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I was born the bastard son of a plantation owner, mothered by one of the housemaids that caught his attention at one point or another. And yet, I never knew her. I drank off a wet nurse and got moved to the main house when I was old enough to shine shoes.

I’d spent my life following behind my nine brothers and sisters, cleaning up after them, minding them, encouraging them to succeed.

I’d sat in the back of the playroom, minding my manners as they taught me to, slowly absorbing the tutors as they taught my siblings math and reading. Little else.

The consumption had claimed a few; flu claimed another. Another passed from fever that I would eventually assume was from a bad tooth. Three of them made it to adulthood, me at their backs. The light-skinned boy everyone knew the mister had fathered, but nobody was polite enough to acknowledge. Blood ties made the strongest ones, I was told.

Blood ties that meant nothing when a dollar waved under Mister’s nose.

Blood ties that would keep me at the plantation long after that ugly bastard of a president set us free. Tried to, anyway.

They made it illegal to own us, but didn’t make it legal to go on about our lives. Not that I’d ever get that chance, though.

It was Thanksgiving, not a legal declaration yet. That would come later the next year, but we had a celebration of the end of harvest and the slaughter for winter to come.

Blood on everyone’s hands.

Eating everything but the squeal, moo, and cluck of any animal that eyed us wrong. And some that didn’t.

Also was fine time to sell off any errant people they didn’t want to feed come winter. I’d watched folks I called auntie and uncle walked off in chains too many times to count.

I’d watched siblings sold, too. Twin half-sisters.

I prayed they went some place where the folks were Christianized. Twins were a bad omen among those from the old world.

A world that was part of me.

A world I never got to know.

All because I’d been born light skinned, and in possession of a penis.

And because of those things, Mister turned a blind eye when I learned to read, called it helpful. As long as it didn’t distract me.

Since I was such a big help, kept my head down, didn’t speak up, and played their happy little part—on Christmas, they let me eat at the household table like I belonged.

When it became clear I had promise, he encouraged me to sit at the back, minding my business as I picked up maths. Because when we got older, my two surviving sisters married off and went their ways, and my one brother, ambivalent about my existence, had no head for learning. He tended the land, let everyone else do the thinking—and I found myself up late nights balancing ledgers and figuring out how to make ten bags of grain last as long as twenty.

And then I made the first error.

Maybe I missed a one, carried a number, moved a decimal… We were near bankrupt and I knew the moment I told Clyde that after the military commandeered our crops, we were near destitute, that he’d sooner put me on the street or sell me off than keep me. But I’d made that little error, knew it was an error, and told myself that I would retally it in the morning. Because that night, looking at that artificial tally, saying we had cash in the coffers, I could sleep, pretending I was safe another night.

But sleep was short lived back then.

“Ezekiel!” A hand pounded my door as I bolted upright from my trundle bed, the thing meant for a child. I bumped my head and flopped onto the floor with a flounder as the door swung inward. “Good, you’re up!”

Clyde beamed at me from the doorway; relief painted over his face—ledger in hand.

The ledger I’d fucked up.

“I thought surely as anything we’d be bankrupt, boy.” My stomach knotted painfully as I thought of a thousand ways to explain the error. “Then I saw this and checked the cashbox. You did good!”

In his hand lay a stack of crumpled bills. A few hundred or so.

Bills we rightly shouldn’t have had.

Were I the praying sort of man, I’d assume they’d been answered.

I wasn’t.