Madame Elizabeth was just taking up the whip to prod the mule when Mama seized her friend’s hand and kissed the knuckles where they wrapped around the switch.

Madame Elizabeth looked startled. Lucien smirked—oh, how I hated him for that.

For Mama looked genuinely pained. “If you should run into any trouble—”

“We won’t,” Madame Elizabeth said.

“But if you should …” She held her friend’s hand for a beat more, then flung it away from her. “Be safe.”

Mr. Ben had come outside for this last bit. He bent his head slightly in the wagon’s direction. “Thanks, mamselle,” he said with slight mockery, to which Madame Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

Then she called to the mule, and they were on their way.

Mama stayed to watch them go. Mr. Ben stood beside her.

“Y’all ain’t afraid of getting caught?” he said.

“She’s very good at what she does.”

Mr. Ben sniffed. “When she’s not trying to murder a man.”

Mama glanced at me, then looked back to the road, where the wagon moved slowly away from us. “You made it here well enough.”

“Back in Maryland,” Mr. Ben said, “where I was before …” He looked down at his hands. “Before I was sold the first time, there was a group of niggers like you gals. They did what you doing. They got fifteen out. And then they was caught. You don’t want to hear what happened.”

Mama glanced again at me, then back at Mr. Ben. “We most certainly do not,” she said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Blood—”

“That’s enough,” Mama said. “Mr. Ben, if you’re well enough to stand and well enough to talk, do you think you’re well enough to help us today?”

He sniffed again. “I suppose so.”

“Good,” Mama said. “The best way to help is to stay quiet and stay out of the way, then. Don’t let anybody who comes to the house see you yet.”

“Your neighbors don’t know you in this business? Mamselle Elizabeth told me she was bringing me to an all-colored town.”

“We are,” Mama said. “You’ll settle well here. But it’s best if we allow people to truthfully say they thought you came here on your own. Generally, we take care of each other here. But I don’t want to put anyone into a position of lying for us. It’s too dangerous. Besides, you know as well as I do, Mr. Ben. Even with our own, you can’t trust everybody.”

He looked out over the yard again, to the barn and the squat crab-apple tree, to the hog pen with the two pigs just now rising from the mud to wander, to Mama’s medicine garden and the small field that lay just beyond it, where we grew the vegetables for the kitchen, to all the things that I’d just told him she owned.

“I suppose that’s right,” he said. “Just because a person’s a nigger doesn’t mean they know the life you do.” Then he looked at Mama and stalked back into the house.