As we approach John Outram’s place, Miata begins to wail. Outram’s people come out to fetch her, and she screams and falls to her knees and begs our captors not to send her back. Everyone is shouting. The dog barks and strains at its tether. Miata struggles as they untie her, drag her into the yard and shut the gate. She looks back at me in despair and we cry out each other’s names; then a woman appears and pushes Miata inside the house, out of my sight. I can do nothing to help Miata.
Our captors take me away, back to George Bainbrigg’s counting house.
Friend George does not beat me. But he locks me in the storeroom and sends word to my buyer.
This man comes and takes me in a cart to his plot on the edge of the city, in the woods. There he leaves me bound, pushes me into the yard and ties me to a fence post. He takes out a whip and beats me till I sag at the knees and cry for mercy. Then he unties me and says, “You run away – you get a beating. Run away again – I beat you again, harder. Understand?”
He sets me to work on his plot, clearing scrub. This is work I have done before, in the fields near our village, when we cleared the land for rice-planting. But there it was happy work. We sang and laughed together, and the women would bring us food and drink when we stopped to rest, and the fields and crops were for all of us to share. Here I have no reward but cuffs and curses, and the land is my master’s.
He is a harsh, hard-working, busy man, this Isaac Shore. He lives with his wife and son and a servant woman, and all four of them beat and curse me. I will not stay in this place. I will escape again and fetch Miata, and next time we will find a better place to hide.