Free Dessa Rose by Sherley A. Williams

had been made wretched by her pleas and pitiful whimperings. The noise from the underbrush stopped abruptly. Then came the rattle of chains and above it a dull thud, startingly loud in the stillness, and the rattling of the chains again. In his lust and alcoholic daze, the guard had failed to secure the chain after he removed Linda from it. Someone in Linda’s chain group moved and all their chains fell away. Seeing this as a sign, Elijah whispered urgently for Nathan, who was already moving stealthily toward Dessa’s group. Linda appeared in the clearing, her dress torn and gaping, the bloody rock still clutched in her manacled hands. All hell broke loose.
    The white men asked her later about attacking the trader, butwhatever answer she had given (and she thought she had given several different ones), she could not remember the trader as distinct from the other white men. She’d tried to kill as many of them as she could. The one thing that stuck in her memory from that night was Nathan in the moonlight, crushing the face of his friend.
    They had argued about which direction to take, some wanting to go north, following the drinking gourd to freedom. There was a mighty river to cross, David admitted, but once across it, they would all be free. Most wanted to go with Nathan, who planned to take Dessa and Cully south to the coast. They could find a ship there to take them to islands he had heard of where slavery had been abolished and black men were all free. Again, Nathan consented, not so grudgingly that time, she thought now, for he had fallen in with their plans. Matilda wrote a pass for them, stating that all of them were in the charge of Toby, a big mulatto, and Graves, a lean brown man approaching middle age, taking them to their master on a plantation farther south. The moon had set by the time this was decided.
    They took wagons, weapons, and horses. The wagons proved too cumbersome for the quick cross-country trip Nathan said was imperative. They plundered, then abandoned them, piling the horses high with supplies, traveling, after the first day, by night and sleeping by day. The patterrollers came up on them one morning just as they were retiring, having, as they thought, eluded the white man for yet another day. Nathan and Cully, never far from her, took her hands and ran.
    Afterward, when she burst into the clearing where the captured people were held, she had fought fiercely hoping by the strength of her resistance to provoke them into killing her. They hadn’t; a blow to her head quickly ended her struggles. She kept count, on the trail and in the warehouse where they were held, scanning the faces of those who were recaptured, culling through the whispered names and descriptions of those who had been killed. Nathan—Nate, as the white men called him—was reported dead and no one of Leo’s description was ever mentioned in her hearing.Only Toby of the several mulattoes on the coffle had been taken alive and she mourned Cully, giving him up as lost.
    Those who had not fought the posse too hard were early taken from the warehouse where Dessa and the rest were held. Those who remained learned their fates when some were taken out and didn’t return, or returned whipscarred and branded. Yet, as the population in the warehouse dwindled, a pinprick of hope was born in Dessa. Perhaps their ruse had worked and Nathan had survived. Had it not been for that hope, her own sentence would have driven her mad. To be spared until she birthed the baby…the baby…Could she but do it again, she sometimes thought, she would go to Aunt Lefonia if that would bring her even a minute, real and true, with Kaine. But to let their baby go now, now…She would swallow her tongue; that’s what Mamma Hattie said the first women had done, strangling on their own flesh rather than be wrenched from their homes…. She would ask Jemina for a knife…. She would take the cord and loop it around