Summary

Georgia, Part 4, pp. 35 – 48. Two weeks after the celebration, Cora continues to recover from the beatings given to her in the aftermath of her defense of the boy. Alone with her injuries, Cora tries to figure out why she did what she did, but she cannot quite define the reason. She seeks comfort by sitting by her garden plot, reflecting on how someone had to be crazy to try to escape north. “But,” narration comments, “her mother had” (40).

Narration then describes Mabel’s disappearance, placing it in the context of comments that she had been the first slave to successfully escape the Randall plantation, and of brief descriptions of the painful fates that came to those who were caught. In the aftermath of her disappearance (when Cora was about 11), Cora “got on her knees and planted anew. It was her inheritance” (42). As she recalls her...