Chapter Twenty-Nine
Grace had been with me so long that it was easy to forget how little I truly knew about her. Most of our exchanges were cordial
but limited. She kept the household running with brisk efficiency; we spoke easily about meals, the children’s needs, the
rhythms of the day, which child had lost a button or skinned a knee. But when it came to anything personal, she held me at
a careful remove.
I didn’t know she was seeing a man until she was visibly pregnant. I heard rumors that his name was John, and he lived on
a nearby farm, someone she’d met at church. When I asked about him—too eagerly, perhaps—she said only, “There’s no need to
talk about that,” with a finality I didn’t dare press.
Over the first five years after we moved the households closer together, she had three boys—Noah, Daniel, and Isaac—though
I never once saw John on the property. She raised her children alongside my younger ones, the way Dinah had once raised her
with me. They ran barefoot through the fields, jumped from the hayloft, splashed in the creek, shared meals with the easy
familiarity of siblings.
Grace and her children lived on the second floor of the kitchen house, a two-story wooden structure with a brick chimney.
The ground floor held a hearth crowded with cauldrons, skillets, and spits, and a long pine table worn smooth by use.
Bundles of herbs and braids of onion and garlic hung from the rafters.
Shelves held crockery pots for preserved fruits and vegetables; a brick oven was built into one wall.
Out back, a sloped-roof extension sheltered a second stove and another worktable.
A well provided water, a smokehouse cured meat, and a springhouse kept dairy cool.
At the top of the narrow stairs, tucked beneath the eaves, Grace’s room held a rope bed, a spindle-back chair, and a pine
chest. Her sons slept beside her on the floor, their straw bedding rolled tight each morning, their few belongings tucked
neatly into the chest. Across the hall, the pantry was lined with barrels of flour, potatoes, and apples; bins of corn and
dried beans; and shelves stacked with crockery jars, salted pork, and tins of lard.
Grace moved through her days with a kind of organized detachment, her expression neutral, her voice even. I found myself watching
her when she wasn’t looking, wondering what she was thinking as she gazed out the window, her hands still for a moment before
she turned back to her work.
I’d managed to track Dinah down—she was now in Taylorsville, sold to a man named Merton. Grace hadn’t seen her mother since
my father’s estate was dispersed. Seventy miles lay between them now—a journey of several days by wagon, too far for her to
make alone.
I didn’t ask Grace if she missed her mother. I didn’t ask if she was lonely. To ask would’ve meant admitting that her losses
were the price of our comfort.
But one day, when I brought some dishes to the kitchen house, I hesitated. We were alone in the dim, smoky room. Grace stood
at the hearth, scraping cornmeal from the skillet, her back to me. She was heavily pregnant, as was I. Something about her
movements—steady, methodical, resigned—made my chest tighten.
“Grace,” I said, “are you . . .” I shifted, unsure of myself. “How are you?”
Even as the words came out of my mouth, they felt presumptuous. What did I expect her to say?
She didn’t stop scraping, didn’t turn right away.
When she did, her face was composed. “Well enough, Miss Sarah.” Wiping her hands on a cloth, she added, “The minister at my church says, ‘Consider it joy whenever you face trials of any kind, because the testing of your faith produces perseverance.’ ”
I nodded. “You seem . . .” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say.
“Some trials test more than faith,” she said, turning back to the dishpan.
The set of her shoulders, the way she kept her face turned from mine, made me want to ask more, but I didn’t. The space between
us felt too wide. Or maybe I was afraid of what I’d learn if I tried to bridge it.
“Was there something else you needed, Miss Sarah?”
I let the moment pass.
One crisp fall afternoon, I sat on the porch, mending an old quilt. Dinah had pieced it for me when I was a baby. The star
pattern was fraying at the edges; the fabric had worn thin in places, and I was adding new squares to patch the gaps. I’d
just threaded my needle when I heard the slow creak of wheels on the drive.
Looking up, I saw the brothers’ wagon rolling to a stop. Something shifted in the flatbed behind them, half hidden by a rough
blanket.
Eng and Chang had left that morning to attend an auction at the Surry County Courthouse. As they climbed down from the wagon,
the blanket slipped aside, revealing three children huddled together—two girls and a little boy, their clothes thin, their
bare feet dusty.
