The Mississippi summer of 1843 pressed down on Thornhill Plantation like a wool blanket soaked in sweat.

The air itself seemed to rot in the heat, thick with the smell of cotton fields and human suffering.

In the slave quarters, whispers moved faster than the overseer’s horse.

Something terrible had happened.

Joshua had been missing for 3 days.

He was 28 years old, lean and strong from years of fieldwork with scars across his back that told the story of previous punishments.

But Joshua had committed an unforgivable sin in the eyes of Master Edmund Thornnehill.

He had been caught teaching other enslaved people to read using a worn Bible he’d hidden beneath the floorboards of his cabin.

Master Thornhill was a methodical man educated at the University of Virginia who believed that discipline maintained order and that order maintained profit.

He didn’t rage like some plantation owners.

He calculated and he had calculated that Joshua’s punishment needed to be memorable, something that would crush any spark of rebellion in the others.

Behind the main house, near the storage buildings where supplies were kept, there was a structure most of the enslaved people tried to forget existed.

The punishment pit.

It was 10 ft deep, 8 ft across, dug into the red Mississippi clay years ago.

The walls were brick, the bottom covered with a foot of stagnant water that never quite drained.

But the true horror of the pit wasn’t the darkness or the water.

It was the rats.

The plantation’s grain stores attracted them by the hundreds.

Brown rats, some as large as small cats, with yellow teeth and eyes that gleamed in the dark.

Master Thornhill had discovered that the pit positioned near the grain storage had become their breeding ground, and he had found a use for it.

Joshua had been stripped to his waist and lowered into the pit on the first day of his punishment.

The iron grate was locked above him, and Master Thornnehill stood at the edge, looking down with the same expression he wore when inspecting his cotton yield.

3 days, Master Thornnehill had said, his voice calm and measured.

“If the Lord sees fit to preserve you, you’ll learn the cost of defiance.

If not, you’ll serve as an example all the same.

” The first night Joshua had stood in the water, his back against the brick wall, listening to the scratch and squeak of rats moving in the darkness around him.

They were curious at first, circling, testing.

When they began to bite, he fought them off with his hands, crushing them against the walls.

But there were always more.

By the second day, exhaustion had set in.

The water was cold despite the summer heat above, and his legs cramped from standing.

When he sat to rest, the rats grew boulder.

They bit his feet, his hands, his arms.

He killed dozens, but their bodies floated in the water around him, and the smell of death only seemed to draw more.

On the third day, Joshua had stopped fighting.

He sat in the corner of the pit, the water up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his knees.

The rats crawled over him now, and he barely moved.

He had entered a place beyond pain, beyond fear, a place where his mind separated from his body, and watched from somewhere far away.

He thought about the Bible he had hidden, about the words he had taught to others in whispered lessons after the workday ended.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

” He thought about his mother, sold away when he was 12.

He thought about dignity, about what it meant to be human in a world that treated him as property.

And he thought about surviving, not because he wanted to live.

The part of him that wanted things had been chewed away by rat teeth and crushed by despair, but because somewhere in the darkness of that pit, a cold understanding had formed.

If he survived, he would carry something back with him, something that would change everything.

On the morning of the fourth day, when the overseer and two field hands lifted the great and pulled Joshua out, they recoiled at what they saw.

Joshua’s body was a map of violence.

Hundreds of bite marks covered his arms, legs, and torso.

Some shallow scratches, others deep punctures that still oozed blood and clear fluid.

His skin had taken on a grayish palar beneath the dirt and dried blood, and his eyes stared straight ahead with an expression that made the overseer, a hard man named Pike, take an involuntary step backward.

“Jesus Christ,” Pike muttered, crossing himself despite not having set foot in a church for 20 years.

“Get him to the quarters.

Have old Ruth tend to him.

” They half carried, half dragged Joshua to the slave quarters, a long wooden structure divided into small rooms where families and individuals lived in cramped conditions.

