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to do the books if Father didn't go along. Father had him back in the fields under the overseer for a while, but in the end he didn't have the heart to waste the boy's talents.

So when Denmark was seventeen, his father brought him to Camelot and set him up with letters of introduction that Denmark had actually written, so the hand would always match. Denmark went around pretending to be a messenger for his absentee owner, soliciting bookkeeping jobs and copy work. Some White men thought they could cheat him, getting him to work but then refusing to pay the amount agreed on. Denmark hid his anger, then went home and in his elegant hand wrote letters to an attorney, again using his father's name. As soon as the White men realized that Denmark's owner wasn't going to let them get away with cheating him, they generally paid up. The ones that didn't, Denmark let the matter drop and never worked for them again. It wasn't so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.

That went on till his father died. Denmark was full grown and had some money set by. No one knew his father in Camelot so it didn't matter he was dead, as long as nobody went back to Savannah to try to follow up on something Denmark wrote in his father's name. Not that Denmark didn't worry for a while. But when it became clear that it was all going well, he started to fancy himself a real man. He decided to buy himself a slave of his own, a Black woman he could love and get children from the way his father did.

He chose the one he wanted and had an attorney buy her for him, then went to pick her up in the name of his father. But when he got her home and she found out that a Black man had bought her, she near clawed his eyes out and ran out screaming into the neighborhood that she wasn't going to be no slave to a Black man. Denmark chased her down, getting no help from the other residents of Blacktown - that was when he realized they all knew he was free and resented him for it. It all came down to this, from his woman and from his neighbors: They hated being slaves, hated all White people, but more than anyone or anything else they hated a free buck like him.

Well, let them! That's what he thought at first. But it grew so he could hardly bear the sight of his woman, chained to the wall in his tiny room, cursing him whenever he came home. She kept making dolls of him to try to poison him, and it made him good and sick more than once. He didn't know a thing about poppeting. He'd spent all his effort learning the White man's secrets and knew nothing about what Black folks did. He came to the day when he realized he had nothing. He might fool White folks into letting him keep the results of his own labor, but he was never going to be White. And Black folks didn't trust him because he didn't know their ways, either, and because he acted so White and kept a slave.

Finally one day he knelt down in front of his woman and cried. What can I do to make you love me? She just laughed. You can't set me free, she said, cause Black folks are never free here. And you can't make me love you cause I never love him as owns me. And you can't sell me cause I tell my new master about you, see if I don't. All you can do is die when I make you a right poppet and kill it dead.

All that hate! Denmark thought that rage was the ruling principle of his own life, but it was nothing compared to what slaves felt. That was when Denmark realized the difference between free and slave - freedom stole hate away from you, and made you weaker. Denmark hated his father, sure, but it was nothing compared to his woman's hate for him.

Of course he had to kill her. She'd laid it out so plain, and it was clear he wasn't going to change her mind. It was just a matter of time before she killed him, so he had to defend himself, right? And he owned her,