way of Roscoe. But really I just got sick of laying up there waiting for them to tell me something. ’Sides, this is how it was when I was a boy. Used to get in where I could. Work where I was needed.”
“Could still go out to the fields,” she said. “They always looking for hands.”
“Did my share of that, thank you kindly,” I said. “How bout you? Ever been in them fields?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Sophia said.
She was now closer and I noted this because I noted everything about her now, in particular the precise distance she maintained from me. There was a part of me that knew this to be all wrong, but it was the discredited part, the part that had believed a coin could reverse Virginia against itself.
“Not the worst,” I said. “Don’t have these folks watching every little thing you do.”
She was closer still.
“What kind of things you might like to hide?” she said, moving closer so that I now felt my balance slipping away. I put my hand down on a piece of furniture, I can’t remember which.
She just looked at me and laughed, then walked back out of the shed.
“Can we talk some more?” she said, almost whispering. “About all that.”
“Yeah, we can,” I said.
“In an hour,” she said. “Down by the gulch?”
“Sound good to me,” I said.
* * *
—
I don’t know what work happened in the time before that meeting. I spent the whole of it thinking only of Sophia. Slavery is everyday longing, is being born into a world of forbidden victuals and tantalizing untouchables—the land around you, the clothes you hem, the biscuits you bake. You bury the longing, because you know where it must lead. But now this new longing held out a different future, one where my children, whatever their travails, would never know the auction block. And once I glimpsed that other future, my God, the world was born anew to me. I was freedom-bound, and freedom was as much in my heart as it was in the swamps, so that the hour I spent waiting on our meeting was the most careless I had ever spent. I was gone from Lockless before I had even run.
“So how’s this suppose to go?” she asked. We were down by the gulch, looking past the wild grass to the other side of the woods.
“I don’t quite know,” I said.
Sophia turned to me with a doubtful look.
“Don’t know?” she asked.
“I put my faith in Georgie,” I said. “That’s all I got.”
“Georgie, huh?”
“Yeah, Georgie. I ain’t ask a whole lot of questions—you must understand why. This thing Georgie got himself into, well, I imagine part of the deal is you don’t talk too much. So my notion is simple. We bring ourselves, and nothing more, at the appointed time and place and then we go.”
“Go into what?” she asked.
I looked at her hard for a moment, then looked back over the gulch.
“The swamps,” I said. “They got a world down there, a whole Underground, where a man can live as a man should.”
“And what about a woman?”
“I know. I thought on it some. Perhaps not the ideal place for a lady—”
She cut me off and said, “Told you once today, Hi, I ain’t no lady.”
I nodded.
“I get along just fine,” she said. “Just get me out of here and I’ll get the rest figured myself.”
That last word—myself—hung in the air.
“All by yourself, huh?” I asked.
She looked back at me unsmiling.
“Look, Hiram, I need you to understand something. I like you, I really do.” Her eyes were hard on me, drilling their way in, and I felt that what she was saying now was from the deepest of possible places. “I like you and I do not like many men, and when I look at you I see something old and familiar, something like what I had with my Mercury. But I will like you a heap less if your plan is for us to get to this Underground and for you to make yourself up as another Nathaniel. That ain’t freedom to me, do you understand? Ain’t no freedom for a woman in trading a white man for a colored.”
I noticed then that her hand was on my arm. And that she was squeezing it firmly.
“If that is what you want, if that is what you are thinking, then you must tell me now. If it is your plan to shackle me there, to have me bring