For a moment they did not move until Chance nudged them, and then she realized that not only had they failed to comprehend what she had read them, but that they did not understand her speech. The field hands talked pure Gullah. It was only with the house negroes that she could communicate at all.

Gradually, she gave up her efforts to manage the negroes. As her pregnancy advanced and increasing malaise and lethargy overpowered her, she could not feel the tolerance for their shortcomings that was requisite to dealing with them. 'Just treat them as children,' Maria Nisbett admonished her impatiently, when she once ventured to discuss her troubles. Still one wearied of being surrounded by, and dependent on, children. Also children eventually improved under tutelage, outgrew pilfering and lying and laziness. But the negroes didn't, they were always the same, and she found them tiresome or worse, as in the case of Venus.

Theo had no idea that part of her difficulties in handling the slaves came from Venus's influence. The girl did her best to spread mutiny throughout the two hundred blacks who served the Alstons at the Oaks. She made little headway; the negroes only laughed at her, and their loyalty to Joseph, their hereditary ruler, was unshakable. Nor could she incite them against the overseer, who was a just man and understood their psychology. But the 'Yankee mistiss' was another matter. Was their allotment of groceries a trifle scant, or the temper of a new hoe not so keen as those dealt out last year? It was the foreign mistiss who had ordered it thus, said Venus. Old Fortune's rheumatism and Hagar's bloody flux, for which Theo had tried some Northern remedies, hadn't they got worse at once?

And she had laughed at conjuh, telling them it was foolish, hadn't she? said Venus, who secretly had no use for conjuh herself, but understood this most powerful of all arguments. That was because young miss didn't believe in anything. She was no better than a heathen. Night after night, said Venus, she had waited and peeked to see if young miss said her prayers. But she never did. She never even opened the Good Book and read. She went to church only when maussa made her. She was bad, was young miss.

All this made less trouble than she had hoped, for Venus was not popular in the 'street/ the women were jealous of her looks, and resented her air of superiority. The men were afraid of her, particularly those who had tried to bed her, and on whom she had turned scratching and snarling like a catamount.

Yet Venus's campaign had its effect and increased Theo's troubles. She gave Theodosia no overt cause for complaint, kept her clothes in perfect repair, obeyed orders with promptness, but with a sort of silky defiance and sullenness that was intangible. Until one day in March.