BSC in the USA

  I smiled. “I guess.”

  “Oh?” Dawn raised an eyebrow. “Have you gone back to red meat since I’ve left Stoneybrook?”

  “Old Richard seems like a meat-and-potatoes guy,” Mr. Schafer said with a chuckle.

  “He’s not,” I said. “Maybe once or twice a week.”

  I could feel my face burning. Why was he doing this in front of my own grandmother?

  “My son-in-law,” Grandma said sweetly, “eats very, very well. In fact, judging from that little belly of yours, you could take a tip from him.”

  The whole table cracked up. Mr. Schafer smiled sheepishly and dug into his lunch.

  I could barely keep from laughing.

  It was great to see Grandma again. Mall or no mall.

  “The Dalton family owned approximately seven thousand acres,” the tour guide said in a blasé voice, “as far as the eye can see, in all directions, and farther. Much of the land was sold, and it became the towns of Dalton and Wainwright.”

  Abby let out a low whistle. “A backyard big enough to fit two towns. I’m impressed.”

  Impressed wasn’t the word. Knocked out was more like it. The Dalton museum was absolutely humongous. We were on the porch, which was lined with white columns as tall as trees. The floor was wide enough to stage a ballet. You could fit three Gracelands inside the building.

  “How many families lived here?” Mallory asked.

  The guide smiled. “Just the Daltons. The household servants, too, behind the kitchen and in the attic. Out back, just hidden by the trees, are the slave quarters.”

  She pointed vaguely toward a nearby field, then led us into the house. “The Daltons had one of the largest cotton plantations in Mississippi. They kept approximately one hundred slaves….”

  I raised my hand. “Are there records of the slave families?”

  “In a way,” the guide said. “The slaves were considered possessions, so some of them are mentioned in household account books and bills of sale. Unfortunately, the owners referred to their slaves only by first names, so it’s just about impossible to know who they were. The Daltons were known for humane treatment of slaves, however….”

  Humane treatment? How could the Daltons be humane if they considered slaves “possessions” and only allowed them one name — like pets? And what about the slaves themselves? Didn’t they keep their own records?

  I wanted to ask a million questions. But I felt self-conscious. For one thing, Abby, Mallory, and I were the only kids in the tour group. And among the fifteen or so others, only one older couple was African-American.

  The guide was now moving through the first floor. “To the right,” she droned on, “we have the Louis the Fourteenth room, many elements of which the Vanderbilts copied for their famous estate in North Carolina….”

  I spun around slowly to take it all in. The walls were covered with photos of stiff-looking people — stiff, bored children in tight, frilly clothes; stiff, grim men with handlebar mustaches sitting on horses; stiff women with ringleted hair and hoopskirts. The Daltons.

  The people my ancestors lived with.

  The people my ancestors were owned by.

  That’s what being a slave meant. You could be bought and sold. Like a mule.

  What must it have been like to leave Africa and come to a place like this? What were my ancestors’ tribal names? Where did they work? What did they look like?

  It didn’t seem as if I would find out anything here. The tour guide was leading us from one fancy room to another. I saw more satin, lace, and brocaded curtains than I’d seen in my entire life.

  After we’d explored the bedrooms upstairs, the guide led us up a plain wooden staircase into the attic. Up there, I broke into an instant sweat. The hot, stuffy air was almost like soup.

  We walked into a cluster of dark, teeny rooms. Small beds with thin, lumpy mattresses stood close together on a plain wooden floor. The slanted roof beams overhead were studded with sharp, rusty nails.

  “The household servants slept up here,” the guide said, then pointed to a contraption on the wall that held several different-sized bells. “The signaling system was considered very modern. Members of the Dalton family would press a button in one of the rooms downstairs to summon a servant, and through an electrical connection, it would ring up here. The servants were on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

  Abby sneezed. This place was Allergy City.

  “Yuck,” Mallory said.

  My stomach was sinking.

  The guide led us back down the narrow stairway. At the bottom, we explored the main kitchen, then went through a screen door into the yard.

