She shakes her head at me. “You’re a free man. You take whatever jobs you want. You can say no.”

I clasp her arm, needing her to understand, but she cringes away from me like I might hit her, and I know I’ve made a mistake by grabbing her. I force myself to let her go and walk up to the workbench, picking up a neck ring. “I don’t agree with this.” But I can see something has shifted for her.

She stares at the ring and places a hand to her throat. “You ever have one of those around your neck?”

I can’t answer her. I can’t look at her.

She snatches up the shackles and thrusts them into my chest. “Or one of these around your ankles?”

I lay my hand over hers and she pulls it away, leaving me holding the cold iron.

I feel the shame choking me, but also the anger, because she doesn’t understand what I’ve been through, or why I need to keep working no matter what.

“I’ve had shackles my whole life,” I tell her. “Being poor is like a chain that squeezes tighter every time your empty belly rumbles, and I’ll not be its victim again.”

“It’s like a chain?” she says. “Like the ones that cut your skin making your ankles bleed when they march you down to the auction block. Does it feel like that? Or like being hooked to the man in front of you and the woman behind you, keeping you hunched up, taking half-steps all the way from Charlottesville.”

“You don’t understand.”

“And when a man down the line takes up a rock and hits at your poor-man chains, does he get whipped till he can’t hardly stand? So everybody knows never to try to touch them chains again?”

“You’ve never known what it means to starve. To see your family shrink to skeletons and die of hunger.”

She lays her hand over the links of metal on the table, like she’s checking that they’re real, and I can see she’s trembling. She doesn’t look at me as she says, “I know about dying of other things.” She wipes her hand on her skirts and backs away. “I have to get on back to work now, Mister Taylor, before they start to miss me. Enjoy your pie.”

Chapter 27

Sarah

Master’s got a dozen friends over so I can’t go to bed. My feet hurt from all the standing. I shift my weight and pick one foot up, barely off the ground, and curl my toes and circle my ankle. I sway my weight back and do the other foot, moving slowly so no one will notice.

“Why should we try to appease people who will never understand?” that Congressman Bocock with the chin beard asks.

Don’t know why he thinks a snatch of billy-goat beard flapping around when he talks makes him look good. He holds his glass out and gives it a shake, and I come scrambling over with the bottle. They been drinking wine all night and now they done moved on to whiskey. Nearly got that bottle beat too.