What followed was a conversation that lasted the better part of two hours. The exact contents of which no one outside that parlor ever heard in full, because the doors stayed shut the entire time, but whose effect was written plainly across Augustine Peton's face when he finally emerged, pale beneath his sun-darkened skin, with the look of a man who has badly miscalculated something important, and has only just understood it. He called for Kums. The conversation with Kums was shorter and considerably harsher, though it never rose to shouting.
It was the particular kind of violence delivered through precise words and concrete threats. Kums left the house with his jaw set tight and his eyes carrying the color of old resentment and walked straight to the shed. Titus was freed before the afternoon was out. Amos and two other men found him with his wrists rubbed raw to the flesh underneath the rope, dehydrated but still standing, because Titus was the kind of man who did not fall until everything in him was spent.
And it was not yet spent. They brought him to the stable, gave him water and food, and Amos dressed his wrists with a poultice of herbs he had known how to prepare since he was a young man himself. Titus did not ask how any of it had happened. He knew, with the same certainty by which he knew the wind was about to change before it changed, By the signs, by the logic of it, by something that had no name but worked all the same, that someone had stood between him and what had been coming for him.
What Titus faced in that shed was not an isolated cruelty invented for dramatic effect. It reflected the actual legal architecture of the antebellum South. Under Alabama's slave codes, as in nearly every slaveholding state by the 1850s, enslaved people could not testify in court against a white person in the vast majority of circumstances, which meant a false accusation from even one white man, let alone two, carried enormous and often unanswerable weight. Overseers like the fictional Jared Kums held near total daily authority over enslaved laborers lives, often with plantation owners largely absent from day-to-day supervision and physical punishment, including stocks and whippings, functioned as an ordinary, legally sanctioned tool of labor discipline rather than an exception.
Alabama, like most southern states, had also passed laws by the 1830s, making it a crime to teach an enslaved person to read or write. A wave of legislation that intensified sharply after Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion in Virginia, which slaveholders across the South viewed with acute fear. Enforcement of these anti-literacy laws varied by household and region, and enslaved people did still learn to read in secret, often at great personal risk, exactly as Titus's fictional education under a sympathetic traveling minister reflects a pattern historians have documented in real accounts from the period. These were not background details.
They were the very machinery that made a false accusation so dangerous, and a moment of quiet literacy so radical.
That night, Titus came to where Theodosia sat. She was alone. Dileia had gone to fetch warm water. The candle was burning low, and Theodosia held her pen, but had not written anything for a long while, only stared at the flame the way she did when she was thinking too hard.
Titus stopped in the doorway. "It was you," he said. It was not a question. Theodosia looked up.
She saw the white cloth wrapped around his wrists. She saw the exhaustion in his face, the first time she had ever truly seen it because it was the first time he had allowed himself to show it. "Mr. Wardlaw has my letter," she said, and a copy sits with his clerk in Selma.
If anything like this happens to you again, that letter reaches the county court within a week, and my father's troubles will be a great deal larger than either of us. Kums knows this, too, she went on. Mr. Wardlaw made certain of it.
What he did was serious enough that my father could dismiss him tomorrow if he ever needed someone to blame for something worse, and Kums is too clever a man not to understand that. A long silence, the crickets outside, the wind moving through the chinaberry trees. Why? Titus asked.
Theodosia set down her pen. She looked directly at him. "Because it was the honest thing to do."
"Why?"
She repeated and paused, not from doubt, but from care. The pause of someone choosing her words, not because she didn't know what she felt, but because she knew exactly what she felt, and that gave the words weight. Because there are very few people in my life who have ever asked me where I wanted to go. Titus did not move from the doorway for a moment.
Then he came in and sat on the floor across from her, not in a chair, on the floor, because there was no other chair in that small room besides her own, and looked at her with eyes that usually revealed nothing, and that in that moment revealed everything. "I don't have many people who ask me anything either," he said. "I know," Theodosia said. Outside, Dileia returned with the warm water, saw Titus sitting on the floor across from Theodosia, the two of them silent, the candle trembling between them, and stood still in the doorway a moment, with the steaming basin in her hands.
Then she turned quietly around, set the basin just outside the door so as not to disturb them, and went to sit with Amos by the stable, looking up at a sky that was that particular night unusually clear over the Black Belt. "What happened?" Amos asked. "Nothing," Dileia said.
"Everything."