A slave chose nothing.
Dara's mulata daughter also was not given her freedom. Instead that daughter was taken into the master's house: taught to play the lute and dance the galliards of Joao de Sousa
Carvalho when she was ten, given an orange petticoat and a blue silk mantle when she was twelve, and taken to his bed the day she was fourteen. Her own father. He had used her as his property for eight years, then sold her to a stinking Englishman. She later learned it was for the princely sum of a hundred pounds.
A slave chose nothing.
Still, something in the Defiance of Atiba stirred her. He was bold. And handsome, even though a preto. She had watched his strong body with growing desire those two days they were together in the boiling house. She had begun to find herself wanting to touch him, to tame his wildness inside her. For a moment he had made her regret she had vowed long ago never to give herself to a preto. She was half white, and if ever she had a child, that child would be whiter still. To be white was to be powerful and free. She also would make certain her child was Christian. The Christian God was probably false, but in this world the Christians held everything. They owned the Yoruba. The Yoruba gods of her mother counted for nothing. Not here, not in the New World.
She smiled resignedly and thought once more of Atiba. He would have to learn that too, for all his strength and his pride, just as she had. He could call on Ogun to tell him the future, but that god would be somewhere out of hearing if he tried to war against the branco. She had seen it all before in Brazil. There was no escape.
A slave chose nothing.
Could he be made to understand that? Or would that powerful body one day be hanged and quartered for leading a rebellion that could only fail?
Unsure why she should bother, yet unable to stop herself, she turned from the window and quietly headed down the creaking, makeshift rear stair. Then she slipped past the kitchen door and onto the stone steps leading out into the back of the compound. It was still quiet, with only the occasional cackle of Irish laughter from the kitchen, whose chimney now threaded a line of wood smoke into the morning air.
The gate opened silently and easily—the indenture left to guard it was snoring, still clasping an empty flask—and she was out onto the pathway leading down the hill to the new thatched huts of the slaves.