“There’s no ‘still’ any more. It will come. I just wish I had got myself out of the way and was lying over there by my Benjamin. I’ve had a life. I want nothing to do with what they all say will happen. One says the Union will let us go peaceful. But others say they’ll fight to hold us. Why can’t they just leave us alone? What we do is none of their business. We’re not a Union any more, we’re different kinds of people. And that ugly Lincoln and his vulgar wife! Black Republicans!” Edna spat on the ground, then shivered and drew closer to Sarah. “To think I’d ever spit in a graveyard.”

“A lot of people up North and some down here say slavery is wrong.”

Edna bridled. “They didn’t say so as long as they sailed their ships back and forth to Africa selling us the slaves in the first place! Now they talk morality! Oh, there’s nothing lower than a Yankee, and you know it. More and more they go against us, and all for money you can bet, no matter how they tell it. But Rooster says we’ll never let them force us to anything!”

Sarah waited a minute before speaking. “Edna, they think they’re every bit as right as we think we are. Roman writes me regularly, and he says—”

“He’s a Nigra, a Northern Nigra by now.”

“He’s Roman and part of us wherever he is, and in his heart he’s suffering the way we do. He loves it down here, but he can’t come home, you know that. Not as long as the Elk family is here, and it looks like they grow stronger by the year. Roman says rumors in Philadelphia are just ridiculous, but that plenty of ignorant people, and some not so ignorant, believe them. It’s being said by the abolitionists—”

“Lying hypocrites!”

“They claim they have secretly supplied out people with arsenic and strychnine to kill us when the time comes!”

“They who say so ought to be tarred and feathered! Stripped and dipped in boiling tar and feathered, I say! When I think of my people—Can you see Lovey poisoning you?”

“Roman says they’re ridiculous, but they believe it because they want to. They’re listened to now even by decent people.”

“If there are any such north of the Mason-Dixon—”

“And they’ve begun to think of us down here as traitors and—unnatural monsters!”