When Deborah and Felix had been summoned by the girl who had come in early to start the kitchen fires, they appeared to find the facts hard to comprehend, as if their minds were still asleep. Ezra understood quickly enough and left Benjamin and Rooster with his mistress while he went to the back door and summoned Skeeter and Bozo, two of the most reliable men on the place, head drivers of the cotton wagons by whose side Arnold had slept on the trip to Savannah in September. The men entered shyly and carried Arnold’s body upstairs to his and Deborah’s room. Ezra followed them; he knew it was for him to bathe and dress the master for his coffin.

Lovey had gone quickly to Selma and Leon. Pauline stopped at Selma’s door to wait until her mother had first told Leon. Floyd went with her into Leon’s room, with which he was long familiar but which he had not entered for several months. Leon had heard the commotion outside and downstairs and was awake, his expression a mixture of the fearful and hopeful which princes ever have worn as they waited for news of the death of kings and their own ascension. Lovey told him what had happened. When he sat up in bed in his night gown, she leaned automatically to hug him, and then let him go, seeing that he did not grieve.

Floyd waited inside the doorway, looking and feeling, for the first time in Leon’s presence, like a servant. Leon did not appear to notice him at all but got out of bed, slipped the night gown over his head and began to dress. Floyd went out with his mother and crept downstairs and out of the house, while she went on to Selma’s room, where Pauline stood guard at the door.

Selma was entirely under the covers, holding the edge of the top quilt over her head, herself a shivering mound. Her senses told her some calamity had come, although the murmurous sounds of the people outside the house and the clamorous comings and goings on the stairs had not told her the precise nature and size of the calamity.

Lovey pulled back the quilt gently, and before she said anything, gathered the girl into her arms. Sitting on the side of the bed, rocking and comforting the child in her arms, she told her that her father was dead. Selma lay stiff in Lovey’s embrace, her eyes glassy. When Pauline, made bold by sympathy, crept close and reached out a hand to touch and comfort, Selma cried out and kicked her away, collapsing on Lovey’s bosom and lap with terrible sobs, wailing, “I wish it was Mama!”

Downstairs Felix had assumed formal charge of things, although it was Deborah’s voice that quietly directed him in what he said and did.