River Sing Me Home
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Synopsis
Powerful, moving and redemptive, RIVER SING ME HOME tells of a mother's desperate search to find her stolen children and her freedom.
We whisper the names of the ones we love like the words of a song. That was the taste of freedom to us, those names on our lips.
Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy.
These are the names of her children. The five who survived, only to be sold to other plantations. The faces Rachel cannot forget.
It's 1834, and the law says her people are now free. But for Rachel freedom means finding her children, even if the truth is more than she can bear.
With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving. From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana and on to Trinidad, to the dangerous river and the open sea.
Only once she knows their stories can she rest.
Only then can she finally find home.
(P) 2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd
Release date: January 31, 2023
Publisher: Berkley
Print pages: 336
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River Sing Me Home
Eleanor Shearer
1
It was the blackest part of the night and Rachel was running. Branches tore at her skin. Birds, screeching, took flight at the pounding of her strides. The ground was muddy and uneven, slick with the residue of recent rains, and she slipped, falling hard against the rough bark of a palm tree. She slid down to the soil, to where ants marched and beetles scurried and unseen worms burrowed through the earth. With ragged breaths she gulped the heavy, humid air into her lungs. She could taste its dampness on her tongue, tinged with the acidic bite of her own fear.
What had she done?
She looked behind her. Looming in the darkness was the outline of the mill on Providence plantation, its arms splayed out like four sharp-edged daggers marking an angry cross into the sky. Terror clawed at her throat, as if the mill itself had eyes and could whisper to the overseer what it had seen.
It was not too late. She could still climb back over the wall and creep through the fields of half-planted cane, where gaping holes awaited young green stalks. She could return to her hut, one wooden square among many, and lie back on the sleeping mat that was worn thin from forty years of use. She could wait for dawn and another day of labor . . .
Scrambling to her feet, she kept running. Her legs plunged her deeper into the half-formed shadows of the forest.
Her chest ached. She wanted to collapse but could not; her body, unbidden, carried her farther and farther away from Providence. Every snap of a twig sounded like a gunshot; the murmuring of cane toads became the distant cries of searching men. She must keep running.
Alone, mud-streaked, with weariness sinking into her very bones, a question haunted her—
Was this freedom?
The empty forest. Her fleeing, sick with dread. Was this what they had hoped for, all along?
The day before, all the slaves of Providence had gathered outside the great house. A stone-faced set of white people waited for them—the master, on horseback, flanked by the overseer, with the master’s wife and three children standing on the steps of the house. The white people stared at the slaves. The slaves stared back.
They all knew what was coming. Some of the slaves even smiled. Rachel was among those who didn’t. She was old enough to remember other times when there were whispers about the end of slavery. She would not believe it until she heard it for herself from the master’s own mouth.
The master’s balding forehead glistened with sweat in the heat. As he brought his horse forward, Rachel caught a glimpse of his wife’s face, her lips pressed into a line of seething contempt. It was this sight, more than anything, that weakened Rachel’s resolve. She dared to hope.
The master kept his remarks short. He told them that the king had decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the new Emancipation Act would come into effect.
They were free.
Some people cried. Others yelled and danced in delight. They were a mass of shouting, sweating bodies, a river bursting its banks. The master and the overseer barked useless orders, unable to be heard over the noise. Eventually, the master rode his horse through the crowd at a gallop, just to get them quiet again. Its hooves kicked one woman’s head in, and she died instantly. But she died free.
There was more, the master said. They were no longer slaves, but they were instead his apprentices. By law, they would work for him for six years. They could not leave. When the sun rose, Rachel and all the rest would be going back out to finish the planting. They would tend to the cane until the next harvest, and the harvest after. Six years of cutting and planting and cutting again.
Freedom was just another name for the life they had always lived.
An ugly hiss went through the crowd. The overseer, gun slung over his shoulder, reached to bring it down. A hundred pairs of eyes watched the arc of his hand. The master’s horse blew air through its nostrils, its reins pulled taut.
The hiss died, and the crowd was still.
