"I won't need him for that. I can make my own acquaintance. What I need him for is to reacquaint me with my children. He can read and write, I reckon?""Sure.""Good, 'cause I got a lot of digging up to do." But the news they dug up was so pitiful she quit.
After two years of messages written by the preacher's hand, two years of washing, sewing,canning, cobbling, gardening, and sitting in churches, all she found out was that the Whitlow placewas gone and that you couldn't write to "a man named Dunn" if all you knew was that he wentWest. The good news, however, was that Halle got married and had a baby coming. She fixed onthat and her own brand of preaching, having made up her mind about what to do with the heart thatstarted beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River. And it worked out, worked out just fine,until she got proud and let herself be overwhelmed by the sight of her daughter-in-law and Halle'schildren — one of whom was born on the way — and have a celebration of blackberries that putChristmas to shame. Now she stood in the garden smelling disapproval, feeling a dark and comingthing, and seeing high-topped shoes that she didn't like the look of at all. At all.
WHEN THE four horsemen came — schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff— the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late. Three of themdismounted, one stayed in the saddle, his rifle ready, his eyes trained away from the house to theleft and to the right, because likely as not the fugitive would make a dash for it. Althoughsometimes, you could never tell, you'd find them folded up tight somewhere: beneath floorboards,in a pantry — once in a chimney. Even then care was taken, because the quietest ones, the onesyou pulled from a press, a hayloft, or, that once, from a chimney, would go along nicely for two orthree seconds. Caught red-handed, so to speak, they would seem to recognize the futility ofoutsmarting a whiteman and the hopelessness of outrunning a rifle. Smile even, like a child caught dead with his hand in the jelly jar, and when you reached for the rope to tie him, well, even thenyou couldn't tell. The very nigger with his head hanging and a little jelly-jar smile on his facecould all of a sudden roar, like a bull or some such, and commence to do disbelievable things. Grabthe rifle at its mouth; throw himself at the one holding it — anything. So you had to keep back apace, leave the tying to another. Otherwise you ended up killing what you were paid to bring backalive. Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth hisown dead weight in coin.