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'Why, pray tell, have I been kept waiting?'
'I was tending to your mother.'
'And where is she?'
'Passed.'
'I see.' His eyes flicked like flies. 'Then it would have behoved you to attend to the living before the dead.'
'Then him have to come back,' Phibbah said. 'For good. Somebody needed to run the place. Though all him do at first was walk. Walk, walk, walk.' Trampled around each morning with a twill-jacketed man, who'd come on the same ship, both dressed too hot. Langton pointed at something, the man nodded; within days it fell like a love rival after a dose of obeah. The old great house, busha's house, the cook-room, the granary, even the sugar mill, one by one. That should have been a sign: Langton was an ill wind. Massa Hurricane. They didn't know where he could have gotten money from. His father hadn't had a half-dollar to spare for as long as they'd known him. One afternoon, Manso dared to ask new Massa his intentions. Langton gave a laugh, roughened by his pipe. Spat. 'Used to be my father's place, boy. I'm making it mine.'
Inside the new house there was a room for every little thing a body could dream of doing in a single day. Eating, sleeping, receiving, tupping. But the library was best of all. Kii, your eye could travel all around that room and not run out of books to see.
Reading was the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to me. I can still see all those spines: Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the Philosophical Transactions, Newton's Principia, the Encyclopaedia. But there were novels, too, that Miss-bella ordered, though Langton kept those on the bottom shelves. Those were the books I loved. Holding one was like holding all the things that could happen in the world but just hadn't happened yet. I had to wait until Miss-bella was finished with them, but then I could smuggle them behind the sideboards, read until I heard footsteps. I read with my mouth hanging open, like I could spoon sugar right out of all those books. I hid in the cook-room at night to read by the light of a tallow candle I made myself, beef tallow moulded in an old pewter bowl. Books answer questions with questions, but still I couldn't get enough. And now that I think about it, it was the same all those years later, when I met Madame.
One afternoon I found myself blessed with solitude and a book and a view. Langton and Miss-bella had taken the buggy over to the Copes. Phibbah was at her grill. There was nobody watching the porch but the cows, and they were busy nosing the long seep of river. I stole some of Phibbah's rum punch and took myself outside with Candide. It was the kind of moment that pinches out happiness like salt into a cake, which meant, of course, that it couldn't last.
I didn't hear the buggy; nor did I notice until I sat up that Langton was upon me, had been waiting for me to look up before he said a word. He squatted to his heels, slow as the river, looking like a thing you were supposed to dread. 'You enjoying yourself?'
The breath sawed into me. I felt something turn in my jaw, like the click of a lock. No right thing to do, other than to let him speak. 'And will you look at my rules,' he said, 'lying broken all around us?'
I almost twisted away, as if to see those poor broken rules, but he held my jaw fast. A pleading noise swam out of me.
'No. I want you to read me a page. Oblige me. I suppose you know a fancy word like oblige. Since you're a reading nigger. But what you mightn't know is what'll happen if you don't.'
Wet ran all down the back of my calico. I held myself tight against the urge to flee. He scrubbed his hands. 'I'm going to put you on the horns of a nigger's dilemma, girl. Though I know niggers aren't used to choices. You listening? One. Read me a page, you keep your hands. Or two. Don't read me a page, and then find out what'll happen.'
Excerpted from The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins. Copyright © 2019 by Sara Collins. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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