“Wasn’t used to call, it was named,” Merian said. “Tell me how you came to get away?”

“No different than anybody else,” Magnus said.

Merian nodded. “Here,” he said, holding out to him the papers Content had written up, which testified that their bearer was his own proprietor. “If somebody aim to do something anyway, they won’t be much good, I imagine,” Merian said. “Then again, if somebody aim to do something, you deal with that the way you must. Things haven’t turned out as bad here as they are in Virginia and down the coast. It ain’t what it is in some other places,” he allowed himself optimistically. “There’s a few free African families around here, so it ain’t so strange a sight for people, and they let you go about your business same as any other man. So what you can expect, if this is where you decide you want to be, is that everybody will act toward you the way you act toward yourself. I can’t tell you what way that should be. I don’t know, but the way I would think about it for myself, if I was in your shoes, is: I started in one place and now I’m in another and aim to be all right there. Simple as that. No different from anybody else in these parts.”

“Is that simple?” Magnus asked

“Anyway, it says you’re free, and if you ever need it there it is.”

Magnus took the papers without comment and looked at them. He was touched by the gesture, but it was holding the paper that made it all real to him, and he did not care if they were legitimate or only fakes worked up to fool constables and sheriffs. What they said was the truth and very real — he was a man free of any other’s hold, and the sole foreman of his soul and being besides the Almighty. That was real as sunshine, and it would never be different. Even if he acted before Merian as if he had carried the papers himself the whole while and only dropped them in the road, he was very much affected.

Merian stood to leave and give Ware the day for himself to do whatever he thought fit. He moved by then like a man who was at ease with himself and who he was in the world. It would be a great many years before Magnus, as he was called, gained the same assurance, but once he did he moved with much the same bearing as his father.

Merian, as he left the room, knew Sanne would raise the devil about it, but for him there was no choice but that the young man, if he wanted, was welcome to stay on at Stonehouses.

three

His terror that second night, when he realized his condition, was abject and complete. He was not normally a sensitive man, but his teeth chattered against each other and his legs locked at the knees as he thought about what challenges lay before him. His manufactured freedom papers were clutched to his breast, making real all that had changed since he arrived there, still he was unmoored by this new status, not knowing whether he would prove master of the thousand strange contests it would pose for his every fiber.

After he had stayed there six days, Merian suggested that work might be the best thing to set his mind and body right again. Magnus agreed to try it, and as he worked out in the fields the next morning, alongside Merian, the older man asked again how he was faring.

“Everyone here treats me fine,” Magnus answered.

“That’s not what I mean,” Merian said. “You will know it when it happens.” He walked away then, leaving Magnus to puzzle just what he did mean.

That night, when he tried to find sleep, Magnus instead found himself disoriented and dizzy to the point of losing his dinner in the chamber pot. As he told Merian the next day, all he felt was that he was in a different place, and he could not stop thinking about Sorel’s Hundred and all he had known there.

“Do you know the story of that place?” Merian asked him then, sitting down to the midday meal.

“Just what I witnessed,” Magnus replied. “I didn’t know there was any story about it to know.”

“You never knew about the old man?”

“He never affected me.”

“Well, he came over here from England — it must have been a full hundred years ago now — and when he bought that land there was nothing at all around there, or anywhere else in all of Virginia. Even so, he thought to name his new property, and the name he thought to call it by, as you well know, was Colonus.

“He would stand out on the porch, after the house grew to a certain size, and stare at all that virgin country around him, with no idea what lay beyond the other side of the river, and get the most forlorn look on his face. He would turn then and say, to anyone who happened to be in hearing distance, ‘See how Edenic it all is.’ That was his word. ‘We are in exile, but only to be purified. If we let ourselves be cleansed without despoiling it, we will be allowed home again.’

“Then, not too long after the time Ruth and her mother came on the place, he started one day to call the old woman Antigone for no good reason. ‘What are we having for dinner this fine evening, Antigone?’ Or, ‘How does the weather agree with you this afternoon, Antigone?’ He claimed that if his wife had agreed to it that is what he would have named Hannah. ‘I can’t think of any better name for a daughter than that,’ he said.

“Nobody paid it much mind at first. Some men rename a slave at the drop of a hat, like a name is nothing more than a plaything. We just thought it a little peculiar, because he was not that way. When time came for Hannah to marry that Sorel fellow, he gave them some land out on his property to build a house and sent me off with them.

“It must have been the night before we were set to leave, and I was going into the house when he called me out there and told me to sit with him. Now that wasn’t very strange either, as he always had somebody to sit out with him after his wife died. What was strange was when he started talking that night, and wanted to tell me it seemed like everything he knew, starting with where the name of his house came from.

“‘Once, long ago, there lived a great king, and those are precious few, who committed two gross and unforgivable crimes, and when they had made him poor as a beggar for it, his people’s gods let it be known that Colonus was the place that would receive him in his old age.’

“When he finished telling me that I could see how very old he had grown, and I thought perhaps he was trying to remember the rest of his story, but he just looked at me and said, ‘It is terrible to be loved by God. Most cannot endure it, Jasper. But name all thy houses Colonus and all thy daughters Antigone, and thou shall never know sorrow.’

“That nearly brought tears to my eyes, to see how scared he was out there on his place; and that it would always be strange to him, even though it was his house. His advice, though, seemed sound as any I ever had. ‘Name all your houses Colonus and all your daughters Antigone, and you will never know sorrow.’”

That night when he went to bed, Magnus lay awake for the same long time as before, staring at the beams of the ceiling in his room and thinking of the last months. But instead of fearing what trial could possibly come next, he saw the good fortune he had had and the strength of the way he had acquitted himself. It felt then as if a great pressure was lifted up from him. He began to see that strength was as much a part of him as the fear he had been carrying since he ran from Virginia and had nearly been consumed by on the journey to Stonehouses, when he spent every day in hiding, waiting for nightfall so he could move on again. He began then to laugh, not altogether maniacally, but he had a good roar at all of it, and when he finished he was in tears. He fell asleep quite peaceful, and the next morning before Merian asked him he could say for himself, “It is good now.”

Merian was pleased when Magnus announced that he had finally put his fear aside. “It is a special day when that happens,” he told his sons, as Purchase left for his shop and he and Magnus went on to the fields. “It is like becoming a man all over again, when you come to know you’re alive but will eventually die and so start to celebrate that. Everything changes. You start winning the struggle, because it is your own.”