Pearls and Lace

One - It Commences

"Amelia, promise me you'll stay here. No matter what happens you'll stay here and keep my legacy going strong."

That was what Father told me right before he passed away. Of course, he didn't know what I had been planning ever since I learned I would inherit his estate. I still didn't know how I was going to free them all, but I made sure that I would, even if it killed me.

For some reason, Father always said that the slaves were 'the reason he was alive,' as if he couldn't do any of the work himself. He ran a relatively small plantation compared to the neighboring ones. South Carolina was full of tobacco, and old men like him wanted to profit as much as possible off of it. Once he had made a steady profit off of the slaves, he bought some more. Mother told him to stop, but Father just sent her away. I'm still not even sure where she is, and I don't even know if she's still alive. 

Once we didn't have any more room to house all seventy-six slaves, Father bought one of our neighbor's homes. In his will, he left the house to the original owner, Charles Seymour. Technically, both Seymour and I own seventy-four human beings (two of them died from Father's malnutrition), and that's where everything gets tricky. If I try to give them their freedom, Seymour will get the courts after me and be deemed the sole owner. If I try to take them away from South Carolina, or even the plantation grounds, the same thing will happen. 

Father left me a chest full of letters. Many of them were sent to Seymour's father, Philip. Apparently, they were both planning on arranging a marriage between myself and Seymour. If the fact that Seymour was twenty-six years older than me wasn't reason enough to not want this to happen, he had been given the largest plantation in South Carolina from his father, and filled it with five hundred and thirty slaves. The only way I would be able to free the slaves would be to marry Seymour, but I didn't want it to come down to that.