The first time Eleanor Bowmont took Jonas into her bed.
The house was so quiet she could hear the river scraping at its banks in the dark.
The lamps in the corridor had been snuffed one by one, the way they always were at Bowmont Plantation after 9, as though darkness itself were a rule.
The only light left burned in the master bedroom where her husband lay, wideeyed and wordless, staring at the cracked plaster of the ceiling.
He could not move anything below his ribs anymore.
The fever that came three summers ago had taken his strength, his cattle, and slowly his mind.
What it had not taken was his pride, and he clung to that like a drowning man, to a plank no wider than his hand.
Eleanor had watched him waste, watched his cheeks hollow and his shoulders sink, watched his hands tremble when he tried to sign his name on the plantation ledgers.
She had watched the plantation itself sag under drought and debt.
Watched the overseer grow meaner and the slaves thinner.
But what everyone watched, what everyone whispered about when she walked past in her stiff black silk was something else entirely.
5 years of marriage and no child.
In Mississippi society, a plantation without an heir was a house with its shutters already half- nailed shut.
Women in town touched her arm and said they were praying for her.
Men clapped Bowmont on the shoulder and said in tones half joking and half cruel, that he should get around to planting seed of his own now that the Lord had seen fit to water his fields.
Bowmont only smiled, that tight, brittle smile that meant he would dismiss a man today and beat a slave tomorrow.
They all thought it was her.
They thought the baron was Eleanor.
She had stormed out of Dr.
Litil’s office when he said gently that sometimes God closes a woman’s womb for reasons we cannot understand.
That had been before the fever, before the sweating nights when she changed her husband’s linens and watched him sobb like a child when the chamber pot was brought in.
After the fever, no one bothered to pretend it was her fault any longer.
But no one stopped looking at her as though she were a failure, walking around in expensive dresses.
A house needs an heir, Ellie, her husband’s mother had told her before dying.
Land this size must not go to strangers.
You must provide.
Like most orders given to women, it had sounded like a prayer and felt like a command.
On that night, the air was still and thick, smelling of magnolia and old sweat.
Elellanena stood at the top of the back staircase, fingers white on the banister.
She could see down into the courtyard through the narrow window, see the line of slave cabins hunched like knuckles against the treeine.
The overseer’s lantern bobbed far off as he made his final rounds.
Her heart had been beating in her throat all day.
Every small sound had startled her.
Every glance from a servant had felt like an accusation, as if they had somehow already guessed what she intended to do.
“You must provide.” “Bring him to me,” she had said that afternoon, standing at the ver rail as the sun beat down on the sugarcane.
The words felt like ashes in her mouth.
Caleb, the overseer, had squinted up at her, a deep line furrowing between his brows.
Which one, Mom? Her gaze had gone as if pulled to the field at the far end of the property.
There, moving through the stalks with a slow, measured power that made the plant seem fragile around him, was Jonas.
He had only been on Bowmont Plantation for a year.
A tall, muscled man in his [clears throat] mid20s, bought at auction for a price that made the other owners raise their eyebrows and mutter that the fever had adultled Bowmont’s judgment entirely.
Where’d you pick up that giant Bowmont? One had laughed down in Nachez.
Louisiana, Bowmont had replied in a monotone as if reading from a ledger.
came from some breeder outfit out there.
Man said he was good stock.
Said he’d worked fields, new discipline.
The men had grinned, understanding the word breeder in ways that hovered between cruelty and something uglier.
Elellanena had stood beside her husband, her gloved hands folded, thinking only that she did not like the way the auctioneers’s assistant had looked at Jonas like an owner admiring a fine stallion.
She had watched Jonas work the fields for months after that, a silent shadow moving under the sun.
He did not speak much, did not joke with the other men or posture.
He had a way of disappearing into himself, even when he stood in the center of a crowd.
But once, when she had passed by with a parasol and a book under her arm, she had felt his gaze on her heavy and [clears throat] assessing.
When she had turned her head, he was already looking away.
“Jonas,” she said now, and the name tasted like sin.
“Yes, Mom,” Caleb had asked, misunderstanding.
Send for Jonas tonight.
Tell him I wish to ask him about the new planting rose.
Her voice had not shaken.
She had been proud of that in a detached, horrified way, the way a person might be proud of how neat their handwriting looked on a forged confession.
Caleb had hesitated, eyes sliding from her to the silent figure in the distance.
You sure, Mom? He’s a strange one.
Came with papers saying he’s been trouble other places.
Not disobedient, just he’d let the word hang, as though afraid to name the wrongness he felt.
Eleanor had tightened her grip on the verander rail.
“He is my property,” she said softly.
“And this is my house.
Bring him at 9.” Now it was 9.
The clock in the front hall had told the hour, each chime a nail in something she could not yet see.
Her husband had finally slept.
After a long afternoon of muttering about weather and debts, and a distant cousin, who was surely circling like a vulture, should he smell weakness? She lit a single lamp in the unused guest room at the far end of the hall, the one with the heavy curtains, and the bed that nobody had slept in for years.
Then she waited.
When the knock came, it was so quiet she almost thought she had imagined it.
“Come in,” she whispered.
Jonas stepped inside, ducking his head slightly under the frame.
in the yellow light.
He seemed less like a man and more like a shadow poured into human shape.
His skin was dark and sheened with the day’s work.
His shirt faded and clinging.
His eyes, however, were not dull or cowed the way many of the others were.
They were sharp, attentive, and too knowing.
“You sent for me, Mrs.” he said.
His voice was low and rough with a hint of Louisiana mud still clinging to his words.
Elellanena forced herself to look at his face.
Not his hands, not his shoulders.
Yes, close the door.
He did.
The soft click sounded louder than the clock’s chimes head.
For what reason you needed me, Mom? He asked.
