Gilbert makes his way two blocks up H Street and past the theater, which shines like a jewel box against the night sky. The bull’s-eye window at the front glows yellow, and when he is almost directly in front of the theater, the doors swing open and the light from the lobby briefly floods the street. Gilbert dreams of being able to take Sara to the theater, like the freed couples he sees strolling through Madison Ward on Saturday nights. But the two of them are a long way off from being able to spend good money on tickets, let alone get permission to go anywhere at the same time.
When Gilbert arrives at the Mayo-Preston place, he makes straight for the kitchen house, where Sara sleeps in the loft, alongside several other women. On summer evenings, when the door to the kitchen sits open from morning till night, Gilbert whistles to Sara when he gets close, a little signal to meet him in the garden. On winter nights, they sometimes slip off to the greenhouse, but in this wind, there’s no chance Gilbert’s whistle will get Sara’s attention.
He raps on the door, then puts his ear to it and listens for the sound of footsteps. Finally, he hears the latch lift, and the door opens wide enough for him to slip inside without letting in a blast of cold air.
“You’re late,” Sara whispers in a tone that tells him she’s not really mad, just disappointed.
He pulls her soft head of hair to his chest and comes close to cooing at her. “I was worried you’d be asleep.”
She lifts her head up off his chest and tilts her face toward his. He is over six feet tall—a colossus was what he was called the last time he was sold—and Sara is barely five feet. He lowers his head and finds her lips waiting for him. They are soft and warm and searching.
The hard part about kissing Sara is figuring out how to stop. But after a minute, Sara puts her hand to his mouth. “Not a one of them is asleep up there.”
“Well, everyone best get to bed,” Gilbert says, raising his voice two notches so that Sylvie and Maddie and Lecretia can hear him where they lay.
“You hush, Gillie,” says Sara.
From the loft comes the wheezing laugh of Miss Maddie. “No one up here wants to hear you thumping on that poor woman.”
“No one?” Gilbert asks. He loves getting Maddie, who is old enough to be his mama, worked up into a knot.
Maddie ignores him. “Honey,” she calls to Sara, “you feed him some of that leftover hash. It’s in the Dutch oven.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Sara as she takes Gilbert’s hand and leads him toward the fireplace. Maddie has already covered the coals with ash, but Sara stokes them until they shine orange again. Then she sets the pot on top of them.
Sara looks good moving around the kitchen, and Gilbert tells her so. “One day, I’m gonna get you a kitchen of your own.” She raises her eyebrows up into the middle of her forehead, like he is telling her a joke she’s heard before.
“You got big plans,” she says sort of quiet.
“They’reourplans now.”
Gilbert grew up on the banks of the Pamunkey River, in King William County. His mother was owned by the proprietor of a tavern in Piping Tree, and by the time Gilbert and his sister reached her waist, they were cleaning the meeting rooms and running meals between the kitchen and the taproom. All of them had assumed Gilbert would eventually grow up to mix flip and punch behind the bar and that his sister might follow in their mother’s footsteps and clean the guest rooms, but those plans went nowhere. The summer his sister turned sixteen, she was sent to the capital to be sold, and when the proprietor’s daughter married a carriage maker in Richmond a few years after that, fifteen-year-old Gilbert was made a part of her dowry.
In Richmond, Gilbert learned the carriage-making business. He was good with a hammer, and by the time he grew into his body, he’d attracted the attention of a local blacksmith named Peter Goode, who bought himfor near double the going rate because he knew Gilbert would be a natural at the forge.
Good Pete, as Gilbert had taken to calling him, was a decent man, and after he had Gilbert all trained up, he left him well enough alone. Gilbert ran the shop, and provided he got Good Pete’s customers taken care of in a timely manner, he was allowed to hire himself out on Sundays. Any extra money Gilbert earned, he kept in an old tobacco pouch, dreaming of the day he’d turn the pouch inside out and buy his own freedom.
Falling in love with Sara had complicated his plans because it meant Gilbert had to put away enough money to purchase the two of them, instead of just himself. They had done the math a hundred different times, but in the end they decided that the best course of action was to buy Sara’s freedom first. That way, God willing, any children they had would be born free.
Gilbert had initially figured Elizabeth Mayo might let Sara go for two hundred dollars, less if she was feeling generous and recalled all the good turns Sara had done her over the years. But now that Elizabeth had taken a new husband, all her property—including Sara—technically belonged to General John Preston, and it was unclear what sort of negotiator he’d prove to be.
Whatever General Preston decided to charge for Sara was going to be a pittance compared to what Gilbert would need to buy his own way out of the smithy. At one point, he had calculated he’d need three hundred fifty dollars to purchase his freedom, but that was before Good Pete had up and died.
Good Pete wasn’t much older than Gilbert, and he was strong as an ox, but in late July of this past year he’d come down with a fever, and by August he was in the ground. His wife had no sons, so after he died, she sold the business piecemeal. The building went to Francis Longbottom, the wagon and a pair of Cleveland bays went to John Ingalls, and everything else—including Gilbert—went to Cameron Kemp, who ran a smithy of his own on Locust Alley, down near the wharf.
Good Pete had never been a fan of Kemp’s operation, and he taught Gilbert how to spot the Scotsman’s work—the rough edges, the crooked lines, the seams that didn’t hold—from a mile away. “It’s utter shite,” Good Pete used to say, “but I’m perfectly happy to make a living fixing his mistakes.”
What Gilbert learned from Good Pete was that something magical happened at the anvil, and a blacksmith either knew what to do with it or he didn’t. A hot iron rod was nothing but raw potential—it might become a trammel to hold a pot full of food over a fire, a sickle to help a farmer with the harvest, or a tire to get a cart to market—but Gilbert never tried to force it to be something it didn’t want to be. Good Pete taught him to listen to the metal as he manipulated it and to loosen his grip on his hammer; it was clear from looking at Kemp’s workmanship that those were two lessons the man had never learned.
Working for Kemp was hard, there was no doubt about that. The hours were long, the rations meager, and the conditions worse than anything Gilbert had ever experienced. But the sleeping arrangements were what just about did him in. All of the men—white indentured servants and enslaved Negroes—slept in the same loft above the smithy. The room had two rows of beds in it—no privacy for more than a dozen men.
At Good Pete’s, Gilbert had had a small room off the back of the shop all to himself. He used to complain about the room to Sara. It was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, but now he realizes what a luxury it was, for that room was where he came to know her as his wife.
When Gilbert had described his new accommodations to Sara, back in September, after the sale had gone through, he’d watched her face fall. But she recovered fast, and then she took his head in her hands and said, “I’m still your wife, even if I can’t share your bed.” He knew it was true, but what was also true was that when Sara was in his bed, within arm’s reach, he felt like a free man.
Now Gilbert sits at the pine table in the center of the kitchen house, watching his wife spoon the hash onto a plate. She sets it in front of him and hands him a fork, but he puts the fork down and takes her hand instead. “It ain’t always gonna be like this,” he whispers. He’s surprised by the way the words catch in his throat on their way out.
JACK
