Out to quarters where you can't grow much anyway, in the dark of evening, past Millie's and August's place along a mudded-up path there was a small one-room place where the catgrass grew high and a small stream ran, most of the time, just a little brook really, on its way to join the Tombigbee and the Gulf eventually, a ramshackle place with a sagging door, dirt floor, a single iron-belly stove, and a tiny uneven porch held together by patches of odd lumber from anywhere.

Willis Cantrell, slave, stepped onto this porch from the dim interior of the small hut, stooping through the doorway and straightening to his full six feet and a few inches, stretching abit more to ease the pain of the last twelve hours of pulling stumps and hauling offcuts from the west acre where the cleared pines lay jackstraw along the edge of the Locke plantation.

He was muscled high and low, and they all ached, but he'd survive. He sat on a cutoff stump he had placed on the porch for the purpose and stretched his legs out, hooking his heels over the edge of the rough planks. His right hand was wrapped around the neck of a crude instrument, four strings on a long fretless neck, a banjo technically, but perhaps not as fine a banjo as one could want, but at least some kind. The pegs were hand carved, wouldn't hold tension very well, the drum was oiled paper, the strings dried gut. But it was his own.

He plunked and tweaked, settled into his slot in the deepening Alabama night, and sent a deep baritone melody drifting over the quarters.

"Steal away, steal away, steal away, oh, steal away.
Steal away, steal away home!
I ain't got long to stay here.

One uv dese days an it won' be long
Call my name, but I'll be gone
Moses is comin yo kin understan
Lead her brother to the promised land

Steal away, steal away, Ain't got long to stay here."

The notes drifted on the breeze, blending with the sour smoky smells of cooked greens and fatback scraps and refuse and offal and old chicken bones and cold, dried-up sweat that always told you where you were when you were in the quarters. Willis plunked and tweak some more tune out of the crude instrument, his long, large fingers lingering here and there on the strings, thinking long.