Rachel heard the news of hollow freedom in silence. For years, she had lived in perpetual twilight. Those she loved were long gone. Her life had shrunk to the size of the plantation, the routine of endless toil and the long shadows of what had once been. So, there was sense to it. Freedom was an emptiness that could only be filled with sugarcane.
That night, everything was the same. The press of the ground on her back. The shape of her limbs, thin and knotted with sinew. The musty smell of her hut. Days of labor lay ahead, her life as neatly plowed as the furrows in the field.
In sleep, she dreamed of her mother. Or maybe it was the idea of a mother, an outline of warmth and kindness. She couldn’t remember her own mother.
The mother was there in front of her, but somehow Rachel knew that she was also not there. She was somewhere far across the sea. She was fragile, a wisp of smoke. She could not stay long.
The mother spoke a name, and Rachel knew that it was her name—the name she was meant to have before some white man called her Rachel. What the white man gave, he could always take away. But this other name—this was hers. Rachel repeated it. The syllables felt strange in her mouth, but as the thrum of speech vibrated through her, they gave her strength. She was able to stand without stooping. She could feel the pleasant weight of her body, solid and powerful.
The mother stepped back and began to dissolve, one drop at a time, soaking the earth underneath her. When she was gone, the soil glistened a deep, rich red.
Rachel had awoken in pitch darkness—wild, trembling and glistening with sweat—and her body could not be stilled. It moved without her asking it to; it moved on animal instinct alone, crawling out of the hut, unfurling and flinging itself out of Providence and into the night.
In the forest, Rachel asked herself again: Was this freedom? A violent rupture, a body driven to flight, a mind paralyzed with horror as it watched things unfold beyond its control?
The trees had no answer. Their leaves whispered in the wind, and Rachel imagined them taunting her—
What now?
Her body moved beyond the range of thought, with a desperate will of its own.
She kept running.
She had no way to mark the passing of time on that moonless night, but by the burning in her legs Rachel knew she had traveled an hour or more when she heard it. So faint she thought she was imagining it at first. Singing.
She saw a speck of light, flickering between the tree trunks. She advanced slowly, her mind filled with thoughts of ghosts and nighttime spirits. But as the singing swelled, accompanied by drumming, filling the forest with sound, her fears receded. The noises were joyful and human and drew her in.
A clearing. A tight circle of bare earth in between the trees. At its center, dozens of people were dancing round a crackling fire, with still more lingering at the edge. As the dancers spun past, Rachel heard snatches of different words and melodies all blending into one. She heard some English, but also other languages, older languages that spoke not to her ears but to her bones.
Rachel stood in shadow, watching. She had been to dances before, as a younger woman, but not like this. Those dances had always been folded into plantation life. They took place in the slave quarters, or in the market square of a nearby town. At any time, a white passerby could appear, or the face of the master in a window of the great house, reminding all present that their joy was not boundless; it could not overflow the confines of slavery. The clearing sparkled with a different kind of magic. With no prying eyes to break the spell, the dancers moved with an unencumbered grace.
The insistent pull of the drums drew Rachel closer, closer, into the light. She found herself one body among many, swaying in time to the beat. She began to tap her foot and hum a song of her own.
A woman threw out her arm, her eyes wide and white, with glittering circles of firelight at the center. She seized Rachel by the wrist.
She sang the command, her voice low and sweet. “Dance!”
Rachel was swept into the throng. In an instant, she lost all sense of herself. She had no end and no beginning, no edges or limits at all. Her whole body dissolved into the rhythm. The dance rippled through the crowd as if through water, and Rachel gave herself up to the music.
Every ache in her body eased. She emptied her lungs of a song she had not even known was inside her. Someone was holding Rachel’s hand; she reached out and grabbed another’s hand, who grabbed another’s hand. As the flames leaped into the sky, Rachel thought she could see the chain of hands climbing to the heavens, a line of people through time and space, united by a single drumbeat.
