The bequest to Theodosia stood unchallenged, in part because Louisa, whatever her faults, had no appetite for a public court battle that would drag her late husband's private failures into the Selma papers, and in part because Wardlaw himself, with the quiet thoroughness of a man who had drafted the papers to be unbreakable from the start, had left no seam for a challenge to find purchase in. Amos was the one who finally answered the question that had lived unspoken in Titus's chest for fifteen years.
In the weeks before their departure, as word spread of Titus's coming freedom, an old man from a neighboring plantation, hearing the story secondhand through the slow grapevine that ran between the quarters of every farm in the county, sent word through a Sunday preacher that he had once, many years before, worked a rice plantation on the Georgia coast alongside a woman named Patience, a woman who used to hum while she worked and who had spoken often in her last years of a boy she'd been forced to leave behind in Alabama. She had died of a lung fever some six years past, the old man said. But she had died believing her son was still alive somewhere, still strong, still carrying whatever she'd managed to give him before the wagon pulled away. It was not the reunion Titus had spent fifteen years hoping for in his most private moments.
But it was an answer at last, after fifteen years of none. And Theodosia watched him sit very still with the small carved wooden bird cupped in both his enormous hands for the better part of an hour, grieving a woman he had not seen since he was a boy, but grieving her finely with the certainty of knowing rather than the ache of wondering.
The weeks that followed the reading of the will were unlike anything Cedar Hollow had seen in Theodosia's lifetime. Louisa, eager to see the whole uncomfortable business concluded, and the estate settled into whatever new shape it would take, under a court-appointed administrator, until the younger Peton cousins came of age to claim their portions, raised no objection to the timeline Wardlaw proposed, and within a month the manumission papers had been filed, witnessed, and bonded exactly as Alabama law required, down to the last clause. Wardlaw himself rode out to Cedar Hollow to deliver the documents in person, unwilling, he said, to trust something this important to any hand but his own. He found Titus in the yard splitting fence rails with the same unhurried strength he brought to every task and called him over.
Titus set down the ax, wiped his palms on his trousers, and approached with the same careful stillness he had carried since the very first day Theodosia had known him. Wardlaw handed him a folded sheath of paper sealed in wax heavier in the hand than its size suggested. "These say you're a free man," Wardlaw said. "The moment you cross into Ohio."
"Alabama law won't recognize your freedom while you remain inside its borders, no matter what this paper says. So you'll want to keep it close and keep moving until the Ohio River is behind you."
"There's a steamboat captain out of Mobile, a man named Chalmers who's carried freedom papers north before without asking questions he didn't need answered. I've already written ahead." Titus turned the papers over in his hands, the same hands that had once carried timber beams that would have broken lesser men, and for a long moment he said nothing at all.
Then he looked up. Fifteen years, he said, and it comes down to a folded piece of paper and a boat captain who's willing to look the other way. That's the ugly truth of it, Wardlaw admitted. It's not the freedom a just world would owe a man.
It's the freedom this one's willing to allow, which is a smaller and meaner thing, and I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. I'm not insulted, Titus said quietly. I'm just remembering every year I spent believing this piece of paper would never exist at all.
That evening, Theodosia found him sitting on the same porchstep where he had once read stitched pamphlets by candlelight in secret, the freedom papers resting on his knee, his eyes fixed on the darkening tree line beyond the fields. She wheeled herself close and sat with him in silence for a long while, listening to the last of the season's crickets and the far-off call of a whip-poor-will somewhere down toward the creek bottom. "Are you frightened?" She asked finally. Some, Titus admitted, not of the leaving, of believing it's real before it's finished being real.
I've watched men here believe things were settled before, only to have it all taken back at the last hour by somebody with more power and less conscience than they had. It won't be taken back, Theodosia said. I intend to make certain of that with every breath I have left to spend on it. Titus turned to look at her, and in the fading light, something in his carefully guarded face finally came all the way open.
The way a door left unlocked for years finally swings wide once someone thinks to push it. "I know you will," he said. "That's the thing I've come to trust most in this whole world. Not the paper." A Tohon, the final days at Cedar Hollow were spent in the quiet, practical business of leaving a life behind.
Dileia wept more than either Theodosia or Titus did combined, insisting through her tears that she was only crying from happiness, though everyone in the small room understood it was a good deal more complicated than that. Happiness tangled up with an old woman's grief at watching the child she had raised from infancy prepare to travel a thousand miles away toward a future Dileia herself, still enslaved, still bound to whatever fate the estate's administrator decided for her, would never get to share.
Theodosia spent three long nights writing letters to Wardlaw regarding the small remaining details of the estate to a Cincinnati acquaintance of her mother's family who had, decades before, married into an Ohio household and might offer some early guidance in a country neither Theodosia nor Titus had ever seen with their own eyes. And finally, a letter to Dileia herself, promising that the moment circumstances allowed it, she would find a way to purchase her freedom, too, and bring her north to the house on the forty acres across from Cincinnati, a promise Theodosia intended to keep, with the same stubborn precision she brought to everything else in her life. Amos was the hardest farewell of all in its own quiet way, because Amos had never been a man given to displays of feeling. And yet, on the last morning, as the wagon that would carry them to the Mobile road stood loaded, and waiting in the gray pre-dawn light, he pressed something small into Titus's palm, a second carving, this one freshly whittled from a scrap of cedar, roughly shaped into the same small bird Patience had made so many years before.
Saw the first one once a long while back when you were still young enough to show it to folks without fear. Amos said, "Thought you ought to carry a matched pair north in case one gets lost along the way." "Man ought to have more than one thing left of his mother, if the world's finally going to let him keep anything at all." Titus could not speak for a long moment. He simply closed his hand around the small carved shape and pulled the old man into an embrace that lasted longer than either of them likely intended. Two men who had shared fifteen years of the same hard ground, saying goodbye in the only language either of them fully trusted.
The road to Mobile took the better part of five days. The wagon rattling south and east along rutted clay tracks that cut through pine barrens and cypress bottoms. Past small crossroads towns where the sight of a free man's papers being checked was common enough that no one gave the wagon a second glance, and past larger towns where Wardlaw's careful instructions, travel by day, keep the papers on your person at all times. Let Theodosia do the talking whenever a white stranger demanded an explanation, because a crippled planter's daughter drew far less suspicion than a giant of a Black man traveling alone, proved their worth again and again.
The landscape itself seemed to soften the farther south they traveled, the tight cotton rows giving way to looser stands of longleaf pine, the air growing thick and briny as it carried the first hints of the gulf until on the fifth evening they crested a low rise and saw spread out below them in the dying orange light, the wide gray ribbon of Mobile Bay, and the masts of a dozen ships crowded along the wharves like a leafless winter forest. It was outside a crossroad store two days into the journey in a stretch of country where the land grew swampy and close and the road narrowed between walls of dark-water tupelo, and the trouble Wardlaw had warned them of finally found them. Four mounted men, part of the county's slave patrol, rode out from behind a bend in the road with the unhurried proprietary air of men accustomed to stopping whoever they pleased. And the lead rider, a heavyset man with a tobacco-stained beard, drew his horse across the wagon track and held up a hand.