The other enslaved people watched in silence as Joshua passed, their faces reflecting horror and something else, a growing anger that they couldn’t express openly, but that burned behind their eyes.

Old Ruth was the plantation’s healer, a woman of perhaps 60 years, who knew the properties of every plant and root that grew in Mississippi soil.

She had seen many injuries in her time, whipping wounds, broken bones, burns from punishment, but when she examined Joshua, her hands trembled.

“Child,” she whispered, cleaning his wounds with water and crushed herbs.

“What did they do to you?” Joshua didn’t answer.

He lay on the thin mattress in his cabin, staring at the ceiling, his breathing shallow and rapid.

Ruth worked through the afternoon, applying picuses to the worst of the bites, wrapping his arms and legs in clean cloth torn from her own spare dress.

But she noticed things that worried her.

Joshua’s skin was hot to the touch, despite the coolness of his extremities.

Several of the bite wounds had begun to swell, the flesh around them turning dark and puffy.

infection,” she said to Sarah, a young woman who had brought water.

“Bad infection! We need to watch him close.

” That night, Joshua’s fever began.

He shook violently on his mattress, his teeth chattering, sweat pouring from his body.

Ruth sat with him, changing the cloths on his forehead, whispering prayers she had learned as a child before she understood what slavery truly meant.

Other people from the quarters came to check on him.

Marcus, a field hand who Joshua had been teaching to read.

Dinina, a woman who worked in the main house.

Thomas, who had been Joshua’s closest friend since they were both children on the plantation.

Will he live? Thomas asked Ruth, his voice tight with emotion.

Ruth didn’t answer immediately.

She looked at Joshua’s convulsing form, at the strange rash that had begun to appear on his chest and arms, at the way his breath came in gasps and wheezes.

I don’t know, child.

I truly don’t know.

There’s something in him that I ain’t never seen before.

By dawn, Joshua’s fever had broken slightly.

He opened his eyes and looked at Ruth with a clarity that seemed almost supernatural.

“Water,” he croked.

She held a cup to his lips, and he drank deeply.

“When he finished,” he gripped her wrist with surprising strength.

“Ruth,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Something’s wrong.

I can feel it inside me.

Something from the pit.

Hush now, Ruth said, but her heart raced.

You just need rest and healing.

No, Joshua insisted.

Listen to me.

The rats, their bites.

I can feel, he trailed off, his eyes losing focus again as another wave of fever took him.

Ruth sat back, her mind racing.

In her long life, she had heard stories from other healers, from enslaved people who had been brought from different plantations, different states, stories about diseases that spread from animals to humans, stories about sicknesses that could pass from person to person like wildfire.

She looked at the dozen people crowded into Joshua’s small cabin, all of them touching him, breathing the same air.

And for the first time in many years, old Ruth felt true fear.

5 days after Joshua’s return from the pit, Marcus collapsed in the cottonfield.

One moment he was picking, his hands moving with the mechanical efficiency born of years of forced labor, and the next he was on his knees, vomiting into the red Mississippi dirt.

The overseer Pike rode over on his horse, his whip already in hand.

Get up, boy.

Work time ain’t rest time.

But Marcus couldn’t get up.

His body shook with chills despite the brutal midday heat.

And when he tried to stand, his legs buckled beneath him.

Pike dismounted, ready to use the whip, but stopped when he saw Marcus’s face.

The man’s eyes were bloodshot, his skin flushed with fever, and a strange rash had begun to spread across his neck and chest.

“What the hell?” Pike muttered.

He’d seen six slaves before.

It was part of plantation life.

But something about this felt different.

Get him back to the quarters, he told two nearby field hands, and get back to work, all of you.

Any man who stops picking loses his evening meal.

By evening, Marcus’ condition had deteriorated rapidly.

Ruth examined him and felt her worst fears confirmed.

The symptoms were identical to Joshua’s.

high fever, shaking chills, swollen lymph nodes in the neck and armpits, and that distinctive rash.

