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things sounded softer, but there was a white wood house big in a clearing and shacks far behind it and behind them crops in the samerows and rows I’d seen before, and nothing was really so different after all. Only the air hung heavier here and was saltier and the cabin they put me in with some other slaves smelled sweet.
    I got there in time to start planting, and though I didn’t recognize the thick stems I was shuffling into the ground, I kept my eyes down and moved my hands the way the men in front of me moved theirs, and by the end of the first week, my back felt the same as it ever had. Treehorn and his bullwhip stayed with us in the fields and he was just as quiet as he had been driving the wagon, though his dog laugh came out sometimes. I learned he liked jokes and dirty songs and whipping folks. We nursed the big pole plants all through the summer and at some point I learned to call them caña or sugarcane and to lie down flat between the rows when Treehorn had left and suck the cut stems until the sweetness hurt my teeth. In the fall, we toppled the shoots, giants now that knocked and whispered when you smoothed the ground beneath them, and we fed them into great grinders, where the pulp of a man’s arm now and again was stirred into the syrup. The liquid we caught we kept in kettles and boiled and skimmed and reboiled and mixed and waited and with tired arms moved iron ladles from pot to pot and boiled some more and always, always threw wood to the fire, which burned for weeks and never slacked until the land around the fields was bare of timber. From the sugar my master sold in barrels came the drippings he turned to rum; the barrels he rolled downhill to boats in the Escambia, the liquor he distilled and packed in stone jugs for paths north. After living there a year, I could not stand the smell of sweet.
    My master I only saw a few times a year when I was run up to the house on some errand or other and on Christmas whenhe came to the cabins to give us our gifts. He was a small man with a fat Spanish wife, and when they shouted at each other, they moved between their languages like they were searching for high ground. This used to be her farm, or was her father’s, and when the English traded for West Florida a dozen years before, she held on to it by marrying this half-man, and no wonder they didn’t much get along. Her family had kept cattle—we’d sometimes find pancakes of old dung in the turned-up earth—and she didn’t understand why he’d switched to cane in this wilderness. They didn’t have any children. His only friend was Treehorn, who he must have trusted like a brother for all he let him do, and him slipping his own bottles in to soak up some of Master’s juice, which all saw and none spoke on.
    Only when I turned sixteen did I learn Master’s first name. The man he used to send to the Creeks with his rum had been shot dead through the gullet by the Choctaws and he needed a new one to ride his horse and carry his burdens—I’d caught his eye for seeming cheerful, there being nothing left to grieve over—and while I was standing in his front hall with my hat in my hands, being told of my new duty, his wife heaved onto the upstairs landing and said, “Josiah!” except it sounded to me like “Hosea.” I was given a fast horse and a pass scrawled in two languages and was told which paths to follow to the Indian towns and I was never once told not to be afraid, so I went ahead and was. I’d been in Florida six years, and still didn’t know where I stood.
    My first trip, he launched me off at night. The crowding black trees on the trail looked so heavy I ducked my head for a mile, thinking they’d topple down, press me to death, at a single wind. I wasn’t used to being sent out on my own, responsible for myown body but on behalf of another man. I had borrowed myself. The farther I got, of course, the straighter my head sat and the more I looked around at the wildness that swallowed