  A walkway led to a barnlike building. Over its front door was a plaque that read SLAVERY AT THE DALTON PLANTATION.

  The inside had been renovated into a modern exhibit hall. Mannequins in raggedy clothes were frozen in work positions — bent over ironing, serving from huge pots, picking cotton.

  Along the wall were framed drawings and photographs from the 1800s. Some of the drawings were crude cartoons from local newspapers, showing the bigoted attitudes that existed. But the old photos of the slaves told another, more human story. Almost all of them showed the slaves in the field — dozens of them hunched over the cotton plants. But a few of the pictures were portraits. Beneath the cracks and scratches, the faces expressed so much. Some looked defiant and proud, others haunted and afraid.

  Not one photo was labeled with a name. I stared into every face. I tried to see resemblances to the Ramsey family, but it was hopeless.

  Soon I came to a section marked MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN. First I saw a sketched diagram of a slave ship. Slaves were packed like sardines, one slave’s head next to another’s feet. Then I saw a drawing of a slave auction. An African man stood on a platform with a chain around his neck, like a prize steer at a county fair. Disgusting.

  Then I came to a photograph of a lynching, and I almost gagged. A slave, a young man, was hanging from a tree. Around him was a whole crowd of white people. Some were pointing calmly. Others were smirking. A few children were among them, just staring.

  Children!

  No one back then warned about “unsuitable images.”

  I was feeling sick.

  The tour group was on the opposite side of the room. I went up to Mallory and nudged her. “I’m going to take a walk. Be right back.”

  Outside, the fresh air calmed me down.

  I walked down a slope and onto a small grassy field. Probably a cotton field at one time, I figured.

  Once I read a book, Time and Again, in which a character surrounds himself with stuff from the 1800s and is able to imagine himself into the past. Of course, I don’t believe that can happen. But sometimes, when no one is looking, I squint my eyes and try to do the same thing.

  A few tourists were strolling by a grove of willow trees, but I turned away from them. I looked at the open field and squinted.

  I pictured rows and rows of cotton. I imagined slaves moving through those rows, stooped over. Tall, sturdy women with kerchiefs wrapped around their heads; bent, hobbled old people; small, quick-moving children …

  My eyes were watering. I saw my whole family out there — Grandma and Grandpa, Daddy, Mama, Aunt Cecelia, my little sister, Becca …

  “Are you lost, darling?”

  The voice startled me. I whirled around. Standing behind me was a smiling African-American woman. Her hair was flecked with gray and she was wearing glasses. She wore a breezy plaid summer dress, and her right arm was folded around a couple of hardcover books.

  “No!” I said with a gasp. “Just … exploring.”

  “Sorry if I scared you,” the woman said. “I’m Annie Pardell.”

  She extended her hand and I shook it. “Jessica Ramsey. I’m here with some friends. They’re on the guided tour. I was just looking at the slavery exhibit.”

  “You don’t sound like you live around here.”

  “No. Stoneybrook, Connecticut. But m
y family used to work on this plantation. At least that’s what my grandparents told me.” I sighed. “I was hoping to find out some information about them.”

  “Well, we have a lot in common,” Ms. Pardell said as we began walking slowly through the grass together. “My family worked here, too.”

  “Really? So we might be related?”

  Ms. Pardell laughed. “Who knows? I’m here for the summer doing some doctoral research on the Mississippi slave trade. Let me tell you, Jessica, it’s almost impossible to find specific genealogical information on slave families.”

  “Didn’t anyone write anything down?”

  “Honey, in the eyes of the plantation owners, an educated slave was a rebellious slave. Reading or writing was banned.”

  “Couldn’t they teach each other at night or something?”

  “Some did, but there weren’t too many who could do the teaching.” Ms. Pardell gestured toward the willow trees. From our angle, I could see a group of small wooden shacks. “That’s a replica of where the slaves lived. Back then, the willows weren’t there, so Mr. Dalton could spy on his slaves any time he wanted to. If you needed to pass along a secret — some news of the Underground Railroad, say — you did it on the sly.”

  “What happened if you were caught?”

