mother and knew your aunt Emma. On weekends the older folks would go down to the woods for their little dances and would leave me to watch over the babies, and you was one of those. I am not so surprised to find you here. You were always different. You just watched, watched everything, and I was thinking when I spotted you up here how you have not changed, how you were just watching. It is my blessing to find you, to meet you again out here, so far from the Task.
“It was such a different time, and it amazes me, shames me almost, to say that I was happy back there, but I do believe I was, for a time, and I recall when the feeling changed. It was when my daddy fell. Fever, you know. That hit my momma hard. She was still warm as ever, but she was so grieved. Would cry every night and call us to her, ‘Come in and rest with your momma,’ she would say, and we—all of us kittens—would lay there with her and she would just cry, and all of us would cry with her. But I tell you, Hi, this was nothing measured against what was coming. Least when my daddy passed, we had each other. But, well, soon we ain’t even had that—was like all of us passed from each other, like all of us died and was damned to a different hell.”
Kessiah now turned to me and said, “They say you knew my momma, a little.”
I nodded and intended to say no more, for I could not yet bring myself to fully accept the story. But I could see Kessiah regarding me with expectant eyes. An expectation I knew well.
“She was not exactly as you say it here,” I said. “But I believe it was the same woman. And more I believe she had reason to be as she was, as I knew her. But I don’t think that much matters. What matters is that she was good to me. That, for me, Thena was the best part of Lockless.”
Kessiah cupped her hands and brought them to her face so that they covered her nose and mouth and she cried gently and quietly.
And then she said, “So you know about the racetrack?”
“I do,” I said.
“Imagine that. All of us, my brothers and sisters, taken out there and sold. Do you know I never saw them again? Do you know how hard I have tried to find them? But there are so many gone, Hi. Like water between my fingers. Gone.”
“I…I know,” I said. “I did not always know. But I know now. Your mother, she tried to tell me. But I did not always know what it meant to be handled as such. But I am seeing it now.”
“They used to say your daddy was a white man.”
“He was,” I said.
“Didn’t save you, did it?”
“No. Don’t save none of us.”
“No, it don’t, and I am here before you only on a chance. Most of mine was taken Natchez-way, but I was carried off up to Maryland and put to work out in the timbers, and not so long after, I met this man, Elias, and we took a shine to each other. Elias was a freeman who worked for his own wage and he planned to buy me off so that I might live free too.
“Timbers was hard labor, but I found me another family. I refashioned myself for that new life, formed myself around that man, and I got to something close to happy. I knew that I could never again be a girl. And I knew that I was marked, very harshly, by what had come before. But I found something, and just when I did, Hi, I tell you they endeavored to put me right back on the block. But I had something for them this time, you see. I had married into a family of a particular sort, and among that family there was the one who you know as Moses.”
And Kessiah was now laughing to herself at the thought of it. “You should have seen it. Me and Elias had said our farewells. It had been so hard. And then the day of, he shows up in the auction and starts bidding. And my heart is leaping because it’s him and some other man all the way from Texas. And they go back and forth until my Elias look at me with