The number reached the crowd almost instantly. Murmurs spread. The merchants frowned. Even those who had built their fortunes on the trade in human beings felt uneasy. In the brutal arithmetic of slavery, price had meaning. It reflected strength, fertility, obedience, longevity. A woman of Dinina’s age and status should have been worth hundreds of dollars. Pregnant women often fetched more. The child she carried represented an inheritance.
But nineteen hundred was another story.
It was written: Eliminate this woman. Erase her. Humiliate her.
Dinina didn’t know the exact number written on the paper, but she understood the atmosphere. She had long known how men reacted to objects they deemed defective. She felt the weight of their judgment pressing down on her like an indelible mass.
She was born in 1827 on a rice plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. Her mother, Patience, worked in the rice paddies from morning till night. Her hands were forever stained green by the rice stalks. Her back became bent early, her breath growing shorter with each passing year. Patience sang softly when she could, old songs passed down through generations, fragments of memory from Africa, passed on by mouths that refused to forget everything.
Dinina never knew her father. This was rarely the case for slave children. When Patience collapsed in the fields one summer afternoon and never got up, Dinina was eleven years old. A few weeks later, she was sold.
Its new owner was Elias Cartwright, a tobacconist from Charleston. Forty-three years old, married, and the father of four children, he was a deacon in the First Presbyterian Church. In public, he was known for his charity and discretion. In private, he understood the privileges afforded him by law.
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