But Marcus had something Joshua hadn’t shown yet.

He was coughing, deep racking coughs that brought up blood flecked flem.

“When did you last see Joshua?” Ruth asked Marcus as she tended to him.

“Two days ago,” Marcus wheezed.

“I brought him food, sat with him for a while.

” Ruth’s heart sank.

She stepped outside Marcus’ cabin and looked across the quarters.

In the fading light, she could see people moving about, preparing evening meals, tending to children, living their constrained lives.

How many of them had been in contact with Joshua? How many had touched Marcus today as they carried him from the field? That night, Sarah, the young woman who had helped Ruth care for Joshua, came down with a fever.

By the following morning, Diner and two of the house slaves were sick.

Within 3 days, 12 people in the slave quarters were laid low with the same mysterious illness.

Master Thornnehill finally took notice when his house servants began falling ill.

He summoned Ruth to the main house, making her enter through the back door and stand in the kitchen while he questioned her from the hallway, maintaining his distance.

“What is this sickness?” he demanded.

Is it cholera typhus? I don’t rightly know, master, Ruth said carefully.

But it’s spreading fast.

Started with Joshua after he came out of the pit.

Thornhill’s face darkened.

Are you suggesting that my disciplinary methods have brought disease to my plantation? Ruth knew the danger of her next words, but she was old and tired and had watched too many people suffer.

I’m saying that boy was bit hundreds of times by rats.

Rats carry sickness, and now that sickness is spreading to others.

Nonsense, Thornhill snapped, though uncertainty flickered in his eyes.

It’s the summer eggs, nothing more.

Negroes are always falling ill in the heat.

Give them willow bark tea and put them back to work as soon as possible.

I have a cotton crop to bring in.

But Ruth could see that he was worried.

The cotton harvest was crucial.

His entire year’s profit depended on it.

If too many workers were sick, if the sickness spread to the white overseers, or god forbid, to his own family, “Master,” Ruth said quietly, “I think we should separate the sick from the well.

And anyone who’s been caring for the sick should stay away from others until we know.

I’ll make the decisions about the management of this plantation,” Thornhill interrupted.

“Now get back to the quarters and do your job.

” Ruth left, but as she walked back through the muggy evening air, she heard something that made her blood run cold.

From the direction of the overseer’s cottage, someone was coughing.

Deep, wet, rattling coughs.

The disease had jumped the invisible line that separated enslaved from enslaver.

By the second week of August, Thornhill Plantation had become a place of quiet terror.

The sickness that had started in the slave quarters now moved through the property like a malevolent spirit, respecting neither race nor status.

Pike, the overseer, was the first white man to fall seriously ill.

His wife found him one morning burning with fever, his neck swollen with inflamed lymph nodes the size of hen’s eggs.

She screamed for help and Master Thornnehill sent for the doctor from town, a man named Callaway, who had studied medicine in Philadelphia and considered himself well-versed in the diseases of the South.

Dr.

Callaway arrived in his carriage carrying his leather bag of instruments and remedies.

He examined Pike, asked questions about his symptoms and possible exposures, and then examined several of the sick enslaved people in the quarters.

Ruth watched as the doctor’s confidence slowly drained away, replaced by something she recognized.

“Fear.

” “Master Thornhill,” Dr.

Callaway said, standing on the porch of the main house and wiping his spectacles nervously.

“I believe you may be dealing with a pestilential fever of an unusual character.

The symptoms suggest a contagion spread through close contact or perhaps through the air itself.

I’ve seen similar presentations in medical texts describing outbreaks in European cities, but never here in Mississippi.

What’s the treatment? Thornhill demanded.

He stood with his wife Elellanena and their two children behind him as if his body could shield them from whatever evil had invaded his property.

Isolation of the sick, fresh air, plenty of fluids and prayer, Callaway said.

Beyond that, I can offer little.

