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willed. She looked straight at him, hoping he would see how sorry she felt, but he jerked against his chains as his look grew fiercer. Later she decided it must have been the same as hot coals dropping on his heart to think about her walking away in freedom he would never know.
    “Keep your eyes down, boy,” the man behind him had shouted as he hit the boy so hard he fell to his knees under the blow.
    Charlotte whirled and ran back up the street the way she had come until she found her mother shopping for parasols while Willis sat in the carriage and waited.
    She didn’t tell her mother what she’d seen. She didn’t tell anyone, not even Mellie. Especially not Mellie. The raw hatred in the boy’s eyes haunted her sleep for weeks until Aunt Tish took her aside.
    “What’s the matter with you, chile? My Mellie says you ain’t sleepin’ hardly none at all. That you toss and turn till the sheets is all a-tumble on your bed. You best be comin’ clean to your Aunt Tish with whatever is tormentin’ you.”
    And so she let the words come out to say what she’d seen.
    Aunt Tish got too quiet as she sat beside her at the kitchen table. Charlotte couldn’t remember her ever sitting so quietly for so long.
    Finally Charlotte said, “I did see it. I’m not lying.”
    “I knows you did, chile. You don’t have to do no explainin’ what it looked like to me. I been there. Me and my Mellie both, though she was just a babe with no sense of nothin’ but her mammy’s arms. The Massah bought me off the block so’s I could wet-nurse you.”
    Charlotte looked at Aunt Tish. She’d always been part of her life, warm and kind. Full of wisdom and sometimes laughter. There was no laughter now. “Did you hate him?” Charlotte whispered. “The way that boy hated me.”
    “I didn’t think it would help anythin’ for me to let hatred build up in my innards. But I had to fight against it when he stopped shoutin’ out bids on Jonah. We’d done jumped the broom before Mellie was born. I thought then right at first maybe he didn’t have the money and as how I ought to be glad enough me and Mellie weren’t goin’ downriver. Little babies die goin’ down the river. That’s what Jonah told me. Not to worry none about him. He could take whatever they threw at him on those cotton plantations.”
    Charlotte had no words to say as Aunt Tish looked away at the wall as if she could see beyond it to the south where her Jonah might still be picking cotton. “But then when we got here and I saw the Massah had a mess of slaves, I had to fight powerful against the bitter gall that wanted to poison me. It still rises up to smote me at times.”
    Tears pooled in Charlotte’s eyes and dripped down her cheeks. And she felt the boy she’d seen was right to hate her. She choked out the words. “Do you hate me too, Aunt Tish?”
    “Now, now, chile. You’s like my own.” Aunt Tish laid her calloused black hands on Charlotte’s cheeks. “You knows my heart could never hate you. And that poor boy you saw wasn’t hatin’ you either. He was hatin’ how life is. And fact is, I can see it in your eyes. You’d a turned him free as you be right now if you coulda done it. That’s what you got to ’member, chile. You’d a set him free if ’n you coulda.”
    Charlotte stared at the black woman’s loving face. “But Aunt Tish, I can’t even set you free, can I?”
    “No, chile, you can’t. Not now, but maybe someday. And then I knows you’ll do the right thing by me and Mellie.”
    Charlotte hadn’t thought about the slave boy for a long time. She had blocked him from her mind, blocked it all from her mind. Things were the way they had to be. The way her mother and father had always told her they were meant to be. Why the memory came sneaking back to unsettle her thoughts on this night, she had no idea.
    Perhaps because everything was different, thrown up in the air to land who knew where. Certainly not as she’d ordered or planned.