Father’s second purchase was a woman named Harriet when Rosalie was one year old. June was two and a half, and Mother, who had no idea how to live in the wilderness, desperately needed help. Once again, Father convinced himself that he was being generous. Father could convince himself of almost anything; he was his own easiest mark. He offered Harriet, currently a slave for life, that form of bondage known as term slavery.

These were the terms:

1. Like Joe, Harriet was to serve five years and then be freed.

   But as a woman, any possible children must also be considered.

   So . . .

2. Father would own any children she had until they turned twenty-four, at which time they’d be freed. And finally . . .
3. Father promised that none of her children would be sold anywhere outside the state of Maryland nor removed from Maryland after manumission.

Three days after this contract was signed, Harriet casually announced her intention to bludgeon Mother to death with a fence rail whenever the opportunity first showed itself. She was given her freedom immediately and dismissed from service. She was the last human Father bought.

Rosalie knows about Harriet because Aunty Rogers has told her. Poor Mother couldn’t bake biscuits and she couldn’t manage a slave. Aunty Rogers could have mentioned Harriet during that quarrel they’d almost had about slavery. Clearly Father and Mother’s principles were more fluid than Mother liked to acknowledge. But it was enough for Aunty Rogers to know this; she didn’t have to say it. Whatever Mother might claim to believe, they were still white women together.

vi

Back in 1838, in the absence of both her mother and father, Rosalie is almost able to relax. Spring is arriving in manageable pieces, like things seen in the shards of a broken mirror, heard from a passing carriage—birds, bugs, leaves, flowers, rain, clouds. A contented hum rises from the earth all around the cabin. Overnight, the cherry tree has burst into spectacular bloom. It is unseasonably warm.

Still no word from the great bullfrog, but the wood frogs are awake and in the evenings when Asia is in bed, Rosalie pulls her mother’s ladder-back chair out onto the doorstep to listen to them. Under the willows, right where the stream turns to marsh, they call out in a chorus strangely like the sound of galloping horses.

She watches for omens, signs of how things are going with her father and mother in Charleston. One night, she sees an owl fall and rise again with something small and tender in its feet. It settles in a nearby tree to eat. Strings of viscera dangle from its beak. Rosalie decides she doesn’t believe in omens. She takes her chair back inside. She avoids the graveyard even more than usual as the ghosts have begun predicting vague sorts of doom—hunters with hounds with teeth like the wolf in the fold they loosed him with a single lash who’ll make the shroud if it’s not in the dark these violent delights have violent ends. It’s not even clear they mean to distress with these ominous mutterings. They themselves seem unperturbed.