That night, Theodosia slept in a small room beside the mule stalls that Titus had swept clean himself before dark fell, packing the dirt floor smooth, laying out a fresh corn-shuck mattress he had bartered from old Amos, and setting a stub of tallow candle on a rough shelf he'd nailed to the wall that same afternoon. It was nothing. It was everything he had. Titus himself slept outside on the narrow porch overhang as he had always done without anyone asking him to.
Dileia, curled in the corner of that same small room, stayed awake until first light. She listened to Theodosia's breathing, shallow and tense for hours, and then, sometime near four in the morning, finally deepened into real sleep. The child she had raised from a squalling infant had fallen asleep in the worst place of her whole life, and yet she was still breathing steady and even. That, Dileia told herself, was something to hold on to.
What Dileia did not know, what almost no one on Cedar Hollow would come to understand for a long while yet, was what moved through Theodosia's mind as she lay with her eyes open in that darkness before sleep finally took her. She was not thinking of her father or of the public humiliation or of the uncertain shape of whatever came next. She was thinking about the question, "Where do you want to go?" So plain, so impossibly plain, and so devastatingly unlike anything anyone had ever said to her before in her whole life. Titus, the name he answered to on Cedar Hollow's rolls, though few people bothered to wonder whether it was the only name he had ever carried, or simply the one that had been assigned to him the day he arrived.
He was a man whose full history no one on the place actually knew. The other enslaved men and women saw what was visible, the hand who never faltered, who finished his own row and then quietly moved down to help finish someone else's. The overseers saw what mattered to them, a body worth more than two ordinary men, and therefore a body worth protecting from being broken too badly. Augustine saw an investment that paid steady dividends.
Almost no one knew that Titus could read. He had learned it from a traveling tutor, a gaunt, gentle Methodist circuit rider named Brother Ephraim Lumis, who had passed through Cedar Hollow for 3 months when Titus was sixteen, ostensibly to instruct Augustine's late first wife's younger cousins, and who had, in the stolen half hours of the midday rest, taught the letters to a tall, silent boy, who kept appearing at the edge of the cane break with a hunger in his eyes that Brother Lumis found impossible to ignore, law or no law. Brother Lumis moved on eventually, as traveling men do, but the alphabet stayed lodged in Titus's mind, like a key with no lock he yet understood. Over the years since, he had taught himself to read in scraps, a torn page of an almanac blown into the fence line, a discarded bill of sale left crumpled in the tool shed, a single loose page of a novel someone in the big house had thrown out with the kitchen rubbish.
He read slowly, piecing meaning together with the patience that came from having nothing but patience to spend, and he understood more than a single soul on that plantation would ever have guessed. Those first days between Theodosia and Titus were strange and taught, like a fiddlestring tuned just short of snapping. She moved through the cramped space of her new world with the practiced efficiency of a lifetime spent learning angles and distances that had never been built with her in mind. She hated being carried, and she made that clear from the very first hour, the first time Titus reached to help her over a rough step.
Don't touch me without asking, she said, not raising her voice, not looking at him with hatred, simply stating a fact the way one states the weather. Titus stopped his hand midair. Understood, he said. If I need to help, I'll say so myself.
And if I don't say so, I don't need it. Even if it looks like I do. Understood? She watched him then, waiting for the sarcasm, the condescension, the impatience she had come to expect from nearly everyone who had ever looked at her.
She found none of it. What she found instead was something she could not yet name, simply attention. The particular kind of attention a person pays to something that matters. The other enslaved people watched her with a mixture of curiosity and caution.
To them, Theodosia had always been a creature from the other world, the master's daughter, house blood, even if her body had never once been allowed to enjoy the privileges that blood usually bought. Now that she lived beside the stables, nobody quite knew how to treat her. Nobody knew whether she deserved the difference owed to a mistress or the weariness owed to trouble. Amos, the oldest man on Cedar Hollow, a thin, wiry soul of perhaps sixty, with hair gone entirely white and eyes that always seemed to be looking at something a great distance off, was the first to speak to her plainly.
He came by one evening carrying a tin cup of persimmon beer and set it on her shelf without bowing or lowering his eyes. "Gets cold in here at night," he said. "Colder than it looks in the daytime." Theodosia glanced at the cup, then at him.
"I know it."
"There are extra blankets in the back room by the tack. Titus doesn't know they're there because nobody's told him. And now I'm telling you." Amos considered her a moment with those distant eyes.
"Because I get cold, too," he said, and left. It was the beginning of something Theodosia had not expected. Not warmth exactly, not welcome, but something more complicated and more honest, the quiet acceptance of people who already carried more sorrow than they had room for, and who found they had none left over to waste, despising her.
It was the eighth night when Theodosia discovered it. Titus believed himself alone. He had lit a stub of candle in the darkest corner of the porch, and held in his hands what looked from a distance like a folded scrap of cloth, but which, as Theodosia wheeled herself carefully closer over the uneven boards, taking advantage of the fact that his back was turned, revealed itself to be several sheets of paper folded and stitched together with coarse thread, something between a notebook and a letter. His lips moved faintly as he read, his brow drawn in a concentration Theodosia recognized instantly, because it was the same expression she wore herself over the pages of a book.
She stopped two yards away. Titus felt her presence, looked up, and did not do what she expected, did not hide the paper, did not scramble to his feet, did not deny anything. He simply looked at her with those eyes that gave nothing away and waited. "What are you reading?" She asked after a silence.
"A pamphlet," he said finally. "About what?" Another brief pause. "Natural rights. Whether men are born free or not." Theodosia looked at him for a long moment.
"And what does it say?" "It says yes," Titus answered, "that any other condition is something men invented for other men." "And what do you believe?"