“I never going a-control these feelings! Hate just going a-get bigger and bigger till I kill somebody!”

“That’s how it feels now, but I assure you, slaves in other cities, in other places, nobody takes their pride and hides it away, but they learn, they watch, they wait.”

“Wait for what? Wait to die.”

“Wait for hope,” said Margaret. “They don’t have hope, but they hope for hope, for a reason to hope. And in the meantime, there are many White men and women like me, who hate the whole idea of slavery. We’re doing all we can to set you free.”

“All you can ain’t worth nothing.”

Margaret had to admit the truth of what she said. “Fishy, I fear that you’re right. I’ve been trying to do it with words alone, to persuade them, but I fear that they’re never going to change until they’re made to change. I fear that it will take war, bloody terrible war between the Crown Colonies and the United States.”

Fishy looked at her strangely. “You telling me there be White folks up North, they willing to fight and die just to set Black folks free?”

“Some,” said Margaret. “And many more who are willing to fight and die in order to break the back of King Arthur, and others who would fight to show that the United States won’t get pushed around by anybody, and—why should you care why they fight? If the war comes, if the North wins, then slavery will end.”

“Then bring on that war.”

“Do you want it?” asked Margaret, curious. “How many White people should die, so you can be free?”

“All of them!” cried Fishy, her voice full of loathing. Then she softened. “As many as it takes.” And then she wept again. “Oh, sweet Jesus, what am I? My soul so wicked! I going to hell!”

Margaret knelt beside her, facing her, and dared now to lay her hand gently on Fishy’s shoulder. The girl did not recoil from her, as she would have earlier. “You will not go to hell,” said Margaret. “God sees your heart.”

“My heart be full of murder all the time now!” said Fishy.

“And yet your hand is still the hand of peace. God loves you for choosing that, Fishy. God loves you for living up to your true name.”

The movement was slight, but it was real, as Fishy leaned a little closer to Margaret, accepting her touch, and then her embrace, until she wept into Margaret’s shoulder. “Let me stay with you, ma’am,” whispered Fishy.

“Come with me to my room, then,” said Margaret. “I hope you don’t mind going along with me in some lies.”

Fishy giggled, though at the end it was more of a sob than a laugh. “Around here, ma’am, if folks got they mouth open, if they ain’t eating then they lying.”

11

Decent Men

So this was what it came to, after all these years at the bar, as lawyer and as judge: John Adams had to sit in judgment in Cambridge over a witch trial. Oh, the ignominy of it. For a time he had been something of a philosopher, and caused an international incident over his involvement in the Appalachee Revolution. He had spoken for union between New England and the United States, daring the Lord Protector to arrest him for treason. He had called for a ban on trade with the Crown Colonies as long as they trafficked in slaves, at the very time that his fellow New Englanders were loudly calling for the right to enter into such trade. There wasn’t a question of import in New England since the 1760s that John Adams hadn’t been a part of. He had even founded a dynasty, or so it seemed, now that his boy John Quincy was governor of Massachusetts and chairman of the New England Council. And for the past fifteen years he had distinguished himself as a jurist, winning at last the love of his fellow Yankees when he refused an appointment to the Lord Protector’s Bench in England, preferring to remain “among the free men of America.”