  Ms. Pardell sighed. “Well, you saw those awful photographs in the exhibit. You avoided capture at all costs. But there were ways to pass on information. One thing you did was sing. See, the owners didn’t mind that. They figured singing kept up the work spirit. What they didn’t know was that many of those songs were in code. Have you ever heard the song ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd’? Well, the words told about a secret escape route for the Underground Railroad, in the direction of the Big Dipper … the drinking gourd! The slaves would pass the song on from plantation to plantation.” She began singing softly: “For the old man is waitin’ for to carry you to freedom if you follow the drinking gourd …”

  I listened to her soft voice. If I concentrated, I could hear the song rising up from the field, the voices of the slaves carrying it to the horizon.

  We walked silently for awhile. I knew I’d have to rejoin my friends soon. I also knew I’d probably never learn about the Ramsey family. I thought about the slave ship. The lynching photo. The generations of slave workers in the fields.

  Somehow, though, I kept thinking about the singing. And the slaves who escaped. Maybe my great-great-great-great-grandparents were among them.

  “Thanks, Ms. Pardell,” I said. “I’d better go.”

  We shook hands and said good-bye. As I walked away, I saw her wandering farther and farther into the field. Humming.

  “I want to go to Wind Cave National Park!” Kristy announced, passing around a South Dakota booklet. “It has one of the longest caves in the world.”

  “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Flintstones, Bedrock City!” Jeff blurted out. “Yabba-dabba-doooo!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Let’s not and say we yabba-dabba-did.”

  “How about Mount Rushmore?” Dad suggested.

  Stacey took the brochure and squinted at a photo. “‘The Corn Palace,’” she read, “‘decorated with giant murals made of colored corn, grains, and grasses.’ Weird.”

  “Ooh, the Laura Ingalls Wilder home,” Mary Anne said, looking over Stacey’s shoulder.

  “Who’s that?” Jeff asked.

  “The author who wrote Little House on the Prairie,” Mary Anne replied.

  “Girls are boring,” Jeff murmured.

  Please excuse my brother’s rudeness. Tempers were a bit short in our RV. Too short, in my opinion. I didn’t know what was bugging Claudia and Stacey. They weren’t even looking at each other. Mary Anne was being grumpy for no reason whatsoever. And Kristy was mad because we were heading into a baseball-free zone.

  To tell you the truth, I had not been looking forward to South Dakota. I mean, say New York and I imagine skyscrapers, noise, excitement. California? Beaches, surfing, movies. Ohio has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Illinois has Chicago. But South Dakota? A big fat nada.

  Well, I was wrong. I hadn’t heard so much excitement in the RV since we left the Mall of America.

  Finally, Dad pulled over to a rest stop. We looked at a map and decided that since we were running a little late, we’d make one major stop. We were all leaning toward Mount Rushmore when Jeff found something new in the brochure.

  “ ‘Mammoth Site!’ ” he cried out. “They have woolly mammoth fossils still in the ground and you can touch them. I have to go to this!”

  Cool. We all agreed.

  One problem. To reach it, you had to drive across the whole state. A very, very long state. With lots of farms.

  Now, I have nothing against farms, but to a suburban girl like me, they can start to look alike after awhile.

  That would have been fine if we had a few car games going, or some singing, or even a decent radio station.

  But even cheerful old Dad had given up trying.

  I fell asleep looking at a flat prairie.

  I woke up on the moon.

  I had to blink. I thought I was dreaming.

  The farms were gone. Outside the window, the landscape was rocky and dry. Between long, flat stretches, jagged peaks rose up. They looked like the outstretched fingers of underground rock monsters trying to burst through the surface.

  Aside from Dad, I was the only person awake in the RV.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “The badlands,” Dad replied. “The early settlers feared this area more than any other.”

  “So what are we doing here?”

  Dad smiled. “I thought it would be a nice sightseeing detour. Too bad no one else is awa?—”

  He cut himself off. He was staring at his dashboard. The RV was slowing down.

  “Why are you stopping?” I asked.

  “I’m not.” Dad dropped his head to the steering wheel and groaned. “We’re out of gas.”

