shined it with ammonia. Then, I couldn’t figure out how to put the thing back together.
I found Sarah in her room, reading a leather book. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. We hadn’t talked much since she got back—she seemed woebegone all the time, always stuck in that same book.
After we finally got the chandelier back on the ceiling in one piece, tears flared up in her eyes. I said, “You sad about your daddy?”
She answered me the strangest way, and I knew what she said was the real hurt she’d brought back with her. “. . . I’m twenty-seven years old, Handful, and this is my life now.” She looked round the room, up at the chandelier, and back at me. “. . . This is my life. Right here for the rest of my days.” Her voice broke and she covered her mouth with her hand.
She was trapped same as me, but she was trapped by her mind, by the minds of the people round her, not by the law. At the African church, Mr. Vesey used to say, Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.
I tried to tell her that. I said, “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”
She blinked at me and the tears came again, shining like cut-glass.
The day Binah left, I heard Phoebe crying all the way from the kitchen house.
Sarah
1 February 1820
Dear Israel,
How often I have thought of our conversations on board ship! I read the book you entrusted to me and my spirit was deeply kindled. There are so many things I wish to ask you! How I wish we were together again—
3 February 1820
Dear Mr. Morris,
After being away from the evils of slavery for six months, my mind burst with new horror at seeing it again on my return to Charleston. It was made all the worse upon reading the book you gave me. I have nowhere to turn but you—
10 February 1820
Dear Mr. Morris,
I trust you are well. How is your dear wife, Rebecca—
11 February 1820
Thank you, sir, for the book. I find a bewildering beauty in your Quaker beliefs—the notion there is a seed of light inside of us, a mysterious Inner Voice. Would you kindly advise me how this Voice—
I wrote to him over and over, letters I couldn’t finish. Invariably, I would stop mid-sentence. I would lay down the quill, fold the letter, and conceal it with the rest at the back of my desk drawer.
It was the middle of the afternoon, the winter gloom hovering as I pulled out the thick bundle, untied the black satin ribbon, and added the letter of February 11 to the heap. Mailing the letters would only bring anguish. I was too drawn to him. Every letter he answered would incite my feelings more. And it would do no good to have him encouraging me toward Quakerdom. The Quakers were a despised sect here, regarded as anomalous, plain-dressed, and strange, a tiny cluster of jarringly eccentric people who drew stares on the street. Surely, I didn’t need to invite that kind of ridicule and shun. And Mother—she would never allow it.
Hearing her cane on the pine floor outside, I snatched up the letters and yanked open the drawer, my hands fumbling with panic. The stationery cascaded into my lap and onto the rug. As I stooped to collect it, the door swung open without a knock and she stood framed in the opening, her eyes moving across my hidden cache.
I looked up at her with the black ribbon furling from my fingers.
“You’re needed in the library,” she said. I couldn’t detect the slightest curiosity in her about the contents I’d spilled. “Sabe is packing your father’s books—I need you to oversee that he does it properly.”
“Packing?”
“They will be divided between Thomas and John,” she said, and turning, left me.
I gathered up the letters, tied them with the ribbon, and slipped them back into the drawer. Why I kept them, I didn’t know—it was foolish.
When I arrived in the library, Sabe wasn’t there. He’d emptied most of the shelves, stacking the books in several large trunks, which sat open on the floor, the same floor where I’d knelt all those years ago when Father forbade me the books. I didn’t want to think of it, of that terrible time, of the room stripped now, the books lost to me, always lost.