THE FIRST DAY I saw Master Wilson was the first day I saw Chloe. She stood across the showroom from me, just opposite, wedged between two dark-complexioned women, one wide and old, the other young, scrawny, and thick veined. Chloe was smooth and young, with soft curly brown hair pulled back into a braid, wisps of it escaping to frame her face. Her skin was light, the color of pinewood, and the contrast made her seem all wrong and out of place, as though a white woman had gotten in among us and somehow made herself for sale.

There was not a man in that room who did not notice Chloe, those that were buying and those that were being bought alike. I heard our trader call her a fancy, which meant she would most likely be sold for some man’s pleasure.

I was no different than the other men in that room. I noticed her. And I watched as the man who had just purchased me walked up to her and began asking his questions. In the scuffle and noise of the showroom, I could not hear her answers, but her carriage was demure and subservient. Master Wilson made her lift her skirt and he felt of her legs. He next felt of her arms and pried her mouth open to examine her teeth. Female slaves, as well as males, were asked to strip to the waist, and Master Wilson indicated that she should do this, and she did. When he was done examining her she shrugged the bodice of her dress back on and buttoned it up again. It was easy to see that Wilson liked what he saw. Without much bargaining he purchased Chloe. With some more bargaining he also purchased my friend Bessle and a man named Henry.

It was November of 1860. The freedom war had not yet started. As Master Wilson chained us together at the wrists and loaded us into the bed of his wagon, there was not, in any of our minds, a hint of the things to come.

Besides his cargo of human beings there were also two barrels of flour, a bolt of cloth, and a sack of coffee. Chloe leaned against the sack of coffee and the rest of us sat as comfortably as we could on the hard uneven planks of the wagon bed, Bessle and I propped against the back, and Henry leaned up against one of the barrels. Henry was a big man, with muscles that strained against the thin cloth of his shirt, and legs that took up most of the bed. He closed his eyes and fell asleep immediately, but Bessle, Chloe, and I stayed awake and watched the landscape go by.

Louisiana was a watery place. The road we traveled was built on the crest of a long ridge of packed earth. Down below, on one side was the Mississippi River, and down below, on the other side were swamps and channels of water, and where there wasn’t water there was land, but the land seemed almost as though it didn’t belong. The fields of stubbled cotton and corn, already harvested, were like something laid on with paint. And then there were fields of something else, something I had never seen before, something tall and grassy that waved in the breeze. This plant I would learn, all too soon and all too well, was sugarcane.

The fields we passed were full, not just of cane and channels of water, but also of slaves. Armies of slaves moved as one, men and women felling the crop with large-bladed knives, and children following along behind, gathering the fallen cane into bundles, carrying these bundles on their small shoulders to a waiting cart. Even over the rattle of the wagon I could hear the rustle of the cane and the sound of those knives whacking into the plants.

It takes four strikes of the blade to bring down one cane plant; two downward strokes to each side in order to strip the plant of its leaves, one to cut it at the ground, a fourth to take off the immature top. Even though I did not yet know this, it was easy to hear a rhythm in the work. Whack, whack, whack, whack, and then the slaves moved on to the next plant and the next quartet of strikes.

Besides cane and slaves and water and fields, we passed the occasional plantation house, each one seemingly larger and grander than the last, almost all larger and grander than anything I had seen in Virginia. One had gnarled oak trees along either side of a drive leading to its entry, and the trees bent into a canopy and were hung with veils of drooping moss. Another had two curved staircases sweeping down from the gallery. There were houses with double chimneys on either end, houses with galleries high in the air, houses with columns lined up like sentry guards against all invaders.

I felt a thump on my knee and looked up to see Bessle leaned over writing something in the dust on the wagon bed with his finger, holding on to his chains with the other hand to prevent them from rattling. “Good master?” the message read.

Chloe quickly looked away, as if the devil himself had come to sit down next to her and tempt her into trouble. My previous master had told me that God had an especially fiery room in hell for any nigger who even thought about learning to read or write. If that is true, then I sealed my fate a long time ago. During our lessons Miss Clemons assured Bessle and me that reading and writing were not sins, but would instead be our salvation should we ever be freed.

Freedom and salvation seemed a long ways off the day I was sold to Master Wilson. Hell seemed much closer. I shrugged my shoulders, not knowing the answer to Bessle’s question. Bessle quick-scraped his foot across the message, and it was just then Master Wilson spat off into the weeds and looked over his shoulder at us. Just as quickly he turned back around and chucked at the horses, lifting the reins and giving them a light slap in the air.