There was no insolence in it, but there was something else, an awareness, a bracing, as if he understood that whatever she said next would change the landscape of his life as surely as fire changed to forest.
Elanor moved to the bed and sat, smoothing her skirts beneath her.
Her hands would not be still.
She folded them, unfolded them.
Finally, she said in a voice that did not sound like her own, “Do you have children, Jonas?” His eyes flickered just once.
“Had some,” he said.
“On other places.” “On other plantations,” she clarified, though she already knew the answer.
“Yes, ma’am,” she swallowed.
Her throat felt raw, as though she had been screaming for hours instead of not speaking at all.
And the women, they did they have grievances? Did they suffer? This time he did not answer immediately.
He leaned against the door just slightly, as if putting more weight on the wood than on his own legs.
His gaze did not leave her.
They suffered because they were slaves, ma’am, he said finally, not because of what you asking about.
The bluntness of it struck her like a slap.
She almost thanked him for it because anything else, any politeness, any coiness would have broken her.
“My husband.” She stared past him at a point on the wall where the wallpaper had bubbled.
“My husband cannot give me a child, this house, this land.
It will go to his cousin, a man who has never worked this soil, who will sell you all to pay his gaming debts.
My mother-in-law is dead.
My own parents are in Virginia, old and half blind, still boasting of a grandchild who doesn’t exist.
The neighbors are watching, Jonas.
This house is rotting from the inside.
I need, she faltered, the word breathing rising in her throat like bile.
[gasps] I need an air.
[snorts] A long silence.
Somewhere outside a whipperwill cried once and then fell silent too.
You want me to lay with you? Jonas said quietly.
Not a question, an arrangement stated plainly.
Ellena’s face burned, but she held his gaze.
One time she said, “Just once.
No one needs to know.
If a child comes, it will have Bowmont blood.
My husband’s line will go on.
The lawyers don’t need to know where the seed came from.” “And if no child comes,” he asked.
“Then God has forsaken me entirely,” she said, and was startled to find tears in her eyes, hot and humiliating.
She wiped them away quickly.
Jonas watched her for a moment longer.
Then he straightened away from the door and walked toward her, each step measured and slow, as though giving her time to change her mind.
“Mrs.” he murmured, standing beside the bed now.
He was close enough that she could smell the day’s labor on him, could see the faint white lines of old scars across his forearms.
You are the owner.
I ain’t got much say in what you decide.
But I’ll tell you this, children that come from this kind of bargain, they don’t never make life simple.
Not for you, not for them, [clears throat] not for nobody.
I know, she lied because she did not know.
Not really.
Her mind had never gone beyond the idea of a cradle and the relief of a signed will.
He nodded once as though some private warning obligation had been fulfilled.
“All right,” he said simply.
She expected to feel something like excitement or terror or revulsion.
What she felt instead, as he reached up and snuffed the lamp with his fingers, plunging them into darkness, was an immense and weary surrender.
It was over more quickly than she had imagined, and not at all like the hidden, fevered scenes from the guilt-edged novels she used to sneak from her mother’s shelves.
There was no swelling music, no dissolving into one another.
There were only two bodies in the dark, one shaking, one steady, both very aware of what this was and was not.
When it was done, she lay still, her breath ragged, her heart beating somewhere near her throat.
Jonas rose silently, adjusted his clothes, and moved back toward the door.
Before he opened it, he paused.
“I ain’t going to tell nobody,” he said.
Not cuz I’m scared, cuz I know what happened if this kind of story gets loose in the fields.
She thought he meant the danger to himself.
Only later would she understand that he meant the danger to everyone.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He slipped out into the hall and was gone, leaving only the thick dark and the faint scent of crushed magnolia that clung to his skin.
Elellanena lay there staring into the shadows until the gray smear of dawn began to creep around the edges of the curtains.
She imagined tiny cells already dividing within her, the beginning of fingers and spine and eyes.
She tried to assign Bowmont’s face to the imagined child.
The effort made her dizzy.
By the time the servants came with hot water and coffee, she had composed herself.
By the time she carried a tray into her husband’s room, she had wrapped herself in the familiar armor of being Mrs.
Bowmont.
Calm, cool, duty bound.
How did you sleep? She asked her husband, setting the tray down beside him.
He stared at the ceiling.
The same, he said.
Always the same.
Something in his voice made her flinch.
It was not anger.
It was the deadness underneath it.
Two days later, one of the house girls fainted in the courtyard under the noon sun.
Eleanor had been on the verseing the unloading of new supplies from town.
The girl, a slight young woman named Diner, who carried laundry baskets twice her size without complaint, had been hanging sheets on the line strung between two pecking trees.
Elellanena saw her sway, one hand going to her head, and then watched as she crumpled onto the packed earth.
“Caleb,” Elellanena called.
The overseer rushed over along with two other women from the kitchen.
By the time Eleanor reached them, Dinina was conscious again, sitting up and blinking in confusion.
Her skin glistened with sweat.
“Just the heat, ma’am,” Caleb said, but there was a tightness around his mouth.
“No, it ain’t,” one of the older women snapped.
Hester was in her 40s with arms like ropes and a face lined by years of sun and grief.
She glared at Dina, then at Caleb, then at Elellaner.
This girl about halfway to birthing.
She ain’t just hot, she’s carrying.
Elellanena’s gaze dropped involuntarily to Dina’s midsection.
The dress was loose, but now that she was looking, she could see the roundness there.
Subtle, but undeniable.
How had she missed it before? How far along? Elellanena asked, hearing the chill in her own voice.
Ha shrugged.
Four months, maybe five? Hard to say.
Four or 5 months? Long before that night in the guest room.
Relief fluttered through Elellanena, so brief and sharp, it almost felt like guilt.
Why wasn’t I told? She asked.
We told Mr.
Bowmont.
Caleb said back when she first started showing he said more slave babies meant more hands one day didn’t seem bothered none.
