Not only was Holcomb expert with his gun, he didn’t let time pass: that very evening, after eating the dinner Venie had prepared （with an extra pan of corn bread for him）， Holcomb waited for his landlord. When Victor came back to the kitchen, instead of his father, Holcomb looked at Venie, who nodded. Then he explained the situation, what the Franklins had done that day, and what he suspected had been happening at night for weeks as well. Holcomb insisted this wasn’t his taking the Negroes’ side. This was about growing cotton. And the Franklins were getting in the way of that. As overseer, Holcomb couldn’t have a ruckus in the fields slowing down work. Victor nodded and left the kitchen house, and within moments, Holcomb apologized to Venie. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings, with what he’d said about Negroes. And Venie told him he needed to hush. She knew where Holcomb stood already—didn’t she bake him corn bread every day? Venie kissed the top of his head.
The next day, the Franklin brothers were absent in the master’s fields, and when night came, the dark path to the outhouse in the Quarters had become safe.
A Kind of Peace
In his first year at Wood Place, Holcomb bonded with Aggie. His beloved Venie already adored her, and Holcomb had come to feel the same. Though the Creek and the Cherokee had been enemies at times, the new overseer was grateful that some of the people of our land had remained there. On Sundays, after the light died down, he and Venie would slip through the back door of Aggie’s cabin. There, they would speak quietly, and the woman would have a bit of joy at speaking with one of the people.
This man came at a necessary time, for even Pop George had not been able to console his family of women over the hurting of Eliza Two and the loss of Nick. Aggie had turned grim, her lips pressed into a forbidding road. In the cotton fields, Tess stood on her row with no interest. Often, Holcomb found her sitting on the earth, gone somewhere in her mind. He left her there with no bother. At night, Tess would walk to the pecan tree that stood a few feet from Samuel’s general store. She would sit under the tree and talk for long hours, crying and wrapping her arms around the thick trunk.
And though Rabbit had found the company of Leena, her twin continued to ache. Eliza Two still grieved for her face, her lost beauty, and her lost innocence. This girl might have disappeared into blood, a new trail made by the edge of a second knife cutting open a vein. So many slaves like her were lost in these ways. Eliza Two might have traveled into madness or sorrow, had it not been for Holcomb. Though he was nearly as quiet as Eliza Two, he was as watchful as Rabbit. And he saw Eliza Two’s disharmony up close, on those Sundays when Venie and he joined the family at dinner.
One of those evenings, Eliza Two sat in the yard in front of her cabin alone. Her twin had taken a tray to the left cabin, for Leena didn’t have anyone to spend this day with. There, Rabbit and she would sit on a quilt in the grass with a lantern, for Leena was afraid of the dark. Holcomb came outside and sat on the log with Eliza Two. He wasn’t frightened of being seen, for the occupants of the big house were in their place, and the Quarters-folks liked him enough to put off curiosity. The girl was perched on one of the logs upon which the smallest children would sit during the days when Pop George and Aggie tended them.
Holcomb sat down, and he didn’t speak for a while. Then he began to tell Eliza Two about his brothers and sisters. He had been the youngest child, and every Sunday the seven of them would enjoy a dinner with his parents and grandmother. He had a great-aunt who lived deep in the woods, so connected was she to the land. As the descendants of white men, this mixed-blood Cherokee family had enjoyed a measure of financial security. Their house had four bedrooms, and a kitchen structure out back, on twenty-five acres. They lived adjoining the farm of their full-white relatives, yet in spite of having white men’s blood, Holcomb’s family kept to many of the old ways of their people. Alongside their Christian beliefs that had come from the white men, they had their stories of how the earth had been formed, how corn had been gifted to the people. They wore clothes like their white relatives, but deerskin moccasins on their feet. And here, Holcomb Byrd pulled at the pouch from inside his shirt: all members of his Cherokee family had a pouch like this, filled with medicine, meant to keep the wearer safe.
Eliza Two was silent, but she was listening closely to this gentle-spoken man. Months before, her twin had reported about the day Holcomb arrived on the plantation. Rabbit had been in the kitchen watching, her sensitive nature attuned. She liked this man. Though she had thought he was white, she knew immediately he was not like the others. She had never seen Venie smile at a man before, not even Pompey.