The Last Days of Dogtown

daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren. For three years, Ruth ate, slept, and worked among the Bernoon children, picking through oysters and clams as soon as she was big enough to stand. But after the smallpox sickened all the little ones save Ruth, Queen got a spooky feeling about the quiet foundling, so she sold her to a fellow named Cuff, a half-breed African-Indian peddler who claimed his wife was pining for a little girl.

“Cuff was a bad ’un,” said Mimba. He took Ruth to Narragansett, where prices for slaves were higher and the law was distant. William Prescott bought the child for a large wheel of cheese and three silver dollars.

“You got a sad story, Ruth,” Mimba said. “But not sad-sad. You here with me and Cato and all us together now.

You have a happy-sad story. Best you can get in this life is happy-sad. But you always gotta remember your own mamma that birthed you. Even though you only got a crumb of her story, you still got to say her name out loud.

You always honor your dead, else you get trouble from them, sure.”

That story would keep Ruth awake at night; she had enough imagination to picture a sad-sad ending to her story, with her sold to some other master. The idea of a life without Mimba or Cato terrified her into nightmares, and Mimba finally stopped telling it to her. Meanwhile, Ruth did everything she could to ensure that she would never be parted from her Mimba. She was obedient, polite, and quick to learn the kitchen work from Mimba. She followed Cato into the fields and studied how he tended the cattle and fixed the long stone fences, too.

From the first, she preferred the outdoors to life in the

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house, where the white people kept her always on edge.

Cato told her to be grateful for the kindness of owners who rarely struck them and had never sold anyone off. But she heard the false voices he and Mimba used when the master or mistress was near. And she knew that Mimba and Cato had jumped the broom in secret, so Prescott would not know they were husband and wife and hold the threat of separation against them.

But it wasn’t the master who pulled them apart. Mimba died when Ruth was seventeen, and she cried all the tears she hadn’t cried as a child. She refused to be separated from Cato after that, becoming what Mistress Prescott called

“willful.” She refused to stay in the kitchen with Patricia, the other female slave who could not remember Mimba’s recipes as well as Ruth did. Master Prescott tried changing her mind with a switch; that didn’t do it, and neither did a real whipping with a belt. After he threatened to sell her, one of the wheels on the buggy fell off as the family was driving to church, and the cows kept escaping their pen.

When the parlor curtains caught fire before dinner one day, Prescott realized what he was up against and told his wife she’d have to make do without Ruth.

She moved into the barn with Cato, who taught her everything he knew about stones and masonry, and then he told her all the bad-sad stories that Mimba had kept him from repeating to their broody girl. Mimba had been the noon to Cato’s midnight, and once she was gone, he recounted the bad-sad memories of his youth on a large Maryland plantation. And he told Ruth, “Your mamma didn’t just die borning you.” Cato whispered so that Mimba would not hear him from the other side. “She was killed by

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a white man. Murdered by her master in a cow pasture is the truth of it.

“I heard it from Queen Bernoon herself,” said Cato.

“I’m only telling you so you stay clear of the men. White men are worst, but the Africans ain’t much better, like that Cuff who lied to Queen about wanting you when all he wanted was money.

“I didn’t tell you before ’cause Mimba didn’t want to break your heart,” he said. The taste of her name in his mouth always set him to grieving. “I miss her first thing in the morning. I miss how she used to heat up milk for my tea. I miss her in the bed every night.” Tears washed his cheeks. “I miss her on Sundays when we would sit together.” Finally he missed Mimba so much, he walked into the ocean, his pockets filled with stones.

When they found his body on the beach, Ruth had been shocked by the gray shards and rough slag he’d used to weigh himself down. Cato had taught her to look at stones the way other people looked at flowers, beautiful and varied. How could he have gone to Mimba without

bringing her something pretty? Smooth white eggs, or the striped, sparkling “coins” that were his favorite?

Once Cato was gone, Ruth cut off her hair, put on his trousers, and came inside the

house only for food. Prescott let her be, not only because she was his most able worker but also because as the youngest of his slaves, she would be his last.

Word of emancipation had finally reached the Africans of the South County plantations. Ruth heard it in church, where the slaves were crowded into the narrow balcony called nigger heaven. “Newport is full of free Africans,”

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