Bloodletting might reduce the fever in some cases, and I have lord him for the pain, but he trailed off, not wanting to voice his real fear that nothing he knew how to do would stop this.

“How many are sick now?” Elellanena Thornnehill asked, her hand protective on her young daughter’s shoulder.

Dr.

Callaway consulted his notes.

“23 among the Negroes, three white men, including Mr.

Pike, and he hesitated.

I’m afraid your cook, Mrs.

Thornhill showed signs of fever this morning.

Elellanena gasped.

Martha, but she’s been preparing our food.

The implications hung in the air, unspoken, but understood by everyone.

If the cook was sick, if she had been handling the family’s meals while incubating the disease.

That night, Thornhill made a decision.

He ordered the sick enslaved people moved to an old tobacco barn at the far edge of the property away from both the slave quarters and the main house.

Ruth protested the barn had no proper ventilation, no water supply, no way to keep the sick comfortable, but Thornhill wouldn’t hear it.

I will not have disease festering in the heart of my plantation, he said.

You’ll tend to them there, and anyone who works with them will not come within 50 yards of the main house or the other quarters until this passes.

So Ruth, along with two other women, who had already survived the sickness and seemed immune, set up a makeshift infirmary in the tobacco barn.

They carried water from the nearby creek, laid out thin mattresses on the dirt floor, and did what they could to ease the suffering of the dying.

Because by now Ruth understood that many would die.

Joshua was one of those who survived the initial fever only to worsen as the disease progressed.

The bite wounds on his body, which had seemed to be healing, suddenly erupted with pus and infection.

His fever spiked again, and he began coughing up blood.

Ruth sat with him in the hot, airless barn, wiping his face, helping him drink water, listening to him talk in his delirium.

The pit,” Joshua mumbled, his eyes unfocused.

“Can still hear them scratching.

Still feel their teeth.

So many teeth.

” “Hush now,” Ruth said, but tears ran down her face.

This young man, who had dared to read, who had tried to pass on the gift of literacy, despite the terrible risks, was being consumed from within by something he had brought back from his punishment.

Ruth, Joshua said in a moment of clarity, gripping her hand with shocking strength.

Is it spreading to the others? She couldn’t lie to him.

Yes, child, it’s spreading.

Joshua closed his eyes, and the expression crossed his face that Ruth couldn’t quite read.

Was it regret, or was it something else? Something that looked almost like grim satisfaction? “Good,” Joshua whispered.

“Let them feel what we feel.

Let them know there are consequences.

Ruth pulled her hand away, disturbed.

Joshua, you don’t mean that.

You can’t mean that.

Would But Joshua had slipped back into fever dreams, and Ruth was left to wonder, had the pit changed him into something beyond what he had been before.

And if this disease destroyed the plantation, if it killed both enslaved and enslaver alike, what would that mean? Was it divine retribution, random tragedy, or something else entirely? Outside the barn, the August sun beat down mercilessly, and in the distance the cotton stood unpicked in the fields, waiting for hands that might never come.

3 weeks into the outbreak, Thornhill Plantation had become a ghost of its former self.

The cotton fields, which should have been bustling with activity as harvest time approached, stood largely abandoned.

Of the 80 enslaved people who had lived and worked on the property, 22 were dead, 30 were sick in the tobacco barn, and the rest moved through their days with the holloweyed expression of people waiting for death.

Master Thornhill had barricaded his family in the main house, allowing no one to enter except Dr.

Callaway, who arrived twice a week to check on them and report on the progression of the disease.

The doctor’s optimism had long since evaporated.

It’s unlike anything in my experience, Callaway admitted to Thornhill during one visit, standing on the porch rather than entering the house.

The fever, the swollen glands, the rash, the respiratory symptoms.

Some patients show all of these, others only some.

The mortality rate appears to be approximately 30%, possibly higher.

And I’m receiving reports that other plantations in the county are beginning to see cases.

other plantations.

Thornhill’s voice rose with panic.

