The twist of fabric was tight as a nut and hard, the size of a thimble. Ruth pried it open carefully, but there was nothing inside but a pattern of yellow flowers. She put the scrap to her nose, but it held no scent. What was this? Why had it been saved?
The questions buzzed like bees inside her head. She put her treasures away and laid her chisel on top of the boulder
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where her mother had perished. And the
n she walked down the steep slope to the water’s edge.
Ruth turned her face to the south and started along the banks of the ’Squam River, putting one foot in front of the other along the muddy shore. She kept her eyes on the ground ahead of her, with no thought to where she was headed. She saw nothing of the lingering golden sunset nor did she notice the rise of a nearly full moon. She succeeded in forgetting herself altogether until she found herself in Gloucester Harbor. Ruth crouched under the wharfs and hid behind pilings, hurrying silently between shadows to avoid detection, running from the fouled water and greasy smells until she reached the quiet of Wonson Point.
From there, she scrambled over the Bass Rocks,
trudged the white Good Harbor sand, and clattered across Pebblestone Beach. From dry granite to slick granite, skirting low tide and soaking her boots at high tide, she let her legs make the case against death.
Only when she arrived at the farthest reach of Halibut Point did she stop and allow memory to have its way.
Brimfield said he’d returned to Cape Ann to make peace with his past. She had come for the same reason, after all.
And because of Mimba.
The short, wiry, coal black woman had been Ruth’s mother from the moment Ruth had appeared in the Prescotts’
kitchen. Mimba pulled the frightened four-year-old onto her lap and kissed her on both cheeks. “You gonna be my dearest-dearest?” she whispered. “You gonna be Mimba’s
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apple-sweetie?” Her words bore the stamp of the West Indies, where she’d learned housekeeping and English, but she never forgot the African names for “milk” and
“home,” for “honey” and “memory,” which found their way into her stories.
Mimba was born to tell stories: old wives’ tales from Africa and Barbados, gossip about whites and blacks alike, family histories of all five of the slaves on the Prescott plantation on Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island’s South County. Mimba told Ruth a story about her life, too, or as much of it as she could and would.
She always began the same way. “Your poor-dear
mother was called Phyllis Brimfield, as I heard it, and she got a sad-sad story, because she didn’t get to love you long-time like Mimba.” Standing between Mimba’s knees while her hair was brushed and braided, Ruth learned that her poor-dear mother had died giving her birth, “up there in the north, on a cold island with a lady name. There was a tall man fetched you to Mistress Naomi and Hiram Smith, Providence-way, and Mr. Hiram give you name of Ruth, to make honor on his wife, I heard.”
It was their black servant, Nance, who’d done the work of caring for Ruth. The Smiths had set all of their slaves free, but Old Nance refused to go. She said her masters wanted to throw her out because she was too weak to lift the wash kettle. “She say they suck the marrow dry, and wants to throw the bone away.
“But then Old Nance passed on and them Smiths
fostered you over to Queen Bernoon, that big-smart free African lady who sells oysters to eat.”
Ruth stayed with Queen and her large family of
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