Moses

The overseer of Henry Townsend's plantation, Moses is thirty-five, married to Priscilla, and is an ineffective father to son Jamie. Moses is the first slave Henry purchased, ten years earlier, for $325 from Henry's former white master, William Robbins. It takes several weeks for Moses to come to grips with how God could allow blacks to own fellow blacks, and at first Henry relates too casually, even playfully, to Moses. Robbins sets Henry straight.

Robbins had purchased Moses for $525 from the jailed Jean Broussard, but rejected Bessie, Moses's companion of several months since they met in a Roanoke slave pen. Moses had risked a beating by reiterating too often to Robbins that he and Bessie were family; they were one. Moses helps Henry build a house, and after Henry's marriage to Caldonia Newman, receives authority over the growing slave population. Before marrying a field laborer, Moses had his eye...