“Who are they?” I asked.
Eng pointed at them, one by one. “Two sisters, Mary and Nicey, seven and five years old. The little boy—Joe—is three.”
The older girl was clutching the younger one, her arm around her shoulders, both of them wide-eyed and fearful. The boy’s thumb was in his mouth. Their faces were streaked with dirty tears. “What did you pay for them?”
“Four hundred and fifty dollars for the girls, one seventy-five for the boy.”
“Where is their mother?”
“Well,” Chang said, brushing dirt from his sleeve, “there are two mothers. So we made the decision to leave them be.”
“Leave them be.” I repeated his words slowly. “I don’t understand.”
“It wasn’t worth the added expense,” he said. “And we got a better price without an adult attached. We can raise them to working
age and get full value.”
Eng nodded. “We’ve got enough grown slaves to worry about. We’ll be able to work this one until he’s in his twenties, then
sell or trade him for a younger one.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Adult males.” Eng made a face. “More likely to run or rebel.”
Chang’s voice was matter-of-fact. “No need to invite that risk.” In my father’s house, these kinds of calculations had been
routine, spoken of in practical terms over supper. I’d heard men at his table fret over rebellions, complain about slaves
who slipped away in the night and disappeared into the woods, never to be seen again. Eng and Chang faced an added complication—their
predictable absence half the time, tending the other plantation. To them, it was a simple equation: minimize the threat.
“Females aren’t a risk?” I asked.
“Not as much,” Eng said. “They get attached. And, you know . . .” He hesitated. I could hear the muffled rustle of the children.
“They’re valuable to us as breeders too.”
“The increase. Slaves we don’t have to purchase,” Chang said.
I exhaled. Women and children were an investment—I understood this.
I knew the value of “good breeding stock” and the cold arithmetic of children born into bondage.
But I had never looked into the eyes of a seven-year-old girl being appraised like livestock.
I had not stood in the dust of an auction yard while families were split apart with the stroke of a pen.
Hearing it stated so plainly by my own husband made my stomach turn.
It occurred to me then that their quick agreement to relocate after Rosalyn’s death hadn’t been only for my sake. They saw
it as an opportunity. This new land offered more acreage. More fields to plant, more labor to exploit. The purchase of these
children wasn’t a whim; it was part of their plan. Expansion demanded more.
In the wagon bed, the children were pressed closer together now. Mary whispered something to Nicey, who had started to cry.
Joe pulled at the older girl’s skirt.
“Who is going to take care of them?” I asked.
“They don’t need much. The big girl is old enough to take care of the younger two,” Eng said.
“No, she isn’t,” I said. “She’s a child herself.”
Chang shrugged. “Grace can oversee.”
I shook my head. On top of everything else, Grace was now expected to care for these strangers’ children? She already had
more than enough to manage—my brood, her own boys, the endless work of the house. The brothers knew this.
“Grace has her hands full,” I said.
Eng glanced at the children in the wagon bed, then back at me. His voice was flat. “It’s not your concern, Sallie.”
For months, I watched my husband and his brother expand their holdings, acquire more slaves, hire another overseer.
Growth was swift. I could feel the strain of it in the air.
The evidence of what it took to sustain this way of life was unavoidable, woven into the landscape: the stripped bark of a whipping tree, iron shackles hanging from a nail in the barn.
But it was the three motherless children who haunted me most. I glimpsed them in passing, clustered near the cabins, playing
in the grass. I heard the sounds of their neglect—a ragged cough, a quarrel that tipped into wails in the heat and dust of
afternoon, thin cries in the air at night. I knew the children were being watched—but not loved, not tended to with a mother’s
care. I avoided the cabins when I could.
One evening on the porch with Eng and Chang, I gave voice to the question that had been pressing on me, growing keener by
the day.
“Do you not think it’s strange, owning slaves, after what you’ve endured?” I asked. “Do you not see the contradiction?”
Chang let out a short, hard breath—between a scoff and a laugh—as if the question were beneath answering.
Eng tapped the armrest of their chair. “Life is full of contradictions.”
“You, of all people, know what it’s like to be treated as property,” I said.
