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muggy but there was usually a breeze from the sea. All the houses were designed to capture even the slightest breeze, and porches three stories high shaded the wealthier houses along their longest face. It gave them deep shade in the heat of the afternoons, and even now, a bit before noon, many a porch already had slaves setting out iced lemonade and preparing to start the shoo-flies a-swishing.
    Small children bounced energetically on the curious flexible benches that were designed for play. Peggy had never seen such devices until she came here, though the bench was simple enough to make—just set a sturdy plank between two end supports, with nothing to brace it in the middle, and a child could jump on it and then leap off as if launched from a sling. Perhaps in other places, such an impractical thing, designed only for play, would seem a shameful luxury. Or perhaps in other places adults simply didn’t think of going to so muchtrouble merely to delight their children. But in Camelot, children were treated like young aristocrats—which, come to think of it, most of them were, or at least their parents wished to pretend they were.
    As so often before, Peggy marveled at the contradictions: People so tender with their children, so indulgent, so playful, and yet they thought nothing of raising those same children to order that slaves who annoyed them be stripped or whipped, or their families broken up and sold off.
    Of course, here in the city few of the mansions had large enough grounds to allow a proper whipping on the premises. The offending slave would be taken to the market and whipped there, so the moaning and weeping wouldn’t interfere with conversations in the sitting rooms and drawing rooms of the beautiful houses.
    What was the truth of these people? Their love for their children, for king and country, for the classical education at which they excelled, all these were genuine. By every sign they were educated, tasteful, generous, broad-minded, hospitable—in a word, civilized. And yet just under the surface was a casual brutality and a deep shame that poisoned all their acts. It was as if two cities sat on this place. Camelot, the courtly city of the king-in-exile, was the land of dancing and music, education and discourse, light and beauty, love and laughter. But by coincidence, the old city of Charleston still existed here, with buildings that corresponded with Camelot wall for wall, door for door. Only the citizenry was different, for Charleston was the city of slave markets, half-White babies sold away from their own father’s household, lashings and humiliations, and, as seed and root and leaf and blossom of this evil town, the hatred and fear of both Blacks and Whites who lived at war with each other, the one doomed to perpetual defeat, the other to perpetual fear of...
    Of what? What did they fear?
    Justice.
    And it dawned on her for the first time what she had
not
seen in Fishy’s heartfire: the desire for revenge.
    And yet that was impossible. What human being could bear such constant injustice and not cry out, at least in the silence of the soul, for the power to set things to rights? Was Fishy so meek that she forgave all? No, her sullen resistance clearly had no piety in it. She was filled with hate. And yet not one thought or dream or plan for retribution, either personal or divine. Not even the hope of emancipation or escape.
    As she walked along the streets under the noonday sun, it made her almost giddy to realize what must be going on, and not just with Fishy, but with every slave she had met here in Camelot. Peggy was not able to see everything in their heartfires. They were able to conceal a part of their feelings from her. For it was impossible to imagine that they
had
no such feelings, for they were human beings, and all the Blacks she met in Appalachee had yearnings for retribution, manumission, or escape. No, if she didn’t see those passions among the slaves of Camelot, it wasn’t