She is happy. Yes. Happy, happy as she never thought she would be, living among the white people, in a thatched house, with an ordered garden, tamed chickens, a cross hanging on the wall, lest they forget the god impaled for their sins.
She has her baby. He's nice and heavy in her arms – demands her to slow her pace. The white women tell her to leave him when he cries, but some memory of women walking with their babies on their backs makes her pick him up. John allows it – smiles indulgently at the native woman and her odd ways. He's often away all day, supervising the tobacco plantation, meeting with traders, and so Rebecca walks to the town. She buys eggs and flour and kneads and molds bread into being, stirs soup in copper pots, scrubs the floors and washes the linen white. Thomas gets left in his cradle when he sleeps, but her ears are always alert. Always listening. She talks and gossips with the women in the town – they are used to her, now, have accepted her, smile when she goes to church – see. See, they say. We can exist along side them. How easily they can be tamed.
And Rebecca smiles and bows her head, keeps her eyes downcast and her voice soft, in obedience to the holy book, which commands she obey her husband and his God.
And she is happy. She kisses John in front of the fire, occasionally sits with Thomas in her arms in her garden, with its imported, docile flowers. There is never any dirt under her fingernails. Sometimes wild things come to the door – a wretched, filthy raccoon, which she fends away with a broom, an annoying buzz of a hummingbird. They hiss at her, implore her to remember, but she has found her place now. Her place inside firm walls, straight paths, soft talk and a thousand identical stiches.
Even so.
Sometime she sits with her son in the garden. Sometimes she holds him to her chest feels their hearts beat as one. Takes off her shoes and stockings, digs her toes into the soil, feels the earth thrum along side their pounding hunks of flesh. Stands and shakes her hair loose from pins and ribbons. Shuts her eyes.
She lets the wind paint out a world in different shades.