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.“No need for more fear at Spring House, witchy woman.Plantation life is hard on all of us.We are all a slave to the land here.”“Then, every now and then, we should all get the whip.”An angry shudder at her impertinence moves through the other men, but Felix just stares.It’s a terrible risk, speaking to them this way, but she cannot let them know how severely they have limited her power by plowing this field.She cannot let them know how much it would require for her to unleash a true massacre.“Don’t remember you being punished so,” Felix says.“Don’t much imagine I will be now.”“If you had the power of the Devil in you, you’d be gone by now, Virginie Lacroix.What makes you stay, working your trickery on my overseer?”The very question she must avoid; to answer in any way would reveal the limitations of her gift, and oh, how those limits have caused her to lie awake nights cursing the God who gave it to her.Why? Why such a tiny drop of power and not the might needed to frighten the white man into seeing the Negro as brother and sister?“Can’t have no hanging tree when there’s no trees,” she says.“No hanging is planned,” Felix answers.“Set me aflame then? Burn me like a witch?”“Are you a witch?”“They’s ghosts in the soil.I can talk to them.That is my story.”“And you can make them dance.We’ve all seen that.Scared my poor wife half to death, that’s for sure.”And there it is.His wife.She had seen some evidence of Virginie’s gift over the years, seen the roses she’d brought back to life with a whisper and a touch.Kept the secret to herself as long as it gave her nice flowers.But the other day, she’d been on the second-floor porch, watching Big John get whipped as if it were a nuisance on par with a mosquito in the bedroom, watching the great vine come free from the oak branches like a snake.And now Virginie is in the dark with men who rape her kind without a second thought.Men who have, at present, made no move to immolate or dismember her.“What else can you do?” Felix asks, closing the distance between him and the horse that holds her a strange kind of prisoner.“Kill me and be done with it,” she says.And then I’ll let all hell break loose, ’cause I’ll know I’m dying.I’ll know for sure the pain won’t last forever, she thinks, so I’ll push it as far as I can, and I’ll bring justice from the earth like the other slaves are always begging me to.“I have no interest in your death, Virginie.I have brought you here for other reasons.”“Name them or be done with me.”“A trade, witchy woman,” Felix says.“That’s all.A trade.”Blake can see her from where he’s standing on the front porch.She’s on her feet inside the solarium, her back to him and the broad, bustling avenue just beyond the house’s fence.There is a strange, diseased-looking slouch to her posture, like she is staring down at something that threatens to draw her so far forward she will lose her balance.He has texted her several times—for some reason this feels less intrusive than ringing her doorbell.He hates the thought that his brief, exploratory messages—U OK? Do u need anything? U home?—are what she’s studying with such paralyzed intensity.The longer he watches her and the more she doesn’t move, the harder it is for him not to ring the doorbell a second time.He gives in.The doorbell is actually part of the intercom system, and after he hits the button on the brown box next to the front door, he’s forced to stand there and listen to the gentle two-tone electronic chime that’s now emanating from every telephone inside the house.He steps back and looks up again.The house has always looked to Blake like a fat, sweating wedding cake.As a child he had recurrent dreams in which its dormers sloughed off like moist icing
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