As the last embers of the fire died, everyone stopped dancing. The dawn was beginning to break, gray light leaking through the trees, and the rising sun brought an end to whatever magic had bound them together. People began to leave, most of them tacking west, the sun on their backs, returning to their plantations. Hovering at the edge of the clearing, standing between two broad oaks, Rachel wondered momentarily if she should follow them. Her absence on Providence might not yet have been noticed. But she hesitated too long. Soon, everyone was gone and she was alone. She slipped eastward, back into the forest.
All of the running and the dancing weighed her down. She ached everywhere. It forced a slow pace. The terror of the first flight had faded to a kind of daze, and she stared up through the canopy at the sky. Somehow, the darkness had been easier—it had a kernel of mystery to it, a sense that the night held many possible worlds, their boundaries worn thin, so that anyone may pass between them. Sunlight was a reminder of the endless march of one day into the next, the unstoppable passage of time to which Rachel had been enslaved all her life.
Still the question plagued her—
What now?
It had a weary edge, a hopelessness. Her run from Providence had been pure survival. Now, she wandered aimlessly through the undergrowth; there was no path, and she stumbled over exposed roots. Her head throbbed with thirst and her limbs were heavy, but her body kept carrying her forward, away from Providence. Apart from the soft thud of her feet on the bare earth, the only sounds were the chattering grackles that flitted overhead.
She climbed the gentle slope of a hill. When she reached the top, suddenly there was the sea. The sight of it spread out below stopped Rachel in her tracks. She had reached the limits of the island.
The rising sun dipped its lower rays into the water on the horizon. Against the gray sky, the sea was a shocking shade of blue, dappled with white-gold sunlight. Its burst of color cut loose the fear that had wrapped itself around Rachel’s throat the night before. As if she had plunged into the gently rolling waves, she felt at peace.
All her life, nothing had belonged to her, not even the children pushed out of her own body. With her world boxed in by Providence’s walls, and its perimeter patrolled by the overseer’s whip, it had seemed as if there was nothing the white men did not own. But now, here was the sea. Vast, defiant and unowned, for who, even white men, could claim it? However much they grasped at it, its waters would run through their fingers and plunge back into the depths.
At the plantation, Rachel had always been made to feel small. With the sea spread out in front of her, she felt small in a different way—not small in herself but a small part of everything that surrounded her. Immersed in the infinite sea. There was freedom in this new kind of smallness, an exhilarating sense that she was in the world, and not just passing through it at a white man’s pace.
The question came to mind once again—
What now?
This time it had a new quality—it looked forward, outward, across the water. Not back over her shoulder to anyone who might be pursuing her.
Her lungs opened; she could breathe again. Her gaze wandered from the horizon down the hill. At first glance, the hillside was deserted. And yet . . .
She leaned forward a little, shielding her eyes against the sun. She thought she could see, nestled among the trees, about halfway down, the sloping roof of a hut.
Then rough hands seized her from behind, and her head was stuffed into a sack that smelled of smoke and damp earth.
2
There was a man on Providence who had tried to run. He was the only one Rachel had ever known who did. Of course, people talked about running—nighttime whispers, and quiet mutterings as they limped back from the fields—and there were always rumors of someone who knew someone on another plantation who had done it. But Barbados was small and densely settled. If you did run, where would you go that the dogs would not follow?
So, throughout her childhood, Rachel saw running as something beyond thought—an idea, too abstract to be made real. It seemed impossible until, suddenly, it wasn’t. They woke up one morning, and he was gone. Rachel was ten years old.
Atlas was his name. He was a private man—quiet, ever since he lost his wife, who was sold away with his child inside her. Rachel had never heard him talk of running. He just slipped away.
For a whole day, the plantation felt different. The boundary walls looked weaker, and the cane no longer seemed to tower over their heads. Men and women stood up straighter. Something sparkled in their eyes. The overseer and the foremen saw it and they feared it, were even freer with the whip than usual. White and Black alike felt like the world could change—until Atlas was dragged back at dusk, a seeping wound on his calf where a dog had seized him. The rupture in the expected order of things was only temporary; Rachel understood then that they could run but they couldn’t hide. Their bodies would always return, dead or alive, to Providence.
Atlas had his nose sliced off as punishment. The wound had grown infected, and he died with foul pus oozing from the gaping holes in his face.
