Sailing to Freedom by Martha Bennett Stiles

Author:Martha Bennett Stiles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Low Country, South Carolina, April 1852

It hadn’t been the new baby’s cries in the room below that had wakened Ogun in his loft bunk, but that rare thing, his mother’s voice rising. Ogun had slid out from under his blanket, crawled as soundlessly as possible across the splintery boards to the ladder hole, and lain there shivering, listening.

“Cold water to my middle all day,” he’d heard his father say. “Hoeing another man’s rice! Buckra rice! No more!”

Lying there with a cramp in his leg, Ogun had turned first hot with shock and baffled anger, then cold with misery. His father was leaving.

Ogun would be eleven in two days. Always before on his birthday his father had taken him fishing at the workday’s end. Always. Where was he going? “Surely,” Ogun thought, “if he cared about me, he could wait three days to go there.” But the door had opened, and the door had closed.

Ogun can’t remember the grandfather who was sent by the overseer to Charleston to buy nails and never came back. (“They find he boat upside down in the water,” his mother tells him.) Ogun wouldn’t know his grandfather if the two of them shared an oar, but he remembers his beloved grandmother, Nana Cora, well. He misses her Buh Rabbit stories. Big as he is, he misses her lap. And now his father?

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