How is that possible? I’ve allowed no one to leave this property.

Disease finds a way, Callaway said grimly.

Perhaps through the overseers who’ve gone into town for supplies.

Perhaps through slaves who’ve had contact at the property boundaries.

Or perhaps, he hesitated.

Perhaps what? Perhaps through rats, sir.

Several other plantations have grain storage just as you do.

and all of them have rats.

If this disease is carried by the animals themselves, spread through their bites or their droppings, then containment may be impossible.

Thornhill sank into a chair, his face gray.

I’m ruined.

The cotton will rot in the fields.

My workers are dying or too sick to labor.

The other planters will avoid me like a leper.

How did this happen? Callaway didn’t answer, but both men knew.

Both men understood that three weeks ago, in a fit of calculated cruelty, Thornnehill had thrown a man into a ratinfested pit, and that man had brought back something that was now destroying everything Thornhill had built.

In the tobacco barn, Ruth worked with a kind of grim efficiency, born of necessity.

She had organized the space as best she could, separating the newly sick from those in the final stages, the children from the adults, trying to maintain some measure of dignity in a place of suffering.

She had watched 22 people die, had closed their eyes, had said prayers over their bodies before they were taken away to be buried in unmarked graves, and she had watched Joshua deteriorate day by day.

He was still alive somehow, though Ruth couldn’t understand how.

The infection in his old rat bites had spread to his blood, causing sepsis.

His fever never broke.

He coughed constantly, sometimes bringing up blood, sometimes just gasping for air.

But he remained conscious more often than not, watching everything with those haunted eyes.

“How many?” he asked Ruth one evening as she spooned water into his mouth.

“How many what, child? How many dead? White and black together.

Ruth paused.

22 of us.

Three white men.

The cook.

One of the overseers children.

Joshua absorbed this information.

Not enough.

He said softly.

Not enough.

Lord Jesus.

Joshua.

What’s happened to you? You’re talking about death like it’s something to be desired.

Joshua’s eyes met hers.

And for a moment she saw the intelligent, compassionate young man he had been before the pit.

Ruth, do you remember what I was teaching people before Thornhill found out? Reading the Bible.

Not just the Bible.

I was teaching them the words.

The power of words.

The power to understand the documents that bind us, the laws that enslave us, the contracts that sell our children.

I was teaching them to be human in a world that calls us property.

His voice grew stronger.

Thornhill punished me for that.

He tried to destroy me for daring to learn, to think, to teach.

Well, maybe I can’t read anymore.

Maybe I’ll die in this barn.

But I’m taking his world with me.

Ruth stared at him.

Horror and understanding dawning.

You knew when you came back from the pit.

You knew you were sick.

You knew it would spread.

I didn’t know, Joshua said.

I hoped.

I prayed.

I asked God, “If I survive this pit, let me carry something back that will make them understand.

Let them feel the consequence of their cruelty.

” He coughed violently, blood flecking his lips, and God answered.

Ruth stepped back, her hand over her mouth.

Around her, the barn was filled with the sounds of suffering, coughing, moaning, fevered mumbling.

Some of these people had caught the disease simply because they had shown Joshua kindness, had cared for him, had refused to let him suffer alone, and others were sick because Joshua had allowed them to be exposed, had perhaps even ensured it.

“You’re not God,” Ruth whispered.

“You don’t get to choose who lives and dies.

” “Neither does Thornhill,” Joshua replied.

“But he’s been choosing for decades.

Every day he decided which of us worked ourselves to death, which of us got sold away from our families, which of us got whipped, which of us got thrown into pits.

I just evened things out.

Ruth left the barn and stood in the evening air, her whole body shaking, the moral complexity of what Joshua had revealed overwhelmed her.

Was he a victim seeking justice? or had he become something else, a weapon wielded by his own hand against oppressor and oppressed alike? In the main house, Elellanena Thornnehill began to cough.

Elellanena Thornnehill’s illness progressed with terrifying speed.

