This Here Is Love by Princess Joy L. Perry

Author:Princess Joy L. Perry [Perry, Princess Joy L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2025-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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David moved among the nearly naked shackled slaves without meeting their dulled gazes. He balanced gourds of water corded from a beam on his shoulders. He handed them porridge on corn husks. Through tight lips, he sipped air rather than breathe in the stench that hung about them like a cloud of gnats. Some of the captives wore shirts and trousers. Some wore blouses and skirts with petticoats. But others were shirtless or wore no pants, grown men and women wearing long shirts, like children, with little underneath. Almost all were shoeless, their feet swollen to blunt clubs. Road filth and worse caked their legs. Their uncombed hair spiked like cockleburs. Crusts of sores dotted their arms and faces. Though he was fully clothed and wore only the grime of that day upon him, David felt their shame.

Jack and the slave trader talked nearby as David handed out the grub. The white men stood with their hands on their hips and legs braced. They pointed, nodded, and gestured, mulling and assessing the humans enclosed behind the bars.

“What do you think of that one?” the trader asked.

Jack tried for nonchalance. He had already noticed the girl, but to let on interest was to cause an immediate increase in her price. She was just what he was looking for. Aged somewhere between sixteen and twenty. A body as straight and sturdy as a loblolly pine. Unlike the rest of the gang, she wore shoes and what had once been decent clothes. Through her blouse, he could see the work-broadened shoulders and muscled back of a field hand, but her manners—even the way she lipped cornmeal mush off a husk—were refined compared to the “stock” around her. The trader confirmed the difference in her, not because he wanted to but because it was obvious. “Only one mark against her: she can read,” he said.

“Is that so?”

“Brought up in the main house, and you know how some people ruin their niggers.”

“Why was she sold?”

“Stirred up some trouble among the men.”

“Cross the water in Kecoughtan? Caused that overseer to get killed?” Jack asked. The story had escaped just like that enslaved young man.

The trader sighed. Apparently, gossip traveled faster than horses. “That’s her.”

“They ever find that buck?”

“Not yet. Advertising him. Dead or alive.”

Quite the opposite from hiking the asking price, the trader now knew he had to lower it. He was furious with himself for mentioning the girl’s past to the one potential buyer who had not yet figured out her identity. Everywhere else he’d been, even the vast farmlands of Nansemond Shire, something had told on the girl, her speech or gestures, the clothes she wore. And though the story had reached this small corner of Princess Anne County before the slave stringer, John Jeffrey, and his gang, Jack had not yet put two and two together. Jeffrey should have kept his mouth shut. Trying to sell a slave tied up with a killing was like trying to sell a dead horse. Still, he’d noticed Jack Crewe had not taken his eyes off the girl.

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