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quarters, she was all set to start bragging to Mama about her Q ’s and P ’s. She was ready to announce to every slave on Parnell’s place that I was giving her book lessons. But I shushed her with a single cut of my eyes, and she swallowed back her excitement. It was a good thing I had taken her book from her. She’d have been waving it right up under Master Gideon’s nose if I’d let her keep it. My backbone went cold just to think aboutthe trouble Summer could have brought with her restlessness.
    This morning I was at the blacksmith shack with Clem, helping him keep the irons’ fire alive. “You know anything ’bout coloreds fighting in the war?” I asked cautiously.
    Clem looked at me sideways. “Maybe so, maybe not,” was all he said. Clem was good at not letting on that he had know-how about certain things. When he didn’t want to let go of what he knew, he said stuff like, “Could be.” Or, “It’s possible.” Or, “That’s a question for the heavens.” Sometimes, Clem didn’t answer at all; he just shrugged. That’s when I knew to back away from badgering him.
    But when Clem answered me with a “Could be,” or an “It’s possible,” it was because he wanted to see how much I knew before he committed himself to sharing any information he had tucked in his back pocket.
    Clem hadn’t always been as short on words as he was now. Just last summer he was serious in love with Marietta, a girl who lived nearby on the Johnston plantation. I never saw a man more giddy than Clem when Marietta came to Parnell’s with her mistress to visit Missy Claire. Clem even got dreamy-eyed when he talked ’bout Marietta (and he talked ’bout her— ’bout her pretty honey-colored skin and her true understanding of how to grow flowers and harvest berries—all the time). Talked about Marietta like shewas some kind of queen. He even used to call her Queen Etta, a nickname he let roll off his lips every chance he got. Heck, whenever I was fetching water from Parnell’s well, I secretly wished that when I got to be Clem’s age—he was sixteen, three years more than me—I’d be lucky enough to find me a Marietta of my own.
    It didn’t take long for Marietta and Clem to decide they were truly matched in the eyes of God. But they wanted to make their match official, so Clem went to Master Gideon and asked to get hitched. He asked if Parnell would purchase Marietta, so’s the two of them could live together as husband and wife.
    I wasn’t there when Clem asked to marry, of course, but I hear tell that Parnell didn’t even consider it. He said no almost before Clem got the words out.
    Gideon is said to have told Clem, “I got enough womenfolk among my slaves.”
    Clem said the master told him to “tie the knot with one of the fine women right here on this plantation. I’ll bless any marriage that’s between two of my own slaves.”
    But Clem didn’t want one of Parnell’s slaves. He wanted Marietta. Back then, Clem was strong-willed, and when something didn’t sit right with him, he spoke his mind about it. But rather than go at the master in his haughty way, people say he got real humble, and he begged the master to buy Marietta so’s they couldmarry. He told Parnell about all the things Marietta could bring to his plantation—how she would make Missy Claire’s flower beds the envy of everybody in Hobbs Hollow. And how she could harvest some of the healthiest vegetables anywhere.
    Clem’s persistence didn’t pay off. The master said no, and he meant it.
    That same night, Clem and Marietta ran off. It was the second full moon in August, to be exact. I remember, ’cause Thea still spoke on it long after it happened, said all kinds of hexes happened under a full moon, that a second full moon in the same month made any hexes