Elellanena swallowed.
Her husband had not mentioned it.
Then again lately he mentioned very little that wasn’t the weather or the price of sugar.
Dinina shifted her gaze darting nervously from one white face to the other.
I can still work.
Mrs.
she murmured.
I ain’t sickly.
Please don’t send me down river.
Elellanena opened her mouth to say something soothing.
Something in the bland, distant tone she used with her sisters-in-law and the priest.
But the words caught snagging on an image that had flashed unbidden across her mind.
Jonas in the fields moving with that slow powerful grace.
Dinina laughing with another girl as they carried baskets past him.
The way the women sometimes went quiet when he walked by.
Who is the father? Elellanena asked.
There was a tight little silence.
Caleb shifted his weight.
Ha’s mouth flattened.
Dina stared at the ground.
Some things don’t need saying, “Mom,” Ha said finally.
A chill crept up Ellanena’s spine.
It wasn’t just the words.
It was the way Ha’s eyes flicked very quickly and very deliberately toward the far end of the field.
There, under the brutal midday sun, Jonas straightened from the cane rose, resting on his hoe for a moment.
As if sensing being watched, he looked up toward the house.
His gaze found Eleanor’s even at that distance.
Held it.
Then calmly he went back to work.
That night Elanor did not sleep.
She lay in bed beside her snoring, half delirious husband, staring into the dark and counting backwards from a future that had not yet come to a past she did not fully understand.
If Dina was four or five months along, that meant Jonas had been with her before, before the guest room, before Eleanor’s desperate bargain.
The relief she had felt that afternoon shriveled, replaced by something more complicated and uglier.
Her stomach cramped suddenly, a sharp, twisting pain.
For one wild moment, she thought it was the beginning of a new life, planting itself deep inside her.
Then it passed, leaving only nausea and a thin sheen of sweat on her lip.
Two weeks later, another woman fainted.
This time it was Mercy, a broad-hipped woman who worked in the kitchen, known for her quick smile and quicker tongue.
She did not faint in the yard, but on the stairs leading down to the root cellar, sending potatoes clattering everywhere.
Again, the verdict came.
She’s carrying again.
Ha’s eyes slid, almost reflexive now, toward the fields.
Elellanena watched Jonas from the upstairs window that night as the slaves gathered around cook fires with their bowls and their songs.
Children ran between the cabins.
Men laughed or played at cards.
Women sat, their hands busy with mending, even as their voices rose and fell.
Jonas sat slightly apart from the others, sharpening a knife by lamplight.
A group of younger women walked past, glancing toward him, giggling behind their hands.
He did not look up, but Elellanena saw the way their steps slowed, the way their bodies angled, unconsciously hopeful, toward him.
Her pulse drumed in her ears.
She thought of her own body, her own belly, still flat.
Her monthly bleeding had not yet failed to come.
Each time she woke to the ache and the stain, she cleaned herself with teeth clenched, hating everything.
the bed, the house.
God.
One night, unable to bear the waiting, she stole into the library and locked the door behind her.
She poured herself a glass of whiskey from her husband’s decanter and drank it with shaking hands, coughing as it burned.
Then she lit a lamp and went to the plantation ledgers.
The pages smelled of ink and dust and old money, acres, yields, purchases, sales.
And there in Bowmont’s angular hand, the entry from a year ago, one male, age approximately 24, Louisiana origin field hand price exorbitant.
Noted previous owner calls him good breeding stock.
Numerous children on several properties.
strong, docsile, good discipline.
The words swam as she read them.
Numerous children, several properties.
Docsile, she thought, was not the right word.
There was nothing docsile in Jonas’s eyes.
Behind her, a floorboard creaked.
She spun around, heart leaping, but it was only the house settling.
When she lifted the ledger again, her own reflection stared back at her from the window glass, pale, drawn, eyes too wide.
She looked like a woman haunting her own home.
In the weeks that followed, the pattern continued.
Another pregnancy, another woman’s rounded belly becoming impossible to disguise.
The whisper Jonas drifted through conversations like smoke.
It ain’t just him, one of the men grumbled when the subject came up near the cook fire.
We all know how masters use us.
Masters don’t give us babies that look like they could sit at their own damn table.
Hester snapped back.
You ever look at Dina’s baby coming in a few months? You see it got Jonas’s height, Jonas’s shoulders, Jonas’s eyes.
You’re going to understand this is his doing, not the white folks.
Women ain’t forced, Mercy added, her hands resting protectively on her belly.
I went to him.
Same as Dina did.
Same as Hadtie did.
We chose.
Chose what? The man snalled.
More mouths to feed, more babies to get whipped, more bodies to be sold.
chose a different blood, Ha said quietly.
Chose a chance that maybe something strong and clever get born.
Not just beaten and broken.
The conversation floated up to the ver where Elellanena sat, pretending to read, her book open, but forgotten in her lap.
She listened, numb, as her own dilemma echoed through the lives of those she technically owned.
She found herself watching Jonas constantly now, watching the way he interacted with the women, with the men, with the children who already trailed after him like ducklings.
He never flirted, never boasted.
When a woman came to him in the shadows behind a cabin, his face was solemn, not hungry.
When a man cursed him, he did not rise to the bait.
He carried his strength like a burden he had learned not to resent.
“You’re staring, Mom,” Caleb said one afternoon, wiping sweat from his brow as they stood at the edge of the field.
“Ellanena started.
I am observing my property,” she said coldly.
Caleb spat into the dust.
“We got a problem,” he muttered.
Half the women on this place going to be waddling by Christmas if that one keeps going like he is.
Can’t work a pregnant woman the way we need to.
Can’t sell her neither, less you want to give a two for one discount, she swallowed.
What are you suggesting? I’m suggesting we either stop him or profit from him, he said bluntly.
