Lyddie

Once I walk in that gate, I ain’t free anymore, she thought. No matter how handsome the house, once I enter I'm a servant girl—no more than a black slave. She had been queen of the cabin and the straggly fields and sugar bush up there on the hill. But now someone else would call the tune. How could her mother have done such a thing? She was sure her father would be horrified—she and Charlie dredges on someone else’s place. It didn’t matter that plenty of poor people put out their children for hire to save having to feed them. She and Charlie could have fed themselves—just one good harvest—one good sugaring—that was all they needed. And they could have stayed together.

“Lucky you’re so plain. Guests couldn’t leave the last girl be.” [The cook] was ladling stew into a large serving basin. “Won’t have no trouble with you, will we?”

[…Lyddie] hadn't had a new dress since they sold the sheep four years ago. Since then, her body had begun to make those strange changes to womanhood that exasperated her. Why couldn’t she be as thin and straight as a boy? Why couldn’t she have been a boy?

[…] She was, as girls go, scrawny and muscular, yet her boyish frame had in the last year betrayed her. Her breasts were small and her hips only slightly curved, but she couldn’t help presenting these visible signs that she was doomed to be female.

“I was my own schoolmaster,” he said. “At first I only wanted to read the Bible so I could preach to my people. But”—he smiled again, showing his lovely, even teeth—“a little reading is an exceedingly dangerous thing.”

[…] “I couldn’t leave my home,” [Lyddie] said.

“No? And yet you did.”

“I had no choice,” she said hotly. “I was made to.”

“So many slaves,” he said softly.

“I ain’t a slave,” she said. […] “We own the land. We’re freemen of the state of Vermont.” He looked at her. “Well, my father is, or was, till he left, and my brother will be…” But Charlie was at school and living with strangers. She hated the man for making her think this way.

“I got good news, Lyddie,” he said, a little of the boy she knew creeping into his voice. Her heart rose.

“The Phinneys have taken me on as a full apprentice.”

“Ey?”

“More than that, truly. They treat me like their own. They don’t have no child but me.”

“You got a family,” she said faintly.

[…] She wanted to scream out at him, remind him how hard she had worked for him, how hard she had tried, but she only said softly, “I wanted to do for you, Charlie. I tried—”

“Oh, Lyddie, I know,” he said, leaning toward her. “I know. But it waren’t fair to you. You only a girl, trying to be father and mother and sister to us all. It were too much. This will be best for you, too, ey. Don’t you see?”