Read Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V for Free Online

White overseers, until the day the master gave her to Cur, the Black foreman of the plantation craftsmen. The shame of being reduced to whoring with Blacks was too much for Fishy’s mother and she hanged herself. It was Fishy who found her. Peggy saw all of that flash through Fishy’s mind when Peggy asked about her mother. But it was a story Fishy had never told and would never tell.
    Likewise, Peggy saw that Fishy got her name from the son of the first owner she was sold to after her mother’s suicide. She was assigned to be his personal maid, and the senior maid in the plantation house told her that meant that she must do
whatever
the master’s son told her to do. What that might have meant Fishy never knew. The boy took one look at her, declared that she smelled fishy, and wouldn’t let her in his room. She was reassigned to other duties for the months that she remained in the house, but the name Fishy stuck, and when she was sold into a household in the city of Camelot, she took the name Fishy with her. It was better than the one her mother had given her: Ugly Baby.
    As for tipping, if any slave in this house were found with money, it was assumed that it had been stolen and the slave would be stripped and branded and chained in the yard for a week. Slaves might walk with their heads downcast, but in this house, at least, they saw no pennies on the ground.
    The worst frustration for Peggy, though, was that she couldn’t say to the slave, “Fishy, do not despair. You feel powerless, you
are
powerless except for your sullen contempt, your deliberate slothfulness, the tiny rebellions that you can carry out and still survive. But there are some of us, many of us working to try to set you free.” For even if Peggy said it, why should Fishy believe a White woman? And if she did believe, what should she do then? If her behavior changed one iota from this obsequiousness, she would suffer for it, and emancipation, when and if it came, was still many years away.
    So Peggy bore Fishy’s unspoken scorn and hatred, though she knew she did not deserve it.
Her black skin makes her a slave in this country; and therefore my white skin makes me her enemy, for if she took the slightest liberty with me and addressed me with anything like friendship or equality, she would risk terrible suffering
.
    It was at moments like these that Peggy thought that her fire-eating abolitionist friends in Philadelphia might be right: Only blood and fire could purge America of this sin.
    She shrugged off the thought, as she always did. Most of the people who collaborated in the degradation of Blacks did so because they knew no better, or because they were weak and fearful. Ignorance, weakness, and fear led to great wrongs, but they were not in themselves sins, and could often be more profitably corrected than punished. Only those whose hearts delighted in the degradation of the helpless and sought out opportunities to torment their Black captives deserved the blood and horrorof war. And war was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.
    Buttoned now, Peggy would go to meet Lady Ashworth and see if the light of Christianity burned in the heartfire of a lady-in-waiting.
    There were carriages for hire in the streets of Camelot, but Peggy had no money to spare for such luxury. The walk wasn’t bad, as long as she stayed away from King’s Street, which had so much horse traffic that you couldn’t tell there were cobbles under the dung, and flecks of it were always getting flipped up onto your clothes. And of course she would never walk along Water Street, because the smell of fish was so thick in the air that you couldn’t get it out of your clothes for days afterward, no matter how long you aired them out.
    But the secondary streets were pleasant enough, with their well-tended gardens, the flamboyant blooms splashing everything with color, the rich, shiny green of the leaves making every garden look like Eden. The air was