  “Whaaaaaaat?”

  “How could I be so stupid?” Dad said.

  “What are we going to do now?” I was trying not to scream. Really. But I couldn’t help it.

  In the seat behind me, Jeff was stirring. “Are we there yet?”

  “Washington, D.C.! All out!” Claudia called out in a half yawn.

  “Claudia, this is no joke,” I said. “We ran out of gas!”

  “WE’RE OUT OF GAS?” That was Kristy. She was awake now, too.

  “Don’t panic!” Dad said in a panicked voice, grabbing a map from the dashboard. “I’ll get us out of here.”

  Jeff was wailing. Kristy and Stacey started arguing about what to do. Mary Anne was sniffling. Claudia had pulled her pad out and was sketching the landscape.

  Around a corner ahead, a Jeep came whizzing toward us. It was the first vehicle I’d seen since I awoke.

  “HEEEYYYY!” Dad climbed out and flagged it down.

  A man and woman and two children were inside. We all plastered our faces to the window as Dad leaned in and talked to the grown-ups.

  When he turned back to us, he looked grim. “Okay, east of here is a place called Cedar Pass. I’m going to catch a ride with this couple and?—”

  “Hitch a ride?” I was mortified. “What about us?”

  “Look, I’m not happy about it myself, but I don’t see any other choice, and Mr. Kingman here says we won’t take long. So you lock up the RV, flag down a trooper if you see one, and I will try to race back.”

  What could we do? We all nodded.

  Mary Anne choked back a sob. It was infectious. I did, too. Jeff had folded himself on the seat, hiding his head.

  “Okay, baseball trivia quiz!” Kristy blurted out. “What Chicago Cub holds the record for?—”

  “Kristy, how can you think of baseball at a time like this?” Claudia threw down her pad. “Look at this place. I mean, the dark doesn’t scare me. Horror movies don’t scare me. New York City doesn’t scare me. But I can’t even draw this place without being scared!”
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  Kristy shrugged. “A game might calm you down.”

  We argued. We complained. We eventually played Kristy’s game. Then we played twenty questions about twenty times. Then we made a list of every single thing we’d seen on the trip.

  When the sun began to set, we ran out of things to do. So we fell silent and watched.

  In the sharp angle of the sun’s light, the peaks threw long, pointed shadows across the badlands. Shadows that seemed to reach toward us.

  “How long has he been gone?” Jeff finally asked.

  I looked at my watch. “Over an hour and a half.”

  “Hey, I know a great round to sing,” I said.

  As I began teaching my friends “By the Waters of Babylon,” the sun went down over a distant peak.

  Night was falling. And Dad was nowhere in sight.

  “WAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

  That was our greeting at the home of Chet and Linda Romney.

  Actually, the greeting was from a teeny baby in the arms of a smiling, brown-haired woman who answered the doorbell.

  “Welcome, I’m Linda,” the woman said. “And this is Isabella.”

  As Watson and Mrs. Brewer introduced themselves, a heavyset, balding man appeared. When he saw Watson, he beamed.

  “Heeeyyyyy, buddy,” he said, giving Watson a bear hug. “The last time I saw you, you used a comb, not a shoe-shine kit!”

  Watson laughed. “Oh, low blow! Look who’s talking!”

  “WAAAAAAHHHHHH!” repeated the baby.

  “May I hold her?” Jessi, Mallory, and I asked at the same time.

  Mrs. Romney laughed. “Yes, yes, and yes. Come on in and sit down.”

  At long last, on a cool, cloudy day, we’d arrived in the heart of Lester, Oklahoma. Which is not, by the way, a metropolis. Or beautiful or newfangled. But Chet Romney was Watson’s college roommate at Baylor University, and they had not seen each other in ten years. And that’s why we were visiting Lester.

  Briefly visiting.

  To be honest, I was itching to see a rodeo almost as much as David Michael was. Our trip was starting to feel very long. We hadn’t had a major stop since the Dalton Plantation Museum. All through Arkansas and Oklahoma, Andrew had been whining, “Are we in California yet?”