Her mother died when Sarah was nine, carried away by fever over three terrible days. After that, Sarah was entirely alone.
The Virginia plantation was liquidated when Sarah was twelve, its owner ruined by collapsed cotton speculations. Sarah was auctioned off in Richmond, standing on a platform while strangers examined her teeth, prodded her limbs, and weighed her market value. She was bought by a Georgia cotton speculator who transported her south alongside seven others, all chained together in a wagon bed, leaving behind everything they had ever known. Six months later, the speculator sold her to a planter in central Alabama who needed domestic staff. That master died two years later, forcing another sale. Sarah was traded once more, this time to a dealer named Wickham, who specialized in moving enslaved laborers west into freshly cleared cotton tracts.
And so it was that on a bitter January morning in 1846, Sarah stood on the auction block in Cahaba, Alabama, waiting to be sold for the fourth time in her short life. She was fourteen, though the exact record of her age had blurred across successive bills of sale. She had learned not to weep, not to speak unless addressed, not to meet anyone’s eyes, and to exist merely as an instrument of labor. She had learned to retreat behind an impenetrable mask of submission.
