Sold

I sold the plantation to Edward Fortier on a morning in late autumn of 1775, after the news from the north had made the shape of things plain enough that even the most deliberate of men was being forced to a decision.

I am not a deliberate woman. I had been ready to leave for some years.

The Fortier family were French Creole of the first order: they understood money and land and the social architecture of Louisiana with the precision of people who had built their position in a new world and intended to keep it. Edward Fortier paid me what the land was worth and perhaps a little more, and I thanked him and took the money and did not look back.

The other thing I will not do is dress what I sold as something other than what it was. There were people on that land whose condition I had arranged and maintained for fifty years, and I sold that condition along with the buildings and the livestock and the blood-bound overseer and the whole apparatus, and I walked out of that meeting into a Louisiana November and told myself it was the way of the world and the times.

By that measure, it was. I have lived long enough to know that this is not the same as it being right.

I am not going to perform a guilt I do not feel cleanly. I made those arrangements because they were available and useful and I did not think overmuch about the weight of them, and that is its own kind of accounting. Three hundred years of that kind of accounting. The ledger is long.

I walked out of the Fortier meeting into the particular light of a Louisiana November, which is the light of a place that does not quite believe in autumn, and I felt what I always feel before leaving a place I have stayed in too long: a loosening, a lightening, the body remembering that it was built to move.

The war was starting. Sings was somewhere north of me, moving in my direction.

I had been fifty years in one place. I had been to longer prisons; I expect I will be in longer ones before I am finished.

I walked away. I did not look back.

I never do.