When William Foster, a fat, drunken fifty-year-old, rejected me despite my father’s offer of a third of our estate’s annual profits, I knew the truth. I would die alone.
But my father had other plans. Plans so radical, so shocking, so completely outside of all social norms that, when he told me, I was certain I’d misunderstood.
“I’m entrusting you to Josiah,” he said. “The blacksmith. He’ll be your husband.”
I stared at my father, Colonel Richard Whitmore, owner of 5,000 acres and 200 enslaved people, certain he had lost his mind.
“Josiah,” I whispered. “Father, Josiah is enslaved.”
“Yes, I know exactly what I’m doing.”
What I didn’t know, what no one could have predicted, was that this desperate solution would turn into the greatest love story I would ever experience.
First, let me tell you about Josiah. They called him the brute. He was seven feet ten, or even less than an inch tall. 300 pounds of pure muscle, the product of years spent at the forge. Hands capable of bending iron bars. A face that made even the biggest men recoil when he entered a room. Everyone was terrified of him. Slaves and freemen alike kept their distance. White visitors to our plantation would stare at him and whisper, “Did you see how big he is? Whitmore has created a monster in the forge.”
But here’s what no one knew. Here’s what I was about to find out. Josiah was the kindest man I’d ever met.
My father called me into his study in March 1856, a month after Foster’s refusal. A month after I had stopped believing I would ever be different on my own.
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