The slave girl begged to sleep on the floor next to the baby girl's crib – the reason left the whole family speechless. The wealthy family thought she was strange, even superstitious. But that night, she screamed… everyone understood…
1855, Blackwood Plantation, Georgia.
The October rain pounded the tiled roof of the Blackwood mansion like heavy lead bullets. The study smelled of tobacco and brandy, the atmosphere was so tense it could be cut into pieces.
James Blackwood, the owner of the richest plantation in the area, leaned against the fireplace, his eyes narrowed in annoyance. Before him, kneeling on an expensive Persian carpet, was Sarah – a very young black slave girl, her thin shoulders shaking violently.
“Say it again?” James growled.
Sarah did not dare to raise her head, her voice was small but filled with a frantic plea: “Master… please… let me sleep in the little mistress's room. Just sleep on the floor. Right next to the cradle. I will not make a sound. I swear.”
Sitting on a red velvet armchair, Eleanor Blackwood – James’s wife – let out a soft sigh. Her face was pale and haggard, the traces of a difficult childbirth two weeks ago still evident. She looked at Sarah with a mixture of pity and suspicion.
“Sarah,” Eleanor said weakly, “Nanny Margaret has been taking care of Catherine. Why would I want to do that? I’ve been working hard all day in the kitchen.”
Sarah raised her head. Her eyes were dark and bloodshot, but deep within them was a terrifying determination.
“Madam, the monsoon is coming. The old people say it brings hungry souls. I… I just want to keep an eye on the young lady. I have a bad feeling.”
James chuckled, a dry laugh echoing. “Superstitious. You slaves are always full of ghost stories in your heads. Catherine is lying in the strongest oak cradle, in the warmest room in this land. No ghost can touch her.”
“Please…” Sarah slammed her head on the floor, the sound of her forehead hitting the wooden floorboards was painful. “I lost my child last week… I know the pain. Please let me protect my little mistress. I will not sleep, I will only keep watch.”
The room fell silent. The mention of Sarah's lost child made the atmosphere heavy. Sarah gave birth the same night as Eleanor. But as fate would have it, while Lady Catherine was born surrounded by luxury and laughter, Sarah's child – a girl – was announced dead at birth because the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. The pain of losing a child seemed to have made Sarah paranoid.
Eleanor, touched by the sacred motherly love, turned to look at her husband. “James, leave her there. If it makes her feel better. After all… she's just lost a child. Maybe being near a newborn will help her calm down.”
James frowned, about to protest, but seeing his wife's tired look, he waved his hand. “Fine. But if the slightest noise wakes Catherine, I'll send you to the stables immediately. Understand?”
“Thank you, master. Thank you, master.” Sarah cried as she backed out, her trembling hands clutching her chest as if clutching a broken heart.
That night, and the nights that followed, the Blackwood servants whispered about “crazy Sarah.” They found her wrapped in a thin blanket, curled up at the foot of the intricately carved wooden cradle. She wasn't sleeping. Her eyes were wide open, shining in the darkness, fixed on the sleeping child.
Sarah's presence in the baby's bedroom initially annoyed nanny Margaret, but eventually she let it go. Sarah was too quiet. She was like a shadow, a stone statue guarding the foot of the crib.
But strange things began to happen.
One night, Margaret woke up to go to the bathroom and found Sarah standing over the crib. Her rough, calloused hand hovered over little Catherine's chubby face. Margaret wanted to scream, but she stopped. Sarah was not harming the baby. She was using her little finger to gently brush a stray hair from the baby's forehead, so gentle that she seemed afraid to break a dewdrop.
Then Sarah bent down and inhaled deeply the baby's scent, her chest heaving violently as if she were holding back a sob.
The Blackwoods began to feel creepy. James thought Sarah was haunted by her child's death and was using Catherine as a substitute. He feared that the madness might be dangerous.
“We must get rid of him,” James said to his wife one afternoon at tea. “The way he looks at her… isn't like a servant looks at his master. He looks at Catherine as if… as if he wants to possess her.”
Eleanor shook her head, fiddling with her china teacup. “I see it differently. It's adoration. Protectiveness. Last night, Catherine threw up milk, and Margaret slept like a log. Sarah picked her up and patted her back. She saved her from choking, James.”
“But he's still very strange,” James snapped. “Tonight will be the last night. Tomorrow, I'll send him down to work in the cotton fields. I don't want a lunatic around my daughter.”
That night was a stormy one
The storm was unprecedented in Georgia. Thunder and lightning tore across the sky, tearing the night sky apart. The wind howled through the cracks in the windows like the wailing of thousands of souls.
In the large bedroom, the candlelight flickered and was about to go out. Little Catherine woke up with a start because of the thunder exploding right on the roof. The baby cried out, a heart-rending cry mixed with the sound of falling rain.
James and Eleanor rushed in from the next room. They found nanny Margaret trying to comfort the baby but in vain. Catherine cried until her face turned purple, her breathing began to become irregular.
“Give her to me!” Eleanor rushed to pick her up, but the baby still arched her back, screaming in panic. The sudden fever made the baby's body as hot as a coal.
“Call a doctor! Quickly!” James shouted to the servants standing around outside the door. But everyone knew that in this storm, the doctor from town could not get there in time. The roads were flooded, the bridges might have been washed away.
Amidst the chaos, Sarah emerged from the dark corner at the foot of the crib. Her usual timidity was gone. She stood tall, her eyes blazing.
Sarah stepped forward, without asking permission, and snatched the baby from Eleanor.
“What are you doing?” James roared, intending to rush forward and snatch the baby back.
