Such dreams comforted Roman’s restless sensibilities only briefly. He remembered that Adam was a child and that none of the dream was true, nor likely to become so, and his fancy moved on, lighting next on one of the slave girls, who was called Roxy. She had been, or seemed to be, an ordinary enough girl until her mother died a few months ago. Her father, it was rumored, forced himself on her and afterward beat her, and then ignored her entirely and let her run wild. She was said now to go into or back of the barn with any stud who signaled to her. She was careless of her clothes and never bathed, not even her face and hands, and her hair went undressed, standing up and around her head like overripe cotton popping out of the boll. She was scorned and ignored by all the women and girls.

It was then that Roman, knowing her history, real and rumored, and seasoning it with romantic sentimentalities, decided that he could love her. Where others jeered, he would be kind. Seeing him notice her, Roxy would begin to bathe herself again, and to mend and wash her clothes, and wait for him to smile on her new, changed self. When that daydream had taken him to the point of actually speaking to her, she laughed at him and declared she “wasn’t going to fuck no humpback.”

Roman kept to his room the rest of that day, feeling a fool and ashamed of his foolish romancing. There were others he loved briefly. If none were as absurd as his dreams of Roxy and Adam, their appeal was not as potent either, and they came and were forgotten in a day’s durance.

Many of the nicer, shier slave girls would have been pleased at Roman’s notice, but he never saw them. When his fancy had exhausted the impossibilities, it seemed almost natural that he should find himself thinking of Leon. No other had as powerful a claim on his imagination. He knew beyond question that he was Leon’s son, and he knew that their relationship would never be acknowledged more than it presently was. There was romance in the very degradation of the kinship, encouraging boldness.