“It ain’t you I’m interested in, Hi. I am interested in her interest in me. I still can’t get, for the life of me, why she ain’t leave me to Natchez.”
“Don’t know. Maybe she favor you.”
“Whites favoring another man’s slave? When you done heard of that?”
I said nothing.
“I hear she travel a bit. Hear she always filling your daddy’s ear with stories of the scandalous sights she done seen up North. Guess she wouldn’t never take no colored with her on that kind of jaunt.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Sure you do, Hi. Either you been or you ain’t.”
I kept looking straight ahead at the road.
“Whatever. Don’t try that on me. You ain’t never been out of this here county, much less up North. If you had, I am sure I would never have caught a sight of you again.”
“Why’s that?”
“ ’Cause if you was up there with them free folks, you’d have to be as dumb as rocks to come back down here. I tell you, should I ever set my foot onto any grain of free soil, you will not hear any tell of me ever again.”
“Huh. And that’d be the end of us, I guess.”
“Now, you know you are not, in any way, built to run. Tried it once before. But you are tied to Lockless. The very fact of your return is the proof.”
“Not my choosing. Not my choosing.”
We reached Nathaniel Walker’s place in late morning and drove off to the side road, where we waited for the courier who would greet us and then disappear with Sophia, and I must leave them to their private business. What did I feel out there? Surely there are higher callings than delivering a woman you love to another man. But I had years of practice having had to hide so much, and I knew whatever agony I felt being there must be doubled in Sophia. And I was older now. I understood things I could not even imagine months ago, so that I felt my greatest desire, in that moment, was to ease her. So when I noticed the edgy silence between us, and none of her usual jest, I spoke up and said, “How’d you get here while I was gone?”
“Walked,” she said.
“You walked here?”
“I did. With my whole costume and effects. Thank God for Thena. She watched my Caroline that weekend. Only had to do it once, but I tell you, when I got that call, I was a mess. But I did it. Fit my face, my dress, and unmentionables right over there behind them bushes.”
“My God…”
“Of all the things I done did, that was the one that left me feeling the most low. Had to strip down to what God gave me, in them bushes, afraid of who might walk by and what they might do. All I could do was sing to myself as I did, sing low and quiet, sing for courage.”
Then Sophia breathed out long and heavy and said, “Don’t ever doubt that I hate them. Don’t you dare doubt it.”
And as she said it, her face shifted into an executioner’s mask. There was no furrowed or raised eyebrow. No spread of the mouth. No light in her brown eyes. Her face mirrored the truth of the hate she now spoke. She shook her head and said, “The things I would put on them, Hi. The things that I would be capable of. You see me here now, in this small body…Why, if my hands, my arms, were as those of men, what I would do with my energies. I have thought of it, you see. I thought of it even in this body, my God, what I would do while he slept, with a kitchen blade, or a tincture in his tea or white powder in his cake….I thought of it very often, and, well, then I had my Caroline and that was that. And I am a good woman, Hi, I tell you I am. But what I would put on them, given my time, what I would put on them…”
She trailed off here into her own thoughts. After twenty minutes or so, a well-dressed tasking man emerged from the woody path. He walked over to the chaise and shot us a stern and disapproving look. “He cannot have you today. He will send word.”
Then he turned away and walked back down the path.
“Did he say anything else?” Sophia called out. But the man did not turn