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in the yellow light from the lamp.
    We stopped for a bit and sat, getting sad, but then I shook my head. Crying wouldn’thelp. “We have to eat something now. So we can keep going.”
    She took out one of the hams. We didn’t have a knife but there was broken glass from the windows and I found a piece and sliced two chunks, thick with fat and smelling of hickory smoke. The smell must have been more than I thought because twice men came to the door while we were eating. One white and the other the same black man who had been beating Greerson. The white man he just looked in and moved on, scared looking, a white face flashing in the lamplight and gone. The black man he came in and we gave him some ham and he chewed it quiet, sitting in the corner, didn’t talk to us, never a word and then he left, nodding his thanks for the ham while we went back to the papers.
    More lives. We looked all night, paper on paper, and I stacked the ones we read in a neat pile. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away meaning what they meant and just at first gray dawn, sun just starting to help the lamp, Lucy she found it.
    “Two children, one boy answers to name of Tyler, girl answers to name of Delie, to be auctioned together or separately—”
    I snatched the paper away from her and read but it didn’t say more. Just that, to beauctioned. My babies, to be sold. Together or separately? Not that, not apart, not all of us apart. Where were they, when were they sold, who bought them, who bought my babies, my life?
    Nothing more on the paper. I turned it over and over but it didn’t give nothing. Couldn’t think, couldn’t do, couldn’t make my brain get working again.
    “We have to keep looking,” Lucy said. “There might be more paper on them.” And she picked up another piece, then another, and I nodded and we kept going, kept looking and finally, eyes burning from smoke and no sleep and reading in the dim light all night Lucy she found it again.
    “Two young Negro children, answer to Delie and Tyler, sold to William Chivington of New Orleans without auction for three hundred dollars.”
    I took the paper, hands shaking. Only thing else was the date. One day after they were taken from me. There was no auction. Greerson he must have been worried about what was coming. Wanted to get his money and run, only he didn’t run far. Just to his yards. Low man, low as a snake’s belly, he laid dead now in the yard where he caused so much misery.
    But we had something now. We had a name, the name of the man who bought my children. We had a name and we had a place.
    “Where,” Lucy asked, “is New Orleans?”
    “It’s where we’re going.” Had hope now, had a name, a place. Had hope. Had
something
. “It’s where we’re going.”

FIVE
    “Easy say,” Lucy said, “hard do, this going to New Orleans business.”
    She was right.
    Was different then. No maps, no trains—least none that would carry us—no way to know how to go. We’d been on the plantation all our lives, all the lives before us, didn’t know anything but the fields and the quarters and what we read in papers and books we stole.
    Suddenly all that was changed. We’re loose, we’re moving, we’re free, and I didn’t have a tiny idea in my head where we were going, which direction, how far—nothing but a name. New Orleans.
    Figured it had to be south. Man buying my children wasn’t going to head north into the blue army. Had to go south.
    I knew south. Place on your right when you face the rising sun, that’s south. North is onthe left, left side for freedom, south is the other. The bad way.
    So I started walking. That night, right then, and Lucy she followed and we made less than a mile when I started in to weaving and Lucy said, “We’ve got to get some rest.”
    I knew she was right. We’d been up so long I was seeing things, hants and specters and such, glowing in the road ahead, and my body just quit.
    “Over here,” Lucy said. “There in the