AMOS TOUCHES MY shoulder. "Let's get us some food."
"Good idea," Beckey says. She seems to have recovered as we walk towards the cabin to which we'd brought the vegetables. The door is open and approximately ten people are clustered inside. Jack, his Papa and Pompey are among them. In the middle of the room the three baskets and the bucket have been placed under a small wooden table, which has been built with a shallow slope, so the bowls positioned on it are tilted. I peer inside the bowls. Pork. Bread. Cornmeal. Brown rice. Rotten peaches.
I notice that nobody is moving and nobody is speaking. I glance at Jack's Papa. He's nodding his head gravely. Pompey squeezes his hand. Amos closes his eyes.
Then nobody moves.
Still nobody speaks.
A women enters the cabin and watches from behind, silently.
Somebody else peeks through the window.
I hear a boy whining that he's hungry.
And I realise.
Laid out in front of us is all the food we have. And it's not much. It's not much at all. There are at least fifty slaves living on this Plantation, all of whom need to be fed. It's not enough. Five bowls of food. Three baskets and one bucket of fruit. It's all we have to live on.
It's not enough.
"This ain't good." Beckey's words voice the thoughts of every person in the cabin.
Still nobody moves.
Then Beckey says, "What we gone do?"
"Share it," Jack's Papa replies promptly.
There's a short period of silence.
"Ain't gonna last us a week," Jack says.
"There's more what's gone grow."
"But there's gotta be more an fifty of us here," I say.
"You has a problem wid sharin'?" Pompey asks, glaring at me.
I look at the floor. "It jus' ain't gone be 'nough for all a us."
"We can make it enough," Pompey says.
"No we can't. When we's eat all the food, then what we gone do?"
Pompey laughs. He laughs at me. "That ain't gonna happen, girl. Noah gone be back by then an' he gone give us more."
This time I laugh. I laugh at him. "You thinks Noah gone come back?"
"O' course," Pompey says.
"Y'all thinks that too?" I say to everyone else in the room. Each of them diverts their eyes away from mine. They know I'm right. They know that Noah isn't going to come back. They just can't admit it.
Just then a man bursts through the door and lunges for the food on the table. He grabs the bowl of pork and has almost left the cabin when Jack's Papa tackles him to the ground. Pompey pins one of his arms to the floor while Jack's Papa holds down the other. Jack snatches the bowl and returns it to the table. The man screams and kicks and tries to prise himself free. His teeth are bared. His eyes dart around in their sockets. Crazy.
"I needs the food!" he yells. "I needs meat. My children gone starve!"
Slowly Jack's Papa and Pompey release him. He lies on his stomach on the floor, panting.
"I needs it," he whispers, "I ain't got no food left, nothin' at all."
"Neither does we," Jack's Papa says quietly. "Neither does any o' us." He towers over the man, his feet apart, the muscle in his arms tense. Alert. Ready.
"Go," he says to the man.
The man raises his head to look at him. Their eyes meet and neither of them seems able to rip his gaze away.
"What? I wants"-
"Go. We gone give you food. Jus' not now. Go."
The man squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, his fingers curl into fists and I think he's going to attack Jack's Papa. Instead, he turns and I watch him crawl out the door.
"Stand guard," Jack's Papa says to Pompey and he and his son leave the cabin. Beckey goes outside to drink from the well. I can tell by the vacant look in her eyes that she's shocked. I'm shocked too.
Becoming free is meant to be a happy time. Instead, it is turning us into animals.