Last night there was either shooting or thunder down the bayou. The dead were took out of the back of the church and laid on the grass under a oak tree. There were flashes of light in the sky and a loud explosion in the bayou. A free man of color say a yankee gunboat was blowed up and fish rained down in the trees and some hungry people picked them up with their hands for food to eat.

Miss Abigail ask me why I come back from New Orleans when I could stay there and he free. I told her this is my home and inside myself I'm free wherever I go. I told her I want to stay and help other slaves escape up the Mississippi to the north. I have been telling myself this too.

I cannot be sure this is exactly truthful. This is my thoughts for this morning.

Respectfully, Flower Jamison

She looked back down at her words in the lamplight, then gazed out the window at the blueness of the dawn and a calf wandering out of the cane field. The calf caught a scent on the breeze and ran toward a cow that stood on the lip of the coulee in a grove of swamp maples.

Flower picked up her pencil and wrote at the bottom of the folded-back page in her tablet:

Post Script-I know I should hate him. But it is not what I feel. Why would a man not love his own daughter? Or at least look at her the way a father is suppose to look at his child? All people are the same under their skin. Why is my father different? Why is he cruel when he does not have to be?

LATE that afternoon Flower filled the caulked cypress tub behind the slave quarters with water she drew from the windmill, then bathed and put on a clean dress and began her pickup route, stopping first at the back door of Carrie LaRose's brothel.

Carrie LaRose could have been the twin of her brother, Scavenger Jack. She was beetle-browed, big-boned, with breasts the size of pumpkins and red-streaked black hair that grew on her head like snakes. She wore a holy medal and a gold cross around her neck, a juju bag tied above her knee and paid a traiteur to put a gris-gris on her enemies and business rivals. Some said she had escaped a death sentence in either Paris or the West Indies by seducing the executioner, who bound and gagged another woman in Carrie's prison cell and took her to the guillotine in Carrie's stead.

Flower paid little attention to white people's rumors, but she did know ont thing absolutely about Carrie La Rose, she either possessed the powers of prophecy and knew the future or she was so knowledgeable about human weakness and the perfidious and venal nature of the world that she could predict the behavior of people in any given situation with unerring precision.

Cotton speculators, arms dealers, munitions manufacturers, and slave traders came to her bordello and had their palms read and their lust slaked in her bedrooms and gladly paid her a commission on their profits.

Early in the war a Shreveport cotton trader asked her advice about risking his cotton on a blockade runner.

"How much them British gonna pay you?" she asked.

"Three times the old price," the cotton trader replied.

"What you t'ink them textile mills in Mass'chusetts gonna pay?" she asked.

"I don't understand. We're not trading with the North," he said.

"That's what you t'ink. The cotton don't care where it grow. Them Yankees don't, either. They rather have it come up to the Mis'sippi than go t'rew the blockade to the British. The blockade runners gonna bring guns back to the Confederates."

The cotton traders who listened to Carrie increased their profits six – and sevenfold.

But those who sought her advice and the service of her girls and sometimes the opium she bought from a Chinaman in Galveston little realized she often listened to their confessions and manifestations of desire and infantile need by putting her ear to a water glass she pressed against the walls of their rooms. On Saturday nights her brothel roared with piano music and good cheer. On Monday mornings a New Orleans export-importer might discover a profitable business deal had been stolen from under his feet.

Flower stripped the sheets from the mattresses in the bedrooms and piled them in the hallway. Outside, the western sky was streaked with gold and purple clouds and under an oak tree in the dirt yard three paddy rollers were drinking whiskey at a plank table. The wind puffed the curtains and blew through the hallway, and Flower could smell watermelons and rain in a distant field. She thought she was by herself, then she heard a board creak behind her and turned around and saw Carrie LaRose sitting in a chair, just inside the kitchen door, watching her, a contemplative expression on her face.

"Why you want to do this shit, you?" Carrie asked.

"Ma'am?"

"I could set you up in your own house, make you rich."

Flower wadded up the dirty linen she had thrown in the hallway and the dresses of Carrie LaRose's higher-priced girls and tied them inside a sheet.

"Don't know what you mean, Miss Carrie," she said.

"Don't tell me that, no. In a week or two this town's gonna be full of Yankees and all you niggers are gonna be free. A pretty li'l t'ing like you can make a lot of money. Maybe you t'inking about selling out of your drawers on your own."

"You don't have the right to talk to me like that, Miss Carrie."

Carrie LaRose looked at her nails. She wore a frilled beige dress, her hair piled on top of her head, a silver comb stuck in back.

"You could have stayed in New Orleans and been free. But you come back here, to a li'l town on the bayou, where you're a slave," she said.

"I don't mess in your bidness, Miss Carrie. Maybe you ought to keep out of mine."

It was silent except for the muffled conversation of the paddy rollers in the yard and the wind popping the curtains on the windows. Flower could feel Carrie LaRose's eyes on her back.

"You come back 'cause of Ira Jamison. You keep t'inking one day he's gonna come to your li'l house and tell you he's your daddy and then all that pain he give you for a lifetime is gonna go away," Carrie LaRose said.

Flower felt the skin draw tight on her face.

"I'll be getting on my way," she said.

"He ain't wort' it, girl. Learn it now, learn it later. Ain't none of them wort' it. They want your jellyroll wit' the least amount of trouble possible. The day you make them pay for it, the day you got their respect."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't play the dumb nigger wit' me."

"I'm fixing to be free, Miss Carrie. It doesn't matter what anybody say to me now. I can read and write. Words I don't know I can look up in my dictionary. I can do sums and subtractions. Miss Abigail and Mr. Willie Burke say I'm as smart as any educated person. I'm fixing to be anything I want, go anywhere I want, do anything I want, and I mean in the whole wide world. How many people can say that about themselves?"

Carrie LaRose propped her chin on her fingers and studied Flower's face as though seeing it for the first time. Then she looked away with an age-old knowledge in her eyes that made something sink in Flower's chest.

The wind was picking up now as she loaded her laundry bags into the carriage behind the brothel. The three paddy rollers were still at the plank table under the oak tree, their heads bent toward one another in a private joke. After the war had begun they had postured as soldiers, carrying the mail from the post office out to Camp Pratt or guarding deserters and drunks, but in reality everyone knew they were mentally and physically unfit for service in the regular army. One man was consumptive, another harelipped, and the third was feebleminded and had worked as a janitor in the state home for the insane.

Flower was about to climb up into the carriage when Rufus Atkins rode into the yard and stopped under the oak tree. He did not acknowledge her or even look in her direction. The three paddy rollers grinned at him and one of them lifted their whiskey bottle in invitation. Atkins dismounted and pulled his shoulder holster and pistol down over his arm and hung them from the pommel of his saddle. His eyes lit on Flower momentarily, seeming to consider her or something about her for reasons she didn't understand. Then the object of his concern, whatever it was, went out of his face and he took a tin cup from his saddlebags and held it out for the harelipped man to pour into. But he remained standing while he drank and did not sit down with the three men at the table.