Denmark nursed that anger and it kept him free. He wasn’t going to end up on this plantation, no sir. The law said that there wasn’t no such thing as a free Black man in the Crown Colonies. One of Denmark’s own brothers, Italy, had been seized as a runaway in Camelot, and Father had to lay some stripes on Italy’s back before the law would let up and go away. But Denmark wasn’t going to get caught. He went to his father one day with a plan. Father didn’t like it much—he didn’t want to have to go back to doing his own books—but Denmark kept after him and finally went on strike, refusing to do the books if Father didn’t go along. Father had him back in the fields under the overseer for a while, but in the end he didn’t have the heart to waste the boy’s talents.

So when Denmark was seventeen, his father brought him to Camelot and set him up with letters of introduction that Denmark had actually written, so the hand would always match. Denmark went around pretending to be a messenger for his absentee owner, soliciting bookkeeping jobs and copy work. Some White men thought they could cheat him, getting him to work but then refusing to pay the amount agreed on. Denmark hid his anger, then went home and in his elegant hand wrote letters to an attorney, again using his father’s name. As soon as the White men realized that Denmark’s owner wasn’t going to let them get away with cheating him, they generally paid up. The ones that didn’t, Denmark let the matter drop and never worked for them again. It wasn’t so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.

That went on till his father died. Denmark was full grown and had some money set by. No one knew his father in Camelot so it didn’t matter he was dead, as long as nobody went back to Savannah to try to follow up on something Denmark wrote in his father’s name. Not that Denmark didn’t worry for a while. But when it became clear that it was all going well, he started to fancy himself a real man. He decided to buy himself a slave of his own, a Black woman he could love and get children from the way his father did.

He chose the one he wanted and had an attorney buy her for him, then went to pick her up in the name of his father. But when he got her home and she found out that a Black man had bought her, she near clawed his eyes out and ran out screaming into the neighborhood that she wasn’t going to be no slave to a Black man. Denmark chased her down, getting no help from the other residents of Blacktown—that was when he realized they all knew he was free and resented him for it. It all came down to this, from his woman and from his neighbors: They hated being slaves, hated all White people, but more than anyone or anything else they hated a free buck like him.