Ramsey left the barn. Fern left off picking off straw and stepped closer to Jebediah. “You will stay here until you learn some manners, until you learn you cannot get up and walk about like some free man.”

“I am free,” Jebediah said. “Mann ain’t knowed what he talkin bout. I am free.”

“The law does not say that.” She had intended, only hours before, to free him, allow what she had paid for him to be a trade for what Ramsey owed him. She had expected Jebediah to go for that because he would be, after all, free and clear once and for all. But the knowledge of her husband’s infidelity had come full and heavy and squatted down big in front of her, blocking everything else out. She resented her husband, and she resented the messenger, the companion to her husband. She was thirty-four years old. “This barn has been here many years, and it will stand many more with you in it if you cannot learn manners.”

“Manners ain’t what I need, lady. I need my money.”

Fern said to Colley, “I don’t want him going anywhere until he learns right from wrong, night from day.”

“Yessum,” Colley said and pulled three times on the chain.

“You and your gotdamn no-good husband can go to hell!” Jebediah shouted as she went out. “Y’hear me good. Both a yall can go straight to hell.”

Jebediah stayed there four days and then he told Colley that he was ready to do what she paid for him to do and Colley and another man took Jebediah to the back of the house and Fern came out and down to him.

“I want no trouble. I want not one moment’s trouble,” Fern said.

“All right, all right,” Jebediah said and she slapped him.

“I thought you said he had learned some manners,” Fern said to Colley.

“He told me he had, Mistress. He told me that.” Colley grabbed Jebediah by the neck and forced him to his knees. Ramsey had not gone away to gamble since he had returned while Jebediah was in the jail. He had not been in her bed since his first night back. She had not washed that day he came back; she had washed the night before she went in to buy Jebediah.

“Please tell him to let me up,” Jebediah said. “I’m gonna do right. I told yall that.”

He was a good worker, when he was there to work. For more than two weeks Fern had no trouble from him. Colley, who was as close to an overseer as the Elstons had, kept watch on Jebediah all the day and night long. Fern had alerted Skiffington that he might run, and the sheriff made sure his patrollers didn’t retire for the night without knowing where Jebediah was. Everyone got used to his being a good worker. Then, near the end of the third week of doing what he was told, he would just saunter off. He didn’t make a show of it. He would simply drop whatever they had him doing and walk away and go fishing, or he’d pick blueberries and gorge himself right at the spot where he picked them, or he would find a pasture to nap in, moving the cows away if they were in a spot he relished.

They would drag him back with little fuss, but he would be at it again, maybe not the next day or the day after but pretty soon.

With the fourth week he began going off in the night and returning before morning, seemingly with no trouble from the patrollers. Several slave women in the area knew his name and knew it well; he told one he was a preacher and had been called by God Almighty. For a week he walked by Alice and they would not say a word to each other but each time they waved as though they were passing in the marketplace. Then one night he said hello and she started in on her nonsense and he turned and started walking with her, listening to everything she said. He wanted to know how long she would keep it up and found that she could outlast his walking beside her.

What Fern and Ramsey were to discover was that he had somehow gotten hold of a piece of paper and made himself a pass and had been showing it to patrollers any night they found him on the road. He had been fortunate that he had not run into Oden Peoples. “This nigger,” the paper said, “is on business for his owners, Ramsey and Fern Elston at the Elston Estate. He can be trusted to come back home.” It was signed “Fern Elston,” but it looked nothing like her signature because he had never seen it. The Elstons took that pass away from him, not knowing he had another signed “Ramsey Elston.” On that one he was not just on “business” for the Elstons but “urgent business.”

But the worst of it was that he started calling out whenever he was near the house that he wanted his money. “I ain’t forget yall got my money. I ain’t forgot what yall owe me. I want my five hundred dollars.” In the night, before they took his passes away, he would say it. He said it on the way to the blueberries and he said it on the way to a nap. “I ain’t forgot yall got my money.” Ramsey came out one morning and shot his pistol over Jebediah’s head, but that didn’t stop him.

Then, three days after Ramsey returned to gambling, Fern came out and told him she wanted him to turn over a new leaf. She had Colley and two other men grab hold of Jebediah in front of the cabin he shared with one other unattached man. “This will all end today,” Fern said. “I have been patient, but my patience is at an end. If you do not do right, I will have you in chains again.”

Jebediah said, as she walked away, “If you was my woman you wouldn’t be sleepin in that bed alone every night.” She stopped but she didn’t turn around. “Do you know how long it would take me to undo your hair and get them things off you? You know how long?” He must have known, with that heart and mind born in slavery, that he had gone way too far and he bowed his head. Without a word from Fern, the men released him and Jebediah took off his shirt and lay on his stomach on the ground. Fern never like to flog slaves; for every whip mark on one slave’s back, she estimated that his value came down $5. But there were some unforgivable matters in the world.

They whipped him fifteen times, the last five having little effect because he had passed out at ten. He took a week to recover, was silent as he went about his work. And he didn’t stray. A week after he went back to work he stepped on a plank with a rusty nail in the barn. He thought nothing of it at first, just doctored the wound with a little mud and some spiderwebs. But the wound festered, and in the end, they had to saw off Jebediah’s right foot to save his life, or so the white doctor said.

He didn’t move from the front of his cabin after that, except to go to the privy or to go in to eat and sleep. A little less than two weeks after they cut off his foot Fern came down and told him she would set him free. He said nothing, just went on listening to his phantom foot talking loud to him.

He came up with Colley to the house the next day, up and into the kitchen. He was on the crutches someone had fashioned for him. Fern was at the table, writing. When she was done, she blotted the paper and handed it to him. He read it and handed it back to her. “Ain’t but one ‘T’ in manumit,” he told her, “cept when you usin the pas tense.” She had never written the word before. She wrote the paper again, then wrote another. Men were notorious for losing things. With all the human beings she would ever know in her life, he would be the only one she would come close to saying “I am sorry” to. She told none of this to Anderson Frazier, the pamphlet writer.

She offered him a place and a job on the estate, but he told her he had come to see Virginia as a demon state and he wanted no part of it. “If there was ocean water right out there,” he said, “I’d jump in and swim all the way up to Baltimore just so I wouldn’t have to walk on damn Virginia land.”

She gave him a wagon and an old horse to travel on. And she gave him $50. “You and your no-good husband owe me $450 more and there ain’t no way round it. I give yall the work I done and my foot for free.”