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dinner.”
    In all my memory, Papa never set foot in the Van Lew mansion. Even Papa’s owner, Timothy Mahon, an Irishman with a steady blacksmithing business, would hardly be expected through the servants’ entrances of the grand houses atop Church Hill. I understood that Papa must obey Master Mahon just as Mama and I must obey the Van Lews, and I knew instinctively the deference with which any colored person, free or slave, acted around whites. But to have Miss Bet assuming Papa was at her beck and call—it was so astonishing even Mama hardly knew how to respond.
    “Miss Bet, Lewis isn’t trained to house service. He’d be clumsy in front of your guests. I’m sure that Old Sam and I can manage without him.”
    “Aunt Minnie, I don’t need anyone to tell me my own mind. If I say we must have Lewis, then I expect you to see that he will come.”
    Trammeled by Miss Bet’s insistence, Mama play-acted meek. “I’ll let him know you want him, ma’am, when next I see him.”
    That was Saturday, and by the time we entered Papa’s cabin the next morning, Mama was anything but meek. “That woman confounds me more each day. One minute she’s barking about the sins of slaveholding, the next she’s ordering around every negro in Richmond. I’ll tell her you’re busy for Marse Mahon. Maybe that will remind her that you aren’t her slave, too.”
    “What use do Mahon have for his smiths on Christmas Day?” Papa cocked his head toward me and shirked his shoulders, a signal he gave Mama whenever he had something to say he didn’t want me to hear.
    I turned my back to my parents and pretended to fiddle with the buttons on my cloak, listening hard for the near-whisper that followed. “That woman got presumption enough for ten white men, it’s true. But you know well as she do, I don’t got a thing to do Christmas Day, ’cept wait for you and Mary El. So don’t go giving off a lie so big you get caught for sure, and who know what she do then. What I gonna do with my whole week’s holiday, unless my daughter get her holiday, too?”
    Papa came around to me, tipping my head up and smiling, trying to appeal to Mama through me. “Look like I’m gonna enter Fortress Van Lew at last. Scale them walls and race Mary El all through the house. Once we get done poking about, I got to ’prentice myself to Old Sam, who gonna teach me to walk and talk just so among them strange pale creatures. Quite a time we gonna have.” The way he winked at me, I wanted to believe we’d really caper and play, without a care for Miss Bet or any of her family. “And the ending gonna be best of all, when I walk my beautiful wife and daughter out that fortress and bring them home with me.”
    Christmas morning, I woke before Mama, feeling the cold floor right through our cornhusk sleeping pallet. The garret quarters, stifling in summer, were always freezing in winter. When we went to sleep our room was warmed a bit by the heat from the fireplaces in the Van Lew family’s bedchambers below. But by daybreak their fires were long out, only to be rekindled once Mama and I set to work downstairs. The bricks we’d heated, wrapped in rags, and carried into our pallet the night before were stone cold to the touch by dawn, and the water in the chipped porcelain pitcher on the wooden table just inside our doorway was long gone frigid. We usually washed and dressed in near silence on winter days, our movements quick and deliberate against the bitter air.
    But not this morning. I kissed Mama and wished her good morning, my voice loud against the sloping ceiling of our room. She smiled at me out of her sleep as I scrambled up to the washstand. “We go to Papa’s tonight,” I said, as if she could have forgotten such a thing. “We have to be ready.”
    “Mary El, that’s not for hours yet. There’s work enough for us to do before then. And don’t you think we might take time for a prayer, today of all days?”
    In my excitement over my imminent