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1. Prologue

2. Among the Stumps

1. Table of contents

Prologue

They were two. Blood covered the sheets. Even the midwife was whimpering and pitiful by the end. “A night and day,” their father would say later. Their mother never corrected him. And they were born, one the night, one the day.

People remarked on this for a long while afterward, though no one knew which was born at night, which the day. Nor would they have been able to tell you what difference it might have made if you pressed them. Still, the story of it followed them. It followed them like the whispers that had always followed their parents ever since they’d arrived. The whispers were a wind, one that blew them sometimes where they wanted, sometimes not. Seafaring people must live with that.

The whispering wind followed them out of the town where they spent their winters, across the sea, running the easterlies to the mouth of the river, the wide open flood plain where they spent their summers on the shore, amongst the great pines. The whispers came with their neighbors working the cod offshore and it came on shore like the August winds that whistled the pines. A whisper that blew harder every year, as if a storm were gathering.

Their father spent all summer, a cold summer, sitting in the evenings, outside the tent, stroking his thick black beard and studying the wind and waves. There are storms worse than the sea he said. That year, when the last the southerlies blew out and before the northerlies turned fierce and cold, they loaded the small boat and slipped out of the old story.

They kept to the coast, giving wide berth to the places men gathered. When they came upon the marshy lowlands of London town, they put in for a time, of which the twins retained no memory, but the mention of which still made their father shudder and their mother turn quiet. The left again, hugging the coast until they found a buccaneer ship that offered passage. And they were gone again. To a new world where people said the soldiers were fewer, the winds warmer and the possibilities wider.

By the time they arrived all they had left was the memory of the trees. The deep darkness of the forest floor where they would lie, staring up at the trees, the trees reaching like thick fingers to scratch at the light of the sky above.

Among the Stumps

She was named Linnea for her father’s friend in the old country, but her mother called her Lulu from the day she was born.

Like her twin sister She’d been easing mainsheets and tightening lines since she could walk, crossed an ocean before she’d seen five north winters, and survived the burning sun and flaming fevers of the Carolina swamps to reach her eighth year. Her skin was brown from long days in the sun. She was thin, but strong. Her body all bone and taught ropy muscle. Her hair was brown bleached to blond by the summer sun.

She licked her lip, pulling the beads of sweat into her mouth and savoring the salty flavor. You are the sea, you sweat the sea all day every day.

Lulu hopped from stump to stump. Crouching down, her knees bent like coiled springs and then sprong, she exploded toward the next stump, landed, teetered, stopped there. There were plenty of stumps. The whole forest was gone.

“Cut em down for the Guvner’s mansion,” her father had grumbled earlier in the boat. In the bow Tamba rotated his powerful upper body, careful not to let his weight move side to side, and smiled knowingly at her. “Rice lulu. They cut em down for rice. They sell the timber to the city.” Tamba smiled again, rolling his eyes toward the sky. They both knew her father, who was standing in the stern of the boat, pushing them through the marsh with the long pine pole, could not see Tamba’s rolled eyes beneath his hat. But the both waited and heard him grumble again, stop rolling your eyes at me Tamba. They all laughed. “The rice will give us food, we won’t have to buy it.”

Lulu heard her father grunt. Tamba turned around again the boat slid silently along the edge of the marsh, where a thin line of trees still stood, offering some shade from the already brutal mid morning sun.

The water ran out right before the line of great oaks started. There were clumps of prickly, fan-leaved palmetto trees growing beneath the oaks. The muddy bank of the marsh quickly gave way to the dark coloured clay, mixed with sand and hundreds of years of leafy hummus. This was the soil, rich in nutrients that would grow rice. “For a time at least,” her father had said as he dragged the small pirogue up onto the muddy clay bank, next to stand of palmetto and tied the pirogue to a tree. But you take away the pine and it all goes, nothing will hold this soil."

“Rice will hold the soil.” Tamba stood under the shade of an oak, arms crossed, nearly invisible in the darkness of the shade.

“You know this?”

“My people know this.”

Her father shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it then.” He climbed up the bank and reached down to lift Lulu up as well. “I tell you what won’t hold it. Potatoes. Turnips. I’ve seen that.”

“Turnips?”

“Like a potato, thin skin, waxy, but bitter.”

“Ah, like you.”

Her father smiled at Tamba. “I am not bitter.”

“No, not you.” Tamba shook his head slowly, a sly look crossed his eyes, “But you are waxy. Skin like tallow. So white.”

Her father laughed. They walked through the oak and palmetto forest toward the bright clearing ahead. Lulu decided that, while she loved her father and looked to him for many things, Tamba was probably the better farmer. But it puzzled her a little why they cared, since neither of them farmed. Her father hated farming and made no secret of it, though he was happy to live by farmers. The Geechee were good farmers. But most of them were not free. A few like Tamba were. But he too was no farmer.

