“I’m bringing my slave to my quarters,” he said, haughty as a rich planter. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“We got a hayloft for the slaves, sir.”

Henry stilled, collecting his nerves. “That’s very kind, but I’ll be needing her ministrations tonight.”

The clerk let us go without another word. When we got in the room, Henry’s jaw was clenching.

“You all right?” I asked.

“They’ll let you in here as my whore but not as my wife. They’re pigs, perfumed over and draped in fine clothes.”

“Just ’cause you play-acting like them, don’t mean you is like them.”

He barely ate that night, which is something for Henry, ’cause he don’t never turn down food.

At another inn, a customer complained about letting bed-warmers stay in the rooms, but he was overruled by the customs of the South. When we traveled on to the next place, another customer offered Henry money to have me warm his bed for the night instead of Henry’s own. And all the while Henry had to treat me like a slave, and I had to call him Master.

We’d planned to keep up the disguise and settle down somewhere with no one knowing the truth, but that weren’t for us. Henry hated the man he had to pretend to be. And I hated that I had my freedom, with my papers tucked inside my pocket, and I still had to call myself slave.

“And the children,” Henry said. “Do we pretend they’re slaves as well?”

It wasn’t how I pictured freedom.

In Maryland, we got clear away from white folks. We went to the tucked-off, leftover parts where blacks go to live. There were people of every color, from as dark as Jim to as light as Maple. Me and Henry reckoned we could just blend right in. We let them believe Henry was like Maple, coming from a long line of slave mommas and slave-owner daddies, washed whiter and whiter, till all his color just about faded out. If anyone knew different, they didn’t say so. Leastways not to us.

The first thing Henry did was build us a house. The good bargain Aaron Newman made on the sale of Matthew Johnson’s witch meant we had nearly a thousand dollars to get started with. Henry bought wood and tools and got to building soon as we found our spot. Not three days in, Pete Freedman came by, a high-yellow man with small ears and a big heart. When he saw Henry trying to build the house by himself, he walked over and picked up a plank of wood.

“You want this over here?” he asked, and then he just started hammering it into place.

The next day he brought seven more men with him. Soon enough, he and Henry got to where they’re like brothers.

Our house has two rooms downstairs and a loft above to sleep. The bigger room is for us to live in, and the small room is a kind of shop. I gather up just about every plant I know and dry them and put them in jars on the shelves. It don’t take long for people to know they can come and tell me what ails them and, chances are, I’ve got something to soothe it.