"But why not?" I'd asked with the relentless why questions of childhood. "Why does he play with them but not with me? Why don't he ever look at me? Why am I not allowed to play in the garden?"
Tildy had frozen for just a moment, her hands stilling on the dough she was kneading, her face showing a flash of pain before she'd controlled her expression and knelt down to my level.
"Listen to me careful, Ellie. Some people in this world got different rules for different children. Those boys out there, they got one kind of life because of who they are and what family they born into. You got another kind of life because of who you are and how you came to be."
"And it ain't fair, and it ain't right. And I wish to God it was different, but it's what we got to work with, you understand?"
I'd nodded, even though I didn't really understand, not then. But I'd absorbed the fundamental lesson that would shape my entire childhood. I was different, was other, existed in a category that had no comfortable name, belonged fully to no group, too white-looking to be fully accepted by the enslaved community without questions and whispers, too black by law and circumstance to be acknowledged by the white family whose blood I carried in my veins. As I grew older, the truth of my situation revealed itself in layers, each one adding new dimensions of pain and complexity to my understanding of who I was and what my existence meant.
When I was seven, Mama Tildy had told me about my mother. We'd been sitting by the fire in our cabin one winter evening, just the two of us, the flames casting flickering shadows on the walls while outside the wind howled and the temperature dropped toward freezing.
"Your mama was named Bridget," Tildy had said quietly, producing the small prayer book she'd kept hidden all these years. "Irish girl, pretty as a picture with hair like copper wire and a smile that could light up a room. She worked in the big house, cleaning and serving meals, and trying her best to survive in a world that wasn't kind to girls like her. Poor and alone and vulnerable."
"And she didn't deserve what happened to her. That's important for you to understand, baby. What happened to your mama? It wasn't her fault."
"She was just a girl trying to survive, and powerful men don't care about survival when they see something they want."
She'd handed me the prayer book, and I'd opened it with trembling fingers, had seen the name written inside in careful practiced script. Bridget Mary O'Connor, County Cork, Ireland, 1814. My mother, a real person with a name and a history and a homeland she'd left behind. Not just an absence or an explanation, but someone who'd existed and hoped and suffered and ultimately died bringing me into the world.
"She died when I was born?" I'd asked, though I'd already known the answer from bits and pieces of overheard conversations, from the way people sometimes looked at me with a mixture of pity and something else I couldn't quite name.
"She did," Tildy had confirmed, her voice heavy with old grief. "Childbirth is dangerous. Always has been, always will be until doctors figure out better ways. But your mama, she loved you even though she only held you for a minute."
"She gave you a name, Aurora, after her own mama back in Ireland. The last thing she did in this world was name you and try to give you something of her family, her history, her love."
"Then why do people call me Ellie?" I'd asked, confused by the discrepancy between the name my mother had given me and the name everyone actually used.
Mama Tildy had sighed deeply. "Because Aurora is too fine a name, too special, too much like something a white girl from a good family would be called. Ellie is safer. Ellie is the name of a granddaughter of a cook, a girl who's enslaved and needs to fit into that world without drawing attention or raising questions."
"You understand? The name protects you by making you seem ordinary."
"But I'm not ordinary," I'd said with the beginning of the resentment that would grow over the years. "I'm me. I'm Aurora. That's who my mama wanted me to be."
"Your mama wanted you to live," Tildy had said firmly, "and sometimes living means hiding who you really are until the time comes when you can be yourself safely. Someday maybe you'll be able to claim that name, but not yet, baby. Not yet."
When I was 10, Mama Tildy had told me about my father. It had been summer, hot and sticky, and we'd been working in the garden behind the big house, pulling weeds and tending vegetables in the early morning before the heat became unbearable. Judge Blackwood had walked past on his way to the stables, had glanced our way with that careful neutrality he always showed when forced to acknowledge my existence. And after he'd passed, Tildy had looked at me with an expression that was part sympathy and part something harder.
"You know who your father is, don't you?" she'd said quietly, checking to make sure no one else was nearby. "I see you watching him. I see you looking at your own face in the mirror and then looking at his. You've put it together."