I’m the only slave sleeping in the Big House. The other house slaves stay in cabins out back, behind the walled garden by the kitchen house, where they can get a few hours break from being under some master’s eye. The field slaves sleep in shacks down by the cotton fields, close to the overseer’s cabin. I got to curl up every night on Master Thomas’s floor waiting for him to wake me up with his bawling.

But it could be worse. Master’s ideas about the Christian way to treat slaves keeps the overseer’s whip on his hip, and we get Sundays to ourselves after Master churches us. But I don’t want to settle in here. If I get sold on again, I want to slip out easy and not be clinging to nothing I can’t stand to lose.

In the first house slave cabin, a blind old woman lives with her gray and feeble husband. She has two sons who work the fields, and four grandchildren. Even without her sight, she walks the plantation sure-footed. Like she’s rooted here. Like the belonging goes both ways.

Back when she could see, blind old Bessie cooked for Master, and for his father before him too. Now, she likes to spend her days at the kitchen house, getting up under Maple’s feet and on her very last nerve.

“I don’t know how you can serve this bland food tasting like nothing,” Bessie says, taking a spoonful from Maple’s pots.

“Your mouth is as blind as your eyeballs,” Maple hisses back. She tells her to leave off messing with her pots and goes stomping out to find Annie and Willa, who she calls “two of the laziest souls God put on this Earth.”

When she’s gone, blind Bessie shuffles over to the spice shelf. Feeling three jars over, she takes a big pinch of a red powder and drops it into the pot, gives it a good stir and shuffles on out of the kitchen house.

Maple gets Annie and Willa to take the food up for serving. After a month on Jubilee Plantation, she still only has me pouring the drinks. In the dining room, with Master and Missus at opposite ends of the table, and little Master Thomas in the middle, I pour the wine and the water—scurrying from one side to the other, and then back to the sideboard to get the lemonade for Master Thomas.

“This food is spicy as the devil,” Master cries out, making me jump and nearly spill the pitcher of lemonade. He drinks down his whole water glass and then takes up the wine.

Little Master Thomas spits his first bite out, thrashing in his seat and howling.

I dash back to the sideboard and take up the cream I set there for the tea. He needs milk to cut the spice.

“Drink this,” I tell him, giving it to him right from the pouring cup.

He just sticks his tongue out, wiping at it with his fingers.