Free The Purchase by Linda Spalding

suffring. I wish I could come back to Brandywine, if I could. Please bid my Christian love to Caroline, although she does not write a word of love to
    Mary Dickinson April 25, 1799
    W hen Mary told Simus about the wooden horse and the ships that sailed away from Troy to find a new home, he said, “Like I,” and she wondered if he had sailed from Africa to Virginia. She told him about Hector and Achilles. “Everyone loved Hector,” she said. “He was more brave than any man.”
    Simus disagreed. “You say to me that Aeneas carry his father on his back to leave Troy and make a new home. That is more brave.”
    That night, while the children sat around the rough puncheon table Daniel had built, Mary told them that Simus thought the Trojan horse had wings. “But that one is Pegasus,” Benjaminsaid and even Jemima laughed, although she didn’t know what it was that they found funny. She loved the story of the flying horse. Daniel levelled a stern gaze at Mary. “Why mock the boy?” he asked. “Is it for this that you provide him with stories?”
    Mary studied her plate. The boys were giggling again but it was in nervousness.
    The scene worried Daniel during much of the night along with the thought that he had brought his children into a sense of superiority through the purchase of an unlettered boy. “You surely want your freedom,” he said to Simus the next day. “And I wish to offer it. But you must help me earn two hundred dollars first or how will I get my horse again? I cannot make such a sum alone. Do you see?” It seemed that the Lord would only help those who could find devious ways to help themselves. “For the present, you will mend your broken bone and merely cut pegs. But when the leg is healed, you will go out to work for others in the evenings. That way we will earn cash … have an income … and …” Daniel would have the money required to redeem Miss Patch and it would be possible to free the slave boy. Pleased with this idea, arms folded across his chest, he waited for the boy to react.
    But Simus said nothing. Knowing Daniel had paid too much for him and knowing that half the amount paid would be beyond his ability to earn in the span of his life. What was there to say? “Full day pay two bits,” he finally replied.
    “Well then, Simus, when our corn comes in, you will pull the fodder and sell it. There are plenty of people with animals to feed. We have only the one cow.”
    “Lessen you git some pigs. You gon need meat come the cole nex yer.” The lying-down boy braced himself on his elbows and looked at Daniel, who was crouched at the entrance of his log pile shelter.
    “How would I feed pigs when I barely feed my children?” Daniel got lower in the crouch and peered around the canvas door that Simus said a bear could go through or a snake. Suck my blood and bite my head, he said. Now he screwed up his face. “Hog fatten hissef up on acorn and hickry. He root in dis wood. Don you know it?”
    “That does not bring back my horse.”
    “Pigs can be sole when fat.”
    “You could look after them? Even while the leg heals?” Daniel began to imagine the boy out in the world, working his way along from one job to another. Simus would be free and he would be the cause of it. Slavery need not be a lifelong sentence.
    The boy said, “I kin do with Isaac hep. And make pegs men-time. And sell off meat come fall. Sell off meat to free Onesimus.” He grinned.
    Daniel had not much insight into the raising and killing of animals, but he thought he had an asset in Simus, after all. He went off in the wagon that afternoon, taking Isaac and Benjamin because it was good, at such times, to be surrounded by enthusiasm and a blessing not to have to meditate in solitude while branches and shadows converged on his mind. At the trading post owned by Silas Murray, he was told of a farmer who had piglets. It would be a long ride.
    Virgil had written of horses and dogs and bees and cows but he’d