Although Lovey, who was about her own age, acted as her deputy, it was Deborah who had trained, or retrained, the house servants and who indeed knew how all the male hands on the place were occupied: who plowed and hoed, who chopped and sawed, and who cared for which animals. Deborah and Lovey were a strange pairing, if anyone thought about it, but no one did, because they had been for so long the pair who ran the house.

Deborah was an erect, quick-stepping woman whose face, because it seemed ever to be scrutinizing and weighing, held no softness or humor. Her dark red hair was parted in the middle and caught at the back of her neck in a bun that grew heavier and larger every year.

Lovey was shorter than her mistress and ampler in bosom and behind, but equally quick stepping. Unlike Deborah, she laughed frequently. Her gestures, like her laugh, were quick and nervous, by temperament rather than reason, for Lovey was afraid of nothing and no one. Her independence of spirit was the thing Deborah had first noticed about her when she came to live at Beulah Land following her marriage to Arnold in 1800.

In the bill of sale that had brought her to Beulah Land a year before Deborah’s arrival, Lovey’s name was given as Laverne La Vey, but this was too fancy to be endured by her new fellows, who soon converted La Vey into Lovey and dropped Laverne altogether.

Laverne La Vey had been plump and attractive, and her temper delighted the other slaves, for their only entertainment was in each other and the turn of events on the plantation. One after another the unattached men made approaches to the girl, who slapped them away like so many flies, declaring that she had no time or mind for men, that, in fact, she despised every one of them and was determined that her distant but eventual grave be virginal. This was taken as an amusing display of spirit, even rebellion, since it was understood that a woman’s function, in addition to performing whatever work she was set to, was to bear the children who would replace her and her man, when their time of usefulness was over. Besides, it was so obviously absurd. How could a girl as pretty and lively as Laverne hope to hold out against the pressing ardor of the young men?