Freedom Stone by Jeffrey Kluger

tone and smiled. “It was wrong o’ me to make mention of such a thing. We got enough magic in this oven and this stone already without pushin’ it places it ain’t meant to go. Besides, I don’t plan to use it at all ’less we got no other choice.”
    Lillie nodded. “How will we know that?” she asked.
    Bett’s demeanor now changed entirely and she allowed herself a laugh. “Full of questions,” she said. “Too many for today. You go back to that nursery now ’fore anyone notices you missing. Ain’t no one gonna bother your brother for a little while yet.”
    â€œWhen can I come again?” Lillie asked.
    â€œTwo days,” Bett said. “ ’Round about then, I reckon I’ll be needin’ to make a trip to Bluffton, and I could always use the help of a young pair of hands.”
    Lillie brightened, Bett’s angry moment now entirely forgotten. “Two days!” she said excitedly. Then she jumped up from her seat as Bett struggled up from hers, and the old woman and young girl hugged good-bye at the door. Bett watched as Lillie ran off and vanished back the way she came. Then she closed the door, gathered up her stone and swaddled it carefully in its drawstring bag.

Chapter Six
    MISS SARABETH was taking her morning stroll when she spied Lillie dashing out of the cabin where Bett the baker lived. That was a surprise, since near as Sarabeth could recall, the place Lillie belonged at this time of day was in the nursery cabin tending to the slave babies. The fact was, however, it had been so long since the two girls played together that neither one was entirely sure any longer how the other spent her day.
    There was a time when Sarabeth—who was the Master’s daughter—and Lillie, who was the Master’s property, played together all the time. They played on Saturdays, when Lillie and Plato were done with their cabin chores and Mama let them go outside; they played on Sundays, when Miss Sarabeth had her afternoons free and the Missus gave her permission to go down to the slave cabins. They would sometimes even play after work was done on weekdays, when both of them had an hour or so before Lillie was called back to the cabin for a dinner of possum or fatback and Miss Sarabeth was called back to the big house for whatever grand meal she would be served that night—a meal that Lillie would ask her about the next day and that Miss Sarabeth would describe in detail, from the creamy soups to the venison or fowl to the tiny sweet cakes she and her brother would eat and the strong brown spirits the men would drink.
    Nobody thought it especially strange that Lillie and Miss Sarabeth liked to play together. Plantation children of both colors often fancied one another’s company—there being few other boys or girls anywhere nearby—and it was only the sternest masters who thought it unfitting for the colors to mix when they were so young. But when the children reached Miss Sarabeth’s and Lillie’s age, it was time for the white boys and girls to start behaving like the Southern ladies and gentlemen they were becoming and the black boys and girls to start acting like the slaves they already were and would always be.
    Before long, Miss Sarabeth started coming to visit Lillie less and less. While she still sometimes stopped by on the weekends, it was usually in the company of the Missus, who liked to put on fine clothes and tour the slave quarters, smiling in a way Lillie never cared for.
    â€œThey look after themselves just fine, don’t they?” the Missus would ask Sarabeth as if Lillie and the other slaves weren’t there. “Your father was right to let them build good cabins that they’d be inclined to keep well.”
    It had been about a month since Miss Sarabeth had made such a visit, and it had thus been that long since she’d last set eyes on Lillie. Part of her smiled this morning as