Free The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

proceedings), and their marriage was clearly in a deeply troubled way already, when she took the step that ultimately proved fatal to her reputation and so much more.
    In her second letter already she mentioned for the first time meeting an extraordinary slave, someone unlike any other on the plantation or any other person—free or slave—of Sibby’s acquaintance. He was what they on the plantation called a ‘house slave,’ which meant he was employed in the capacity we in Great Britain would recognize as that of a butler or head-servant. Most unusually for a slave (but we shall come to this soon) he could both read and write. He was only a few years older than Sibby and his name was Abubaker Ba—I have spelled it as Sibby did, though I do not believe there is any standard or required way to do so, at least in English.
    Mr. Ba (and I will honour him with the title) was born in Africa, of the Fulbay, also known as the Fulani, people;—he was a Mahomettan. In these two aspects, he was highly distinct from the other Africans on the plantation, since they were all Eboes, a people near the coast, who are not followers of Mahomet. Not only was he a Mahomettan, he was one of their great teachers, having been a tutor (to use the closest proximation in our tongue) at what he called the University of Sankor in the city of Timbuktoo, which he said is near a great river in the desert very far from the coast.
    My sister believed him, and I see no reason to doubt her faith in Mr. Ba. I know that no white person has seen Timbuktoo and that many believe it to be legendary, like the caves of Serendib or the gardens of Prester-John. Yet the fact that
we
have not seen it is not
prima facie
proof that
it
does not in fact exist; I would rather say that Mr. Ba’s voluminous and very detailed account to my sister—which she in turn wrote down assiduously in her letters to me—is deserving of far more acceptance as proof and evidence than otherwise.
    Mr. Ba told Sibby that he had been captured in a war with a rival kingdom, called Bambara, and sent down the great river to Calabar, from whence he was added to a cargo of Eboes being shipped to Maryland. When she met him he had been in Maryland for six years, long enough to have mastered the English language, which Sibby said he spoke with great ease and grace, using turns of phrase that most speakers born to the tongue do not conceive or use.
    Her final letters to me suggested an increasingly close form of intercourse with Mr. Ba. Sibby spent more and more time with Mr. Ba, as much as they could find in a small place where eyes and ears were at all times primed for transgressions of any sort, especially when it came to relations between the whites and the blacks, the free and the slave.
    According to Sibby, they spoke of many things: the stars and the planets, the possibility of other worlds, the likelihood that laws might be universal for all men. He was a mathematician and an astronomer. The two would slip away at night to watch the stars, along the banks of the Chesapeake.
    No letters came from Sibby after her eighth; I became very anxious and sent many letters to her and to my brother-in-law to ascertain her well-being. Almost a year passed before I received any news, which was only a short note from my brother-in-law that they were sailing for Edinburgh and to make ready.
    Sibby was changed out of all features when she arrived, disjacketed, despondent,
déboîtée
. I scarce recognized her for the gay sister whom I once knew so well. My brother-in-law allowed us only the briefest of reunions and thereafter he had as little to do with me as possible. As the Court knows, Sibby died within two years of her return; of grief and anguish I say.
    Just before she died, she wrested from her husband several hours of time to be alone with me privately. In those few, precious hours, as she neared her end, she told me all that had happened, which I now relate.
    She and Mr. Ba had become lovers