Other owners pay good money for a proven stud.
especially one like him, strong as a bull and smart enough not to put up fuss.
We could rent him out or sell him for more than we paid.
Plantation can’t afford to be sentimental just now, not with Mr.
Bowmont’s mind half gone and the bank sniffing round.
The words blurred at the edges for her like smoke.
Stud profit, rent him out.
Leave that to me,” she said, forcing steadiness into her tone.
“You focus on the harvest.” That night she went to Jonas again, not to the guest room, not to her marital bed, but to the edge of the fields, where the cane rustled like whispered gossip in the dark.
He stepped out from between the rows as if he had known she was there the whole time.
Moonlight silvered his cheekbones.
“You call, Mrs.” he asked softly.
“How many children do you have?” she asked, skipping any pretense, he considered.
“Hard to say.
Six, I know for sure.” A faint bitter smile.
“Owners don’t much keep count.
They only tally what they can sell.” “And here, on my land.” His gaze slid for a moment toward the cabins.
Some coming, he said.
A handful.
Why? She demanded, surprising herself with the heat in her voice.
Why so many? Why so fast? Why does every woman who looks at you seem to see something? He exhaled, a sound almost like a laugh and almost like a sigh.
Cuz this place is dying, Mrs.
Bowmont, he said.
Everybody feel it.
No air upstairs.
Master’s mind going.
Crops thin, storms worse, plague and fever in the stories from town.
Folks down here on the bottom, we got a way of knowing when a house is fallen for the ones living in the big rooms see the cracks.
That does not explain the pregnancies, she snapped.
He tilted his head.
When things fall, folks reach for whatever might hold.
He said, “Some of these women, they look at me and think maybe if a child come out of this body, it’ll have more chance than if it come from a drunk in the cabin next door or some overseer who don’t even remember their names.
They think I got strong bones, sharp eyes.
They see I don’t break easy, that’s all.” It sounds very rational put that way, she said, hating him for his calm.
Ain’t much about this life rational, ma’am.
His gaze softened.
What you really asking? She swallowed.
The wind picked up, bending the cane, making the night hiss.
I am asking if she forced the words out.
If you’re doing something something unnatural, if you are putting children into these women on purpose, if this is some sort of revenge.
At that his face changed.
The faint lines of weariness hardened into something sharper.
Revenge, he repeated, and there was a thread of dark humor in it.
Now you think I got power like that to decide what babies come and what don’t.
Men lay with women every night on this and every other place.
Folks breeding since the first chain snapped shut around the first wrist.
And now you see some bellies starting to swell at the same time.
And you think it’s witchery.
You came from a breeding farm.
She insisted.
The papers say so.
You had numerous children.
That’s not normal.
That’s owners doing with my body.
What owners do with fields.
His voice was flat now.
Plant me where they want.
Count what comes up.
Call it a harvest.
His gaze met hers unflinching.
I [clears throat] ain’t the devil, Mrs.
Bowmont.
I’m just the plow.
The bluntness of it scraped at her.
She thought of that night in the guest room, of her own hand on his shoulder, of how easily he had rolled her beneath him, because that was what he had been taught to do when an owner called.
“Do you resent me?” she asked quietly.
He blinked as if the question itself surprised him.
“For what? For what I asked of you?” He took his time answering.
I resent the world that made you think you ain’t got no other choice, he said finally.
I resent the world that trained me from boyhood to say yes when any white mouth asked for my body.
But you, he lifted one shoulder.
Your piece in the same game, just playing from a nicer room.
The words landed heavy and unwelcome because they contained a truth she had long suspected but never let herself name.
“My courses have not stopped,” she blurted.
“Each month I bleed.
Nothing takes rooe, yet everywhere I look.
You see life coming up in the wrong places,” he finished softly.
She laughed once, a short, helpless sound.
“Yes.” He was silent for a while.
Then he said, “Some places cursed, Mrs.
Bowmont.
Some wombs, some houses, some names.
Maybe the Lord don’t want no more Bowmonts walking this earth.
You ever think about that?” “No,” she lied immediately.
“Maybe you should.” His gaze slid past her, up toward the big house, silhouetted against the sky.
But curse or no curse, babies coming.
That much true.
And my husband, she pressed her fingers to her temple.
He must not find out.
He is barely stable as it is.
If he learns that half the women on his property carry children by the same man, Jonas’s mouth quirked.
Then he’ll do what men like him do.
blame somebody and hurt the easiest ones to reach.
Meaning you, she said.
Meaning everybody, he corrected.
The next day, her husband found out.
It happened by accident, as most catastrophes do.
He insisted on being wheeled down to the courtyard for some air, bored of the same ceiling, the same wall, the same view from the bedroom window.
Eleanor, desperate to keep him calm, agreed.
Two house boys carried him in his chair down the front steps, bumping carefully over each lip of stone.
He squinted against the sun, his once handsome features sagging, his hair yellowing at the edges.
“Everything looked smaller,” he muttered.
Elellanar walked beside him, one hand on the back of the chair, forcing herself to smile.
The cane is shorter this year, she said.
But Caleb says we can still bring in a decent yield.
I don’t mean the fields, Bowmont snapped.
I mean the people.
The place feels light, like something’s been taken.
His eyes slid sidelong toward her.
You haven’t been selling stock behind my back, have you, Elellanena? No, darling, she said smoothly.
You’d see it in the books.
They were halfway across the yard when a shout went up.
At the far end of the cabins, Mercy clutched her belly, doubling over with a cry.
Women rushed to her.
Men stepped back, uncertain.
Even from across the yard, Elellanena could see the wet spreading between Mercy’s legs, darkening the fabric.
Not yet, Hester hissed, propping Mercy up.
Too soon, girl.
You hold that baby in as best you can.
What’s that? Bowmont demanded, craning his neck.
Just someone taken ill, Elellanar said quickly.
