AS MUCH WORK AS WE’D BEEN DOING AROUND the place, and from all the other things we had to think about, I hadn’t been in the barn much in the last couple weeks, except the far end where the cows came for milking. One day I went inside and looked over and noticed the pillow and blanket and a few other things still there from when Katie’d found Emma and when she’d given birth to her baby here in the barn. None of us had ever thought to clean them up.
So I went over and picked up the blanket to take it outside to wash. Then I was going to take out the straw and dump a new bale down from the loft above, and was fixing to clean up the area a little.
All of a sudden as I swept back the straw, a little blue-and-white bit of color sparkled up at me on the hard dirt floor from the sunlight coming in through the door I’d left open. I stooped down and picked up the tiny gold piece of jewelry with its flat blue top and white gold letters in the middle of the blue.
I couldn’t believe my eyes!
I recognized it. It had been my mama’s! Now that I saw it again, I wondered why I hadn’t found it with her things.
I held the little object for a minute, filled with reminders of my family. Mama’d had it as long as I could recollect, though I still hadn’t a notion what it was. It didn’t look like any kind of white woman’s jewelry I’d ever seen, and was such an odd shape.
The first time I’d seen her holding it years ago and had asked her about it, she’d just smiled a sad smile and said the letters stood for a teardrop. What did that mean? I asked her. She just said, “Some memories are best left unremembered,” and then she would answer no more of my questions about the thing.
Then all of a sudden I came to myself standing there in the barn, realizing that the thing hadn’t got there with me.
So how had it gotten here?
I wandered outside and back to the house where I heard Katie and Emma and William in the kitchen and was going to ask Katie about it. It was a good thing Aleta was upstairs in Katie’s room right then. The instant I opened my hand to show it to her, Emma burst out.
“Where’d you git dat?” she said, trying to grab it from me. “Dat’s mine!”
I pulled back and closed my palm.
“What are you talking about, girl?” I said, confused at first.
“It’s mine,” she repeated. “I lost it. Where’d you fin’ it?”
“Out in the barn. It was under the straw where you were lying that day we found you.”
“Dat’s it—jes’ like I tol’ you. I was holdin’ it an’ I lost it. Gib it to me.”
I saw Emma’s eyes flash and took another step back, still clutching it tight. And now I was starting to get angry myself.
“What is it, Mayme?” asked Katie, confused over what we were arguing about.
I opened my hand and showed it to her.
“It’s a cuff link,” she said.
“What’s a cuff link?” I asked.
“It’s a thing a man wears to hold the cuffs of his shirt together. Where’s the other one?”
“There isn’t another one. I found this out in the barn just now, under the straw where Emma was laying when she had William.”
“So it is Emma’s, like she says?”
“No, Miss Katie,” I said. “This used to belong to my mama. She had it for years.”
“It’s mine!” Emma said again. “I brought it wiff me when I ran away.”
Katie looked back and forth between the two of us, more bewildered than ever.
“What do the letters stand for, Mayme?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “All my mama would tell me is that they meant ‘teardrop.’ ”
“Maybe this one of Emma’s is the other one,” she suggested. “There are always two.”
“My mama only had one,” I said. “How could Emma have gotten the other one.—If it’s yours, Emma,” I said, turning to her, still a little riled, “where’d you get it?”
“Neber min’ where I got it. I got it, dat’s all.”
“It had to come from someplace, Emma,” said Katie gently. “Won’t you tell me where?”
“I foun’ it.”
“Found it … where?”
“I foun’ it in a place when dere weren’t nobody aroun’ … an’ it wuz dere an’ it was pretty an’ it din’t belong to nobody, so I jes’ took it.”
Suddenly I remembered something Emma had said about the time she’d run away from her plantation, about going down to the colored town after everyone was dead. A chill swept through me. Why hadn’t I thought of it before—William McSimmons was one of the McSimmons boys! And the instant the name came to my mind, with it came back the memory of the man Katie and I had seen asking about Emma in Mrs. Hammond’s store.
It had been him!
“Was that before they killed the black folks, Emma?” I asked.
“Yes, dat was before den, but dey was all out workin’.”
“All the slaves, you mean?”
“All da field slaves. I was a slave too, but I stayed at da house.”
“But you went down to the colored village that day, when everyone was gone, and you found it then?”
“Yes’m, an’ when I went inter da house, I saw it—
” All at once Emma realized I’d found her out, and she shut her mouth up tight.
“You saw it and you stole it—is that what you were about to say?”
Emma did not reply.
“You found it in one of the slave houses, didn’t you?” I persisted. “The slaves were out working and you went in and saw it and took it?”
Still she remained silent.
“That was my house, Emma. And that cuff link was my mama’s!”
Emma glanced away. I think her anger at me was starting to turn to embarrassment, though I think she was still mad that I’d found out her secret.
“What were their names, Emma?” I said. “When you were telling us about what happened to you—what was your master called?”
Still Emma wouldn’t answer.
“Emma, answer Mayme’s question,” said Katie. Her voice was insistent, like she was Emma’s mistress.
“Master McSimmons,” Emma finally whimpered.
“So it did come from my mama!” I cried. “You took it from our house!”
“I still don’t understand, Mayme,” said Katie, now glancing toward me.
“Now we know why the baby’s name is William, Miss Katie,” I said. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Me and Emma came from the same place!” I said. “The father of her baby is William McSimmons, the son of my own master, who has about as bad a reputation as a man can have about what he does to women. I’ve heard talk about him and slave girls, and Emma’s baby is obviously his doing. He’s who was asking Mrs. Hammond about her that day.”
“What dat you say?” shrieked Emma. “He been ax’ing ’bout me! Oh no … no!” she wailed and then started crying.
“But why didn’t you know each other?” asked Katie, for the moment ignoring Emma’s ruckus.
“I don’t know, Miss Katie,” I said. “I can’t figure that out either. I don’t know why I didn’t see her at the plantation. I’d figured the McSimmons were all dead till just a few days ago.”
Again I turned to Emma.
“How long had you been at the McSimmons place?” I asked.
“I don’ know,” whimpered Emma, “maybe a year. I wuz always gettin’ bought an’ sold. Da master hadn’t bought me too much before dat, I reckon. I’m sorry, Miz Mayme. I din’t know it wuz yer mama’s. I din’t mean ter steal it. It wuz jes’ so pretty an’ I neber had something so pretty, but I din’t mean ter steal it.”
She was so sad and pitiful when she cried and blubbered like that, how could I stay mad at her?
“It’s all right, Emma,” I said. “What’s done is done and it’s over now.”
“Thank you, Miz Mayme. Yer so good ter me too, jes’ like Miz Katie.”
Her words didn’t go down too easily in light of how angry I’d gotten at her. I was angry with myself for getting so upset. With Aleta here now, and five of us to take care of instead of just me and Katie ourselves, I couldn’t let myself be angry and selfish over something so little as a cuff link. Katie was acting like a grown-up, and I had to too. I had some serious growing up to do, that was for sure.
Even though we’d temporarily solved the riddle of the cuff link’s origin, the incident still raised a lot of questions in my mind that I didn’t have answers for. Along with the gold from the cellar and where Aleta had come from, there were sure a lot of mysteries to think about all of a sudden.