Asia walks between John and Sleeper as they approach Stephen Hooper’s cabin. John is just saying something about the profusion of stars, when he suddenly shoves Asia to the ground, throws himself over her. Asia hears the sharp sound of a rifle and slowly understands that Stephen Hooper is peppering them with buckshot.

John’s hat has been blown from his head.

The shots continue, striking rocks and mud, echoing in the still night. Little Susanna Hall begins to cry. “Am I shot? Am I shot?” she asks her brother Pink, who kneels to wrap his arms around her, rocks her gently, and says that she is not. No one has been shot.

When firing ceases, John rises slowly and retrieves his hat. “I’ll remember this, Hooper,” he shouts. “Count on it.”

Sleeper helps Asia up, asks anxiously if she was hurt in the fall. She’s too angry to know for sure. As a black man, Hooper is not allowed to have a gun. “He had no provocation,” Asia says, forgetting his dead dog, incapable of understanding what a black man might feel, living alone in a remote cabin, and seeing a mob of people coming silently towards him in the dark.

It would be as easy as anything to see him hauled away. Asia assumes John will report it. And yet, days go by. She asks John about it. “I don’t know,” he says, as if he’s as surprised as she by his own lack of action. “I seem to have forgiven him.”

How is a person able to do this, erase an injury from the heart as if it never made a mark? Asia can’t fathom it. John, so determined, so single-minded about some things, is oddly mercurial about others.

His restraint appears to unsettle Hooper. Henceforth, Asia says, he treats them with a smiling hatred. A year later when some of Hooper’s sons are hired to work on the farm, Asia objects. “Remember Halloween,” she says.

John puts a hand on her arm. “That was a long time ago.”

No, she thinks. One may smile and smile and be a villain.

—

This is the last time Asia will see Pinkney Hall on the farm. A few days later he and his sister Mary Ellen run. Aunty Rogers takes this as a personal insult, a suggestion that they don’t take care of their slaves, that their slaves are not, in fact, practically family. If anything, Elijah has been too indulgent. Hasn’t he let Pink see his parents more often than a slave could hope? Hasn’t he always behaved with tolerance and generosity when another owner might have noticed laziness and insolence?

She turns a suspicious eye on Ann and Joe. Someone gave Pinkney and Mary Ellen the money to escape—they could never have managed without money.