The Vampire Servant's tale.

This is a work of fiction, any resemblance to persons either living or dead is coincidental. I've heavily edited this chapter as of 1/6/25 and 11/7/25

as well as 5/14/26

although a few overlooked mistakes may remain. The poor grammar will remain.

The Writer's original date of writing this story is 10/7/20 and editing of this chapter was done on 1/6/25 and again on 5/14/26.

01.

St. Luke's Parish, 1846.

I was born on the Magnolia plantation in the small parish of St. Luke's, in the winter of 1830. My earliest memories are sharp with the smell of frozen earth, heavy rotting magnolia leaves underfoot, and the sting of frost cracking the skin on my knuckles.

I looked so much like Marse' Wilkes that everyone knowed that he were my pa. I had his slender nose, emerald green eyes, white skin and auburn curls. Because of this resemblance, his wife hated me with every breath in her body. Whenever she passed me in the drafty hallways, the stiff silk of her skirts would rustle like dry corn husks, and she would look down her nose as if she smelled a dead rat.

To punish me for my face, she'd give me the dirtiest work around the place.

"No high yellow bastard child is going to be treated like a queen in this house." Missy Wilkes would snarl whenever she set eyes on me. "Here gal, take this chamber pot and empty it. Mind you, don't spill any of it on my nice, clean floors or I'll take a whip to you."

So, I dutifully carried the nasty thing outside, slowly making my careful way down the long, winding stair of the front veranda, whilst trying my best not to trip and spill a drop of the sludgy contents. Missy Wilkes were a right terror, an' she never handed out empty threats; her every command was quickly obeyed by every servant on this place with fear an' trembling.

There was not a drop of grace running through her entire body, an' the woman especially despised my mama and me. My mama is named Essie, an' she was also the child of a white planter who had sold her to Marse Wilkes to pay off a gambling debt.

So there I be, a child barely old enough to speak in clear sentences tasked with the job of emptying the missy's disgusting chamber pot every morning. An' as I gotten older, she done begged her husband to banish me to the cotton fields, which were the lowest job on any plantation, where the field hands was treated poorly. Dread seized my entire body at the mere thought of working in them fields.

It were later that evening when I spilled my fears to Mama, because I shared all my secrets with her. She was my best frien'. We's alone together inside our cabin in the slave quarters behind the "Big" house-us servants called the Wilkes mansion the Big House. A fire crackled in the hearth, sending bright sparks up the chimney, and Mama was seated in her cane- bottom rocking chair, shelling a pan of peas for our supper .

"Is you gone plumb crazy, gal?" Mama exclaimed. "Marse Wilkes ain't sending you to no field."

"But that's what the missus done said," I argued.

Mama turned up her nose. "Don't you go listenin' to that one. It be Marse' Wilkes word that matters on this place, not hers."

My mama, she were thirteen year old when she birthed me, so she were still a young woman now. Although her hazel eyes were weary from the burdens of a hard life, already the lines had formed in her high forehead. The missus made all the serving girls hide they kinky hair beneath clean tignons whenever they worked inside of the Big house including Mama, who's hair didn't kink.

So there really weren't a reason for Mama to wrap her head other than the pure mean-spiritedness of Miss Wilkes. At the end of the day, Mama always unwound the scarf and freed her coal- black hair, which framed her thin, high -cheek boned face like a silk curtain, because she liked it to hang loose and free down her back.

I felt Mama's gentle fingers playing with my own auburn curls, and her light touch was making me drowsy. I thought it was part of a dream when she whispered, "Don't you worry 'bout nothing. Who ever heard of a man sending his own child out in the fields?"

Mama was right. I hadn't needed to worry about it, because Marse Wilkes refused to send me to the fields, which infuriated his wife just like a bee done stung her on her rump..

"Sophia is a bright girl. Have Cookie train her for the kitchen." I heard Marse Wilkes give these very instructions to his livid wife right before he left for another one of his many long "business" trips away from the plantation.

Missy called me into her "sitting room" later that morning, where she was seated upon the throne like green velvet chair in front of the tall, French windows. She had on a white silk dress with real rosebuds embroidered at the ruffled neck line, and her yellow hair was scraped back in a chignon and decorated with seed pearls.

"You think that you're so special," Her tone was scathing, and the look in her black eyes was cold and filled with hate. "But you're nothing! Mr. Wilkes wouldn't allow me to banish you to the fields, even though it's where you rightfully belong---you and that slutty mama of yours. So, I'm sending you to the kitchens to empty slops and carry garbage for Cookie. Now get out of my sight."