Part 1
The first time Grace Bell saw the giant, he was being dragged off a trader’s wagon in chains thick enough to anchor a riverboat.
Blackwood Plantation had stopped breathing.
Even the cicadas seemed to hush in the live oaks, as if the whole Mississippi afternoon had leaned close to see what kind of man could make hardened overseers look suddenly small. The wagon stood in the yard beneath a sun white enough to blind, its wheels sunk deep in dust, its mule team lathered from the road. Men gathered near the veranda with their hats tipped back. Women from the big house watched through curtains. The enslaved people stood farther off, pretending to work, pretending not to see, because seeing too much on Blackwood land could get a person punished.
Grace saw anyway.
She had learned to see without being caught. Learned to lower her eyes while noticing everything: the whip looped at Curtis’s belt, the whiskey glass in Richard Blackwood’s hand, the cruel shine in young Thomas Blackwood’s smile, the trader’s nervousness as he unlocked the wagon door.
Then the giant stepped down.
No, Grace thought, not stepped.
Descended.
He was taller than any man she had ever imagined, near eight feet, so massive he had to turn sideways to clear the wagon frame. His shoulders looked broad enough to carry a church bell. His hands were enormous and scarred, hanging loose beside thighs as thick as split timber. The iron collar at his neck seemed absurd against him, like a child’s cruel idea of control.
They called him Goliath.
The trader said it proudly, as if the name itself added value.