This memory—of Atlas, his flight, his capture and his agony—came to Rachel as she retched, the coarse cloth of the sack filling her nose and mouth. Calloused palms held her wrists tight—besides twisting her head and scrabbling against the earth with her aching feet, there was no way she could struggle. She had no sense of where these hands were pulling her—forward, backward or apart, ripping her in two. She tried to cry out, but she had no voice, and besides, who would hear? Who would come to her aid? Like Atlas, she had attempted the unthinkable, and the world must be put to rights.
She was no longer moving; the hands held her still. Rachel’s breathing was ragged, catching on her fear. Something told her she had been brought inside—although she could not see the walls, she felt them pressing close.
There was silence. The grip on her was like iron. Fear kept her limbs twisting in vain—she could not free herself, however hard she tried.
Over the sound of her own heartbeat, Rachel heard soft footsteps.
A woman’s voice—deep and close—said, “Well?”
A man’s voice came from next to Rachel’s ear.
“We find her near the forest.”
“A runaway?” the woman asked.
The man gave no reply.
Rachel no longer struggled. She no longer even breathed. The course of her life was not in her hands. She waited.
The woman said, “Let me see her.”
As quickly as it had descended, the sack was ripped away, and Rachel was left blinking, a shaft of harsh sunlight shining onto her face through an open doorway. They were in a hut, as small and anonymous as any in the slave village on Providence. But something was not right. The scent was not like Providence, where everything smelled of sweet cane and brutal despair. Fresh, salty air blew in from outside. And when Rachel craned her neck, she saw that the hands that held her were dark, like her own.
Before Rachel stood a tall woman, her hair shorn tight to her skull. Her skin was smooth, unlined and ageless, but something in her eyes betrayed that this woman had seen many years of life.
The woman looked at Rachel. Her gaze had a sharpness to it, something piercing. Rachel felt naked before it, whittled down to the barest elements of herself.
“You running?”
Rachel didn’t dare speak.
The woman ran her eyes all over Rachel, taking in every part of her body. She nodded slowly. “Release her.”
The hands did as bidden. Rachel tumbled forward, her knees sinking to the floor. She stared up at the tall woman, whose face was as impassive as if it was stone.
The woman took Rachel’s chin in her hands. She had rough, worn palms, and her fingers were slightly cool against Rachel’s skin.
“Me know why you here.”
Rachel’s voice was small, barely a whisper. “What you mean?”
“Me see it in your face. Your pickney. You want to find them.”
The hut filled with ghosts. All of Rachel’s lost children, crouching in the shadows. She did not have to turn her head to see them. She knew if she tried to look at them directly, they would disappear. They had been her companions, in the corners of her vision or on the cusp of sleep, for many years.
She counted them one by one. Eleven children in all.
Micah. Tall and strong. Taken from her before he’d even turned ten, because they knew he could pass as old enough for the first gang at the market.
Mary Grace. Never spoke again after the night the overseer ambushed her in the fields. Sold because they took her muteness as a sign she was damaged beyond repair. No good could come of a silent slave, who could not say yes, massa, no, massa and right away, massa.
Mercy. Almost as tall as Micah and also sold young—as soon as they saw a “breeding look” about her.
Samuel. Dead of a fever just after his second birthday.
Kitty. Dead at five of the same disease.
Cherry Jane. Taken up to work at the master’s house on account of her honey-colored skin. Rachel saw her only in glimpses—riding in the cart with the other house slaves on the way to market, or tipping a pail of water out of the kitchen door. One day, even these occasional sightings ceased. Cherry Jane was gone.
Thomas Augustus. Small. Overlooked. He’d stayed with her longest of all, until he was fourteen, when they finally realized he was almost a man. They grumbled as they took him that he wouldn’t fetch much of a price.
Then there were the unnamed ones. One born backward with the cord wrapped around its throat. Three that died inside her; blood-babies that ran out of her body into the ground.
Their round, watchful eyes prickled on Rachel’s skin.
Is it true? she asked them. That you are the reason I left?
