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THE black woman’s name was
Sarie, and when she crashed out the door of the cabin at the end of the
slave quarters into the fading winter light, her lower belly bursting
with the child that had already broken her water, the aftermath of the
ice storm and the sheer desolate sweep of leaf-bare timber and frozen
cotton acreage and frost-limned cane stalks seemed to combine and
strike her face like a braided whip.
She trudged into the grayness
of the woods, the male shoes on her feet pocking the snow, her breath
streaming out of the blanket she wore on her head like a monk’s cowl.
Ten minutes later, deep inside the gum and persimmon and oak trees, her
clothes strung with air vines that were silver with frost, the frozen
leaves cracking under her feet, she heard the barking of the dogs and
the yelps of their handlers who had just released them.
She splashed into a slough,
one that bled out of the woods into the dark swirl of the river where
it made a bend through the plantation. The ice sawed at her ankles; the
cold was like a hammer on her shins. But nonetheless she worked her way
upstream, between cypress roots that made her think of a man’s knuckles
protruding from the shallows. Across the river the sun was a vaporous
smudge above the bluffs, and she realized night would soon come upon
her and that a level of coldness she had never thought possible would
invade her bones and womb and teats and perhaps turn them to stone.
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