Mawu rolled her eyes at Sweet. “Who don’t got childrens? But what I’m gone do for my child as a slave woman? I need to run off so as I can try to get my boy out. As long as I is a slave, ain’t nothing gone change.”

“What ideas you got, girl?” George asked in an almost-whisper.

Mawu’s words hummed in Lizzie’s ears as she murmured her plan. But even more disturbing was the penetrating concentration of the others, the rapt attention of their bodies and barely audible breaths. Even Reenie. Only Lizzie looked from face to face.

“I figure us can get that white woman to help us get a letter to the high yellow woman I met at that there resort.” Mawu looked around. “But I can’t read nor write.”

George spoke again: “Lizzie know how to write the best.”

Lizzie’s throat narrowed and she had to open her mouth to breathe. Once, when she’d first been bought by Drayle, she and another child had sneaked off to the woods to play. They’d witnessed a line of slaves whose ankles and feet were chained, led by a young white boy with a rifle almost bigger than he was propped on his shoulder. Lizzie had just been a child, her hair still in pigtails, but the memory had never left her. The girl hiding behind the bush with her had pointed to the group and whispered “runaways.” As the slaves walked by, Lizzie could smell something like fresh feces. One of the men was wearing a shirt and no pants, and she caught a glimpse of an oozing scar tucked into his thigh as he walked by. Flies flew around the limp hand of a woman that was blackened with the dried blood of what looked like fresh bite marks.

Drayle rarely beat his slaves. He preferred to sell what he called a bad slave rather than break him. The fear of being sold off what they figured was a good plantation to a lowdown slave trader was enough to keep them in line. Most of the time. Since he sold off the rebellious ones, Lizzie could not remember a slave trying to escape the Drayle plantation.

“How we find that woman when she the one what find us?” George asked.

Mawu turned to look at Lizzie once more, and this time the others followed her eyes. Lizzie looked down at her hands. They were soft and smooth, not work-worn like field hands. Her nails were a bit yellowed, but they were strong, not peeling and withered like those of the women who lived down in the quarters. She could feel Nate’s soft curls stretched between her fingers.

“She know.” Mawu said it quietly, so quietly that Lizzie could barely hear. Lizzie tried to shift her eyes around to the others, still not believing they were serious. There was a canyon to cross-as wide as the Ohio River-and Lizzie was being told to take the first leap.

SIX

Mawu was from a plantation in Louisiana about twenty miles west of the Mississippi border. Her master, Tip, owned a modest thirty-six adult slaves-twenty-five men and nine women. Of the eighteen children living in the slave quarters, more than a dozen were tan-colored.

Tip’s wife had died years before and it was agreed among the slaves that the man had gotten meaner each passing year since her death. Mawu had been a child when her mistress died, but she remembered that the death had been a slow one. Many moons had passed as the woman lay there wasting away until her frame was covered by a thin layer of yellowed skin.

Tip didn’t believe in hiring an overseer. He said he could oversee his own farm. He’d sit astride a giant horse and watch the slaves as they plowed, hoed, and tilled the crops. If someone failed to work or lagged behind, he beat them himself. When he didn’t feel like doing the beating-which was rarely-he had a young slave do it for him.

Tip visited the women in the slave quarters even before his wife was dead. After the mistress was gone, his visits increased. He barely waited for the young girls to stain their pallets red before he took them. Mawu held him off longer than most. The first time he came for her, she bit him and kicked him in the leg. The second time, she dropped an iron on his foot that broke a toe. After that, he brought her down to the barn for her first beating. When he told her to strip off her clothes, she refused. Even though he was smaller than the average man, she was even smaller. He took her afterwards while she was still sick in bed healing from the lashes. The more Mawu fought, the more determined he became to have her over and over again. He had her strapped to the bed on more than one occasion.

She’d given Tip four children, but he’d sold three of them outright. The last child left was a four-year-old boy with a lazy blue eye. He’d been dropped as a child-fallen out of the cloth tying him to Mawu’s back while she worked in the fields. The ground might have served as a cushion as it was still soggy from the previous night’s rain, but the baby had the bad fortune of hitting his head on a rock hiding amid the cornstalks. When he finally started talking at three years old, he had difficulty answering straightaway and often gave a blank stare when he was told what to do. His mind wasn’t right, they said. Tip denied that the “slow blue-eyed nigger” was his.

Once Mawu’s third child was sold, she told Lizzie that she just stopped loving. She knew she couldn’t bear losing another child, so she figured it was better not to think of her youngest as her youngest anymore. Now he was a pickaninny just like any other pickaninny. She didn’t allow him to suckle like she had the others. She had loved them so-light skin, silky hair, and all-but now, she told Lizzie and Sweet and Reenie that she knew all her children had been born of evil spirits.

After the sale of her three children she took the name Mawu and started spending time with an old conjuring man the slaves called Doctor who lived back of the plantation. Even though Tip owned the elderly slave, he left him alone. Some said Tip was scared of him. Mawu took the Doctor his meals, and soon began asking him questions about the sacks hanging around his neck. The old man did not answer at first, but once he was convinced of her belief he emptied out some of the sprinkling powder and demonstrated Mawu’s first conjuring trick. It was a spell to keep the bad spirits away from her boy. Mawu was surprised that the Doctor even knew she had a son. It wasn’t long before she was asking him how she could keep Tip away. The Doctor gave her a bag of herbs that she tied inside her skirt. It worked for a while. Then Tip started up again. The old man gave her a bitter root to chew that made her breath so foul it was difficult for anyone to be within five feet of her. Whenever Tip got close, she spat on the ground near his feet. That worked for a while, too. But Tip just took her from behind. She continued to go to the Doctor’s cabin, begging for new tricks, paying him with stolen food from the big house, learning as much as she could about his magic. He taught her to mix her Christian religion with the spells, neither upsetting the other. It turned out that she liked the spells better than Jesus.

When Tip announced he was going to Ohio for the summer, he chose Mawu as his companion. She had been as surprised as the others. She had never performed her duty like the rest of them-quietly and without complaint. And she wasn’t considered his favorite by any means although they all admitted that she stood out from the rest of them, both in looks and spirit.

Tip’s cousin would run the plantation while he was away. They did not know how this cousin would treat them, they said. They feared Tip would not return. Ohio seemed like another country. Someone said it was God’s country. Another called it Canaan. Mawu did not know what they meant.

It was only after she reached the train depot in Cincinnati and overheard two white men referring to Ohio as a “free state” that she understood. She’d tried to calm the new feelings in her chest.