“I understand, sir,” she answered evenly.
“Good,” Thornwood said. “Now tell me: what do you fear most?”
Sarah paused, searching for an answer that would sound compliant without giving him leverage.
Thornwood saw through the hesitation. “Do not calculate what I wish to hear. Answer truthfully. What is your greatest fear?”
Her throat felt parched, but she answered plainly, sensing that deceit would only prolong the scrutiny.
“I am afraid of forgetting,” she said.
“Forgetting?” Thornwood raised an eyebrow. “Explain.”
“I am afraid of forgetting who I was,” Sarah said, the confession slipping past her defenses. “My mother. My name. Who I was before the sales. I am afraid I will wake up one day and remember nothing except being a slave, that there was never anything else to me.”
A faint, chilling smile touched Thornwood’s mouth.
“That,” he murmured, “is precisely the threshold we shall examine. Your candor is appreciated. It makes the work far more engaging.”
What followed that night was not physical violence. Instead, Thornwood initiated what amounted to a methodical deconstruction of her identity. He questioned her continuously, compelling her to repeat phrases that stripped away her humanity, forcing her to hold strained, motionless postures while he read aloud from tracts by Southern physicians and naturalists asserting the natural servitude and intellectual void of Black bodies. When he dismissed her past midnight, Sarah climbed to her room with trembling limbs.
