The months that followed were the strangest and most complicated Theodosia had ever lived, which was saying something, because her life had never been simple. Augustine ignored her with the particular efficiency of a man who has decided a problem does not exist if he refuses to look at it. He did not send for her, did not speak to her, did not ask anyone to check on her welfare. Louisa did the same.
It was as though the plantation had split itself into two separate worlds, divided by an invisible wall, and Theodosia had chosen, or had been chosen for the side that stood on the wrong end of that wall's architecture of power. But on the wrong end of that architecture, there were things the right end never had. There were conversations that lasted until the candle burned down to nothing. There were books passing from hand to hand, read and argued over with a quiet passion.
Neither of them had ever been permitted to spend on anything before. There was Dileia's cooking, cornbread and simmered greens shared without the formality of a dining table Theodosia had rarely been welcome at in the first place. There was Amos' talk in the evenings of the years before Cedar Hollow existed at all. When this stretch of Alabama had belonged to the Chau and the Creek and the rivers had run through country, no fence had yet claimed.
And there was Titus's laughter, which Theodosia took weeks to hear for the first time, but which, when it finally came, felt like discovering that a mountain she had thought cold all the way through had warm springs running beneath its base. It was on a rain quiet evening in October that Theodosia found the letters. She had asked Dileia to bring the old trunk she had kept locked since childhood, the one that had belonged to her mother, thinking only to find a heavier shawl against the coming cold. Instead, beneath the folded linens, her fingers found a bundle of paper tied with a faded ribbon, brittle with age, and her own name written across the top in a hand she recognized instantly, though she had not seen it in twenty-two years, because it was the same hand that had once guided her own small fingers over the shapes of letters in a primer long since lost, her mother's hand.
Cordelia Peton had known in the final months of her pregnancy that something about the birth troubled the midwife more than she let on. And in the quiet hours when Augustine was occupied elsewhere, she had written letters to the daughter she would likely not live to raise. Letters meant to be given to Theodosia when she was old enough to read them herself. Letters that Augustine, grief-stricken and furious at the world in the way that some men turn their grief into cruelty, had apparently found, read, and locked away instead of ever delivering.
In them, Cordelia wrote of her hopes for a daughter she already loved without having met, of her fear that her husband's disappointment, for the midwife had warned that whatever ailed the child, it might mean she never walked, would harden into something the child would carry as a wound of her own making. "Do not let his coldness become your inheritance," one line read, in ink gone the color of weak tea. "Whatever your legs allow or do not allow, walk toward the people who see you plainly, and stay there." Theodosia read every page twice by candlelight, and when she finished, she did not cry. Not at first, because crying was not a habit her life had left room for.
But she held the pages against her chest for a long while, and when Titus found her later that night, her face carried an expression he had not seen on her before, something between grief and a strange hard-won relief, as though a door she had believed sealed for two decades, had finally been found unlocked all along, simply hidden behind furniture no one had thought to move. She showed him the letters. He read them slowly, the way he read everything. When he finished, he said only, "She sounds like she knew you before you were even born." "She did," Theodosia said.
"My father just never let her finish knowing me." It was that same season that Theodosia learned something of Titus's own past, a story he had never offered easily to anyone, but which came loose slowly over these long evenings, the way old knots eventually give way to patient hands. He had been thirteen when he was sold south out of a small farm near Savannah, separated in a single afternoon from his mother, a woman named Patience, whom he remembered mostly in fragments now, the particular way she hummed while she worked, the smell of woodsmoke in her apron, and a small carved wooden bird no bigger than a thumb that she had pressed into his hand the last time he ever saw her, whittled from a scrap of cedar with a pocketknife she was not supposed to own. He had kept that bird for fifteen years wrapped in cloth at the bottom of the one wooden box he was permitted to call his own, and he had never once in all that time learned what became of her. "Amos knew her," Titus said one night so quietly Theodosia almost missed it.
"He was on the same coffle years before, sold off the same trading yard in Savannah before either of us ever came here. He told me once a long time ago that she'd been resold to a rice plantation somewhere along the Georgia coast. He didn't know more than that. I never asked him again after that because I was afraid of what asking again might cost him to remember and what it might cost me to hear."
Theodosia looked at the small carved bird when he finally showed it to her, turning it over in her palm, feeling the worn grooves where a mother's careful knife had shaped it decades before. "If you were ever free," she said slowly, "would you look for her?" Titus was quiet a long time.
"Every day of my life," he said. "I've thought about it, and every day of my life I've had no way to."
Winter came and went, and with the spring came a new complication that neither Theodosia nor Titus had fully reckoned with. Mr. Wardlaw, who had continued to correspond quietly with Theodosia, through Dileia and the boy Pete over the intervening months, more out of a lawyer's professional curiosity than any expectation of further trouble, paid a visit to Cedar Hollow in March, and found occasion to speak with Theodosia alone on the stable porch, while Augustine was away at a livestock auction in Demopolis. "I want to ask you something plainly, Miss Peton," he said, "because I think you'd rather hear it plain than hear it softened."
"Go on."
"Suppose your father someday wished to free the man Titus. Suppose he wished it sincerely, out of whatever changes a conscience or a scandal or simple old age might work in him. It would not be so simple a thing as writing a paper and handing it over."
Theodosia's expression did not change, but her hands tightened slightly on the arms of her chair. "Explain it to me." Wardlaw did. Alabama law, like the law of nearly every deep south state by the 1850s, had grown steadily more hostile to manumission with each passing decade, particularly since the anxieties that followed Nat Turner's uprising two decades before.
A private manumission required at minimum the posting of a substantial bond and a public notice of intent, subject to challenge by any citizen who cared to object. And in practice, many counties required legislative approval that was rarely granted. Worse, even where manumission succeeded, state law generally required the newly freed person to leave Alabama within a fixed period, often no more than thirty days, or risk being seized and sold back into bondage on the theory argued in courthouse after courthouse across the South, that free Black people living among the enslaved population posed a danger to the entire system. "So even if my father agreed," Theodosia said slowly, "even if he signed every paper in the county, Titus would still have to leave the state, and quickly, and likely with very little to his name beyond the clothes on his back and whatever you could arrange to send with him."
"It is not freedom in any full sense most men imagine when they use the word," Wardlaw said. "It is an exit, if it is granted at all, and a narrow one." Theodosia said nothing for a long while after Wardlaw rode away that afternoon.