THE YEAR BEFORE I WAS BORN, our neighbor and my father’s employer, Mr. Isaac Heath, took up some of the notions of Quakers and freed all his sixty-two slaves, gave them fifty dollars apiece, and provided all that wanted safe passage into Pennsylvania or farther north, into Canada, if they were so disposed. Those who wanted to stay, he gave two acres and a two-bedroom frame house with plank floors and glass windows, ten chickens, one hog, a year’s worth of clothes, and hired them on at fifty cents a day. Mr. Heath built them a meetinghouse right on Laurelea so they could walk to church and never leave home. So it’s no wonder I grew up not knowing much about the meanness of slavery or the orneriness of greed until the summer I turned thirteen.