She pinches her lips and raises her eyebrows. I can see the nastiness and the hardness in her and I hope she ain’t fixing to aim it at me.

“Miss Martha wants you sleeping on the floor in Master Thomas’s room,” she says. “He’s been waking up the whole house with his night frights and it’s going to be your job to keep him quiet. In the morning you come on down and find me in the kitchen house, and I’ll get you to work helping with breakfast and give you your chores for the day.”

I blink at her, piecing together the meaning behind her words. She said Miss Martha and Master Thomas, not your missus and your young master. She said in the morning I’ll find her in the kitchen house making breakfast. Here I am thinking she’s a cousin or a spinster aunt, but she’s a slave.

I swallow the “yes, ma’am” sitting ready on my tongue, and instead ask, “What’s wrong with Master Thomas?”

“Thrown from a horse,” she says. “Don’t know why anyone would put a six-year-old boy on a horse in the first place, but they did, and now he screams the house down almost every night thinking about it.”

“What’s Miss Martha want me to do with him?”

“Get him back to sleep. And you’ll be calling her Missus. It’s Master and Missus here. I call her Miss Martha because I’ve been calling her that since she was little.”

I look again at her high forehead and small, close-set eyes. “She grew up with you?”

She nods. “I was twelve when she was born. I been taking care of her all her life. Couldn’t do without me when she got married, so her daddy gave me as a wedding gift.” She spits out the word “daddy” in a puff of bitterness and I know why she looks like the missus. And I know why she looks so angry. Their daddy gave his older daughter to his white daughter as her slave.

Maple must have come from a long line of slave mothers and slave-owner fathers to wind up so light she could pass for white. Looking like she does, it would be so much easier to run. I wonder if she’s tried.

“I guess they don’t got the railroad up here,” I say, trying to ask without asking. It’s not enough to know about the underground railroad helping runaway slaves, you’ve got to find them too.

Maple squints at me with her daddy’s eyes and purses her momma’s lips tight. “You best get that thought right out of your head before someone comes along and beats it out. Everything you do gets paid for one way or the other. If you ain’t the one paying, you can sure bet someone else is.”

November 1848

Chapter 5

Sarah

In the weeks that pass, I learn I was right about Maple. She’s a hard and bitter woman. I reckon it’s a sour thing for her to be “yes ma’am-ing” and “no ma’am-ing” her half-sister all day long, and I hear she left a daughter back at Missus’s daddy’s plantation, but we all got a story.