He's Mine

Virginia, 1846. A planter buys a seamstress because he wants her, and her six-year-old son comes with her.

Not knowing what else to do with the boy, he gives him to his own lonely son as something to play with.

Nelson and William grow up in the same weather.

Nelson carries the schoolbooks he is not allowed to open, learns his letters in a hole in the ground, and becomes the most valuable hand on the place.

What happens between them at fourteen happens in a curing barn, on a night neither of them ever describes to anyone.

Esther sees it before they do. She has spent thirteen years building the arrangement that keeps her son near the house and out of the field, and she knows to the dollar what it will cost and who will pay.

When it comes apart, Nelson is sold: Richmond, Norfolk, a brig, New Orleans, and a sugar plantation on Bayou Lafourche where nothing he knows is worth anything and nobody has ever heard his name. Behind him, in a county that will not tell her where he has gone, his mother has one word to work with.