The Triumph of Grace Read Free

And, really, why should he? There was, after all, that expensive handkerchief to consider. What further evidence did he require?
    "Grace Winslow," Magistrate Warren pronounced, "I commit you to Newgate Prison to await trial on the charge of thievery."
    Forgetting himself, Lord Reginald Witherham allowed a whoop to escape his thin lips. He looked triumphantly at Grace, who had dared bring such ridicule and humiliation down on him, and crowed, "If you thought you could hide from me, you were indeed the greatest of fools!"
    Magistrate Warren's shoulders slumped. He swiped at the sweat that glistened in the crevices of his tired face.
    Grace looked neither at the uneasy magistrate nor at the gloating Lord Reginald. She shut her eyes tight and desperately tried to trace Cabeto's face in her mind. His mouth . . .his eyes . . . his brow. . . . But this time, she could not.
    After all Grace had endured, after all she had survived, it had finally happened—Cabeto had slipped away from her.

3
    Y ou don't thinks you can keep on livin', but somehow you do," said Kit as he attacked the endless expanse of weeds with his hoe. "My woman, she be gone. My children, dey be gone, too. Everyone already be ripped away from me. You don't thinks you can keep on, but here we be sloggin' in de swamp."
    "Here we be," said Caleb. "Together . . . all alone."
    Caleb.
    Yes.
    In another life he was Cabeto, but now he was Caleb. Caleb, who wore a mud-splattered white man's shirt and breeches soaked to the knees. Caleb the slave, that's who he was now.
    "Do you remember Africa?" Caleb asked Kit.
    "No, and if'n you knows what's good for you, you won't, neither."
    No African names were allowed on the plantation. No words in any of the tongues of Africa. No drums, no dances, no talk of the ancestors. And no Grace. No Grace. Aching homesickness tore into Caleb's heart, which was precisely why he did his best to block Grace from his mind. He could not endure the memories.
    "Dis here be like de islands of home," said Kit.
    Caleb never knew the rice fields in the coastal swamps of Kit's Africa. Caleb hailed from the parched savanna, the flat grasslands. The rich bottomland marsh at White Jasmine Plantation, which lay just up the Ashley River from Charleston, South Carolina, brought no recollections of home to him. Certainly the dank swamp, overgrown with cypress trees and sweetgrass, didn't, either. To Caleb, it was nothing but the land of masters and slaves.
    "Folks like me, we's de ones what knows when to plant de rice seeds," Kit said. "We knows how to strap up de water so's it drowns de land with de tide. After de harvest, it be our womenfolks what know to use fanna baskets to throw de chaff to de winds. And dey's de ones what knows how to pound de last bit of hull off de rice grain, too."
    Africans using African ways to grow African rice to make the white master richer still. Caleb plunged his hoe into the thick mud with such vengeance that the head flew off.Growling with frustration, he dropped to his knees and groped in the weed-strewn mud. When he located the metal head, he laid it aside, then thrust his hands back down into the muck to feel around for the piece of stone he had carefully chiseled to fit under the cracked head and make the broken tool usable again.
    Be a good slave. Fix de massa's useless tools. Den take dem to de field and work, work, work. Work hard like a good slave.
    Caleb's first master, Silas Leland, had bought both Caleb and his brother, Samson, from the auction block, fresh off the ship from Africa. Silas Leland's only thought was to get a couple months' hard, unending labor from the two maimed Africans before they sank to their deaths in the snake-infested swampland. But then Macon Waymon came around, his head full of big ideas for his own rice plantation. When he saw the strapping Caleb knee-deep in the soggy swamp doing the work of two men, it caught his attention.
    "Silas," Macon said as he lounged with his host in the gathering