"Yes ma'am."

"My name is Peggy. What's yours?"

"I's Fishy, ma'am."

"Please call me Peggy."

"Yes ma'am."

Don't belabor the point. "Fishy? Really? Or is that a nickname?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Which?"

"Fishy, ma'am."

She must be refusing to understand; let it go. "Why would your mother give you such a name?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

"Or was it your mother who named you?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

"If I give you a tip for your service, do you get to keep it?"

"No tips please, ma'am."

"But if you were to find a penny in the street, would you be permitted to keep it as your own?"

"Never found no penny, ma'am. All done now, ma'am." And Fishy was out the door in a heartbeat, pausing in the doorway only long enough to say, "Anything else, ma'am?"

Peggy knew the answers to her questions, of course, for she saw into the woman's heartfire. Saw how Fishy's mother had shunted her off on other slavewomen, because she could hardly attract the master's lust with a baby clinging to her thighs. And when the woman grew too slackbellied from her repeated pregnancies, how the master began to share her with his White visitors, and finally with the White overseers, until the day the master gave her to Cur, the Black foreman of the plantation craftsmen. The shame of being reduced to whoring with Blacks was too much for Fishy's mother and she hanged herself. It was Fishy who found her. Peggy saw all of that flash through Fishy's mind when Peggy asked about her mother. But it was a story Fishy had never told and would never tell.

Likewise, Peggy saw that Fishy got her name from the son of the first owner she was sold to after her mother's suicide. She was assigned to be his personal maid, and the senior maid in the plantation house told her that meant that she must do whatever the master's son told her to do.