system that gave Sophia to Nathaniel, that made me. There was no peace in slavery, for every day under the rule of another is a day of war.
“What is your name?” I asked the old man.
“What do it matter?” he said. “What matters is that I loved a woman, and in that love I forgot my name. That was my sin, the cause by which I am found here, with you, and with this boy, and left to the mercies of these low-down whites.”
He was trying to stand now—using the iron bars to pull himself up. I stood to help but he waved me off. He managed to lean against the bars, with his left arm looped through for support.
“I was wedded as a young man and lived for a great many years in all the happiness that a man and a woman might ever hope to know. We lived among the Task, you see, but the Task never lived in us. We had a son. He grew upright and Christian. He was taken in high regard by all around—Quality, Tasking, and Low. He worked the land like it was his own, and thought our masters might be so struck to grant him freedom, perhaps upon their dying.
“He was a boy of big thinking. All knew it. Girls fought over that boy’s legacy. He would not marry. He held for one of high honor and would accept none who measured less than his mother. But she died, my wife, my whole heart, yes she did. Fever took her from me. Her last injunction upon me was simple—‘Keep that boy safe. Let him not sell his legacy for wood.’
“I kept to that. I kept him right under true law. And when he took a wife, a girl from up in the cook-house, it was like the spirit of his mother returned, for the girl was honorable, and worked her task in the same spirit as my son.
“Years passed us by. We was re-formed into something new, another family. I was blessed with three grandchildren, but only one, a boy, made it past yearling. When they died, we grieved hard together, for the love flowed between us all was strong, something like that river James, and all of that love was given to that one who survived.
“But the land was not what it had been, and the Quality took up a new trade, and the trade was us, and each week when we counted we saw hands fading away.
“Then one evening, after the count, the headman come and address me alone. He say, ‘All of us round these parts done long felt you a good man. You and your folk are as children to us, near to our heart. But you have heard the soil that is now bearing a song of death. It breaks me all to pieces to say this, but we must part with your boy. I am sorry. It is for the good of us all. I come to you to tell you first, so that I am honorable. We have done all we can to assure him some comfort. Best I can do is send his wife and boy along with him. It’s all I got.’ ”
I was now standing myself. I was watching the old man, for fear that he might tumble. The light from the parlor was still glimmering. The laughter had grown a little lower and there were fewer voices to be heard now.
“When they told me that, I went to nothing,” he said. “I walked back to my quarters. I was trembling. My sight was going black. I walked out into the woods to address the Lord. But I tell you, I could not speak. I slept out there and did not come to the fields in the morning. They must have known I was grieving, for the headman never came for me.
“That day I wandered the near-country with only my thoughts. I walked, but never ran. A notion gnawed in me. These people were so low that they would divide a father from his only son. I knew what I was. My whole life was purchased on time. I was born in the varmint trap. There was no way out. It was my life. But no matter how much I said it, a powerful part of me had never believed. Then they took my boy.
“I come in that night and face him. I told him what they said. His face was