Mother tells Rosalie privately that she needn’t worry about any of this. Mother is sure that Mr. Rogers won’t sell Ann’s children away. He’s reckoned to be a generous man and a tolerant slaver by every white person in the neighborhood.

She seems remarkably oblivious to how much Ann hates him though it’s obvious to Rosalie. Ann and Joe have been married for years, but Mr. Rogers never lets Ann stay the night here. And Rosalie knows that Mother knows that one day when Ann was working in his fields, he’d refused to send for her as one of her own children choked to death.

Ann and Mother are bound together by their dead children. Ann has two—the little boy who choked and a baby girl who died before she could be named. Both are buried here on the farm. In working for Mother, Ann has traded time with her living children for time with her dead. Their graves abut the family graveyard, but outside the railing rather than in.

Rosalie has never felt their presence, but then she wouldn’t recognize them by feel or voice. It’s possible they’re there and just not interested in Rosalie. Sometimes she thinks she’ll ask Ann if they speak to her, but she always thinks better of it. Mother must never learn about the ghosts.

—

So Rosalie grew up with slaves all about her. As a child, she swam with the children, climbed after them into trees, joined the pack following Joe Hall, their personal Pied Piper, as he went about his business. They were some of her first playmates, but their childhoods ended while they were still children and they were returned to the estates that owned them, to work the houses and fields while their parents remained in Father’s employ.

She’d had one particular friendship, lasting nearly two years, with a little boy named Nelson. Nelson was, like Henry Byron, good at making up games and good at playing the games he’d made up. Nobody knew exactly how old he was, but probably younger than Henry and certainly younger than Rosalie. He would come into the yard some mornings after breakfast and whistle for June or Henry or Rosalie to come out—not a one-note, fingers-in-the-mouth whistle, though he could do that, too, but a whole stanza of a song Rosalie didn’t know.

Many years later, quite grown-up, Rosalie will hear this song again, hear it played on the fiddle by a man in a Baltimore park, when she is out for a Sunday stroll with her family. The others will walk on oblivious, but the tune will come for her like a fist, knocking the breath from her lungs. That tune will bring back everything. Nelson first, of course, Nelson smiling up at her from the yard, and then, the sharp, cutting memory of Mary Ann, begging to be allowed to come along when Rosalie leaves her to run off and play, and of Elizabeth, her arms outstretched, her cheeks flushed, her nose running, her light hair sparse over her baby skull.