Margaret tried to speak up, “Massa Tom, you lie! You was—”

Tom Allan raised his hand to stop Margaret’s speech and looked at Ness. Maybe he remembered the scars on her shoulders, remembered how they had kept his wife laid up in bed for the rest of that day and put him off his dinner for a week. Maybe he wondered what a nigger had to do to earn stripes like that, what trouble a nigger like that must be capable of. And there his son was on the ground with dirt on his shorts and the mute child Pinky crying. Ness was sure that he could see clear as day what had happened, but it was the memory of her scars that made him doubt. A nigger with scars like that, and his son on the ground. There wasn’t anything else he could do.

“I’ll deal with you soon enough,” he said to Ness, and everyone wondered what would happen.

—

That evening, Ness returned to the women’s quarters. She crawled into her bed and closed her eyes, waiting for the images that played every night behind her lids to still to darkness. Beside her, Pinky began to hiccup.

“Oh Lord, here she go! Ain’t we had enough trouble fo one day?” one of the women said. “Can’t get no kinda rest when dis girl start to hiccup.”

Ashamed, Pinky slapped a hand to her mouth as though, with it, she could erect a wall to block the sound’s escape.

“Don’t pay dem no mind,” Ness whispered. “Thinking ’bout it only make it worse.” She didn’t know if she was speaking to Pinky or to herself.

Pinky squeezed her eyes tight as a series of hiccups exploded from her lips.

“Leave her be,” Ness said to the chorus of groans, and they listened. The events of the day had planted a little dual seed of respect and pity for Ness that they watered with deference of their own. They didn’t know what Tom Allan would do.

In the night, once they had all finally reached sleep, Pinky rolled over and snuggled into the soft skin of Ness’s gut. Ness allowed herself to hold the girl, and she allowed herself to drift off into memory.

She is back in Hell. She is married to a man they call Sam, but who comes straight from the Continent and speaks no English. The master of Hell, the Devil himself, with red-leather skin and a shock of gray hair, prefers his slaves married “for reasons of insurance,” and because Ness is new to Hell and because no one has claimed her, she is given to calm the new slave Sam.

At first they do not speak to each other. Ness doesn’t understand his strange tongue, and she is in awe of him, for he is the most beautiful man that she has ever seen, with skin so dark and creamy that looking at it could very well be the same thing as tasting it. His is the large, muscular body of the African beast, and he refuses to be caged, even with Ness as his welcoming gift. Ness knows that the Devil must have paid a great deal of money for him, and therefore expects hard work, but nothing anyone does seems to tame him. On his first day he fights with another slave, spits on the overseer, and is stood on a platform and whipped in front of everyone until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby.

Sam refuses to learn English. Each night, in retribution for his still-black tongue, the Devil sends him back to their marriage bed with lashes that are reopened as soon as they heal. One night, enraged, Sam destroys the slave quarters. Their room is savaged from wall to wall, and when the Devil hears of the destruction he comes to serve punishment.

“I did it,” Ness says. She has spent the night hidden in the left corner of the room, watching this man she’s been told is her husband become the animal he’s been told that he is.

The Devil shows no mercy, even though he knows she is lying. Even though Sam tries time and again to accept the blame. She is beaten until the whip snaps off her back like pulled taffy, and then she is kicked to the ground.

When he leaves, Sam is crying and Ness is barely conscious. Sam’s words come out in a thick and feverish prayer, and Ness can’t understand what he’s saying. He picks her up gingerly and places her on their pallet. He leaves the house in search of the herbal doctor, five miles away, who comes back with the roots and leaves and salves that are smeared into Ness’s back as she slips in and out of consciousness. It is the first night that Sam sleeps in the cot with her, and in the morning, when she wakes to fresh pain and festered sores, she finds him sitting at her feet, peering at her face with his big, tired eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says. They are the first English words he ever speaks to her, to anyone.

That week, they work side by side in the fields, and the Devil, though watchful, does not act against them. In the evenings, they return to their bed, but they sleep on opposite sides of it, never touching. Some nights, they fear that the Devil is watching them as they lie, and those are the nights Sam hugs her body to his, waiting for the metronome of fear that keeps her heart’s drumbeat moving quickly to slow. His vocabulary has grown to include her name and his, “don’t worry” and “quiet.” In a month, he will learn “love.”

In a month, once the wounds on both of their backs have hardened to scars, they finally consummate their marriage. He picks her up so easily, she thinks she must have turned into one of the rag dolls she makes for the children to play with. She has never been with a man before, but she imagines that Sam is not a man. For her, he has become something much larger than a man, the Tower of Babel itself, so close to God that it must be toppled. He runs his hands along her scabby back, and she does the same along his, and as they work together, clutching each other, some scars reopen. They are both bleeding now, both bride and bridegroom, in this unholy holy union. Breath leaves his mouth and enters hers, and they lie together until the roosters crow, until it’s time to return to the fields.

Ness awoke to Pinky’s finger poking her shoulder. “Ness, Ness!” she spoke. Ness turned to face the girl, trying to hide her surprise. “Was you having a bad dream?” she asked.

“No,” Ness said.

“It looked like you was having a bad dream,” the girl said, disappointed because when she was lucky Ness told her stories.

“It was bad,” Ness replied. “But it wasn’t no dream.”

*

Morning announced its presence through the roosters’ cries, and the women in the slave quarters readied themselves for the day, all the while whispering about Ness’s fate.

No one had ever seen Tom Allan do a public whipping before, not like the ones they saw, or experienced, at other plantations. Their master had a river for a stomach, and he hated the sight of blood. No, when Tom Allan wished to punish one of his slaves, he did it in private, somewhere he could close his eyes during, lie down after. But this seemed different. Ness was one of the few slaves that he had ever publicly berated, and she knew that she had embarrassed him, what with his own child lying in the dirt while Pinky stood silent and unscathed.

Ness returned to the same row of field that she was in the day before as everyone stared. It was rumored that Tom Allan’s plantation stretched longer than any of the other small plantations in the county, and to finish picking one row of cotton took two good days. Without warning, TimTam was back behind Ness. He touched her shoulder and she turned.

“They tol’ me Pinky spoke yesterday. I s’pose I should say thank you for that. And for the other thing.”

Ness looked at him and realized that every time she’d ever seen the man, he was chewing on something, his mouth always working its way around in a circle. “You ain’t got to do nothing,” Ness said, bending again. TimTam looked up to check if Tom Allan had arrived on the front porch yet.

“Well, I’m grateful anyway,” he said, and he sounded it. When Ness turned her face up, she saw that he was grinning again, his wide lips pulling back to make way for teeth. “I can talk to Massa Tom for you. He ain’t gon’ do nothin’.”