I don’t stop until I’m far from what’s happening under the sycamore tree. At the river in the woods, I hear chirping and buzzing and the burble of the water, and I stand still, pulsing with feelings I can’t put to words. I’ve known starving days and fever nights and waking up next to dead kin, but I’ve never known this.

I stay in the woods, staring at the river, until the daylight drops away.

Chapter 32

Maple

By the time Master Mulch tires himself out and hands Red the key to the shackles, Annie ain’t got strength to stand. She hangs alongside the trunk of the whipping tree, her arms strung around a low branch, her naked body slick with blood.

Red unhooks her and Samson and Clover catch her and carry her to the cabin she shares with Willa. Callie May picks her clothes from the dirt, and then runs ahead to put a soft quilt on the bed and cover it with an old sheet so the blood don’t stain it. With her back ripped to pieces, they lay Annie on her stomach. He got her from her shoulders to her knees. In some places, her flesh hangs loose. I ain’t never seen a slave whipped so hard at Jubilee. A time or two at Belle Grove, but never here.

“We should tell Master what he done,” Callie May says.

“You crazy, woman?” Samson scratches his fingers through his thick hair. “If Master Mulch finds you been talking on him, he’ll get you good.”

Callie May hugs around her own waist. “Red, you should say something. You ain’t up under him in the fields.”

“He don’t need to be,” Clover says, slipping an arm around his wife, pulling her to his side.

“We ain’t saying nothing to nobody,” Red says. “We ain’t making this worse.”

Willa comes in with a bowl from the kitchen house and a rag floating in it. She kneels next to Annie and dabs at her back. Annie’s whimpering turns into yells.

“Leave her be,” I say. “It’s too raw to be touching on it.”

“This here’s from Sarah. She says we got to keep the infection out. She’s brewing up something else for the pain and to help her sleep.”

Red holds Annie’s hands as she quakes and jerks and moans and whimpers every time Willa takes the cloth to her. Samson, Clover and Callie May leave for the fields and I leave for the kitchen. Whipping or not, I can’t be late with supper.

In the kitchen house Sarah bends over my pots, brewing up her potions and mashing up a paste.

“That stinky mess for Annie?” I ask.

She nods, mashing and mumbling to herself. I leave her to it. Annie needs all the help she can get.

I take up the basket of collard greens and wash and cut them myself. When Sarah’s done, she carries her pot and her paste out to Annie and I finish the meal on my own. When it’s ready to serve, I go by the cabin and see Sarah and Willa hunched over Annie, dabbing paste on her back and laying soaked cloths over the top. They got her drinking some foul-smelling mess, but she’s quieter.