We had set out from New Orleans late in the day, and had traveled only a few hours before we stopped at a plantation, a place called Lidgewood, where we stayed the night. Master Wilson went inside the big house and supped with the other white folks, and was given, I am sure, a nice warm bed made up with linens and quilts. Bessle, Henry, Chloe, and I were made to stay in a barn, still chained together, Chloe to one side of me and Bessle to the other, and Henry chained to Bessle.

A boy brought us some plates of food. It wasn’t much—bacon and biscuits, a bit of potato, all of it cold and greasy—but we were hungry, so we ate and licked the plates to get every scrap we could. After we ate, we were let off the chains to go relieve ourselves. Then we were locked together again, given one blanket each, and the lantern was taken away.

We were not in total darkness however. Outside there were torches, and through the slats in the barn their light jumped and flickered against the walls. A strange burnt scent filled the air, and I heard wagons rattling past, and a little ways off the plodding feet of horses, and what sounded like wooden gears turning one against another.

“What’s going on out there?” I asked.

“Grindin’ season,” Henry answered.

“Grinding what?”

“Cane.”

“How late are they going to work?”

“Maybe all night. Maybe till midnight. Then back befo’ dawn. It won’t be over till a frost come or the last plant get cut.” Then he picked up his chain and rattled it, laughing. “Welcome to cane country, boys. If the work don’t kill you, the skeeters will.”

I rose up and twisted my body to look out through a crack in the wall. Another wagon rattled past, the bed heaped with stalks of cane.

“Sunup to midnight?” I asked.

“If you lucky,” Henry answered. “Befo’ sunup in some places.”

Bessle stirred beside me and he, too, tried to rise up and look out. “You worked cane before?” he asked.

“Cane, cotton, rice. You think cotton kill you? You think rice hard? Cane kill you faster than anythin’. You learn soon enough.”

Bessle and I eased back down and leaned against the wall.

“They ship it out downriver,” Henry said. “That road we up on, that be the levee road. You take a look tomorrow and you see a dock fo’ every big house.”

“I seen ’em,” Chloe said.

“That right. Every big house,” Henry said. “Boats come up the river, pick up barrels of sugar. You see.”

I watched the torchlight dance against the walls of the barn and listened to the creak of the gears and wagon wheels, the shush of cane being unloaded.

Henry kept on. “That levee hold back the river,” he said. “They ain’t even supposed be no land here. That river flood and break the levee, the whole mess gonna get washed away. Us too. Us first prob’ly.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I could feel them wetting up on me. I don’t know why, but I’d thought of Mama just then. I hadn’t thought of her since we’d stepped off the boat and been herded into the pen. Before that, if she’d come into my mind, I’d pushed her away. Henry must have felt some change in me, because he said, “Where you came from, Sprout?”

“Don’t call me Sprout,” I said.

“All right. Ain’t no need to get yo’ hackles up. I call you Shoot. That suit you? You big on the outside, but you ain’t quite growed on the inside. That the way I be lookin’ at it.”

Chloe said, “I wish I warn’t growed.”

But Henry was looking at me. “What ’bout you, Shoot? You growed all the way on the inside yet?”

“I reckon not.”

“Ain’t none of us growed,” Henry said. “We all massuh’s little chirren. Me too. Big old man like me cain’t even keep hold of his family.” He sniffed a little, and then asked again, “Where y’all came from?”

That was when we talked some. Bessle and I told our stories. His family had been sold all over the place too. We’d both watched our fathers chained together into a coffle that was led down a road heading south.

“Trader,” Henry said.

I nodded dumbly.

“Papa’s trader took him by land. Ours took us by ship,” Bessle said.

“He prob’ly bringin’ ’em here,” Henry said. “They might get sold close by. Most of this land be sugar, and sugar need slaves.”

Bessle gave a choked little sob and then was quiet.

Henry added, “Aw, fo’get ’bout it. You ain’t never find him.”

I asked Henry where he came from and he said a place in South Carolina where he worked rice. But then he was sold downriver. He’d worked cotton some, and cane for two years, tried to run away twice, was sold for that. He had a wife and two children he’d left behind in South Carolina. He heard his old master had died, and the slaves were sold, families split up just as mine had been. He reckoned his wife had taken up with someone else by now. He couldn’t blame her, he said.

