The child was born in the spring of 1854 in the slave quarters in the smallest cabin at the end of the row which had been given to Dileia after her mother's death. The midwife was an elderly woman named Grace, who had delivered more than a hundred babies on that plantation and the surrounding ones over her long life. The labor was long. Dileia made almost no sound. When the child came at last, just before dawn on a morning in early April, he came quietly with his eyes open, looking at the lantern as if he had been expecting it.
It was a boy. Dileia named him Isaac after her grandfather, who had been brought to the sea islands on a ship whose name no one in his family had ever known. The child was light-skinned with hair the color of wet sand and eyes that would, as he grew, turn the same pale gray as Augustine Ravenals. When Grace saw the child, she looked at Dileia and did not need to ask. She washed the baby in a basin of warm water, wrapped him in a clean linen cloth, placed him in his mother's arms, and sat down on the wooden stool beside the bed, saying very softly that the child had the look of someone whose life would need to be guarded carefully.
Dileia nodded. She already knew. Henry at Arnold knew, too. She could not fail to know. The child was too obvious, the plantation too small, the eyes of the other servants too knowing for her to pretend otherwise.
For several weeks after Isaac's birth, Henrietta did not come down to breakfast. When she finally did, on a morning in late April, she did not speak to her husband across the table, not in any meaningful way for almost a year. But Henrietta was a woman of her class and time, and the solution to a problem of this kind among the planter families of the Low Country was not to acknowledge it. Divorce was impossible. Scandal was unthinkable.
The solution was to keep the mother in the cabin at the far end of the row, to pretend the child belonged to some unnamed field hand, and to wait for the years to soften the outline of the resemblance into something that could be politely ignored. For 8 years, that was what they did. Dileia raised Isaac in the cabin at the end of the row. Augustine continued intermittently and with a pattern only Dileia and Clarissa would have recognized to visit her. Henrietta lived in the main house, conducted her social calls, took the sacrament at the parish church and did not speak her husband's name in connection with the child in the cabin.
Isaac grew. He learned to walk, to talk, and from the other children in the quarters, the careful art of becoming invisible whenever a white person passed. By the time he was seven, he was the quietest child on the plantation. But also in the private geography of his mother's cabin, a child who laughed. Dileia had carved out a small world for him with Clarissa's help and the help of the other women of the quarters a world entirely his own.
She taught him to read in secret from a torn Bible. Clarissa had smuggled out of the main house and sewn into the lining of Dileia's mattress. She taught him to count using dried beans in a kitchen jar. She taught him the old songs, and she taught him in the careful language an enslaved mother used to teach her son to survive. When to speak and when to be silent, when to bow his head and when to meet a white man's eyes, when to laugh and when to hold his face as still as a pond at dawn.
By his eighth year, he had learned all these lessons. He was a quick child and a watchful one. Dileia sometimes watched him sleeping at night in the yellow light of a single tallow candle and thought with a kind of grief she had no word for that he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and that the world into which he had been born was going to destroy him and that she could not imagine a future in which this would not be true. Ezekiel, the head driver, was one of the few people on the plantation who spoke to the boy directly. In the long evenings of spring and summer, when the work of the day was done, Ezekiel would sometimes come to the end of the lane where Dileia's cabin stood, sit on the wooden step outside the door, and tell Isaac stories.
He told him about the river, the birds, the way the tide worked, and in a careful coded way, about places up north where a man could be free. He did not say the word freedom. He did not have to. Isaac, small and thin, watching the older man with gray eyes already old for his age, understood what was being described. Dileia, listening from inside the cabin, said nothing.
She was afraid of what Ezekiel was telling her son and she was afraid of what would happen if he did not tell him.