She was deemed unfit for marriage – so her father gave her in marriage to the strongest slave.

Suddenly, I was no longer just a disabled person. I was defective in every way that mattered to America in 1856. At the time, William Foster, fat, drunk, and fifty years old, rejected me, despite my father’s offer to give him a third of our estate’s annual income. I knew the truth. I was going to die alone. But my father had other plans. Plans so radical, so shocking, so utterly unconventional that when he told me about them, I was certain I had misunderstood. “I entrust you to…”

“Josiah,” he said. “The blacksmith. He will be your husband.” I stared at my father, Colonel Richard Whitmore, lord of 5,000 acres and 200 slaves, convinced I had lost my mind. “Josiah,” I whispered. “Father, Josiah is a slave.” “Yes, I know perfectly well what I’m doing.”

“What I didn’t know, what no one could have predicted, was that this desperate solution would become the greatest love story of my life. Let me first tell you about Josiah. He was called a brute. Six feet ten, if that’s short. One hundred and thirty-six kilos of pure muscle, the fruit of years spent at the forge. Hands capable of bending iron bars. A face that made even the hardest men recoil as soon as he entered a room. He inspired terror.”

Slaves and free men alike, without exception, respected his distance. White visitors to our plantation stared at him and murmured, “Did you see the size of that one?” Whitmore had forged a monster. But here’s what no one knew. You need protection. When I die, this property will go to your cousin Robert.