Prisoner of Desire Read Online Free PDF

contain them. The jails had not been an ideal solution, for the unfortunates were often preyed upon by other prisoners, or else were a danger themselves to the weaker inmates.
    Nathan Hamilton had not been able to support the thought of that kind of life for his brother. He had prepared a room for him in the building that housed the cotton gin at Beau Refuge, a stout structure some distance from the house, so that his cries would not be a disturbance. A fireplace had been installed for comfort in winter, as well as high windows with strong iron bars for air. It had been furnished with a bed, an eating table and chair, an armchair, armoire, and washstand. It also had a leg shackle with a long chain that was attached to a stout bolt set into the thick wall beside the bed.
    There in that room above the gin, with a pair of strong servants to tend to his needs, Uncle Will had stayed for four long years. He had endured his confinement without complaint for the most part, though sometimes he begged to be set free in the swamp with a gun and a knife. Then one night he managed to hang himself with a rope he had made, inch by patient inch, season after season, by twisting into threads the cotton fibers that drifted into his room, and twisting the threads into a rope.
    The room was still there at Beau Refuge. Like everything else at the plantation, it was kept in order; the floor swept, the bed ropes renewed, the lock and the shackle oiled, and the fireplace chimney kept free of birds’ nests. Now and then baled cotton was stored in it when space became scarce. Once an unruly slave bent on beating his woman to death was kept there until he calmed down. It was empty now.
    The carriage rolled through the city and turned into a dark street near the outskirts. Here were rows of narrow shotgun houses, so called because a shot fired through the front door of the house would go completely through the two rooms placed end to end and exit out the back door. Before one such house, the carriage drew up. Anya got down and moved quickly to climb the narrow steps and knock on the door.
    It seemed a long time before there was an answer. Then a bolt was drawn and the door opened a cautious crack.
    “Samson? Is that you?” Anya asked.
    “Mam’zelle Anya! What you doin’ here this time of night?”
    The door was drawn open, and in the light of the carriage lanterns could dimly be seen an enormous black man. His head barely cleared the doorframe, and his shoulders and arms bulged with muscles that had come from pounding hot iron in his job as a blacksmith. His voice as he spoke held disapproval not unmixed with suspicion, and he peered beyond her toward the carriage that waited.
    “I need to talk to you, and to Elijah. Is he here?”
    “Yes, mam’zelle.”
    “Good,” she said, and when Samson’s brother, a man larger if possible that Samson himself, appeared, she began to outline what she wanted.
    They did not like it; that much was plain. Anya could not blame them. It could not be denied that what she asked would be dangerous. Still, they did not deny her. She had known she could depend on them, no matter the hour or the nature of the request.
    It was Samson and Elijah who had tended her Uncle Will. In order to help pass the time of their vigil, Anya had shared her school books with them, teaching them painstakingly to read and write by drawing with a stick in the dirt. Later, after her uncle’s death, the pair had been given jobs in the blacksmith shop. But they yearned for the freedom they had read about in the history books and in the tracts passed out by the abolitionists. They thought they could make their own way, earn their keep in the blacksmith trade.
    As Anya’s father lay dying of the injuries from his fall from horseback, the two men had come to her. They asked that mam’zelle intercede for them, that she beg the master to free them. It was still possible then for a man to free a slave by will on his death, and so Anya had