Year after year, I observed the girl’s metamorphosis into a young woman with a proud, dignified bearing. The resemblance to the young woman I had once been only grew. I watched Jeanne become my double, my likeness, my sister. Of course, she never paid me the slightest attention. Her only acknowledgment of my existence was the minimum necessary for the fulfillment of her duties. I began, in the solitude of my thoughts, to contemplate the prospect of making my next crossing with the slave girl who served me my every meal. But if I was to cross again, I wished to avoid making the same mistake I had made with this one. I was lost, cast adrift here on this Louisiana plantation, and what I yearned for was a new beginning, morally as well as physically. Jeanne became the symbol of the fresh start I craved. And as I did not wish to live a life of slavery, before crossing with her, I would need to procure her freedom.

Obtaining the freedom of a slave was no simple undertaking. I could either buy her myself and free her or organize her escape and expose her to the risk of capture and punishment. In the dungeon under the same house where, nightly, we gathered to eat our fill, recalcitrant slaves were subjected to unspeakable cruelties. I was determined to avoid that fate. However, having no money of my own, I was unable to purchase the girl myself—and even if I had, the act would have caused more problems than it solved. For whenever Jeanne was near, Hortense’s gaze blazed in my direction, envious of the attentions I devoted to the girl; all Hortense ever received from me was politeness. Sometimes, when she caught me gazing longingly at Jeanne, she would slip into an uncontrolled rage and, in tears, beg her father to send the girl away. Desire would reply that he had nowhere to send the girl, other than the slave market. “Send her to the slave market, then, Papa!” she would plead, knowing it was the banishment of his own daughter, her half sister, that she was asking of him.

At dinner on the porch one evening in the autumn of 1838, with fireflies flickering softly in the darkness of the garden below and all the world soft and gentle, Desire finally relented after another of Hortense’s fits of pique. Jeanne was attending to us impassively as always. She was standing within earshot not a few feet away from him when he announced, “If it makes you happy, I will sell the girl.”

Hortense looked up, wide-eyed with happy astonishment. “What did you say, Papa?”

“Jeanne. If it makes you happy, I will send her away.”