“Tales had spread among the swamp island children like herself about what lay in plantation lands: two-headed men, turtles without shells, and skeletons that rose from the dead. Although she was twelve and almost grown, at least in her mind, Sanzi still wasn’t sure how much of it was true, but she did believe that dangers lay out there.”
This paragraph is asking what could there possibly be on earth that would be more terrifying to a child than the possibility of meeting men with two heads and zombie skeletons. The answer, of course, lies in the system of slavery which made America run for nearly the first entire century of its existence. Sanzi knows about the real-life horrors of plantation slavery and when confronted with such an abomination of the concept of humanity, turtles without shells hardly even seem unnatural. This is a book about a little-known aspect of the history of those who managed to escape the horrors of slavery. If one had access to a swamp to run to for freedom, one could at least count on the possibility that what terrors lurked in the mysteries of the swamp were too great even for men who found owning other human beings to be perfectly normal behavior. Sanzi is presented with a choice when it comes to believing in the dangers of the swamp. She must wonder if they could be any worse than the other dangers all about her.
“We’ll get back in there soon enough. But the next time we go, we’ll do it properly, with the right men and everything we need to smoke those runaways out. If they’re living in there, it won’t be for long.”
Mr. Crumb is the owner of the plantation as well as the people forced to work for him which he views as his slaves. Mr. Crumb has a problem. More and more those people he calls slaves are coming to view themselves as something completely different. They are beginning to see themselves as human beings who were not born to become the property of another person. This quote comes within the context of an unsatisfactory attempt to enter the swamp and bring back a couple of runaway children. Things did not go well with Mr. Crumb’s search party, and they are not particularly excited about launching another search. They float the proposition that after what they had experienced in the swamp, it is almost a certainty that the children cannot survive. To this suggestion, Mr. Crumb responds with the above quote. Keep in mind these two runaways are children and Mr. Crumb’s stable of human begins he calls slaves is perfectly robust without the limited labor they can offer. Not that such a thing would ever concern such a person as Mr. Crumb.
“Craftiness was required for her mission. She could do that. After all, the octopus was known for its stealth. She’d snuck down the hall many days and knew where each creaking floorboard lay to get down to the kitchen. However, today, her mission was different. Instead, she traveled the opposite direction to her parents’ room.”
The person being described in this passage is Nora. Her father is Mr. Crumb. That is to say, her legitimate and legal father married her legitimate and legal mother. In other words, Nora Crumb is the white daughter of a slave owner. For many of the miraculous stories of slaves escaping to freedom to ever come to fruition, there often had to be collaborators working within the system that benefited their own families. Nora sees the truth of the situation. Unlike her father, she is capable of seeing what he calls slaves as being humans deserving of dignity. In this passage, she has reached the point of no return in which her moral compass will forever point in the opposite direction of her father. Her mission requires craftiness because it is so fraught with the potential for failure. She is sneaking into her mother’s bedroom to steal papers containing her mother’s signature. She has a plan that requires her ability to recreate the signature. If it works, she will help gain freedom for some human beings while driving a spike into the entire concept of slavery upon which her father depends for his economic enjoyment.
