Forty-eight blank faces stare back.

“All right, now. I’m going on to church. You all should sing a song.”

There’s a moment of hesitation. A silent shuffling. Resistance. Then Jim clears his throat and sings out in his honey baritone, “Swing low, sweet chariot.”

We all join in with, “coming for to carry me home.”

We’re singing with all our heart and soul. Master looks pleased and hurries on off to his wife. He’s pleased because he don’t hear the anger and the longing and the determination. He don’t know we’re singing for that runaway. He don’t see the tears on Jim’s face when he sings out the last part. “If you get there before I do, tell all my friends I’m coming too.”

He don’t know it’s a freedom song and we’re singing it for the slave who got away, and for all of us left behind dreaming of the promised land.

Chapter 31

Henry

The chains are done. And the neck collars and the shackles. Mister Johnson is pleased with them and I am glad to have them out of my sight.

The new piece I’m working on is a decorative fireplace grate that he’s asked me to make for the dining room. If I do a good job with it, it being the first decorative thing he’s asked me to make, he’ll have a lot more work for me. He’s mentioned gate doors for the walled garden made of twisted iron vines, and a new handrail full of iron roses for the stairs.

I’m awkward with my hammer strokes. I should be tapping, coaxing the metal into shape, but my mind is stuck on Sarah and my frustration makes me clumsy.

The children who usually supply me with fresh water buckets haven’t turned up, and I can sense that something is different on the plantation.

I stop my hammering and snatch up my bucket, meaning to head to the well, but the sound of a sharp crack down by the fields catches my attention and makes me curious. I strike off that way, just to see, and find a crowd gathered around a sycamore tree that grows beyond the overseer’s cabin and the field slave huts. It looks like a Sunday church gathering, except those are held under the walnut tree on the lawn behind the main house, and it isn’t Sunday.

As I draw up closer my ears prick at the swish and lick of the lash. I’ve heard about these plantation whippings, but in all my months down South, I’ve never seen one first hand. I hold back on the paddock hill and hear another blow. And another. I don’t want to stay up here, hovering like a spy, but it seems cruel to go on about my day as if nothing were happening. There’s a chance, I think, that another white face might keep the overseer’s anger from getting too excessive with his punishment, so I make my way toward the gathering.

In the middle of a sea of black and brown, clad in the dull tan of homespuns, I can see the billowing white shirt and blond head of the overseer. There’s a rhythm to the blows he’s meting out. His body surges forward and back like a wave. This time, when he rears up for another blow, I get a view of a mahogany back, slashed and slick with blood. The slim waist and shoulders tell me instantly he’s striking a woman and my stomach turns at seeing his brutality.