We should go back inside.
But Mercy screamed again, a long animal sound that seemed to rip the sky.
Bowmont flinched.
His gaze flew to the cluster of bodies.
What in God’s name? The scream came again, lower now, roar with terror.
It’s coming.
Mercy sobbed.
Ha, it’s coming.
Get her back in the cabin.
Ha barked.
You men, turn your damned heads.
This ain’t for you to see.
Bowmont, however, was already gesturing jerkily to the boys.
Take me over there now.
Sir, perhaps, Elellanena began.
He slammed a fist down on the arm of the chair.
Now the boys obeyed.
Eleanor had no choice but to follow.
By the time they reached the cabin, Mercy was on a pallet inside, her dress hitched up, sweat shining on her face.
Ha knelt between her knees, barking orders, snapping at anyone who got in her way.
The air smelled of blood and fear and something deeper, something old.
Out! Ha snapped when Bowmont appeared in the doorway.
“All of you men, out!” Bowmont ignored her.
His gaze had fixed on Mercy’s belly, on the unmistakable curve of late pregnancy.
Then it flicked to the corner where Dina sat, her own belly big beneath her folded hands.
Another woman across the room, similarly encumbered.
“What is this?” he demanded.
“What’s happening here?” “A child is being born,” Elellanena said, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“You shouldn’t be here, darling.
It’s not proper.
Let the women.” His hand shot out surprisingly fast, gripping her wrist.
His fingers dug into her skin hard enough to bruise.
How long has this been going on? He hissed.
How many of them are are like this? Women been having babies on this land since before you ever set foot on it, Ha said coldly, not looking up.
You just ain’t noticed till now.
Don’t you speak to me like that, he snarled.
The baby came then with a great rending shriek from mercy and a wet spill that made Elellanena’s stomach flip.
The child slid into Ha’s hands small and slick, its head crowned with a thatch of dark curls.
For a moment there was no sound.
Then the baby gasped, drew breath, and wailed.
Ha wiped the child quickly, her hands deafed despite their roughness.
She held the infant up for Mercy to see.
“You got your boy,” she said.
Strong lungs on him.
Mercy sobbed with relief, reaching out.
“Let me see him, please,” Ha.
Bowmont stared.
His face went slack.
The baby’s skin was a shade lighter than his mother’s, a deep bronze instead of ebony.
His eyes, when they blinked open, were startling, clear hazel.
The same hazel as Jonas’s.
“Who is the father?” Bowmont asked.
His voice was too calm, too thin.
“Nobody answered.
Even the baby’s whales seemed to falter.
” “I asked,” he repeated louder now.
“Who is the father?” Ha’s jaw tightened.
That your property line over there,” she said, jerking her chin toward the window.
“You want to know so bad, you go look with eyes God gave you.” Bowmont twisted in his chair, following her gesture.
Outside in the yard, Jonas walked past with a bucket of water balanced on one shoulder.
Sweat glistened on his neck.
He turned his head just enough to glance toward the cabin.
His hazel eyes met Bowmont’s through the gap in the doorway.
Something in the room seemed to snap like a rope pulled too tight.
“Get me back to the house,” Bowmont rasped.
“Now! Now!” The boys scrambled to obey, swinging the chair around so fast it bumped the doorframe.
“Ellanena stumbled aside, her heart racing.
All afternoon the house seethed.
Bowmont raged in his bed, gripping the sheets, cursing in a horse stream that frightened even the hardened servants.
He called for Caleb, for the priest, for whiskey, for a gun.
A slave, he spat over and over, in my house, on my land, spreading his seed through my stock like some stud animal.
This is what you’ve been doing while I rot, Elellanena.
This is how you honor our name.
She tried to calm him, tried to explain that she had not even known about mercy until that day.
But the more she spoke, the crazier his eyes became.
You always were soft on them.
He hissed, always watching them, always asking about their families, their feelings.
Never could understand your bleeding heart.
Now I see it.
You sympathized your way into making me a cult in my own fields.
It is not like that, she protested, though there was a kernel of truth in his accusation, twisted and buried.
We will make an example, he said suddenly.
His voice had gone cold.
There will be a hanging.
Her blood ran cold.
No.
Yes, he said.
There will be a hanging.
Bring me Caleb.
Think of the harvest, she said desperately.
We need every hand.
If you kill a strong man like Jonas, the work will suffer.
I’ll suffer worse if word gets out that my wife’s land is crawling with bastards from one slave buck, he snarled.
Do you know what they will say? Do you know what they will think? They will think what I am now thinking, Eleanor.
She flinched.
“And what is that?” He smiled, “A brittle, poisonous thing.
That you chose him yourself.
That you’ve been lying under him while I lay dying upstairs.” The truth in that accusation, though it only described one clandestine night instead of an ongoing affair, hit her like a blow.
She said nothing.
Silence bloomed like a stain between them.
Get out, he whispered.
Get out of my sight.
Tell Caleb to be ready at dawn.
She left the room on shaking legs.
At the top of the stairs, she had to grip the banister to keep from swaying.
The house hummed around her like a hive struck with a stick.
Servants moved faster, faces tight.
Word traveled as it always did through half-heard whispers and glances.
Masters planning to hang Jonas.
Master’s gone mad.
There’ll be blood in the morning.
Eleanor went to the back staircase again, the same path she had taken that first night.
Her mind roiled.
Every step felt like walking through molasses.
She found Jonas where she knew he would be near the well just after sunset washing the day’s dust from his arms.
“They’re going to hang you,” she said.
No preamble, no softening.
He paused, water dripping from his fingers.
He did not look surprised.
“When in the morning? Who told you? My husband.” He resumed rinsing his hands as if she had told him the weather would turn tomorrow.
He got reason.
Mercy’s child was born today, her throat tightened.
The boy has your eyes.
He saw.
He knows.