Tamba and her father were still arguing as they stepped into the clearing. “Mind the gators Lu,” her father called over his shoulder. “And the snakes. Fresh cuts and all.”

Stirring up the forest stirred up the animals of the forest. The plant eaters lost their homes, the insects lost their homes. The animals that ate the insects lost their food. Only the animals at the very top stood any chance. The snake might get the homeless mouse, but eagle got the snake. Nothing got the alligator though. Nothing ever got the alligator. Her father always said not to fear the alligator, but to respect it. Give it a wide berth and do what you can to make sure it doesn’t see you as meat. She sat down on stump and wondered what made you look or not look like meat.

Tamba and her father walked out into the field, leaving her at the tree line. They stopped every so often to dig at the roots of the stumps with their sharpened staves, marking choice stumps as they went.

Three hours later the sun was directly overhead. Lulu could just barely see her father on the far side of what had once been a forest of broom pine. Slash pine the sailors called it. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was gone. No more tufts of green above to filter the harsh clean light of day, no more long thin needles to whistle in the wind when the onshore breezes started. It was a dead still afternoon. The world highlighted in a glare that made it difficult to see. It was hot, humid. The air felt like a wet wool blanket wrapped around you. Lulu decided she would not like to be a rice plant or anything else that tried to get along in this place. She liked it better back at camp. By the sea, in the wind. What was life without wind?

She jumped to another stump and looked down. It had her father’s mark on it. A square inside a diamond. “Two squares really,” he had once told her and her sister, “one is just rotated 90 degrees. It’s easier to draw than four interlocking circles, which is what I used before.”

Lulu shielded her eyes from the sun and lifted a gourd of water to her mouth. It was bitter and hot, but it coated her throat for a moment and kept her tongue from feeling so swollen. She was hot and bored. She wished she’d stayed with her sister and her mother, tending the kiln fires. Looking after Henri or even cleaning and drying fish would better than this stillness and heat. Anything to escape this relentless sun. At least at the beach, at camp, there was a breeze.

Lulu wore a straw hat that a woman had given her the year before when a ship had come to careen on the beach where her family spent the summers making tar. Despite repeated soakings, stretchings and pullings, it was too small for her now. “At least your head is growing,” her sister, who was nearly a head taller, teased. Lulu wanted to punch her in the mouth, but instead she took of her hat, hit her sister over the head with it, stuck out her tongue, bared her teeth and growled at her. Then she ran before Birdie could retaliate. Sometimes it was intolerable to have a twin. Usually though these moments were just that, moments. And then they were gone as quickly as she felt them, though she was not above drawing them out for a while to get at her sister, who rarely seemed to feel this way.

Sometimes Lulu needed to get away, to be alone, so she had come today with her father and Tamba out into the scorching midday sun to find stumps for the winter’s drying time. Her father made carvings in each stump, a square within a diamond, the beginning of wisdom he told her when she asked what it meant.

Others would mark their stumps with their own marks and then all of them and their wives and children would come out together every night for a week, maybe two for this field, thought Lulu as she glanced around at the vastness of the clearing. They’d come for a week on either side of the full moon, to work in what light could be had, digging stumps and hauling then back to the beach, to the dunes just beyond camp where they would be piled in great heaps and lie there drying like great white bones bleaching in the sand until they were so weathered they were gray and then in spring, before the heat got too bad, the kilns would be built and lit and the great dry stumps chopped and piled in.

Lulu and Birdie and Henri and two other families worth of children, their cousins and friends, would gather moss and dry grass to feed the slow heat of the kilns. As the wood burned the dark pitch drained down to the bottom of the kiln and dripped into barrels set below the catch it. This was the Arkhangelsk tar. The archangel tar that kept the ships afloat, the rigging tight, the sailors safe and bought Lulu and Birdie and Henri a place in the world, clothes to wear, food to eat and sometimes even peppermint treats or dolls or new ribbons for her hair. These stumps were the reason Lulu’s life was possible.

But that didn’t make the day any cooler or her patience any greater.

Birdie sat in the shade of the last sago palm. It was the edge of camp. After the palm was the beach. She watched the ocean from the top ridge of the dune, squinting in the bright light of the midday sun. Birdie’s real name was tk, after her mother’s sister, who was down at the shoreline, pulling in a fishing net with Birdie’s own mother. Birdie had helped them cast out the net and secure it to their buoys earlier in the morning. Now she was waiting. Waiting for her brother to play, waiting for her sister to return, her cousins to be done with their chores. She glance up the beach toward their camp but there was no sign of Charles or Samuel. She sighed and plucked at a sea oat, slowly breaking up the stem.

