turned away to sleep and felt Sophia pulling close to me and slipping her arm underneath mine, until her hand found the warm, soft part of me.
“You know you chaining yourself to something here.”
And for a while the only answer was the soft warm breath on the back of my neck, and then she said, “Ain’t a chain if it is my choosing.”
* * *
—
The next day, Thena and I went out on our route, collecting the washing. And then we spent the next hauling up the water and tubs, beating the jackets and trousers and then hanging them in the drying room down in the Warrens. Sophia was not with us, pleading illness on behalf of Caroline. But there was no illness, it was part of our plan, one that was ill-thought, for now, at the end of the day, with our hands worn and our arms exhausted, Thena was ornery at her absence.
“What is wrong with her, Hi?” Thena said. We were walking slowly back down to the Street. The sun had faded long ago and we moved like shadows down the path, past the orchards and through the woods. “I wish you had chosen a girl with more back to her. That Sophia don’t know nothing about work.”
“She work just fine,” I said. “She worked for you while I was gone.”
“If that is what you must call it,” Thena said. “Way I see it, she only start really doing it once you was here. How you gonna make a way with a woman like that, Hi? All that’s put on a man’s life, how you gonna get it done with a woman who only work for show? When I was young, I outworked every man on the home-place, every one, even mine. I was terror in the tobacco fields, and I kept house too. Of course I sometimes wonder what it all got me—cracked over the head and robbed of my little stack of freedom. So maybe that girl know something I do not.”
“I seen Kessiah,” I said. All day I had tried to weave this announcement, somehow, into our conversation. I had failed at discovering some decorous way to accomplish this, and knowing that it had to be done, I elected for the most direct route.
Thena stopped and turned to me. “Who?”
“Your daughter,” I said. “Kessiah. I seen her.”
“Is this you being mad for what I said about that girl?”
“I have seen her,” I said, as firm as I could muster.
“Where?” said Thena.
“North,” I said. “She lives just outside Philadelphia. Was taken to Maryland after she was stripped from you. From there, escaped north. She got a family. A husband who is good to her.”
“Hiram…”
“She want you to join her,” I said. “She want you up there with her. Thena, this ain’t no joke. When I left her I told her I would get you back to her. I promised, and I now mean to honor that promise.”
“Honor? How?”
And there in the forest, as I had done with Sophia, I explained what had happened to me, what I had become.
“So this the Underground?” she asked.
“It is,” I said. “And it ain’t.”
“Well, which is it?”
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s me. And I’m asking if you can hold to that.”
“Kessiah?” she asked of no one in particular. “Last time I seen her she was such a small thing. Willful as hell. She loved her daddy, you know? And he was so very hard. We used to have camellias. It was another time, another time. She would go out back and pick in them until I…”
She paused here and her face took on a look of confusion.
“Kessiah…” she said softly. And then the tears came, slow and silent, and without a cry or wail. She said her daughter’s name again and then she turned to me and asked, “Did you see any of the others?”
I shook my head and said, “I am sorry.”
And that was when the wailing came, and it was low and deep and throaty, and she moaned to herself, “Oh Lord, oh Lord,” and shook her head.
“Why you bring this back to me? Why you do this? You and your Underground? Hell I care. I have settled up with it. Why you bring this to me?”
“Thena, I—”
“Naw, you done spoke, let me speak. Do you know what I done? And you, you should have known. You who I took in, you bring this back to me! You do this to me.