theme in three movements

Spine — novel — $6.99

Elijah and Pearl. Natchez, Mississippi. 1847.

Part One: Natchez

The first time Pearl saw Elijah, he was holding a horse's hoof between his knees and talking to it.

Not to the horse. To the hoof. Quietly, the way you'd talk to a child who'd stepped on something sharp. She was standing outside Barlow's dry goods on Main Street with the mistress's list folded in her palm — two pounds of white sugar, a tin of black tea, six yards of blue muslin, one bottle of rosewater — and she'd stopped walking because a man was talking to a horse's foot and the horse was letting him.

He was at the farrier's stall across the road, bent over, his back to her. She could see the muscles in his forearms, the sheen of sweat on the back of his neck. His shirt was rough-spun but clean. His skin was brown — not dark, not the deep black of the field hands she'd grown up alongside, but the particular warm brown that meant what it always meant around here. Somebody's grandfather was in the big house. Same as hers.

The horse stood perfectly still. Pearl had been around horses her whole life — the mistress kept three for the carriage — and she'd never seen one stand that still for a farrier. They stamped. They pulled away. They rolled their eyes and showed their teeth. This one looked almost sleepy, head low, one ear cocked toward the man's voice.

He finished, set the hoof down gently, and straightened up.

That's when he saw her.

Later, Pearl would think about that moment the way you think about a door you didn't know was a door until you'd already walked through it. One second she was a woman standing in the street with a shopping list. The next second she was something else entirely and there was no going back through.

His eyes were light. Not blue — hazel, maybe, or green, the kind of color that shouldn't have surprised her but did. He looked at her and didn't look away, which was dangerous for both of them — a brown man and a brown woman making eye contact on Main Street in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1847 — but he didn't look away and neither did she.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

Then the horse shifted and bumped him with its nose and he turned back to it, and Pearl remembered the list in her hand and the sugar and the tea and the blue muslin, and she walked into Barlow's with her heart doing something it had never done before.

---

Pearl had been shopping in town since she was fourteen. The mistress — Mrs. Caroline Harding, who was forty-six and beautiful and tired in a way that had nothing to do with work — trusted Pearl more than she trusted anyone, including Mr. Harding. This was not because Mrs. Harding was kind. It was because Pearl was useful, and because Pearl had learned very young that being useful was the closest thing to safe that existed in the big house.

Pearl could read. She could write a clean hand. She could do sums in her head faster than the overseer. She could arrange flowers, mend lace, iron a shirt so flat it looked painted on. She could dress hair, mix a headache powder, and tell Mrs. Harding she looked beautiful at eight in the morning without it sounding like a lie.

Trouble was the word they used. It meant everything — stealing, running, talking back, looking wrong, being in the wrong place, knowing too much, wanting anything. Trouble was the sea they all swam in, and Pearl's particular gift was swimming so smoothly that the surface never broke.

---

The second time Pearl saw Elijah was a Saturday, three weeks later, at the market.

She picked up one of his hand-forged hinges. Turned it in her fingers. The metal was still warm from the sun, or maybe that was her imagination.

"You made these?" she said.

"Yes ma'am."

"Pearl," she said. "Not ma'am."

"Elijah," he said. "Eli."

"You like it?" She didn't know why she asked that. It was a stupid question. Nobody liked it. But she wanted to hear him talk. His voice had a steadiness to it that made her feel like the ground was solid, which was not a feeling she was accustomed to.

"I like the work," he said carefully. "Making things. The iron does what I tell it."

She understood him perfectly. The iron does what I tell it — meaning nothing else does.

"I arrange flowers," she said, and it came out like a confession.

"What would you arrange if nobody told you?"

The question hit her in the chest. Nobody had ever asked her what she would do if nobody told her. The concept barely existed in her life.

"Wildflowers," she said finally. "Whatever was growing. I wouldn't arrange them at all. I'd just put them in water and let them be what they are."

He smiled. It was the first time she'd seen him smile, and it changed his whole face — opened it up, made the careful architecture of his blankness dissolve into something warm and real and slightly crooked.

"That sounds right," he said.

— three movements inside —