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didn't he? She wouldn't be the first Black woman killed by her master.

He hit her in the head with a board and knocked her cold. Then he bundled her into a sack and carried her down to the dock. He figured to hold her under the water till she drowned, then pull her out of the sack and let her float so it didn't look like murder. Well, he had her under the water all right, and she wasn't even struggling inside the sack, but it was like a voice talking in his mind telling him, You killing the wrong one. It ain't the Black woman killing you, it's the White folks. If it wasn't for the White folks, you could marry this girl and she be free beside you. They the ones she wants to kill, they the ones you ought to kill.

He dragged her out of the water and revived her. But she wasn't right after that. It might have been the blow to the head or it might have been the water she took on and the time she spent not breathing, but she walked funny and didn't talk good and she didn't hate him anymore, but everything he loved about her was dead. It was like he was a murderer after all, but the victim lived in his house and bore him a baby.

Oh, Denmark, he was a sad man all the time after that. The joy of fooling White folks was gone. He got sloppy with his work, doing it late, and his customers stopped hiring him - though of course they thought it was his White master they were firing. The Black people around him hated him too, for what he done to his woman, and he had to watch all the time to keep them from getting any of his hair or fingernails or toenails, or even his spit or his urine. Cause they would have killed him with that, if they could.

His son Egypt got to be four years old and Denmark prenticed him to a Black harness maker. Had to do all kinds of pretending, of course, that it was a White man who owned the boy and wanted him trained to be useful on his plantation, and it cost nine pounds a year, which was most of what Denmark was earning these days, but the paperwork went well enough, and even though Egypt was treated like a slave, he was learning a trade and there'd come a day when Denmark would tell him the truth. You free, boy, he'd say that day. Egypt Vesey, no man owns you. Not me, not nobody.

When Egypt was gone, the last light went out of the boy's mama. The day Denmark saw his woman drinking varnish, he knew he had to do something. Stupid as she had become, she hated her life and hated him. He agreed with her. Maybe he hated himself even more than she did. Hated everything and everybody else, too. It was chewing him up inside.

That was when he met Gullah Joe. Joe came to him. Little Black man, he suddenly appeared right in front of Denmark when he was in the dirt garden peeing. He wasn't there, and then he was, holding a crazy-looking umbrella all a-dangle with strange knots and bits of cloth and tin and iron and one dead mouse. "Stop peeing on my foot," said Gullah Joe.

Denmark didn't have much to say. Piss just dried right up when Gullah Joe said so. Denmark knew he must be the witchy man they were always threatening him with. "You come to kill me, witchy man?" Denmark said.

"Might," said Gullah Joe. "Might not."

"Maybe you best just do it," said Denmark. "Cause if you don't, what if I kill you?"

Gullah Joe just grinned. "What, you hit me with a board, put me in a sack, drown me till I can't walk or talk right?"

Denmark just started to cry, fell to his knees and begged Gullah Joe to kill him. "You know what I am! You know I'm a wicked man!"

"I'm not God," said Gullah Joe. "You gots to go see him preacher, you want somebody send you to hell."

"How come you talk so funny?"

"Cause I not no slave," said Gullah Joe. "I from Africa, I don't like White man language, I learn it bad and I don't care. I say people talk real good." Then he let loose a string of some strange language. It went on and on,