The instinct that had driven her from Providence was still coiled inside her like an animal. Rachel closed her eyes, tried to reach into herself, to understand. The sight of her children had not dulled this animal but roused it and caused its fur to stand on end. In her legs, worn down from running and dancing, she could feel the muscles tighten. The faces of the children who might yet live—Micah, Mary Grace, Mercy, Thomas Augustus and Cherry Jane—were etched behind her eyelids.
When Rachel opened her eyes, the ghosts were gone. The old woman was still standing in front of her. She nodded to the man behind Rachel.
“Me can take her from here, Gabriel.”
Rachel turned, saw a stocky man bow his head.
The old woman held out a hand, with knuckles gnarled like tree roots.
“Come.”
“Me name is Bathsheba, but they all call me Mama B.”
Outside the hut, the older woman paused, allowing Rachel a moment to take in her surroundings. They were on the hillside, close to the sea. There were indeed dwellings here, as Rachel had glimpsed from the top. A large wooden house sat in the center of a circle of smaller huts, all supported by stilts on the sloping ground. Around them, the soil showed signs of cultivation, but not of the regimented, plantation kind. The furrows meandered, changing course to allow a few palm trees room to grow among the crops.
Rachel kept her arms folded tight across her chest. She felt Mama B watching her, waiting for her questions. A few men and women were at work weeding, moving between the huts, but there were no white people in sight.
“What is this place?”
“It was a tobacco plantation,” said Mama B. “A small one. The massa get in some kind of trouble. He leave a few years ago, and we hear nothing since he gone.”
Rachel watched a young boy, no more than ten or eleven, skip out of one of the huts, with the pang she often felt when she saw children of a certain age.
“This your family? Your pickney?”
“No. Me have no pickney.”
“Then how come—” Rachel caught herself. There had been a sharp edge to Mama B’s reply, and she didn’t want to pry.
The older woman looked sideways at Rachel. “Then how come they call me Mama B?” Quite suddenly, she smiled, and deep lines formed across her face—the lines of someone who smiled often. “Me mother to no one, so me try to be mother to all. Me mother, Betsy, had twenty pickney. They call her Mama B before me, so in a way me inherit the title. Since the massa leave, me try and keep this place for them folks that have no place to go.”
Mama B took Rachel into the main house. Rachel followed her slowly, carefully, ears still pricked for a sign that this was all a trick, that at any moment white men would come barreling out from the bushes with guns raised, ready to drag her back to Providence. Trust did not come easily to Rachel, but what choice did she have? There was nowhere left to run. The sea marked the outer boundary of Barbados—beyond it was nothing but deep water and sky.
The front door led to a large room, with a wooden table surrounded by chairs, stools and upturned barrels. A woman sat in one corner, pounding spices with a mortar and pestle. A few sleeping mats were pushed up against the walls, some empty and some still occupied. Two doors to the left and right signaled that the house had more rooms still, and through one door Rachel could hear the murmur of voices.
Mama B clapped her hands once. Activity in the room ceased, and heads were raised from the sleeping mats, eyes half-open. A man stepped through the door to the left, looking curious. Rachel, standing behind the older woman, felt hot under all these gazes. She stared down at her feet.
“This is Rachel,” said Mama B. “She looking for her pickney, lost long ago.”
From the way some of the faces in the room twitched, Rachel knew she was not the only one to have lost family, and perhaps not the only one to have tried to find someone again.
The woman in the corner had put down her pestle. She stood slowly—she was slight, young, and her hands were twisting together.
“Me think . . .”
Rachel’s heart lurched.
“Yes.” The woman came close, her eyes roving over Rachel’s face. Her voice was light and gentle. “Me think . . . you have a daughter?”
Rachel nodded.
“Yes,” the woman said again. “Me think me did see her. A few years ago, in Bridgetown. Your face have the same shape. Me remember because she don’t speak.”
Rachel did not move. She felt weak and light-headed. Her mouth was dry and her lip trembled. The image of Mary Grace flashed before her—a stronger, sharper picture than she had seen in years, more solid now that Rachel knew she existed in a particular place. ...
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