Chloe told us she came from a place in Alabama where she’d been a house servant. She’d left behind a sister and a niece. She’d been used hard, she said, and she hoped things would be better with Master Wilson. We all knew what she meant by used hard, and we didn’t answer, the three of us, as if by being male, we were as guilty as any white man who had taken her that way.

The silence grew and Chloe started crying. We could hear her snuffling and sniffing and trying to keep it quiet. I could feel her shoulders shaking next to me and with each shake our chains rattled just a little, and against this sound was the background noise of the sugarhouse and the work going on there, the torches outside flicking a little light against the far wall. Finally Henry said, “God help us.”

At the beginning of that day I had believed in God. But that night in the barn at Lidgewood I could feel God leaching away from me, just like the warmth in the air leached away as nighttime trenched itself in.

Off in the distance we heard a wild scream.

“Panther,” Bessle said, and this stopped Chloe’s crying and caused her to pull her body closer to mine.

I smelt the scent of coffee left in Chloe’s hair from the sack she’d leaned against in the wagon bed. After a while she fell asleep and her head dropped against my shoulder, and I dared not move for fear of disturbing her. Henry soon knocked off with deep, resonant snores that Bessle and I stifled giggles against. Then Bessle nodded off and I was left awake.

Besides us, there were animals in the barn that night: a cow with a bleating calf, horses and mules, rats and mice whose feet scurried and scratched in the darkness, mosquitoes and gnats and spiders, an owl that had swooped out at dusk and would swoop back in at daybreak. I flicked something away from my face, flicking, that is, as best one can with heavy chains on the wrist. Chloe sighed in her sleep and threw her one free arm around my waist. Finally I, too, slept, with the scent of coffee lingering in Chloe’s hair so close to me, and the sounds of wagons going by and the cane being ground, gear squeaking against gear, and the endless plodding of hooves.

Was it the silence that woke me? Or the barn door screeching open? All I know is that suddenly my eyes were awake and there was a man with a lantern standing in the opening of the barn door. I was struck by how quiet it was, all the work outside having ceased. The man came closer and held the lantern up over us and in its light I saw that it was Master Wilson.

He set the lantern down and pulled a key from his pocket and leaned over, unlocking Chloe from me. The chain he loosened from her wrist thudded to the ground.

“Massuh?” Chloe muttered sleepily.

And then he had her by her arm and pulled her to her feet. “Get the lantern,” he said.

Chloe picked it up and he dragged her away from us, the light and the two of them disappearing into an empty stall. Through its slats I could see their shadows as Master hung the lantern from a beam.

“What’s he doing?” Bessle asked.

“Don’t be stupid,” Henry said in a rough whisper. “Be quiet.”

And so we were quiet.

What else could we do? The sounds coming from the stall where Master Wilson had taken Chloe said everything that needed to be said. Grunts. Scuffling. A slap. Flesh smacking against flesh.

I cannot say that soon it was over, although that is most likely true. But it is also true that in that moment time was stretched taut. It was as if time would pull itself into forever, that the sounds of Master Wilson taking Chloe would never end, and when they did finally end, it felt like time could have snapped and thrown us, like a slingshot would, through the roof and into the dark sky. “Get dressed,” I heard him say.

Chloe was returned, chained to me once more. I kept my eyes closed, but as Master Wilson left, taking the lantern with him, I opened them and I saw by its swinging light one piece of straw hanging from Chloe’s hair. And then it was darkness again. I felt her move away from me, but I tugged the chain and pulled. I just wanted to comfort her, to put my arm around her and let her cry, but Chloe gave a hard yank on the chain and curled alone into the straw. She did not cry.

Eventually I heard Bessle’s breath slowing, and Henry’s deep snores again. I sat in the dark listening. I could tell that Chloe did not sleep and she could tell the same of me, for after a while she asked in a fierce whisper, “Ain’t you gonna sleep?”

“I can’t,” I said.

She laughed a little. “Uh-huh. You gonna stay awake and protect me?”

“I wish I could,” I answered.

She was silent then. The calf in the stall at the end of the barn bleated once and then rustled in the straw, snuggling up to its mother, I presumed. And then briefly, once again, I thought of my own mother and how I had snuggled up to her as a young child.

I heard the straw shift beside me and felt the chain go slack. Chloe moved closer. She leaned her head against my shoulder. “I wish you could too,” she said. “Protect me.”