of low whites, because unlike their brethren, these men, while originating in that bottom file, had grown wealthy from the flesh trade, but seemed to revel in their debased roots, their slovenly dress, their missing teeth, their foul odors, their habit of spitting tobacco wherever they wished, as a kind of absurd show. The Quality shunned them, for slave-trading was still held as disreputable business. They did not host the traders in their homes nor invite them into their Sunday pews. Time would come when gold would outweigh blood. But this was still Virginia of old, where a dubious God held that those who would offer a man for sale were somehow more honorable than those who effected that sale.
This shunning caused a great resentment in the traders, a resentment they vented on us. They took glee in their work, so that in that parlor, they seemed to dance as they approached, and when they gripped at my buttocks to check their firmness, they did it with vim and vigor; and when they twisted my jaw in the light, checking my skull against their theories of phrenology, they never failed to smile a little; and when they stuck their fingers in my mouth, probing for rotten teeth, or struck my limbs searching for old injuries, they hummed a melody to themselves.
I would fall into myself during these “examinations,” because I quickly learned that the only way to survive such invasion was to dream, to let my soul fly from my body, fly back to Lockless and another time, when I called out the work songs—“Be back, Gina, with my heart and my song”—or stood before Alice Caulley, watching her gleam as I recited her history, or sat under the gazebo, passing a jug of ale and nursing all my wants and desires. But it was only a dream. And the fact was I was there in the awful now, being handled by men who gloried in their power to reduce a man to meat.
* * *
—
So I was now under it, down in the coffin of slavery, because whatever I had endured back at Lockless, it must be said, was not this and was nothing like what surely was to come. And I was not alone. There were two others in my cell. The first was a boy with light brown hair, barely twelve I guessed, a boy who did not smile and never spoke and maintained the hardened aspect of a man long tasked. But he was a boy, a fact revealed at night by the fearful whimper in his sleep, by his small yawn in the morning. Each night, after our supper of scraps, his mother called on him. And I guessed from her garments, which were above the heavy osnaburg of the Tasked, that she was free but had somehow lost possession of her child. She would sit on the floor outside the cell holding his hand through the iron bars and they would pass the moments silently, hand-in-hand, until Ryland dismissed her. There was something achingly familiar in this ritual, something that an old forgotten part of me recognized, like a scene from some other unrecalled life.
My other cellmate was an old man. His face was lined by the ages, and upon the ocean of his back I saw the many voyages of Ryland’s whip. Whatever my miseries during that time in Ryland’s Jail, nothing I endured approached what was put on this old man. The math of profit shielded me and the boy. But this old man, his days of use over, with only pennies to be wrung for him, was meat for the dogs. At any moment in the day, whenever the mood struck, these men would pull the old man out and compel him to sing, dance, crawl, bark, cluck, or perform some other indignity. And should his performance dissatisfy any of them, they would wail on him with fists and boots, beat him with horse reins or carriage whip, hurl paperweights and chairs at him, or reach for whatever else was at hand. And I felt the rawest shame beholding this, though I did not recognize it as such, shame in myself in having no ability whatsoever to help.
These were dark times of the soul. My sympathy for these two was quickly swallowed by the sense that it was these same dumb sympathies that had brought me to this moment. My mind was frantic with suspicion. Perhaps it was