that night. She was aware, whether she would accept it or not, of the night that accounted for how Ghost Baby got his name. She had cried about it that morning, and carried hate quietly with her everywhere afterwards buried deep under God and forgiveness because of it.

            It had been a cool night in the beginning of winter, and Massa was supposed to be leaving for Natchez the next morning to discuss some issues about crops and the upcoming harvest season—he had actually told Mrs. Massa he planned to leave before the sun rose, around two or three in the morning. She had felt then heard him roll from the bed, listened to the boards creak, felt the cool air on her back as he rose lifting the blanket from her body and pretended to be asleep. She listened as he dressed, gathered his things, and left. If he hadn’t been so quiet about it; hadn’t seemed to sneak; more specifically, hadn’t neglected to kiss and tell her good-bye before he left, she would have stayed in bed. Had he done any of this, she wouldn’t have felt obliged to get up from the bed and rush to the window to watch him leave. If she had stayed in the bed just three seconds longer, she would have missed his entering the flat in the slave quarter, and his tugging at the nigger girl’s arm as he pulled her along into the darkness after him.

            The sight stole the breath from her, and she took no time to change into clothes appropriate for the cool outside. Instead, she rushed quickly down the stairs and out the back door to follow him. Her heart raced as she tried to find them, having briefly lost them in her dash down the stairs. Squinting and staring as hard as she could through the darkness, at the trees and bushes that lay on the far stretches of the plantation, she saw them rounding the corner behind the bushes at the edge of slave quarters on the other side of which led into the William plantation that lie adjacent to theirs. The grass felt like ice to her bare feet as she trotted out across the yard, past the flats in the slave quarter to see where her husband and the little nigger winch were going.

            As she came around the bush, off to far side of the William plantation, there was a small building, glowing softly, flickering with a yellow light in the distance across the large field. In the glow, she could see out before her, the silhouette of her husband and the girl. Eventually, after following them for a while, the door of the building opened and they entered. By now, her feet were numb from the cold. Nevertheless, she raced even faster across the field, unable to even see the ground beneath her, breathing heavily, focusing past the dark trees that separated their plantations on her right, guided only by the full moon and flickering light. As she approached the flat, she heard voices, and the sounds they made, almost stopped her in her tracks. She slowed to a timid walk, listening through the chatter of crickets, and she had not been mistaken. It was women moaning—high pitched sex moans. Her heart threatened to stop as she approached the window. Then she could hear the low huffs of men. She stood, as best she could, out of sight, staring into the room. There were a few lanterns on the ground inside, a few stacks of hay, no furniture, and three men between the legs of naked nigger girls. At first she didn’t see her husband, and desperately naïve, she hoped she had followed the wrong person. However, suddenly, a man rose from the floor  in front of the window, and realizing that it was her husband she moved quickly completely out of sight—heart racing, too shocked by the entire situation to be angry. Peeking back into the window she now saw her husband, on a stack of hay between a nigger girl’s legs, and the sight paralyzed her. With her eyes frozen on him, tears began to roll down her cheeks. She could not look away. She watched every stroke; watched him give her one final thrust of ecstasy; watched him then lay exhausted on top of her. Disbelief took her to a place darker than where she was outside. And when she awoke from her daze, she was startled by the piercing eyes of the nigger girl who now just might have her husband’s baby, who lay on the hay under him staring at her.

            Unable to bear her gaze or the agony that seemed to choke her, she turned and ran back to her house and her bed, where he had left her—where she should have stayed. Though she had not really seen who the girl was—could only make out her eyes—she would not forget her.  And she was nearly certain—when she went down to the slave quarters as she always did when a baby was born, only this time with more curiosity because it had been nine months since she had crept in the cold to see where her husband was taking the nigger girl—that her intuition had not lied when she saw the little olive baby with grey eyes. Immediately she had to see his mother’s eyes; had to see if they were the same ones that gazed from the hay under her husband at her, and she snatched her eyes violently to see them. Almost simultaneously, the nigger girl looked up at her. And when their eyes met, again she stood outside the window staring in; they were indeed the same eyes. At that moment, she readjusted her own—blond-haired, blue-eyed, one month old—baby in her arms and left.

She remembered all of this as she caught glimpse of Ghost Baby lying on the floor, and all this that she remembered, yet had never spoken of, accounted for why she felt so many things she didn’t understand—why she loathed his being there, yet could never summon enough anger to disallow it. It was this disparity between her fury, empathy, and wishful doubt that kept her silent—this balance that kept her sane. It was this dilemma in her mind that allowed the nigger winch that had perhaps given birth to her husband’s baby to work for her, and the bastard Ghost Baby to stay in her home—to sleep beside her son.

What she was unaware of was that this wasn’t the first time her husband had dragged the nigger girl off to a flat in the middle of the night, and he wasn’t the first white man to give her his baby that night. She was also oblivious to the things that had filled his mind when she asked him how he felt about the nigger boy staying in their son’s room. She was unable to see him, in his mind, again, dealing with the possibility of the nigger boy being his son. She was unable to see him replaying the night over in his memory, watching the other men, too, give her their babies; telling himself the nigger boy couldn’t be his child.

Due to the unsaid things that they both assumed the other not to know, due to the things that neither of them were able to deal with or understand, due to their shame manifesting itself into curiosity, and a yearning to see and know that would not die, Ghost Baby and his mother, were, and always would be the only niggers allowed to live and work daily amongst them.