“Whatever I find. Old newspapers, sometimes books I borrow. I read slowly. I didn’t learn it well, but I read.”
“Have you read Shakespeare?”
His eyes widened. “Yes, ma’am. There’s an old copy in the library that no one touches. I read it at night, when everyone was asleep.”
“Which arts?”
“Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest.” His voice involuntarily gained enthusiasm. “The Tempest is my favorite film. Prospero controls the island with magic. Ariel yearns for freedom. Caliban is treated like a monster, but perhaps more human than anyone else.” He stopped abruptly. “Excuse me, madam. I talk too much.”
“No,” I smiled. I smiled genuinely for the first time in this strange conversation. “Go on. Tell me about Caliban.”
And then something extraordinary happened. Josiah, a powerful slave known as the Brute, began discussing Shakespeare with an intelligence that would impress university professors.
“Caliban is called a monster, but Shakespeare shows us that he was enslaved, his island stolen, and his mother’s magic rejected. Prospero calls him a savage, but Prospero came to the island and claimed ownership of everything, including Caliban himself. So who is really the monster?”
“Do you find Caliban a sympathetic person?”
“I see Caliban as a human, treated as something less than human, but still a human.” He paused. “Like… like enslaved humans.”
“I’m done.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We talked for two hours about Shakespeare, books, philosophy, and ideas. Josiah was self-taught, his knowledge fragmented, but his mind was sharp, and his thirst for knowledge obvious. And as we talked, my fear vanished.
This man was no brute. He was intelligent, gentle, thoughtful, trapped in the body of a society that looked upon and saw only a monster.
“Josiah,” I finally said, “if we do this, I want you to know something. I don’t think you’re a brute. I don’t think you’re a monster. I think you’re a person forced into a hopeless situation, just like me.”
Tears suddenly welled up in his eyes. “Thank you, miss.”
“Call me Ellanar. When we’re alone, call me Elellanar.”
“I shouldn’t, ma’am. It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Nothing about this situation is appropriate. If we’re going to be husband and wife, or whatever it is, you should use my last name.”
He nodded slowly. “Elellanar.” My name and his deep, gentle voice were like music.
“Then you should know something too. I don’t think you’re unmarriageable. I think the men who rejected you were fools. Any man who can’t see beyond a wheelchair and the person inside doesn’t deserve you.”
It was the kindest thing anyone has said to me in the last four years.
“Will you do it?” I asked. “Will you agree to my father’s plan?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I will protect you. I will care for you. And I will try to be worthy of you.”
“I’ll try to make this bearable for both of us.”
We sealed the deal with a handshake, his enormous hand engulfing mine, warm and surprisingly gentle. My father’s radical solution suddenly seemed less impossible.
But what happened next? What did I learn about Josiah in the months that followed? This is where this story becomes something no one could have predicted.
The agreement formally entered into force on April 1, 1856.
My father held a modest ceremony; it was not a legal wedding, as slaves were not allowed to marry, and certainly no white society would recognize it, but he gathered the household staff, read verses from the Bible, and announced that Josiah would now be responsible for my care.
“He speaks with my authority on Eleanor’s behalf,” my father told everyone gathered. “Treat him with the respect his position deserves.”
A room was prepared for Josiah, adjacent to mine, connected by a door but separate, maintaining a semblance of decorum. He moved his meager belongings from the slave quarters—some clothes, a few secretly collected books, tools from the forge.
The first few weeks were awkward. Strangers were trying to navigate a hopeless situation. I’d grown accustomed to the servants. He was used to hard work. Now he was responsible for the intimate matters. He helped me dress, carried me when my wheelchair failed, and helped me with needs I never thought I’d discuss with a man.
But Josiah approached everything with extraordinary gentleness. When he had to carry me, he asked permission first. When helping me dress, he avoided my gaze whenever possible. When I needed help with personal matters, he preserved my dignity, even when the situation was inherently undignified.
“I know this is uncomfortable,” I told him one morning. “I know you didn’t choose this.”
“You don’t either.” He was reorganizing my bookshelf. I mentioned I wanted to alphabetize it, and he took it on as a project. “But we manage somehow.”
“Are we?”
He looked at me, his powerful frame seemingly harmless as he knelt by the shelf. “Ellaner, I’ve been enslaved my whole life. I’ve done backbreaking work in heat that would kill most men. I’ve been beaten for mistakes, sold away from my family, treated like an ox with a voice.” He gestured toward the comfortable room. “This life here, caring for someone who treats me like a human being, access to books and conversations… This isn’t hardship.”
“But you are still a slave.”
“Yes, but I’d rather be here with you in captivity than somewhere else, free and alone.” He turned back to his books. “Is that so bad?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s fair.”
But here’s what I didn’t tell him. What I couldn’t admit to myself yet. I was starting to feel something. Something impossible. Something dangerous.
By the end of April, we had developed a routine. In the mornings, Josiah would help me get ready, then carry me to breakfast. Then he’d go back to the forge, and I’d do the household accounting. In the afternoons, he’d come back, and we’d spend time together.
Sometimes I watched him work, fascinated by how he transformed iron into useful objects. Sometimes he read to me, and his reading skills improved greatly thanks to access to my father’s library and my tutoring. In the evenings, we talked about everything—his childhood on another plantation, his mother, who was sold when he was 10, his dreams of freedom that seemed impossibly distant.
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