Jonas nodded slowly.
I told you, he said, “When houses fall, men look for someone to blame.
You’re not.” She shook her head.
You are not the cause of this decay.
I ain’t saying I am, he said.
But I’m the easiest symbol.
Big black man making babies with women he owns.
Folks only need half that story to justify all kind of violence.
[snorts] Desperation clawed at her.
Run, she said suddenly.
Take the swamp path.
Go now tonight before Caleb and the others come.
I’ll say I’ll say nothing.
Let them think you vanished.
He regarded her for a long moment.
Run where? He asked.
You know what happened to a man like me? Caught on the roads without papers.
No noose here, but plenty ropes elsewhere.
You’d rather just stand and let them kill you, she demanded.
Like a like a sacrifice.
He shook water from his hands.
Ain’t much difference between dying and spending 30 years watching every man in a gray coat try to sell you to the highest bidder.
His gaze softened then, and to her horror, she realized there was pity in it for her.
You the one can still change something in this house, Mrs.
Bowmont.
Not me.
Change what? She choked.
My husband is half mad.
The bank is circling.
The neighbors gossip.
The women in those cabins are all carrying your children.
What exactly do you think I can fix? He stepped closer, lowering his voice.
You can decide if the story ends with me swinging from that live oak and them babies growing up knowing what their daddy’s face looked like with his neck broke, he said gently.
or if it ends with something else.
What’s something else? She whispered.
He didn’t answer.
He only held her gaze until she had to look away.
That night was the longest of her life.
The house did not sleep.
Somewhere someone cried quietly behind a closed door.
Somewhere else, someone hummed a lullabi to a child who would grow up under a shadow.
She went to her husband once hoping to sway him.
He lay staring at the ceiling, eyes bright with a fever that was not from illness.
“Have you come to beg for your lover’s life?” he asked without looking at her.
“There is no love in this,” she said tiredly.
“Only desperation.” “They will laugh at me,” he said.
“At us if I show weakness.
If I let this pass, if I do not make an example, they will think you cruel if you hang a man whose only crime is being used like a bull by owners who treat people like cattle, she shot back.
He turned his head slowly toward her.
“You speak very passionately in defense of him,” he murmured.
“More passionately than you have ever spoken in defense of me.” She had no answer for that.
In some deep secret place, she suspected he was right.
At dawn, the rope was thrown over the lowest branch of the live oak that stood in the center of the yard.
Its roots had lifted the earth into knotted ridges over the years, like veins bulging beneath aged skin.
Children were hushed and pulled back.
Women stood in clumps, faces closed as shutters.
Men gathered, their expressions grim or hungry or simply resigned.
Jonah stood beneath the branch, hands bound behind him.
His back was straight.
He looked, Ellena thought, more like a soldier than a condemned man.
Bowmont was wheeled out onto the porch, wrapped in a blanket despite the growing heat.
His eyes glittered.
Today, he announced, voice carrying thinly, we remind everyone on this property that there is order, that there are lines that cannot be crossed.
A slave who forgets his place will find himself elevated.
A few nervous chuckles quickly stifled.
Elellanena stood just behind his chair, her fingers digging into the wood.
The noose swung lazily in the morning breeze, a pale obscene halo.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Bowmont called to Jonas.
Jonas lifted his head.
His gaze swept the crowd, lingering on the women with their swollen bellies, on Dina holding Mercy’s newborn son, on Ha’s set jaw.
Then he looked up at the house, at the window, where Eleanor knew the nursery lay empty and untouched.
His eyes met hers briefly.
Something passed between them.
A question, an accusation, a farewell.
No, sir, he said.
Nothing you’d care to hear.
Then let this be a lesson, Bowman said.
He nodded to Caleb.
Do it.
Caleb stepped forward, rope in hand.
His face was pale beneath his sunburn.
He slipped the noose over Jonas’s head with fumbling fingers, tightening it around the thick column of his neck.
Elellanena felt something inside her fracture.
Time slowed.
The creek of rope, the whisper of leaves, the tiny whimper of Mercy’s baby.
Each sound was magnified.
She saw with crystal clarity the lives that would spool out from this moment if she did nothing.
Children growing up with a hanging man’s shadow burned into their memory.
Ha’s hatred curdling into something that would poison every interaction.
Her own life shrinking into a narrow corridor of guilt and decaying rooms.
You the one can still change something in this house,” he had said.
Her hand moved before her mind had fully decided.
She stepped around her husband’s chair, down the porch steps, her skirts catching on a splinter.
“Stop,” she said.
Caleb froze, glancing between her and Bowmont.
“Ellanena,” her husband hissed.
“Get back here.” She ignored him.
She walked to the center of the yard, the packed earth hot beneath her thin shoes, and stood a few feet from Jonas.
“Take the rope off,” she said to Caleb.
“Ma’am, I can’t,” he stammered.
“Master said.” “Master is not in his right mind,” she said, voice ringing louder now.
“Everyone here knows it, whether they say it or not.
This plantation is bleeding to death while he raves about appearances.
Eleanor.
Bowmont’s voice cracked.
You will obey me.
She turned to face him.
For the first time since his illness, she saw not her husband, but a man who had once been a boy, taught that land and bodies were his inheritance.
A man whose fear of humiliation outweighed any concern for justice.
I have obeyed you, she said, each word steady as a nail driven into wood.
I have nursed you, managed your accounts, kept your secrets, and smiled, while the world assumed my womb was the problem.
Gasps rippled through the gathered slaves.
Caleb’s eyes bulged.
“I have watched this land rot under your pride,” she continued.
Now I will do something you never have.
I will choose life over reputation.
Take that rope off, she said again.
Caleb’s hand trembled on the knot.
Mom, please.
If you do not, she said calmly, I will have you flogged and then dismissed, and everyone in this yard will know it was because you disobeyed the one person in this house still capable of thinking clearly.