Down the beach she would see the single mast of the Arkhangelsk. She was a 22ft Bermuda sloop that had been taken by the Whydah and put ashore with a small crew to careen and re-tar. Unfortunately for the Ave Marie, as she was known at the time, her hull was too worm eaten and split even for the quality of tar Birdie’s family was know for.

The captain of the Ave Marie had disagreed. While the rest of his crew shrugged and went off fishing and hunting, the captain stewed, drinking all afternoon until finally he’d strode into camp shouting for her father, who eventually appeared. There was a good bit of quarreling in several languages until at some point Birdie remembered the captain drew his sword and her father had gone very quiet. Her mother had pulled all the children inside the thatched hut that was their summer home, but Birdie had found a crack in the palm fronds and watched as her father walked very slowly forward until he had placed his neck against the captain’s sword, a move that had been so unexpected that the captain had not noticed her uncle tk had slipped quietly up behind the captain and put a pistol to the back of his head.

In the end the captain tried to laugh and pass it off, but he was clearly still angry. The last she or anyone else had seen of him he’d been marching off up the road to Charles town. She’d been worried about him coming back for several nights, refusing to sleep outside until her mother finally coaxed the problem out of her. “Sweet girl, you don’t need to worry,” her mother had said, “he’s gone.”

And indeed he never came back. The Ave Marie had been left where she was when the family departed for their winter camp in the south. When they came back this year they found a storm had pushed the ship high above the tideline, and filled her hull nearly full of sand. She listed considerably to port, but was plenty straight enough to climb about what was left of her decks and bones.

She had been commandeered by Birdie, along with Lulu, Henri and their cousins from up the beach, Charles and Samuel, and Tamba and Kadiatu’s boy Cuffee. They’d spent the summer in her, every free moment they had, sailing the sands of the island, re-christening her the Arkhangelsk. Birdie was captain. They had voted, as free sailors did, and she had been elected, and only voted out once, when Lulu called a new vote after Birdie had ordered all the boys over the side to raid an enemy ship for the hundredth time, holding Lulu back. But Lulu’s term as captain had lasted only a few days before Henri called a vote that put birdie back in charge, and set the boys, along with Lulu, over the side to attack the forts and towns of the coasts they sailed.

Lulu hadn’t been able to see her father or Tamba for at least an hour. They were resting in the shade on the far side of the clearing she guessed. Which meant another hour before they’d be back.

When they finally did return, both were pouring sweat and no longer bickering about farming or anything else. They drank the gourd of water and sat a while in the shade in silence. Lulu sensed that asking anything at that moment would only have earned her grunts. After a few minutes her father motioned with his head and Lulu set off, back through the trees to the pirogue.

Her father ruffled her hair as he stepped over her in the boat. He pushed them out again, following the trail through the reeds, back to the deeper waters of the marsh, toward the river, which would lead them back to beach where Lulu and her family currently had their camp. In two more moons they’d head south, down to Savannah for a moon or two, depending on how much work their father found in the shipyards, how many clothes her mother could make or repair for the townswomen. Lulu and her sister would go to school. The thought of it even now filled her with a burning anger that made the backs of her ears itch. She tried to focus on the little black snails, which had climbed ever so slowly up as the tide had come in while they were ashore, which meant the tide was with them to return, but the thought of school kept intruding, pushing the snails down into the water. She hated school because she had to wear a dress. She hated town because she had to wear a dress. All of the spring and all of the summer and all of the fall she wore the clothes of the Edistow, a deerskin skirt that reached midway down her shins and was fringed with shells Lulu was extremely proud of and forever changing when new shells washed ashore. Unlike her sister she often wore a cotton shirt if she was going to be in the sun all day, but she had not today. Her long blond hair was pulled back in a single braid that reached nearly to her waist and had shells woven into it. She looked, aside from her slightly lighter skin, like everyone else on the island they called home.

The Edistow have lived here for hundreds of years, probably more, her father said. There were few of them left, but enough still that her family traded with them and helped them harvest rice in the fall. Fine clothes her father had boasted not long after he built on the circular pole structures he’d seen in their camp and taken to wearing a deerskin loincloth, which made for no end of jeering from sailors, though few of them would say anything to his face. Why mama when she blushed at his attire, they’ve lived here longer than us, I expect they know what’s best to wear.

They might know best Lulu thought, but he did look a little ridiculous with his thick black beard and hairy chest and then the little flap a deerskin which reached right above his knees and looked, no matter how long it might have been, too small on his rather large body. At nearly six feet their father towered over almost everyone on the island, save her uncle who was about the same height.

