was powerless before it. She stared at dark shapes. The fireplace, the beams undergirding the loft, the tools dangling off nails on the walls. The first time she had spent a night outside the cabin she’d been born in. A hundred paces and as many miles.
It was only a matter of time before Ava implemented the next stage of her scheme. And there was Old Abraham to contend with. Old Abraham, who was not old at all but who had comported himself in the manner of an elderly misanthrope since he first learned to sit up. He had no designs but wanted the plot gone on principle. Why should he and everyone else respect this little girl’s claim just because her grandmother had kicked the dirt over once? Old Abraham was not one for tradition. He’d been sold too many times for the proposition to have much weight. On numerous occasions as she passed on errands, Cora overheard him lobby for the redistribution of her parcel. “All that for her.” All three square yards of it.
—
THEN Blake arrived. That summer young Terrance Randall assumed duties to prepare for the day he and his brother took over the plantation. He bought a bunch of niggers out of the Carolinas. Six of them, Fanti and Mandingo if the broker was to be believed, their bodies and temperament honed for labor by nature. Blake, Pot, Edward, and the rest made a tribe of themselves on Randall land and were not above helping themselves to that which was not theirs. Terrance Randall made it known they were his new favorites, and Connelly made sure that everyone remembered it. You learned to step aside when the men were in a mood, or on a Saturday night once they’d emptied all the cider.
Blake was a big oak, a double-ration man who quickly proved a testament to Terrance Randall’s investment acumen. The price they’d get for the offspring of such a stud alone. Blake wrassled his buddies and any other comers in a frequent spectacle, kicking up the dust, inevitably emerging the conqueror. His voice boomed through the rows as he worked and even those who despised him couldn’t help but sing along. The man had a miserable personality but the sounds that came from his body made the labor fly.
After a few weeks of sniffing around and assessing the northern half, Blake decided that Cora’s spread would be a nice place to tie up his dog. Sun, breeze, proximity. Blake had coaxed the mutt to his side during a trip to town. The dog stayed, lingering around the smokehouse when Blake worked and barking at every noise in the busy Georgia night. Blake knew some carpentry—it was not, as was often the case, a lie put out by the trader to bump up his price. He built a little house for his mutt and tried to induce compliments. The kind words were genuine, for the doghouse was a handsome piece of work, of nice proportion, with clean angles. There was a door on a hinge and sun and moon cutouts along the back wall.
“Ain’t this a nice mansion?” Blake asked Old Abraham. Blake had come to value the man’s sometimes bracing candor since his arrival.
“Mighty fine work. That a little bed in there?”
Blake had sewn a pillowcase and stuffed it with moss. He decided that the patch outside his cabin was the most appropriate spot for his dog’s home. Cora had been invisible to him but now he sought her eyes when she was close, to warn her that she was invisible no more.
She tried to call in a few debts owed her mother, the ones she knew about. They rebuffed her. Like Beau, the seamstress Mabel had nursed back to health when she was struck with fever. Mabel had given the girl her own supper portion and spooned potlikker and roots into her trembling lips until she opened her eyes again. Beau said she had paid that debt and then some and told Cora to get back to Hob. Cora remembered that Mabel had extended an alibi to Calvin when some planting tools went missing. Connelly, who had an aptitude for the cat-o’-nine-tails, would have stripped the meat off Calvin’s back if she hadn’t concocted his defense. Would have done the same to Mabel if he’d found she was lying. Cora crept on Calvin after supper: I need help. He waved her away. Mabel had said that she never discovered to what purpose he used