Gracie Honeywalker: Clink, clink

I's hiding in the floor below's our cabin. They done come for Seth minutes fore and I can hear 'em, shuffling their feets across the wood. Old Master, he still outside, can see the Sun, its shine coming from the black boots with silver tips. He surrounded by his people from the big house. Seth, he inside and he being shackled in chains, going away Praise Be God only knows where. I hear them moving toward the front door and the clink, clink, clink of chains on the wood above my heads. Sounds like chains when they release the coffin down in the Earth. I see Seth, he come down our three steps, two big white men in blue and brown on either side. He's bent at the knees, can't walk since the whippings when they done found him outside the gates. Even with the war over in Virginia now they got to keep their men on the farm, can't bring in the tobacco without 'em. My Seth, he's the fastest in the fields.

They won't miss me, those girls in the house. I's in training for maiding Miss Colleen. I ain't no regular maid, can't be no regular maid until I's fourteen years old. Miss Colleen, she's the second and meanest of them three girls. And ugly, ugly as a hungry vulture. Told me the other day, war's over in the fall, we're gone to be sorry the North ever crossed over from Ohio. After the Yankees, they done bombed that fort back in South Carolina, she said, we got to fight back. And when it all done, we gone to be back to normal.

Ain't no normal without my Seth on the place. And ain't no way I's staying around without him. He the daddy to my two babies, little Josiah who's two months and little Percy who's just over a year. Don't know what's gone to happen to them, can't leave without them, but I's leaving. I knows it. Ohio line's only fifty, maybe sixty miles from this here farm, I can make it with my babies. We just hide out in the woods, trap some rabbits, give the babies my milk. I done milked good for 'em. Summer weather's warm, too, ain't no problem freezing at night in the woods.

We gone to have it better, I knows that. We gone to have it better, once we get cross the Ohio line.