yearlings to you, then tell me now and allow me the decency of making my own choice here. You are not like them. You must do me the service of giving me that choice. So tell me. Tell me now your intending.”
I remember her ferocity in that moment. It was such a peaceful day. Late in the afternoon now and the sun was setting in this season of long nights, the perfect season, I would soon learn, to run. I heard no birds, no insects, no branches in the wind, so that all my senses were focused on Sophia’s words, words that for the first time in my life I experienced without pictures, for reasons I could not fully then understand. What I did understand was that she was terribly afraid of something—something in me, and the thought that I would, in any way, exist to her in the way of Nathaniel, that she would fear me as she feared him, scared and shamed me all at once.
“No,” I said. “Never, Sophia. I want you to be free and I want any relating between us, should there ever be relating, to always be one of your choosing.”
She loosened her hand now, so that her grip became just a touch.
“I cannot lie,” I said. “I hope that you will some day, at some time, choose me out there. I confess it. I have dreams. Wild dreams.”
“And what do you dream of?” she asked. Her grip was again tight on my arm.
“I dream of men and women who are fit to wash, feed, and dress themselves. I dream of rose gardens that reward the hands that tend to them,” I said. “And I dream of being able to turn to a woman for whom I got a feeling, and speak that feeling, holler that feeling, with no thought beyond me and her as to what that might mean.”
We stood there a little longer and then walked up from the gulch together and then out of the woods. By then the sun was setting over Lockless. We paused at the edge of the woods. Sophia said, “I had best go ahead alone.” I nodded and watched her walk out and disappear. And then I came out, up from the forest toward the house, until I could see the tunnel beneath into the Warrens. And standing there in that tunnel, with her arms crossed, was Thena.
Thena was also transformed by my new vantage. I was running off, a young man with a young girl, toward a new life, the first true life we’d ever have, one that these old coloreds were afraid to pursue. I had tried to save them, save the whole of Lockless, but that was over now. They were lambs waiting for the slaughter. The elders all knew what was coming. They knew what the land whispered, because none lived closer to the land than those who worked it. They lay awake at night, listening to the groaning ghosts of tasking folk past, those who’d been carried off. They knew what was coming and still they waited for it. And all of this sudden shame and anger, rage and resenting for they who let this happen, who stoically watched their children carried off, all of this I now heaped upon Thena, so that when she saw me there coming up from the woods, and I saw her, with her arms crossed, waiting for me as I approached, and I saw the disapproving look on her face, I felt an incredible anger.
“Evening,” I said. She rolled her eyes in response. I walked into the tunnel and toward my quarters. She followed me. When we were inside, she turned up the lamp on the mantel and then shut the door. She sat in a chair in the corner and I saw the flame of the lamp casting shadows on her face.
“What is with you, son?” she asked.
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“You still fevered or something?”
“Thena…”
“Been mighty strange these past few weeks, mighty strange. So what is it? What’s got you?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“Alrighty, lemme ask it like this. What in all of creation done possessed you to run round Lockless with Nathaniel Walker’s girl?”
“I ain’t running round with nobody. Girl choose her company, sure as I chose mine.”
“That’s what you think, huh?”
“Yep, that’s what I think.”
“Then you as dumb as you seem.”
What I now did was cut my eyes at Thena, in a gesture I had learned from children rebellious