San Antone. V. J. Banis

was mildly surprised. She had detected no accent in his voice, other than what she had come to think of as a Texan accent, though she was not quite sure how to describe what that was.

      “I came here as a child,” he said. “To New York my family came, and much later, to Texas.”

      “To San Antonio?”

      “No, first we came to New Braunfels. Do you know it?”

      “I’m afraid not.”

      “It is east of San Antonio, not far. We farm there. But there are many brothers and not enough farm. So when I marry, I take my wife to San Antonio and we start a store there.”

      “Is your wife with you on this trip?” Joanna asked. She did not recall seeing him with anyone.

      His eyes fell away from hers. “My wife is dead,” he said.

      “Oh, I am sorry.”

      “It is many years,” he said. There was a moment of awkward silence; then he looked up again, at Melissa first, and then Joanna. “Please—you do not take offense at my gift? This sun, it is very hard for the ladies. This lotion is one my wife favored. It is one of the items I traveled to Galveston to procure.”

      “We’re most grateful for it, I’d begun to fear we’d be indistinguishable from the saddle horses by the time we reached our destination.”

      “But—such beautiful ladies, you could not be mistaken—oh, I see, you jest.”

      Humor, Joanna had begun to suspect, was going to be in short supply on this journey. To alleviate the awkwardness, she said, “You must let us pay you for this, however.”

      “Please, no, it is my honor.”

      “Well, then, you must eat with us one evening, perhaps tomorrow night?”

      “I shall be most grateful; but when we arrive in San Antonio, you will come to my house for dinner, yes?”

      On that note, he took leave of them, walking stiffly erect.

      “Our first invitation,” Melissa said when he was gone.

      “And your first conquest, it seems to me,” Joanna could not help mentioning.

      “Mr. Hansen? Don’t be ridiculous,” Melissa protested, reddening. “Why, he’s years older than I am—anyone can see that. He’s probably your age.”

      “Imagine that,” Joanna said, “and still able to get around under his own power.”

      She noticed, however, that her daughter stole another glance in the direction of Mr. Hansen’s departing back before she turned once again to the wagon.

      Chapter Eleven

      By day, nearly thirty slaves were grateful to ride packed into the Hartes’ second wagon. At night, Lucretia and William slept alone inside while the others found room on the ground about and beneath.

      Lucretia loved William because he was an essentially good man. He was, as well, an uncomplicated one, that rarest of all the plantation master’s possessions, a slave without resentment of his slavery. His acceptance of his status mirrored that of the white masters he had served all his life: It was the natural order of things. Born and reared at Eaton Hall, he had known only one way of life, and that, for a slave, had been singularly lucky. His father had been major domo under the old massa; his mother, cook before Lucretia. As a boy, William had been beaten only twice, and both times he had regarded the punishment as fitting. As a man, he looked down with kindly conceit on most of the other slaves he knew; and had prejudice been less ingrained, he would have seen himself as the better of many whites, too.

      Lucretia both admired and despised him for his tolerance. She was not so lucky. There were days in the old house, in South Carolina, when she had not dared pause before a mirror, nor glance in the direction of her own reflection, lest her hands rise of their own accord and try to strip the blackness from her face.

      Lucretia’s first beating had been a matter of color. She had been five, perhaps six—she was no more certain of her exact age than her mistress was—when she had stolen into the bedroom of Joanna’s mother, in itself enough to bring punishment down upon her head. She was found there seated at the vanity table, her face hidden under a thick mask of lotions and creams, and over them a caked layer of white powder that crazed and cracked when she howled at her punishment, falling in chunks to the floor, ground back into powder by her flailing feet. All for nothing. What she had seen of her handiwork in the vanity mirror had been punishment enough.

      She loved Joanna, and hated her, too; hated herself for loving her, hated herself for hating her. She thought sometimes she would be happier under a harsher mistress. Joanna was kind and gentle, good to her slaves, good to Lucretia in particular. And how could you not resent the necessity of feeling grateful for that? What soul could not fester, bearing such a wound?

      How lucky she had felt when Joanna first helped her learn to read. But why, then, had it come to feel a gift she gave the writer, too, something essential to the very urge that had driven him in the first place? Why did only she bear the burden of obligation for something the inherent rightness of which seemed to blossom and spread like a field of dandelions within her?

      Oh, the hunger that had spawned, insatiable, gnawing, making the hunger she fed in others seem puny indeed.

      Words, clogging her innards, threatening to break through the fragile shell of her skull and print themselves across her brow, for all to realize her guilt.

      Like a secret drunk she was, stealing at night into forbidden rooms, dens and studies and parlors; pawing with trembling hands through trunks and valises and letters bound in molding ribbons, thirsting for words, words, more words.

      Books, smuggled under her apron. Letters, the possession of which meant the hide off her back. Labels on patent-medicine bottles, and the ragged scraps of newspapers, discarded by those who could read without danger.

      For she knew the danger; it had come up like gorge within her. She had awakened one night in a cold sweat of terror and known in an instant why the others did not let their slaves read, and why she dared not let even Joanna know of the books and letters, of the pages and the thousands and thousands of tumbling words that beat against the backs of her eyelids.

      It wasn’t the words. They were only seeds. It was their harvest of ideas, that was the danger; she’d known that when the first one rotted in her mouth and made her world taste sour.

      That was the bitterest lesson of all, and she could thank Joanna for it as well. She could look back now and see, its seed had been planted in the very first lesson (“A is for apple....”): There was no unthinking an idea.

      So, she lay in the dark, with her William snoring beside her, and listened to the sounds of slaves creeping away in the darkness, and did not move to stop them or warn her mistress. She wished them well, and ached for what lay before them; envied their courage, and mocked their foolhardiness. She knew what they felt, what drove them to the risks they took. And her burden was worse than theirs: She had the words for it. And the idea of it.

      And now, like a fragile bud she had cupped in her hands, lest her very wishing crush it, she had the dream of it, too.

      Their own land. The freedom of it, for her and William, and the children whose sprouting waited in her belly, and the children to come from them.

      She would get it; she would use her mistress’s own goodness against her to get it, and without shame.

      Because that was the shape the words had taken for her, the idea that had come to live in her, and become her: Freedom was a right. You owed no thanks for it. And the very loving goodness that would make a gift of it was in itself a chain that must be broken if you were to be free.

      * * * *

      Joanna did not learn until the midday stop the following day that three more slaves had run away during the night.

      She stood, worrying at the far horizon. Why was