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insults to his anger, soaking up the cuts and bruises and spit until the bark house wasn’t just what he wanted, but was what he couldn’t have, what some men owned but not him, not Primus, because he didn’t even belong to himself. I didn’t know this, like most things, until the time for knowing it had already passed.
    ON THE DAY before his fourteenth birthday, Primus crawled out of our cabin shoeless before dawn, which I know because I watched, and moved skink-like across the near fields up the slope to the big house, which I know because I followed, and from the base of a cherry tree I saw his shadow slip inside that wide hall with a flint and a fist of straw, his aim I suppose to burn the master down, and when I saw him come out again and run toward the creek, tall on his toes, I slunk back to bed. When the first bell rang, my mother sent me to fetch him, she thinking he was in the bushes with his stomach trouble, and when he wasn’tin the bushes, I followed his prints down to the creek, his bare foot-marks the only ones in the dawn dust. I wanted to be curled back in my straw, is the only thing I was thinking when I came to the bank and saw his toes dipped in the water and followed them up to his bony knees and on up to his nightshirt that the wind was wrapping around him in a pretty kind of way and up to his face, which was a foreign purple swell, and I stopped looking and started screaming and so never even saw the rope that bound him to the willow, the rope of his own twisting, the knots of his own design. An old woman found me and brought me back to my mother, leaving Primus swinging on the low branch, his toes skating in the creek, making eddies where there were none.
    The cook who we called Auntie had found the feeble brushfire in the hallway as she was taking the master up his washing water; she had stamped it out with one foot and walked on.
    FEELING IS TOO small a word. Words are too small. We worked in the fields and took our beatings for the extra time we had to stop to hold on to ourselves and at night we gathered again, my mother and all of us, and ate our collards and corn and went to sleep. The next day we’d work and eat our collards and sleep. We could never say it was the worst thing ever happened to us, because who knew what was coming next.
    A few months after Primus stole his own body from the men who stole his great-grandfather’s, and before my mother was speaking again, Farlan came to me in the rows and said I was wanted in the big house, that they needed extra hands for bringing noon dinner to some folks stopping from out of town, so I went, happy enough to rest my hoe and not yet too bitter toserve the men who built my sorrow. I was only eleven, and just a mimic of a man.
    Turns out there weren’t any guests, no men from up the road or ladies out for an airing, so I scrubbed down the slick cedar-board halls after someone handed me a bucket of sand and a rag. When I was at the window with a jar of vinegar is when I heard her screaming, and I tried the door but it was locked and the key taken, so I stared with my hands spread on the window and my open mouth against the glass and my eyes nearly shut with tears, the shape of her blurred out, and still when I think of my mother I can taste vinegar and salt.
    They had her hands bound but her feet were kicking out in a wild dance and though I’d seen my mother proud and worn down and silent with sadness, I had never seen her rage, and after not hearing her words to me for weeks, the sound of her screaming my name made me hope to crawl back in her belly. The trader had come for her and two other women and a man, and knowing her love—and knowing her love—they had locked me in the house to sell her barefaced, as a chair is sold, as a piece of land. The other children were in the pen with Granny and never knew. White men lashed her to the left side of the wagon, which I remember because that was the side shaded by the front drive’s walnut,