“Back off!” Sarah shouted, a powerful, wild sound that stunned James.
Sarah held the baby close, pressing her cheek to its hot forehead. She began to hum. Not the hymns the Blackwoods sang, but an ancient, sad melody, filled with the sound of endless cotton fields and the eternal pain of her people.
Sarah's hand ran down the baby's spine, rhythmically, expertly. She whispered nonsense words into the baby's ear, “shh… shh…” sounds like soothing waves.
Strangely, little Catherine began to calm down. Her crying stopped, replaced by small hiccups. Her breathing became more even. The panic passed, and the child snuggled closer to Sarah’s thin chest, seeking the familiar warmth and drifting off to sleep.
The room was silent. Only the pattering of rain outside could be heard. James and Eleanor stood rooted to the spot. A ragged slave was cradling their precious daughter as if she were his own.
But it was then, as the lightning flashed brightly into the room, that James saw something he had never noticed before.
Sarah was crying.
Her tears streamed down the baby’s sleeping face. She bent down and kissed the small, leaf-shaped, pale brown birthmark on the back of Catherine’s neck – a birthmark so small, hidden by her hair, that even Eleanor rarely noticed it.
And then, Sarah whispered a sentence, very softly, but in the absolute silence of the room, James heard it clearly.
“Sleep well, my Bessie.”
Bessie.
The name was like a knife stabbing straight into James's heart.
He stepped back, his face drained of color. He looked at his wife, Eleanor, still breathing a sigh of relief that her daughter was safe, completely oblivious to the strange name.
But James understood. The terrible truth came crashing down, connecting all the events, shattering his pride.
Memories flooded back to that stormy night two weeks ago. The night when both his wife and Sarah had gone into labor.
The old doctor had come out of Eleanor's room with a mournful look on his face. “I'm sorry, Mr. Blackwood. The baby… was too weak. It died at birth.”
James was devastated. Eleanor had had two miscarriages. If she knew that this child would also die, she would go mad, or perhaps commit suicide. She was too weak, both physically and mentally.
At that moment, the midwife from the slave quarters ran up to announce: “Sarah has just given birth. A baby girl. Healthy, crying loudly.”
In a moment of utter despair and selfishness, a crazy thought came to James's mind. He was the master of this place. He owned everything, even the people.
James ordered the doctor and midwife to perform a cruel exchange.
Eleanor's dead daughter was taken down to the slave quarters. Sarah's healthy, plump daughter was wrapped in silk swaddling clothes and placed in Eleanor's crib.
Poor Sarah had fainted after giving birth. When she woke up, she was given the cold corpse of a white baby (whom they lied about being deformed, which is why her skin was so pale). Eleanor, when she awoke, held the rosy baby in her arms and cried with joy, unaware that the blood flowing through the child did not belong to her.
James had thought his plan perfect. Sarah’s baby had a rather light skin tone – not uncommon in mixed-race children, and in time, he would explain it as a recessive gene from some distant ancestor. He had buried the secret, believing Sarah would never know.
But he was wrong.
He had underestimated a mother’s instincts.
Back in reality, in the flickering candlelight, James looked at Sarah. The slave girl raised her head, her eyes meeting his.
No more fear. No more subservience.
In those eyes was a painful understanding and a
silent accusation.
Sarah knew.
She had known from the first moment she saw the baby in the cradle. Maybe it was the scent. Maybe it was the birthmark on the back of her neck that everyone in her family had. Or simply, it was the invisible bond that was stronger than any chains: maternal love.
She did not make a fuss. She did not scream for her child back, because she knew her place. If she told the truth, James would kill her, or sell her far away to cover up the evidence. And the baby – her Bessie, now Catherine – would lose the protection of her birth mother.
So she chose to remain silent. She accepted the label of a madwoman, a superstitious person, accepted sleeping on the cold floor, accepted being a guard dog… just to be near her child. Just to breathe the same air as the child she had given birth to.
Sarah's cry at this moment was not a cry of begging. It was a cry of great helplessness. She was rocking her child to sleep in her arms, but had to call her “mistress”.
James felt his legs collapse. He looked at his wife Eleanor, who was filled with tears of gratitude for the loyalty of the slave, completely unaware that the black woman was the real mother of the child she loved.
The whole room was silent, but in James's mind there was a storm. He saw Sarah's terrible sacrifice. She accepted to let her child live the life of a rich, free, white lady, instead of taking her child back and having him suffer the same life of a slave. She accepted to lose her child so that her child could be “human” in the true sense of this cruel society.
Asking to sleep on the floor was not superstition. It was the only way for her to be a mother, even if it was only in the dark, even if it was just a few secret touches at night.
The storm gradually subsided as dawn broke.
James Blackwood did not send Sarah away.
The next morning, he ordered the most comfortable armchair to be moved into little Catherine's room. He told everyone that Sarah was the baby's special “protector,” and she was allowed to stay there whenever she wanted.
No one understood why the master changed his mind, except Sarah.
Every night, when the lights in the mansion went out, people still saw that woman sitting beside the cradle, singing sad country lullabies. Eleanor often told her friends how lucky she was to have such a loyal servant, who loved Catherine like her own child.
At such times, James just turned away, hiding a heavy sigh. He knew that the peace and happiness of his family was built on the grave of a truth, and paid for by the silent tears of the mother lying on the cold wooden floor every night.
The child grew up, bearing the name Catherine Blackwood, but in her sweetest dreams she always heard the whisper of the name “Bessie” and felt the warmth of the rough hands of the strange “nurse”.
That was the secret buried under the floor of the Blackwood mansion, where maternal love triumphed over prejudice, fate and the cruelty of time.