“Which is precisely why we choose to live as we do.” Eng’s voice was measured. “We were nothing and had nothing. Now we are
men of means. Which would you choose?”
“Men don’t break their chains just to walk free,” Chang said. “They break them to wield them.”
I recoiled. “That’s a harsh philosophy.”
Chang took a long pull on his pipe. When he exhaled, smoke drifted between us, dissipating in the air. “A man who is powerless
craves power. In this place, owning people is a form of power. A form of . . . protection.”
“Protection from what?” I asked. “No one is threatening you.”
The porch planks creaked under the chair as Chang leaned back, stretching out his legs. “If we believed ourselves untouchable, we’d be fools.”
Eng dug in his pocket and pulled out a handful of peanuts, cracking the shells with a flick of his thumb. “You were born here,
Sallie,” he said, letting the husks fall to the porch. “You don’t have to prove yourself. You belong to this place.”
“Besides, we need the labor. More hands mean greater yields.” Chang tipped his chin toward the fields, dark beyond the porch
rail. “It’s a sound investment.”
I thought of their stories about the British merchant who had paid their mother for them, the years spent in taverns and town
halls. Always on display, always at someone else’s mercy. How they’d saved every dollar, calculated every detail, until they
could buy their way out.
The brothers had learned early on that the world is divided into those with power and those without. Those who own and those
who are owned. They’d decided—perhaps from the moment they first felt the weight of coins in their palms—where they stood
on that divide.
Maybe it was too much to expect that their own pain would lead them to empathy. Maybe survival left no room for that. If they
saw themselves in the faces of the people they claimed as property, they never let on.
I hated how they had turned their pain into armor. I wanted to tell them they were wrong, that there were other ways to redress
the past, but I knew my words would sound feverishly ineffectual against their grim logic.
When the brothers were at my house, we all went to the church they’d built on the property, White Plains Baptist, and met
Addie and her children there. When they were at her house, I met them with my children.
The minister, Manley Hawkins, framed the Southern way of life as God’s design, a social order He had decreed, every rank and role assigned.
He quoted Ephesians and Titus, urging servants to obey their masters; Romans, calling for submission to authority; even Genesis, invoking the curse of Ham to justify bondage.
Masters offer guidance and protection, he said, while slaves fulfill their God-given purpose through labor.
Any disruption to this balance could invite not just unrest, but divine punishment.
One Sunday, when Eng and Chang were with Addie, I decided to attend a Quaker meeting instead. I gave my children a choice:
they could come with me or meet their father at the Baptist church.
Katie, curious and solemnly observant, looked at me for a long moment before nodding. “I want to see what it’s like,” she
said.
Patrick grinned and grabbed his shoes. “I’m coming too.”
The Quaker meeting house in Surry County was plain and unadorned, with wooden benches arranged in a circle. No stained glass,
no altar. When the elders spoke, they cited different Scriptures than Reverend Hawkins.
Micah 6:8: What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Galatians 3:28: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ
Jesus.
These words were a beacon, lighting the way to a different path. In the silence that followed, Katie’s hand found mine.
Two days later, when the brothers returned to my house, Eng asked why I hadn’t been at White Plains.
“I wanted to try something different,” I said. “I liked it. Katie and Patrick did too.”
Chang said, under his breath, “She humiliates you, Eng.”
“I don’t mean to,” I said. “You know it was my father’s faith.”
Chang looked at me directly—a rarity in my house. “Your father is dead. You belong with your husband, your family. That is
your role.”
“But—”
He turned to Eng. “This will not do. You need to control your wife.”
Eng eyed me with a pained expression. “You must be aware of how it appears, Sallie.”
“You are welcome to come with me.”
The room fell into silence. Chang’s jaw worked as if chewing words too bitter to speak. Eng would not meet my eyes. Three
breaths. Four. Five. Each of us waiting for someone to yield.
I had crossed a line that could not be uncrossed. I had chosen, openly, to stand apart.
Abruptly, awkwardly, Eng stood, pulling his brother up with him.
From then on, Katie, Patrick, and I attended Quaker service while the others went to White Plains. And the crack between Eng
and me—between me and the other three in our foursome—widened.