Roscoe understood that there are many shadings of character and relationship, and that these are always changing, however imperceptibly. His ordinary observation told him which slaves he could deal with hardly and which were best handled softly, and those few not to be handled at all. Of the last, when he had been there three or four years, he knew only Lovey and Ezra to be immune to his power. They baffled him, because they were neither self-seeking nor self-excusing. They could not be despised as he despised the white-loving willies and janes of his earlier experience who knew their place and accepted its lowness, who feared God and had no greater hope than to go on serving their white folks in Heaven.

Floyd was their son. Floyd was the—he would not use the word friend, he could not say servant—companion, the everyday, no-kin brother of the son of the lord and lady. While the boys were young, this was not a problem, but as they grew older it became one that plagued his mind at odd times. Children of slaves were set to work early. Heavy demands were not made of them, but they worked alongside their fathers and mothers in the fields and woods, house and barns and pens. They took childish pride in learning the work that would occupy them all their lives and were praised and rewarded for any sign of quickness or excellence.

As an extension of his record-keeping, Roscoe had come to be something of a director of workers, with a good eye for assigning men where they were most needed, which Arnold Kendrick was quick to appreciate and confide to Deborah, although she would have already seen it for herself. All Arnold had to say was, “Send some men to dig up the potato hill,” for Roscoe to know exactly the job to be done, how many hands were required to accomplish it, and how long it should take.

Floyd was a bright, fast-growing boy, always a little too big for his clothes, and Roscoe could not see him without wanting to set him to work. Floyd did work sometimes; he was not lazy. He could hoe corn, chop cotton, pick cotton, pull fodder, cut sugar cane, all before he was ten years old, and he often did such work. But as often he left it without a word of permission to go off with Leon to the woods, or wherever the mood of the day and hour suggested. Floyd was a slave boy, but he felt free, and that was what Roscoe could neither understand nor abide.

Remembering himself as a boy, he hated Floyd. Gradually and carefully he brought up the question with Arnold, who seemed surprised that there was such a question at all, gave him no satisfaction, no authority to deal with the boy.