the Virginia swamps. What powers guarded them there, I did not know. What I knew were the tales of Ryland’s Hounds sent off on expeditions to discover the Underground and root them out, tales of how these expeditions returned, reduced in number, scarred and battered, testifying of snakes, strange ailments, poisons, and root-doctors marshaling crocodiles and catamounts into the fray. And this Underground, I was told, would, from time to time, take on new recruits who preferred the wild freedom of the swamps to the civilized slavery of Elm County. It seemed perfect that noble Georgie, praised and esteemed by the whites, and held to have some secret life by the coloreds, would be their man.
I was pulled out of my ruminations on Georgie by the sound of gunfire. I was at the southern end of the town square. I followed the sound and saw a gentleman, in his formal black uniform, laughing uproariously with his shotgun pointed in the air. The tenor of the day was changing. Clouds now crowded the sky. I watched two men stumble fighting out of a pub and into the streets—one older with a long scar across his cheek—and when the older man was bested, in seemingly a single motion, he pulled out a long knife and sliced the face of the younger man. Then two more men raced out of the pub and jumped the older fellow. I hastily walked away as they started to thrash him. On the next block, I watched as a low white woman grabbed a Dutch girl by her hair and slapped her. Her male companion laughed, pulled out a flask, took a drink, and then emptied the rest on the Dutch girl’s head. I walked on. This was the riotousness that my father had warned me of, that he begged me to keep Maynard distanced from. But it was always like this with them, a race of cackling Alice Caulleys. Like the parties of Lockless, race-day would start off in high pageantry, and then the drinking would start and the festive spirit would darken, and all the masks of fashion and breeding would fall away, until the oozing, pocked face of Elm County would lie revealed.
There were no other colored people out, because we all knew what came next—the ill feeling descending on the whites would soon be turned upon us. It is odd to say this, but it was the free coloreds who had the most to fear under such circumstance. We who were Tasked belonged to someone. We were property and any damage inflicted on us must be done under the orders of our owner, for you could no more beat another man’s slave than you could beat another man’s horse. But even from my relative safety, I felt uneasy. And in that state of mind, I endeavored to make my way away from the square to Freetown, and the home of Georgie Parks.
It was a small community, clustered together so tight that I knew everyone who lived there. I knew Edgar Combs, who’d once worked iron at the Carter place, and now did the same for the blacksmith in town, and Edgar was married to Patience, whose first husband had died when the fever hit all those years ago. And across from there was Pap and Grease, brothers, and next to them was Georgie Parks. So I walked out of the madness of the square and to the southern end of the town, and there found myself before Ryland’s Jail, which marked the beginnings of the free colored section of Starfall.
It was all planned this way, it had to be, for Ryland’s Jail was not a jail for criminals. Sprawling two city blocks, it was a warehouse for the Tasked who’d been caught running away or were being held before being sold. The jail was a daily reminder that no matter their freedoms, these coloreds of Starfall existed in the shadow of an awesome power, which, at a whim, could clap them back into chains. Ryland’s Jail was run and staffed by the Low. These men became rich off the flesh trade, but their names were of too recent vintage and their work of such ill repute that they could never rise above their designation. It was the strong association between the jail and the low whites who fed and served it that gave them the name Ryland’s Hounds. We feared them and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated