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CHAPTER FIVE

  The beginning

  If you asked anyone who knew him, Albert Gates Sr., was a good man. He was a good man who owned Haitian slaves. At the time, it was acceptable to most and even a sign of wealth to own slaves. He bought a large piece of land in North Carolina and brought his young wife to live there in February of 1817, twenty-eight years after statehood was granted. There wasn’t anything on the land but pine trees, scrub oaks and sand but he and his brother, Walter, carved a road through those woods and along with several other families, settled the area and called it Smithville in the county of Brunswick. Walter passed away from influenza the very next winter.

  Others who settled there were from inland, from Raleigh, or from other port towns like Wilmington which was just a few miles up the coast. The tracts of land were large and plentiful and before long, homes and businesses were plentiful. The new locals sold their crafts, crops, meat from hunts and fish hauled in from their boats. They created a small port market and it blossomed into a community. Prosperity came in between the hurricanes and what the occasional storm tore down, the people of Smithville came together and rebuilt. The pace was slow and comfortable, for the most part, folks were friendly, and God was in charge.

  Odette was a sixteen-year-old slave who worked on the Gates’ land. She was twelve when she had come to work for Albert. Two of his other slaves, Big Jacques and Jacques’s wife Celine took her in as if she was their own and finished raising her. Odette cooked for the Gates family and cleaned their laundry and watched after their children, Albert Jr. who was ten, and his sister Clara, three. There had been three siblings between them, but each had passed. Two were miscarried and the third, a baby boy, died in the night at only three weeks of age.

  Albert Gates had never given over to cruelty. He was neither violent nor was he hateful to Odette or any of the other slaves. Aside from her social status, she found life to be tolerable. They worked hard, but were fed well and had adequate housing. They were given time to themselves to practice their own religion and never questioned about it. Albert encouraged Big Jacques and Celine to educate themselves and their children. He let them dance to Big Jacques’s fiddle playing until late in the evenings and occasionally brought Miss Charlotte down along with some wine and they all joined in the celebration. On rare occasions, Odette felt like she was part of a family. Most of the time, she felt like a prisoner. She missed her mother and father and her two little brothers, lost in a trade when she was only nine. She did not miss her last master, a hulking man who started his drinking early in the morning and was very fond of his whip. He was also fond of young girls and liked to take them on his knee and touch them. He liked for them to touch him, too. He was a filthy man.

  Odette heard tales of other slave girls who were beaten, raped, even released into the woods and hunted for sport like an animal. She heard of one girl who was burned in the face by her owner’s wife because the master had taken a shine to her. That poor woman had the foolish notion her master loved her, that maybe he loved her more than his own spouse. She had let herself become happy, had let her guard down. When she and the master were caught, bare-naked and groaning in that most familiar of ways, the wife tied the girl down, doused her with fuel oil and held a lit candle to her face. She let the poor girl burn for a spell before smothering the flames with a blanket.

  “I won’t let you die,” the angry woman said. “I want you to live and be ugly. I want no man to want you.”

  Odette didn’t know if the story was true, but she would never let her guard down. She would never forget her place, even during those rare good times. Those times were an illusion. She could not and would not trust any person that would claim another person as property.