Moving pieces on aboard Pettigrew could not quite see. He did not intend to let Elias find whatever he was seeking. On the very eve of the planned journey, Pettigrew rode into the Warfield yard with three mounted men behind him, roughmen patrollers by their look, and he did not smile this time. Warfield, he said, I've come to collect.
The note's not due for three weeks, but I find I've lost patience. I'll take the girl now against the debt, and we'll call the balance settled when the land comes to me at forfeiture. $200, as offered. She's coming with me tonight. Behind him, one of the patrollers uncoiled a rope from his saddle.
“Legal or not,” Pettigrew added softly. “She's coming. You're one man, Warfield, and it's dark and the roads long. Be sensible.”
What happened next happened fast, and Elias would turn it over in his mind for the rest of his life. He stepped in front of the gallery, in front of the door behind which Delphia stood, and he said, “She's not property to be seized, Pettigrew. And even if she were, you've no writ, no order, nothing but three hired men and the dark. This is robbery and I'll say so to the magistrate.”
Pettigrew laughed. The magistrate's my wife's cousin, he said. Stand aside, and he nodded to his men and the patrollers swung down from their horses and then the door behind Elias opened and Delphia came out. She came out slow, and she filled the doorway, and then the gallery, rising to her full towering height in the lamplight, and the three patrollers stopped where they stood.
One of them, a young one, took an involuntary step backward and had to catch himself against the gallery post. The horses shifted and stamped, catching the fear off their riders. She had a look on her face that Elias had never seen. Not fear, not the old guardedness, but a vast and terrible calm, the calm of a woman who has decided that she will not will not be taken back into the dark from which she has only just begun to climb.
She did not shout. She did not raise a hand. She simply looked at the men one after another, holding each one's eyes until he looked away, the way a person looks away from a fire that is too hot to face, and then she looked at Pettigrew, and she spoke in that low, rough voice, and every word fell into the silence like a stone into a well. “I have been sold four times,” she said.
“I have been whipped past counting. I have been carried away from everything I ever loved twice over, and I have found my way back to the edge of it. My mother's living 40 miles west, and I mean to see her face before I die. She took one step forward, and the gallery groaned under her.”
You want to lay hands on me tonight? You go on and try. But I promise you this. It'll cost you more than $200.
It'll cost you more than you've got. For a long moment the yard hung on the edge of violence, and Elias's heart hammered, for he knew that if it came to blood, even Delphia's strength could not stand against three armed men and a fourth, and that whatever happened after would be laid at her feet and paid for with her life. But Royce Pettigrew was a coward at the root, as cruel men so often are. And he looked at the giant woman on the gallery and at the three hired men who had suddenly lost their appetite for the work, and he did the sum, and he did not like the answer.
“This isn't finished,” he said, backing his horse. “The note still due. You three weeks, Warfield, and not a soul in this district will lend you a dime. I'll have the land, and I'll have her, and I'll have the pleasure of taking my time about it.” and he wheeled and rode into the dark with his men trailing, and the threat hung behind him in the yard like smoke.
But he had blinked. He had backed down, and in doing so he had given them their three weeks, and their chance. Elias rode west at first light with Solomon guiding him, the two of them keeping a careful distance on the road. A white man and a Black man could not ride as equals in that country.
And so Solomon rode a length behind as a servant would, and they spoke only when the road ran empty. They crossed the Wateree on a flatboat ferry, pulled by a silent man who eyed Solomon's pass and Elias's shabby coat, and asked no questions. And on the far bank the land changed, grew flatter and richer, the cotton standing taller and greener than anything that would grow in Chesterfield's worn out dirt. They passed plantations far grander than the Warfield place, white houses with double galleries and long rows of quarters behind them, and Elias felt the smallness of his own errand.
One broke farmer chasing one gray woman across a country that measured a man's worth in acres and heads. They slept one night in a pine thicket off the road, not daring an inn. And there, in the dark Solomon told him a little more of why he had come, that he'd had a sister once, sold off when he was a boy, and had spent his whole manhood carrying other people's messages up and down the district, partly in the mad hope that one day the message would be about her. never was, he said. But I keep carrying them.
You carry enough of them home. Maybe it counts for something. Maybe it counts for her wherever she's at. Elias had no answer to that, and the two men lay listening to the whip-poor-wills, and did not sleep much.
They came up into the Veril lands by the middle of the second day, and Elias played his part. a poor planter looking to buy a strong hand cheap. And old Veril, who was land rich and cash poor, and no friend to the trouble a noteholder like Pettigrew could bring, received him civilly, and walked him out to the fields, grumbling the whole way of debts and drought, and the price of cotton. A man Elias recognized at once as another version of himself, sliding down the same long slope. And there, at the far end of a cotton row, straightening up from her work, with a hand pressed to the small of her back, was a woman gone gray and bent, but still enormous, still a head taller than any soul around her.