Cold meals and provision grounds gone to weeds and the cabin filthy, hearth piled high with ashes and walls surrounded with trash. He and his sister itching with lice and driven nearly frantic by bedbugs at night because their mother had no time to wage the slave's endless battle against those pests. His mother falling asleep sitting in the doorway, too tired to undress and go to bed.

"Yes, sir," he told Fourchet. "I know."

"Then you should know how devastating this kind of thing can be at such a time. And it's not the first time. God knows blacks are always doing one thing and another to get out of work. Breaking tools, or crippling a mule or a horse. You'd think they'd have the sense to know that a poor harvest will only hurt them in the end, but of course they don't."

No, thought January, silent. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes when you were that tired and that angry you didn't think very straight. When he was a child he'd wanted to kill Fourchet, after the man had flogged Mohammed, the plantation blacksmith's apprentice, nearly to death in one of his fits of drunken rage. Remembered how the drivers had untied the slim youth's body from the post and dropped him to the ground in the stableyard, and how the flies had swarmed around the bloodied meat of his back. Mohammed was a favorite of the children-the hogmeat gang, as they were called-a storyteller and a singer of songs. January had wanted to kill Fourchet and even at the time had known that if the big man died, at least a couple of the slaves would end up being sold to pay debts while the man's son was still a young boy. Maybe all of them.

And he'd known then, for the first time, that taste of helpless fear, the awareness that some things had to be endured for the sake of the slender and priceless good that endurance bought you.