He hesitated.
Then, very slowly, he loosened the knot and slipped the noose back over Jonas’s head.
A murmur went through the crowd.
Relief, confusion, fear.
Bowmont let out a strangled sound.
You ungrateful.
You faithless.
Elellanena turned back to him.
“You want a sacrifice?” she said softly.
“Fine, but it won’t be him.” Before he could respond, she reached into the pocket of her dress and drew out the small, cold weight she had put there just before dawn.
Her husband’s pistol.
His eyes widened.
Elellanar.
She had never shot a man before.
Her father had taught her to shoot rabbits in Virginia, standing behind her, correcting her grip.
Firm, he had said, “Don’t flinch.” Her hand did not shake now.
She lifted the gun, aimed carefully, and pulled the trigger.
The sound cracked the morning like a pane of glass.
Birds exploded from the trees.
Children screamed.
Someone dropped a bucket.
Bowmont jerked in his chair, then slumped forward, the blanket soaking quickly with red.
The boys holding the chair stumbled back, faces white.
For a moment there was absolute silence.
Then the yard erupted.
Voices rose, some in panic, some in shock.
Caleb rushed toward the porch.
Ha grabbed Mercy’s baby and clutched him tight.
Jonas stood motionless.
The rope coiled like a dead snake at his feet.
Elellanena lowered the gun.
Her ears rang, her vision tunnneled briefly, then cleared.
“Listen,” she said, not sure to whom she was speaking.
Herself the crowd.
God, listen to me.
The chaos subsided slowly.
Dozens of eyes fixed on her.
My husband is dead, she said.
Saying it aloud made something twist in her chest.
But there was no room for that grief now.
He died because he would have killed a man for doing something we have demanded of other men for generations.
He died because he would rather slaughter his own future than admit his own failure.
She looked at Jonas.
This plantation is mine now.
The bank may try to take it.
My husband’s cousin may come buzzing like a fly to claim what he thinks he’s owed.
But while I am breathing, things will not be done here as they have always been done.
A dangerous thing to say, she knew, a tempting fate.
Anyone who wishes to leave this place, she said, voice ringing, may go.
I will sign papers.
I will write what needs to be written.
I will give what money I can spare.
You will risk much on the road, but you will be free of this cursed soil.
A stunned hush.
Those who stay, she continued, will work this land as before.
I will not pretend we are suddenly equals.
I am still the mistress.
You are still bound in ways I cannot pretend away.
But there will be no more hangings.
No more using people like studs or broodmares.
No more pretending that children are nothing but currency.
Someone laughed once harshly.
And how you plan to do that, Mrs.
A man called Law say we property.
Sheriff say we property.
Papers say we property.
Your words don’t change that.
No, she said they don’t, but they change what happens here.
And for now, that is all I can offer.
She turned to Jonas.
The yard seemed to narrow until there was only him and the space between them.
You can go, she said quietly.
If you want tonight, I will give you papers saying you were manumitted before my husband’s death when he was still capable of making such decisions.
No one can prove otherwise.
You can leave this place and never look back.
And leave them? he asked, tipping his head toward the women with their swollen bellies, the newborn in Hester’s arms, the men watching with narrowed eyes.
Pain lanced through her.
They may come with you if they wish.
And what you do, Mrs.
Bowmont? he asked.
When your husband’s cousin ride up here with the law behind him, papers in hand, say in this land, his by rights.
I will deal with him, she said.
You have dealt with the whip and the auction block your whole life.
Let me deal with cousins and bank ledgers.
It’s what women like me were trained for.
He studied her for a long moment.
The morning sun was climbing now, burning off the mist.
Sweat trickled down the back of her neck under her dress.
Her hand still tingled from the pistol’s recoil.
Finally, Jonas nodded.
“Some will go,” he said.
“Some will stay.
That’s how it always is when chains loosen.” “And you?” she asked.
He looked past her up at the empty nursery window.
“Me?” he repeated.
I’ve been planted and replanted so many times, I don’t rightly know where I belong.
But I know this much.
My blood is in this ground now, in their bellies.
His gaze returned to her, sharp as ever, and maybe in yours.
You sure about making enemies of every white man within 10 miles to protect that? She swallowed hard.
Her monthly bleeding had not yet failed to come, but her body felt strange lately, her breasts tender, her sleep restless.
Hope was a dangerous thing, but it warmed her like a fever.
“Yes,” she said.
“I am sure.” He held her gaze a beat longer.
Then, for the first time since he’d arrived at Bowmont, he smiled.
It was a small thing, lopsided and tired, but real.
Then I reckon, he said, “I’ll stay long enough to see what you do with that.
” In the days that followed, the world beyond Bowmont’s borders reacted predictably.
The doctor came and pronounced Bowmont’s death an unfortunate accident, the result of a weakened heart and a pistol mishandled in his delirium.
The priest came and muttered prayers, his eyes darting uneasily between Eleanor and the clusters of slaves in the yard.
The cousin sent a letter full of stiff condolences and soft threats.
He spoke of lawyers and obligations of preserving family honor and the integrity of the estate.
Elellanena replied with a letter of her own written in a hand steady from years of copying ledgers.
She invoked clauses in the will, hinted at debts the cousin would inherit if he pushed too hard, and reminded him politely that scandal would reduce the market value of everything he hoped to claim.
For now, he stayed away.
Inside the boundaries of Bowmont, life rearranged itself imperceptibly at first, like furniture shifted a few inches each day.
Elellanena freed no one on paper yet.
The weight of law beyond her fence line made rash moves dangerous.
But she stopped the worst of Caleb’s punishments.
She allowed marriages between slaves to be recognized in the house records.
She made it quietly known that no one would be sold without her personal review.
Some nights she walked the rows of cabins, her skirts catching dust, listening to lullabies in languages she did not know.
