The Slave Quarters: Writing What I Know

The Slave Quarters: Writing What I Know

 When I was six years old, my family moved from a two story, cedar-sided home with an intercom system and attached garage into a 500 square foot slave quarters set on a 365 acre, Civil War-era farm. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, only until our new house was built, but my nine-year-old brother Joshua did not appreciate my Polly Pocket paraphernalia being mixed in with his LEGOs regardless if it was for a short time or not. To provide a solution to our territory wars, Mother took home decorating to a whole new level by dividing the room into halves with a strip of duct tape.

“Merle, where’ve you taken us?” she asked our father while jabbing at a photo of an oozing, gangrenous leg. “Do you know when a brown recluse bites you, your skin rots until that area’s cut out?”

We soon realized those were not the only creatures parading around our walls. At night before we went to sleep, Joshua and I could hear the skittering paws of tiny animals as they burrowed around in the attic insulation to make their nests. When I lunged into my parents’ bed one night while whimpering about the noise, my mother hushed me and said they were just momma squirrels taking care of their babies. Regardless of her sweet story — which she surely did not even believe — in my mind all I could see were rats.

During the winter mornings when the wind nipped at the slave quarters’ walls, my father would stuff the stove with logs and hurriedly slam the door before the glowing embers could spew onto the hardwood floor. Even with this attempt to raise the temperature of the rooms, Joshua and I were still so cold we wiggled into our school clothes while hunkered under our covers.

Then, in 1993, an ice-storm swept through the Southern states, snapping power lines like silly string. We spent that week gathered around the woodstove sipping soup, coffee, and cocoa. Once our bellies were warm, my mother bundled my brother and me to the point we’d rather wet ourselves than go through the pain of shedding multiple layers. Feeling like the Charles Ingalls family in their little house in the Big Woods, our father nestled me into an orange toboggan sled and asked Joshua to lead us into the wide, white world.

Outside, we were surrounded by silence. Then, with a crack that reverberated like a .22 rifle being fired, one of the coated trees came crashing down through the surrounding forest and collapsed in a spray of snow and splintered ice. Throughout that day, with each new snap of toppling timber, Father knew somewhere there was another tree he’d need to cut up with his chain saw and haul out of the woods. But because all the snow and ice reminded him of the 33 years he’d spent in Pennsylvania, he didn’t seem to mind. Instead, my father whistled as we hovered around the woodstove and waited for the sounds of the falling forest.