Now with sick dread he realized that Honoré’s warning had been well placed. This net was designed to catch and hold souls, or bits of souls, anyway, and keep anyone from finding them. Calvin had sent a bit of his own soul into the net, and now he couldn’t get out.

Well, that’s what they thought. Nets were made of cord; cord was made of threads wound and twisted; threads were spun from fibers. All of these were things that Calvin well understood. He set to work at once.

Denmark Vesey scowled at Gullah Joe, but the old witchy man didn’t even seem to notice. White men had been known to step back a bit when they saw Denmark passing by with such a look on his face. Even the kind of White men who liked to goad Blacks, like those men on the dock today, they wouldn’t mess with him when he wore that scowl on his face. He only let them push him around today because he had to show the new slaves how to keep White folks happy. But he still felt the rage and stored it up in his heart.

Not that he felt the kind of fury that filled that net of souls hanging up not ten paces away. That’s because Denmark wasn’t no man’s slave. He wasn’t even fully Black. He was the son of one of those rare slaveowners who felt some kind of fatherly responsibility toward the children he sired on his Black women. He gave freedom to all his half-Black bastards, freedom and a geography lesson, since every one of them was named for a European country. Few of them stayed free, though, if they once strayed from Mr. Vesey’s plantation near Savannah. What difference did it make being free, if you had to live among the slaves and work among them and couldn’t leave any more than the slaves did?

It made a difference to Denmark. He wasn’t going to stick around on the plantation. He figured out what letters were when he was still little and got hold of a book and taught himself to read. He learned his numbers from his father’s cousin, a French student who lived on the plantation to hide out because he took part in an anti-Napoleon rally at the university. The boy fancied himself some kind of hero of the oppressed, but all Denmark cared about was learning how to decode the mysteries that White people used to keep Black folks down. By the time he was ten, his father had him keeping the books for the plantation, though they had to keep it secret even from the White foreman. His father would pat his head and praise him, but the praise made Denmark want to kill him. “Just goes to show your Black mama’s blood can’t wipe out all the brains you get from a White papa.” His father was still sleeping with his mother and getting more babies on her, and he knew she wasn’t stupid, but he still talked like that, showing no respect for her at all, even though her children were smarter than the dim-witted little White weaklings that Father’s wife produced.