Within 2 days of her first cough, she was bedridden with high fever, the characteristic swollen lymph nodes appearing in her neck and armpits.

Her daughter, 12-year-old Rebecca, had also fallen sick, though less severely.

Master Thornnehill paced the halls of his own house like a caged animal, helpless in the face of a disaster he could not control through force or money.

Dr.

Callaway moved into one of the guest rooms, no longer bothering to maintain the fiction that he could leave and avoid contamination.

He bled Ellena twice a day, gave her lordinum for the pain, and applied picuses to her swollen glands.

But they both knew these measures were more ritual than cure.

I’m dying, aren’t I?” Elellanena asked him during one of her lucid moments.

She had been a beauty in her youth, daughter of a Charleston merchant, educated in music and literature.

Now her face was gray and drawn, her hair matted with sweat.

Callaway couldn’t meet her eyes.

The crisis will come soon.

Some patients survive it.

Some don’t.

And Rebecca, she’s young and strong.

Her chances are better.

Elellanena closed her eyes.

Edmund should never have put that man in the pit.

I told him it was excessive.

I told him that cruelty breeds cruelty, but he wouldn’t listen.

Mrs.

Thornhill, you shouldn’t upset yourself.

Why not? Her eyes opened bright with fever and anger.

I’m dying because my husband wanted to make an example.

Rebecca is suffering because we built our lives on the backs of people we treated as animals.

Don’t tell me not to be upset, doctor.

I have earned the right to my anger.

Down in the slave quarters, the situation was no less dire.

With so many sick or dead, the basic functioning of the plantation had broken down.

There was no one to prepare food, to tend the vegetable gardens, to maintain the property.

Those who were still healthy, existed in a state of confused limbo, not free, but no longer under any effective supervision.

The overseer Pike had died and the other white men were too frightened to venture near the quarters.

Thomas, Joshua’s friend, organized the healthy survivors.

They gathered in the evening away from the tobacco barn where the sick lay dying and discussed their situation in low voices.

“We could leave,” said Marcus’s brother, James, who had somehow avoided the sickness.

“Thornhill can’t stop us now.

The overseers are dead or hiding.

We could make for the north with what? asked Dinina, who had survived her bout with the illness and now bore the scars of it.

Pock marks on her face, a persistent cough.

We got no food stored up, no weapons, no money, and the patrollers are still out there.

Just because this plantation’s falling apart don’t mean the world’s changed.

“Then what do we do?” Thomas asked.

Stay here and wait to die or wait for Thornhill to sell us off to pay his debts once this is over.

The group fell silent.

The truth was that none of them knew what to do.

They existed in a strange twilight, trapped between bondage and chaos.

In the tobacco barn, Ruth continued her work with mechanical determination.

She had stopped trying to calculate odds of survival or understand the moral implications of Joshua’s actions.

She simply did what needed to be done.

Gave water to the thirsty cleaned wounds, held hands, whispered prayers, and witnessed death.

Joshua was still alive, though barely.

His body had wasted away to skin and bones.

His breathing was labored and wet, and he drifted in and out of consciousness.

But when he was awake, he watched everything with those burning eyes.

“Ruth,” he whispered one night when she sat beside him.

How many now? She knew what he was asking.

35 of ours, five white people, including Mrs.

Thornhill as of this morning.

Something that might have been satisfaction flickered across Joshua’s face.

The master still healthy, him and his son.

Not enough, Joshua said again.

He began to cough.

A deep rattling sound that brought up blood.

When the coughing fit past, he looked at Ruth with sudden clarity.

I need you to understand something.

I’m not sorry.

I know you think I should be, but I’m not.

They put me in that pit like I was garbage.

They would have let me die down there and thought nothing of it.

Well, now they know what it feels like to be powerless.

To watch the people you love suffer, to understand that your world can be destroyed by something you can’t control.

But innocent people died,” Ruth said, her voice breaking.

“Children died.

