Mother watches as Rosalie reads to the end. “We have no secrets between us,” Mother has begun to tell her, which certainly isn’t true on Rosalie’s side, and Rosalie wishes weren’t true on her mother’s either. There are things she’s glad to know and things she’d rather not. Mother never says, “We have no secrets,” to June, which sometimes makes Rosalie think she loves Rosalie best and sometimes makes her think just the opposite.

Father’s attempt to kill himself is one of those things Rosalie would rather not know about, the second suicide attempt of which she’s aware—a hanging first, a drowning now—and June is not. What would happen to them all if Father were gone?

She comforts herself that when he actually wants to die he’ll be less theatrical about it, and she takes further comfort in the fact that he’s incapable of being less theatrical. Her father would never waste the dramatic potential of suicide. It’s a big scene; it demands a big audience.

“I must go to him,” Mother says. She makes two attempts to rise before she manages it with her huge belly and her shaking legs. She packs her case. She talks to Grandfather and to Ann and Joe Hall. At the last minute, she decides to take Edwin along. Edwin, she says, will cheer Father. So the tractable child goes and the intractable child stays.

v

The Enslaved

June and Rosalie are not left fending for themselves and caring for Asia alone in the wilderness with only their drunken grandfather to help. Far from it. By 1838, the farm is home to some forty people, most of them slaves who live in a scatter of cabins at the forest’s edge. Father has leased these slaves from their owners to work the farm, but he also pays them wages directly and a handful have been able to buy freedom with that money.

Once, when Rosalie was nine or so, she heard Aunty Rogers say to Mother that the distance between owning a slave and leasing one was not so great. “In my house,” Mother had said, “we respect the natural dignity of every single person God made.” Rosalie was shocked by how angry she sounded. Suddenly it seemed as if Aunty Rogers and Mother were quarreling.

But then Mother asked about Aunty Rogers’ bad knee, which, as luck would have it, was very bad on this particular day, bad enough to require a detailed description. “It cuts under my kneecap like a knife,” Aunty Rogers said, and then, feeling the insufficiency of this, “like a ribbon of fire.” The contentious subject of slavery was forgotten. Ann, who was working in the kitchen at the time, said that’s a shame about Aunty Rogers’ knee.

Ann and Joe Hall are more like family than Aunty Rogers, yet Rosalie doesn’t think of them as aunt and uncle, only as Ann and Joe. Joe came to the farm in 1822, so she’s never known a home without him. He’s been a steady, comforting presence in her life.