they pinned you. And I knew I was done, I tell you. Natchez calling, Natchez. And a girl like me, baby or no, I knew I would be put right out to fancy. I was right terrified, I tell you. I know I tried to be strong that night out there, Hi, and I was because I had you, and I felt I had you to worry for, and long as I had that, wasn’t much time for thinking of my own worries.
“But that day the hounds pinned me in that jail, it all hit me, all the evil that was bout to come down on me. Wanted to cry, but I knew I had to be strong. I just talk to my Caroline, that whole time. Just talk to her, and I am telling you, she soothed me. Like I felt myself to no longer be so alone. It’s like you say, I did not ask for her, but in that moment I was so happy to have her even though she was but a small thing blooming in me.
“And I think that was the moment when I became a mother to her. I was angry at what that man, Nathaniel, had done to me. What he had put upon me. And though I am thankful for her, I will never be thankful to him. Caroline belongs to me and my God. I named her for my lost home, for my Carolina, the land from which I was stripped by no doing of my own. And that is the whole of it—in that jail, with the knife of Natchez at my throat, Caroline—my home—she saved me.”
I handed her the bottle and she took another drink, shivered, and said, “Mmmm.” She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. And was silent for a moment and I just sat there watching her in this silence. When she turned back to pass the demijohn to me, I felt that she looked different, as though the very texture of her story had somehow been etched into her face.
“But that’s not really the whole of it,” she said. “Late that night, same night, I was drifting off to sleep, huddled in the corner of the jail, rats scurrying around, cold drafty air blowing in, and I look up and see a shadow looking in on me. And then the shadow walk away for a few, and I am wondering if this is some kind of dream. But then the shadow come back with one of the hounds, who opens the door to my jail and he say, ‘Get on.’
“Ain’t got to say it again, you know? So I get up and then I see that it ain’t no shadow at all. It is Corrine Quinn in her mourning clothes. And when I walked outside, her chaise was there with her people. They sat me in the back with her and she told me she knew what I was headed for, what was coming, should Nathaniel hear of my run. But he really ain’t need to hear nothing, she was sure of it. Nobody needed to know. I could go back to everything as it was before. Onliest thing she ask is, if she could stop down to the Street every now and again and speak to me.”
“Speak to you about what?” I asked.
“Mostly things down here,” Sophia said. “Like I tell you, she stop in now and again and ask about who still here and who gone Natchez-way. Always struck me as curious, you know. But after Caroline come, my only desire was to keep that baby safe. I ain’t care about much else.
“But I did ask her about you,” Sophia said. She put her arm around mine as she said this. “I asked her what they would do with you. She told me not to worry. You’d been gone a spell, but you would return. You would come back.
“Can’t say I believed her, Hi. You know I have lost so much in my time, and I have found that what’s gone is gone, and that is all there is.
“ ’Cept you. You came back,” she said. And she was looking at me, looking through me, with dagger eyes. I felt the room spinning all around me. “I can hardly believe it, but you have come back. Come back to me.”
I had now stopped thinking. I felt the beams and rafters and daubing of the cabin bend, and with them, the beams and rafters