People who never hurt anyone.

” “And how many innocent people died in the fields?” Joshua replied.

“How many children were sold away from their mothers? How many people were worked to death or whipped to death or raped or broken?” He gripped her hand with surprising strength.

“I’m not saying it’s right, Ruth.

I’m saying it’s balanced.

For once, the scales are even.

” Ruth pulled her hand away.

The scales will never be even, child.

There’s too much blood on both sides now.

Joshua smiled, a terrible expression on his dying face.

Then at least Thornhill will remember.

Everyone who survives this will remember.

They’ll remember that there’s a cost to cruelty, that you can’t torture people without consequence.

He closed his eyes, and Ruth thought he had slipped back into unconsciousness.

But then he spoke again, his voice barely audible.

Tell them my name.

When it’s over, tell them Joshua did this.

Tell them I did it on purpose.

Let them know that even slaves have power.

Ruth didn’t answer.

She sat with him through the night, and by morning, Joshua was dead.

Elellanena Thornnehill died 3 days after her husband’s wife, despite Dr.

Callaway’s best efforts.

She went quietly in the early morning, her daughter, Rebecca holding her hand.

The girl had survived her own bout with the illness and was recovering, though she would carry the scars, both physical and emotional, for the rest of her life.

Master Thornnehill received the news of his wife’s death with a kind of numb silence.

He had not left the main house in weeks, terrified of contracting the disease that had devastated his plantation.

Now it had taken the person he loved most, and the grief broke something fundamental inside him.

Doctor Callaway found him in the study that afternoon, staring at the ledgers that documented his plantation’s operations, the names of enslaved people he owned, the yields from past harvests, the debts and credits that formed the economic basis of his world.

All of it meaningless now.

Edmund,” Callaway said gently, “the sickness appears to be subsiding.

We’ve had no new cases in 5 days.

I believe the worst has passed.

” “The worst has passed,” Thornhill repeated flatly.

“My wife is dead.

38 of my slaves are dead.

My overseer is dead.

My cotton is rotting in the fields.

My daughter is scarred and traumatized.

My reputation is destroyed.

No one will do business with me.

No one will visit us.

But yes, doctor, I suppose the worst has passed.

Callaway sat down across from him.

What will you do? What can I do? Thornhill’s voice rose with hysteria.

I’m ruined.

The bank will foreclose on this property within 6 months.

I’ll be lucky if I can sell the remaining slaves for enough to pay a fraction of my debts.

Everything my father built, everything I maintained, gone because of that damned negro and his damned reading lessons.

It was the rats, Callaway said quietly.

The disease came from the rats in the pit.

If you hadn’t Don’t, Thornnehill cut him off.

Don’t tell me this is my fault.

I was maintaining discipline.

I was protecting my investment.

How was I to know that throwing an uppety slave into a punishment pit would destroy my entire world? But even as he said it, Thornhill knew the truth.

Everyone knew the truth.

He had created the conditions for this disaster through an act of calculated cruelty, and now he was reaping the consequences.

In the quarters, the survivors had begun the grim work of rebuilding some semblance of normal life.

The dead had been buried, 38 enslaved people in one mass grave behind the quarters, the white people in the plantation cemetery near the main house.

Ruth had presided over the burials of her people, saying what prayer she could remember, trying to give dignity to those who had been denied it in life.

Thomas stood at the grave marker they had made for Joshua, just a piece of wood with his name carved into it.

Diner stood beside him, her face still marked with the pock marks from her illness.

He told Ruth he did it on purpose, Thomas said quietly.

That he let the sickness spread to punish Thornhill.

Do you believe that? Dinina asked.

Thomas was quiet for a long moment.

I don’t know.

Maybe he convinced himself of it after the fact to make meaning out of his suffering.

Maybe he really did understand what was happening and chose not to warn us.

Does it matter? It matters if we’re honoring a hero or a murderer, Dinina said.

Can’t he be both? Thomas replied.

