Free Freedom Stone by Jeffrey Kluger Page A

from doing something that was strictly forbidden and harshly punishable. No one was certain how many slaves on all the plantations of the South were able to read so much as a word, but the guessing was that it was not five in a hundred. Lillie had learned from her papa, who himself had learned as a boy, when he would carry his Master’s son’s books to school and then wait outside in the sun so that he could carry them home in the late afternoon. With nothing to do during those long hours, he found himself listening through the window as the white children got their lessons and slowly learning the letters himself. Oftentimes he’d even get to practice what he’d learned when the white boys would bring picture books and adventure journals to school—things their parents forbade them to read—and leave them with their slave boys to hold.
    Papa taught Lillie’s mama to read shortly after they wed, and he began teaching Lillie and Plato as soon as they could talk. He decided what he wanted to call Plato even before the boy was born, after he’d been summoned to the Master’s library to fix a leaky ceiling and had secretly flipped through a book written by a man of the same name. Papa never had a chance to read more than a few scraps of sentences in those pages, but the little he did see had stayed with him. He told Plato that he’d given him the name to remind both of his children of the kinds of grand thoughts all people could think—whether they lived forever as slaves or one day tasted freedom.
    Lillie carefully returned the traveling pass to Bett, then sat quietly for the rest of the hour-and-a-half-long journey to Bluffton. When they finally arrived, there was no mistaking where they were. Buildings rose up on either side of the hard dirt street, some of them three stories tall. The building fronts were a splash of colorful awnings and signs describing the businesses conducted inside—DRY GOODS, HABERDASHER, HAY & FEED, TELEGRAPH OFFICE—but Lillie dared not linger on them, lest she reveal herself as being able to make sense of the letters.
    People seemed to be milling everywhere—black people and white people alike, though it was mostly the whites who were on the planked sidewalks or inside the stores. The slaves kept largely to the streets, loading and unloading wagons and dodging the horses and rigs that clattered by. Lillie thought she recognized some of the black faces from visits those slaves had paid to Greenfog when they were running errands or driving their masters. None of the white people looked familiar.
    â€œStay close by me, girl,” Bett said. “It won’t do for you to get lost.”
    â€œYes’m,” Lillie said, not needing to be reminded of such a thing.
    Samuel brought the wagon as close as he could to a store marked GROCER—PURE MILK, FOODS & NECESSITIES and reined the horse to a halt. Lillie hopped down from the wagon and helped Bett ease herself out of her seat and into the road. They left Samuel to mind the horse, dodged the puddles and wheel ruts underfoot, climbed the sidewalk and entered the store. With the sun not yet high, it was poorly lit inside, but as Lillie’s eyes began to adjust, she gaped at the bounty on the shelves and tables that filled the big room. There were bags of rice and grains, jars of beans and peas, baskets of apples and squash, jugs of milk still foaming at the top, dried fruits wrapped in brown paper and jars of preserves put up on shelves. There were whole salted fish and dried flanks of pork, wheels of cheese covered in wax and barrels of nuts, barley, coffee and cocoa. There were also large sacks of sugar and flour and salt, which were the things they had come here today to buy.
    Lillie and Bett were the only shoppers in the store save for a white man in coveralls, and they stood to the side while the proprietor tended to him. As they waited, a young white mother and her small, toddling