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By Root 4711 0

the days when Stamford had another young woman to be with, in the days before Gloria. “Get outa my face with them things, man,” Delphie said. The few children then on the Townsend place took much of their happiness from the adults and they began funning Stamford. The doomed Luke, then eleven, the boy who would be worked to death, shared a song he had learned from his mother—“I’m over here, I’m over there, I ain’t nowhere . . .” Celeste heard about the runaway Elias as she was eating the last of her ash cakes. She did not like Elias but she, too, was happy for him. What she herself could not have she always wished for someone else, so her food went down well that morning. After he got the word, after he ate his breakfast, Moses went up and told Henry, “Master, that new nigger’s in the wind.”

On Sundays, a preacher, a free man named Valtims Moffett, came over and held services for the slaves, in the barn when it was cold and out along the lane when the weather was nice. He would preach for some fifteen minutes and then everyone would sing two or three songs. The day Robbins caught Elias was a day of nice weather, not too warm, though the preacher liked to say that every day was a good day for God’s word. The preacher was a large man who suffered with gout and rheumatism, which, he was quick to tell people, “God put upon me the same way he put the cross on our savior Jesus Christ.” Some mornings it took him more than an hour to get out of bed and dressed. He had a wife and one slave to his name, but the wife, Helen, was a tiny woman and so was their slave, Pauline, full sister to the wife, and both of them together could do only so much with a large man with a cross to bear. The preacher was quite late that Sunday morning after Elias ran away, but he was not as late as he was the day Henry was buried.

Moses had just told Henry that Elias was gone when they heard Robbins’s voice and they both went around the side of the house to the front. Robbins had awakened that morning and not remembered the encounter with Elias the night before, that he had taken Elias back to his plantation and chained him to the back porch. His cook came in and reminded him at the breakfast table.

Robbins now said to Henry, “Good mornin. Sweet good mornin. Are you and Caldonia well?” Elias, chained, stood next to Robbins, only inches from his booted foot in the stirrup.

“Yessir, Mr. Robbins, we well enough,” Henry said.

“I have something of yours,” Robbins said, and he kicked Elias and the slave fell to the ground. “Picked him up on the road home last night. He has a wound somewhere in his leg, but it won’t kill him and it won’t amount to anything if you decide to sell him off one day. Less he had a very noticeable limp.” He laughed, a little joke between them, because Robbins was even less inclined those days to sell a slave and that was what he always advised Henry. He had said once, “Niggers appreciate in value, so appreciate them.”

“I see,” Henry said. Moses was behind him. “Help him up, Moses. You wanna come in, Mr. Robbins.” Moses picked Elias up by the shoulders and gave him a little bit of a smile and reminded Elias with the smile and his eyes that he never liked him.

“No, not today, Henry. Not today, but tell Caldonia I will come back this way soon. I promise.” The land they stood on had once belonged to Robbins, sold to Henry at a price far cheaper than Robbins had ever sold anything, save the slaves Toby and his sister Mindy. Robbins looked once at the side of Elias’s head and nodded to Henry. Henry told him good day. Robbins raised the reins up from his lap and pulled gently and the horse, in a slow and beautiful move of its grand head and neck, the glinting bit in its mouth a kind of accent to all that grandness, turned, and they left, prancing away down to the road, where they took off in a full gallop. The glint would stay forever in Elias’s mind. The night his second child was born he would hold him, still wet from fighting into life, and the fire from the hearth would reflect off that wetness and that glint would come forward again