and now gazed at the pond for a moment before speaking.
“I like you, Hiram,” Georgie said. “I really do. If I was so lucky as to have a daughter about your season, you would be my only choice. You are smart. You keep your mouth where it should be, and you were more better to Maynard than such a man ever deserved.”
He rubbed his red-brown beard, turned and looked up into the trees. His back was now to me. I heard him say, “Which is why I can’t for the fact of things understand how a man such as you would come to my door looking for trouble.”
When he turned back to me, his deep brown eyes were simmering. “What would a respectable man like you want with this?” he asked. “And by what reasoning have you got it figured that I am the one who shall award it?”
“Georgie, I know,” I said. “We all know. Perhaps you have hid it away from the Quality, but we have always been smarter than them.”
“You don’t see the half of it, son. And I am telling as I have told you before—Go home. Get a wife. And get happy. Ain’t nothing over here.”
“Georgie, I am going,” I told him. “And I ain’t going alone.”
“What?”
“Sophia going with me.”
“Nathaniel Walker’s girl? Have you lost it? You take that girl and you might as well spit on that man. It is a high offense against any white man’s honor.”
“We are going. And, Georgie,” I said with only a hint of the anger I now felt in me, “she ain’t his.”
It was not only anger in me. I was nineteen, and a guarded nineteen who’d worked to feel nothing in this direction, so that when I did feel it, right there in that moment, when I did feel that I loved her, it was not with reason or ritual, nor the way that makes families and homes, but the way that wrecks them, I was undone.
“Now, let’s get one thing straight here,” Georgie said. “She is his girl. They all his girl, you get it? Amber his girl. Thena his girl. Your mother was his girl—”
“Careful, Georgie,” I said. “Real careful.”
“Oh, it’s careful now, huh? That’s what it is? You telling me about careful, son. They own you, Hiram. You a slave, boy. I don’t care who your daddy is. You a slave, and don’t think that just because I’m out this way, out here in this Freetown, that I ain’t some kind of slave too. And as long as they own you, they own her. You got to see. We are captured. Been captured. And that’s the whole of it. What you are talking here done got men a whole week in Ryland’s and beat within a prayer of they life. You have got a feeling in your heart and I respect it. I done felt it myself, what young man ain’t? But you almost died, Hi. You do this, and you will wish you had.”
“Georgie, I am telling you that this is not a choice. I cannot stay. And you have got to help.”
“Even if I was what you have me figured to be, I would not.”
“You ain’t understanding,” I said. “I am going. That is a fact. I am asking you to aid me, because I believe you an honorable man devoted to the honorable path. I am asking you, Georgie. But I am going.”
Georgie paced for a moment, executing his own internal calculations, for he knew now that with his help or without, I was going and I was going with Sophia. What I could not know as he regarded me there, his eyes widening with realization, was that he must have been figuring on the consequence of such an action, and his conclusion made clear, and whatever his hatreds, whatever his loves, especially his loves, he now saw but one path forward.
“One week,” he said. “You got one week. You meet me here, on this spot where we now stand, with your girl. You should know that I would not do any such thing if not for what you have told me here and determined yourself to do.”
* * *
—
My power was always memory, not judgment. I walked away from Georgie’s home fixed only on my own suspicions, never suspecting how much beyond those the fact of things truly ranged. And even when I, again, came upon Amy and Hawkins, this time seen straight by them right outside