The grapevine still runs, child. Word still travels mouth to mouth, place to place, faster than these white men know. If your mama is living, somebody knows where. And if we could find her, he stopped.
Elias finished the thought slowly. If we could find her, and if she's on a place that could be reasoned with, he shook his head. It's a thin hope. A thin, wild hope.
It's more hope than we had this morning, said Delphia. And for the first time in weeks, there was something other than dread in her face. So they sent word out. It went the way such word had always gone among the enslaved people of the south by the invisible network that ran beneath the notice of masters, the grapevine telegraph, the passing of news from a driver to a ferryman, to a woman drawing water to a man with a pass to travel.
It was a network the masters did not believe in, and could not have broken if they had, for it had no wires to cut and no office to burn. It lived in memory and in trust. In the split second of a glance exchanged at a crossroads, in a verse of a work song altered to carry a name, in the words murmured between two people passing on a road with their hats brim low. Through that network the enslaved had for generations warned each other of a cruel overseer down the way, of a sale coming, of a patrol riding tonight, and through it now went the strangest and most hopeful message of all.
Kato carried it first to the people on the neighboring places on a Sunday when visiting was allowed, walking miles on his old legs to sit in a quarter doorway and tell it plain. A giant woman named Delphia found at last on the Warfield place looking for her mother Juny sold west a decade past herself a giant marked and known. And the word traveled, as words did, out along the creeks and the county roads and the market towns, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, carrying the oldest and most human of all questions out into the wide, cruel country. “Does anybody know where my mother is?”
Does anybody know if she still lives? Tell her I'm found. Tell her I'm looking. Tell her I never stopped, even when I forgot her face.
Tell her the door I shut is open now and I am coming.“ The answer came in April, three weeks before the note fell due, carried by a free Black drayman named Solomon, who traveled the district with a pass and a wagon, and a memory like a courthouse ledger. Such men were the arteries of the grapevine. They had legal leave to move, to haul goods from town to landing to plantation, and in the beds of their wagons and the folds of their memories, they carried more than freight. Solomon had been hearing the message about the giant girl for two weeks, passed to him at a ferry landing by a man who'd had it from a woman who'd had it from a cousin, and something in it had caught in him, and would not let go, and he had gone out of his way at some risk, following the thread of it west, and then back east again until he was sure.”
He came up the Warfield lane at dusk, and he would not speak until he had looked at Delphia a long moment in the failing light, measuring her against something in his mind, against the description he'd been carrying, and against something older, some ache of his own. And then he took off his hat. Everyone took off their hats to her, Elias had noticed. There was that in her bearing that called it forth.
And he said, “There's a woman on the Veril place 40 miles west, past the Wateree River, big woman, strong past believing, been there nine or ten years, keeps to herself, they say, sings a song nobody else knows of an evening. He turned the hat in his hands. And the people on that place say she asks every soul who passes through. She has been asking so long they have stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing a clock.”
She asks, “Have you seen my girl, big girl?” Mark on her neck. His voice went soft. “Her name's Juny.” 40 miles was nothing and everything on a map. It was a day's hard ride.
In the world Delphia lived in, it was a distance measured not in miles, but in passes and patrols, and the 10,000 ways a southern county could stop a Black woman traveling and never let her go. The slave patrols that rode the roads at night. The law that made any unaccompanied black person presumed a runaway. The certainty that a giant woman on the road alone would be seized within the hour and jailed and sold.
She could not simply go. And Elias could not simply take her, for to take her onto another man's plantation, and lay claim to his property was a thing that could end with both of them dead in a ditch, and the law calling it justice. But the Veril place could perhaps be reasoned with if a white man of some standing made the approach. And Elias Warfield, for all his poverty, was a white man with his name on a deed.
And that, in the terrible arithmetic of that world, was a key that could open doors that were bolted against Delphia forever. They made their plan by firelight, the three of them, and Solomon the drayman, who had agreed to guide them for reasons he did not fully explain, but that had something to do with the way he had said Juny’s name. Elias would ride to the Veril place openly, as a planter seeking to buy a strong field hand, a story that would raise no alarm, for such visits were common. He would see the woman.
He would confirm she was Juny. And then if God was merciful and the Veril owner was a man who could be dealt with, he would try to buy her. Though where the money would come from, with the note falling due and Pettigrew's jaws closing, none of them could say. It was a plan made mostly of holes.
But it was a plan, and it was more than they had possessed in a year, and Delphia agreed to it, because the alternative was to sit still, while the last thread that connected her to her own beginning frayed and broke. Then Pettigrew moved first. He had spies, as such men always do. A hand on a neighboring place who carried tales for a coin, or perhaps only the ordinary leakage of news through a talking countryside, where a drayman's questions and a Sunday's visiting, could not stay secret for long, and he learned that Warfield was planning some journey west, and he guessed shrewdly that it touched somehow on the giant girl he coveted.
It gnawed at him. He was a man who needed to own the ending of every story he was in. And here was Warfield. Warfield, the district's joke, the failing man he had all but buried.