Lulu liked it better when he wore his sailing britches, as he had today, which was how he looked in her earliest memories and how she preferred he look all the time. Lulu looked back at him now, pushing them slowly along, still sweating, eyes fixed on some point in the distance. Lulu loved her father, but often felt lost around him. He could be stern, or even cross with her or Birdie or Henri, at times, but more often he just seemed to be elsewhere, lost in depths of thought no one, not even her mother seemed to be able to plumb, though he often returned from wherever this place was quickly with startling bursts of temper.

Mama had a patience her father did not. And she still wore the calico dresses and skirts Lulu barely remembered from the old country, a different river, a different marsh, a different shoreline with the cold smell of wet mud and salt brine, the barnacle crusted rocks that had cut her feet tile they bled. She could still feel them sometimes when she starred into the fire in the evenings or when she watched the stars at night, lying under her sheets in the soft cradle of sand. She did not miss it exactly. She did not remember enough to miss it. But she did think of it sometimes on the edge of sleep, she’d hold it in her thoughts, turn the memories over and around, looking for details she’d missed in all the times before. Though it had been a long time since she’d found a new detail she didn’t already hold in her memory, still she did it most every night, letting those old visions usher her into sleep on the hot summer nights when the mosquitoes dove at her all night long, even through the smoke of the smudge fires her father tended all night long.

Lulu could feel the water pulling them now, partly the tide of the marsh, partly the current of the river it was drawing them to the sea. The boat rocked slightly as her father laid the pole down and took up the paddle he used to steer. She looked back and he was sitting, smiling now as they drew nearer to home. Stern and distant though he might sometimes be, her father was almost always smiling when his face was turned toward the sea and the wind was on his cheek.

The shadows of the moss dangled like fingers form the oak trees when the pirogue finally nosed onto the sandy shore of the island, not more than half a mile from their home. She hopped off the side into the water and waded ashore. She glanced back at her father who nodded once and she needed no further encouragement, taking off down the path that led back to camp.

Lulu rounded the corner at full speed, through the tall field of sea oats that formed the southern border of their camp, bursting out of the grass like a lion. She smelled the warm sweetness of fish stew. Her mother was stirring a kettle over the fire. Her sister and Henri came running from the other side of camp, calling her to come to the dunes, but she was hungry. She ran over and hugged her mother, who pulled the stray hairs from her face, tucked them back behind her ears and scooped her up a bowl of stew with a piece of cold fried bread. Lulu slurped at the hot stew, earning her a frown from her mother.

“Did you mark stumps?” Birdie watched her eat.

“Papa did.” She took another bite of bread. “Squares.” Her sister did not seem to care. Birdie had never liked stumping.

“Mama gave us a pot for the kitchen in the Arkhangelsk.”

Lulu stopped chewing. “Really?” A smile came over Birdie’s face, all she could do was nod faster than Lulu had ever seen a head move before. “It’s the best” blurted Henri.

“I started to carve spoons for it they aren’t done yet but do you want to see?” Birdie was already pulling on her arm, dragging her away from the fire.

Birdie was always making things for them to play with, she’d fixed the wheel, carved a pole for the flag, made a tk, and was always helping Papa repair the fishing nets. Sometimes Lulu hated the way Birdie was so good at making things, but mostly she loved to use the things when they were finished. She scooped up some sand and wiped her bowl out. She dumped it all at the edge of the fire and handed the bowl back to Mama. “Going to the ship,” she blurted as the three of them ran out of camp.

They slowed when they reached the dunes, they all knew from experience that running in the dunes was a waste of effort. “How come Mama gave us the pot?” Lulu had been trying to come up with reasons for a gift in her absence ever since Birdie had said it, but she had come up empty.

“Mama said we could use it if we her left alone.”

“Were you bad?”

Birdie nodded at Henri, who scowled. “Was not!”

Henri was only four, but was, as their father said, clever as a Lynx and innocent as the doves. Henri had a way of twinkling his eyes when he smiled in such a way that adults were immediately less angry at whatever had attracted their attention in the first place. It did not, naturally, work on Lulu or Birdie, though they both secretly and not so secretly, admired this ability of Henri’s. In fact Lulu and Birdie had practiced this twinkle for hours, Lulu thought they were pretty good at it. But it never seemed to come off right when they tried it on adults.

Despite his twinkle, Henri never got away with anything. He was too naturally mischievous and not very good at being sneaky. If something was amiss at camp, some prank played, some calamity caused, Mama always came looking for “my little brown imp.” The only other possible culprit was their cousin Charles, but he was a year younger, actually quite sneaky, and lived a quarter mile down the beach with their aunt and uncle, which generally absolved him.