Well, let them! That’s what he thought at first. But it grew so he could hardly bear the sight of his woman, chained to the wall in his tiny room, cursing him whenever he came home. She kept making dolls of him to try to poison him, and it made him good and sick more than once. He didn’t know a thing about poppeting. He’d spent all his effort learning the White man’s secrets and knew nothing about what Black folks did. He came to the day when he realized he had nothing. He might fool White folks into letting him keep the results of his own labor, but he was never going to be White. And Black folks didn’t trust him because he didn’t know their ways, either, and because he acted so White and kept a slave.

Finally one day he knelt down in front of his woman and cried. What can I do to make you love me? She just laughed. You can’t set me free, she said, cause Black folks are never free here. And you can’t make me love you cause I never love him as owns me. And you can’t sell me cause I tell my new master about you, see if I don’t. All you can do is die when I make you a right poppet and kill it dead.

All that hate! Denmark thought that rage was the ruling principle of his own life, but it was nothing compared to what slaves felt. That was when Denmark realized the difference between free and slave—freedom stole hate away from you, and made you weaker. Denmark hated his father, sure, but it was nothing compared to his woman’s hate for him.

Of course he had to kill her. She’d laid it out so plain, and it was clear he wasn’t going to change her mind. It was just a matter of time before she killed him, so he had to defend himself, right? And he owned her, didn’t he? She wouldn’t be the first Black woman killed by her master.

He hit her in the head with a board and knocked her cold. Then he bundled her into a sack and carried her down to the dock. He figured to hold her under the water till she drowned, then pull her out of the sack and let her float so it didn’t look like murder. Well, he had her under the water all right, and she wasn’t even struggling inside the sack, but it was like a voice talking in his mind telling him, You killing the wrong one. It ain’t the Black woman killing you, it’s the White folks. If it wasn’t for the White folks, you could marry this girl and she be free beside you. They the ones she wants to kill, they the ones you ought to kill.

He dragged her out of the water and revived her. But she wasn’t right after that. It might have been the blow to the head or it might have been the water she took on and the time she spent not breathing, but she walked funny and didn’t talk good and she didn’t hate him anymore, but everything he loved about her was dead. It was like he was a murderer after all, but the victim lived in his house and bore him a baby.