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road leaving the Quarters ran straight to the river which was the plantation's main highway out into the world, the faithful carrier which took away its bales of cotton and brought back all its luxuries. The road's deep ruts cut by slow-moving wagon-wheels ran side by side past cotton-fields, through woods where last year's fallen leaves and brown pine-needles made them dim and where every grass-blade or leaf budding up above the ground was crushed back into the earth by the cloven feet of patient oxen or small, round, quicker-stepping mule hoofs.

As the road reached the brow of the hill, it slackened its gait and sent a small fork off to one side. Mary followed this as it crept cautiously and with painstaking curves through thickets, under low-hanging trees whose roots clutched the earth, until the cabin where Old Daddy Cudjoe lived came in sight. Small, dilapidated, paintless, lonely, it squatted low on the ground in the midst of a confusion of little rickety outbuildings. A crape-myrtle tree beside it was gorgeous with leaves that the heat had dyed in every shade