Children toddled around her ankles, some darker than night, some with skin like coffee stirred with cream, some with eyes the color of cane syrup, some hazel, Jonas’s hazel.
She watched the pregnant women grow rounder, their backs aching as they worked.
She insisted on lighter duties for them, ignoring Caleb’s grumbles about productivity.
“You can’t save him from everything,” he muttered once, watching a very pregnant diner carry a basket of laundry.
“No,” she said.
“But I can save them from you.” He snorted, but he said nothing more.
Months passed.
The babies came one by one in cramped cabins and on pallets laid out on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night and in the heat of the afternoon.
Some came easily, sliding into waiting hands, squalling robustly.
Others came hard with hours of labor and whispered prayers and in one heartbreaking case a final terrible silence.
Elellanena was present at more births than she had ever imagined she would be.
She held hands, wiped brows, shouted encouragement in a voice from disuse.
She watched Ha tie off umbilical cords with strips of boiled cloth, watched Mercy and Dinina and the others cradle slick, squirming bundles to their breasts, and in every little face she looked for patterns.
Some of the children looked like their mothers, carbon copies with tiny hands.
Some bore faint flickering echoes of Jonas, the tilt of an eye the shape of a chin.
One girl, born on a stormy evening when lightning strobed the walls, had eyes that were unmistakably Elellanena’s own pale gray.
Ha saw it, too.
She handed the baby to her mother, then looked up slowly at Elellanor, eyebrows raised.
“Ellanena’s heart pounded.” “Jes are strange,” she said stiffly, knowing it was a word almost nobody around her understood.
Ha snorted.
“Strange? Sure,” she said.
“Or maybe blood got away or mixing stories we don’t know about yet.
” That night, alone in her room, Elellanena undressed and stood before the mirror.
Her belly was no longer flat.
It had not yet rounded fully, but there was a subtle rise there, a softening.
Her breasts were tender.
Her courses had not come for 2 months.
Very slowly, she laid a hand on the slight swell.
If you’re there, she whispered to whatever cluster of cells might be listening.
Know that you are called into a world already on fire, and your mother lit some of those flames herself.
I can’t promise you peace, only that I will not hang a man for what you are, or for what you are not.
She thought of Jonas sitting outside his cabin, whittling toys for the older children.
She thought of the night in the guest room, of the way his eyes had searched hers in the dark, as if asking for absolution neither of them deserved to give.
In the years to come, people would tell stories about Bowmont Plantation.
Some would say it was cursed that the mistress shot her husband and turned the place into a breeding ground for strange, too tall, too clever children.
Others would say it was blessed that beneath the moss draped oaks and the cracking white columns, a different kind of seed had been planted, one that grew into something the old world did not know how to name.
They would whisper about Jonas, the slave who should have died on a rope but walked away instead.
His blood scattered through the cabins like wild flower seeds.
They would whisper about Eleanor, the plantation lady who slept with a slave and then discovered he had impregnated almost every woman under her roof.
Only a few would know that this was never really a story about lust.
It was a story about a house collapsing and the desperate, reckless things people did to keep something standing, even if it was only a new story to tell their children.
On a humid evening, 5 years after the morning, under the live oak, a man rode past the gates of Bowmont, and paused to look in.
The fields were still there, though smaller now.
Parts of the land had been sold off to pay debts.
The big house was peeling, its paint flaking like dried skin.
Children ran in the yard, shrieking with laughter.
Some were brown, some black, some pale.
Some had hazel eyes, some had gray.
On the ver, a woman in a faded dress sat in a rocking chair, cradling a toddler.
Beside the steps, Jonas leaned against a post, his arms folded, watching the children with an expression that was not quite pride and not quite sorrow.
The rider shook his head, muttered something about ruined gentry, and spurred his horse on.
He would retell the site in town.
How the Bowmont estate had become a strange mixed place, neither proper nor entirely lawless, a house that refused to die quietly.
Back on the ver, Elellanena shifted the child on her lap.
The boy, her boy, had her mouth and Jonas’s eyes.
He giggled as one of the older girls chased him with a stick, demanding he join some game.
Go,” she murmured, setting him on his feet.
“Play.” He ran off, legs pumping, curls bouncing.
She watched him go, her hand resting on the back of the empty rocking chair beside her.
“You ever think about leaving?” Jonas asked quietly, stepping up onto the porch.
She considered, “Every day,” she admitted.
“And every day I realize I already did.” He frowned slightly.
“You still here?” “Am I?” she asked.
“This is not the house I married into.
Not the woman I was.” He huffed something like a laugh.
“Fair enough.” They stood in companionable silence for a while, watching the children.
“You know what they’ll call them?” she asked.
“Out there in town, in the next county, in their whispers?” He shrugged.
They called me worse.
She turned to look at him, her gaze steady.
What do you call them? He did not answer immediately.
He watched a little girl with gray eyes and dark skin, kneel beside the roots of the live oak, tracing patterns in the dirt.
He watched Mercy’s son, now school-aged, help a smaller boy to his feet after a fall, brushing dust from his knees.
“Future,” he said finally.
“I call him future,” she nodded.
“Then let that be enough.” “It would not be, of course.
There would be more letters from the cousin, more threats from the bank, more laws passed by men who had never stepped onto her land designed to keep people like Jonas in their place and people like her quiet.
But there would also be harvests, songs, laughter, babies born into hands that while still rough from work, no longer believed suffering was the only inheritance they could offer.
And there would be stories, stories told at night in cabins and parlors, in whispers and in anger and in awe.
Stories about a plantation lady who did the unforgivable and then somehow tried to live with it.
Stories about a slave whose children were scattered like seeds growing in ways no one had planned.
Stories about how in a time and place soaked with cruelty, a single shot under a live oak did not change the world, but it changed the ending of one house’s tale.
Sometimes that was all history allowed.