Ain’t that the truth of what slavery does to people? Turns victims into villains.

Makes heroes out of those willing to do terrible things.

He touched the wooden marker.

Joshua taught me to read.

He risked his life to give me that gift.

And maybe he killed me.

Or would have if I’d gotten sick.

I don’t know how to hold both those things in my head at once.

Diner took his hand.

We hold them because we got to.

We hold all of it.

The love and the hate.

The kindness and the cruelty, the life we got and the life we lost.

That’s what it means to survive.

At the tobacco barn, Ruth was supervising the cleanup.

The building would never be used for sick people again.

The survivors had voted to burn it down once everything was removed.

Too many had died there.

Too much suffering had soaked into the walls.

As she worked, she thought about Joshua’s final words.

Tell them I did this.

tell them I did it on purpose.

Should she honor that request? Should she tell the story of a man who had weaponized his own suffering, who had turned his body into a tool of revenge, or should she let people believe it was just tragic accident, a natural disaster no one could have prevented.

In the end, she decided to tell the truth, but only to those who asked directly.

And she would tell all of it.

Joshua the teacher, Joshua the victim, Joshua the avenger.

people would have to make their own judgments about what it meant.

A week after the last death, Dr.

Callaway prepared to leave Thornhill Plantation for good.

He had done what he could, and there was nothing more for him here.

Before he left, he filed a report with the county medical board documenting the outbreak and his observations.

In that report, he noted that the disease appeared to have originated from infected rats, transmitted through their bites to a negro slave who had been subjected to punishment.

He noted the rapid spread through close contact, the high mortality rate, and the symptoms that had mystified him throughout.

What he didn’t note, what he never told anyone was his suspicion that the slave in question, a man named Joshua, might have understood what was happening and allowed the disease to spread.

Doctor Callaway had no proof.

Only the look in Joshua’s eyes when he examined him.

Only the words the old healer Ruth had repeated.

Some knowledge, Callaway decided, was too dangerous to preserve in official records.

Let the world think it was simple tragedy.

Let them miss the deeper, darker truth that even the most powerless could find ways to strike back and that cruelty always, always carried a cost.

Dramaradishti chapter 8, the aftermath.

6 months after the outbreak, Thornhill Plantation was a hollow shell of its former self.

The bank had indeed foreclosed and the property had been sold at auction to a consortium of investors from Nachez.

Master Edmund Thornnehill, now simply Edmund Thornnehill, had moved with his daughter Rebecca to a small house in town, living off the charity of his wife’s relatives.

He would never own property again.

The surviving enslaved people had been sold off to settle debts, some to nearby plantations, others to traders who would transport them further south to the expanding cotton lands of Texas.

Ruth was among those sold, ending up on a smaller plantation near Vixsburg, where her healing skills were valued.

Thomas and Diner were sold together to a plantation in Alabama, a small mercy in the brutal mathematics of slavery.

But the memory of what had happened at Thornhill Plantation spread through the enslaved community like the disease itself had spread, whispered in quarters at night, passed along the invisible networks of communication that existed beneath the master’s awareness, growing and changing with each telling.

In some versions of the story, Joshua was a hero who had deliberately infected the white people, striking a blow for freedom.

In others, he was a tragic figure, a victim of cruelty who had inadvertently brought disaster to his own people.

In still others, he was something more complex, a man broken by torture, who had made terrible choices in his brokenness.

The story reached other plantations, other states.

In Georgia, an overseer thought twice before using a punishment pit, remembering what had happened in Mississippi.

In Louisiana, enslaved people found courage in Joshua’s example, however they interpreted it.

In South Carolina, a master decided that teaching slaves to read might be less dangerous than punishing them for it.

The ripples spread outward, invisible, but real, changing the calculations of power and resistance in small ways across the South.

In Vixsburg, Ruth continued her work as a healer.

But she also began to tell stories to the enslaved people who came to her for treatment.

Stories about Joshua, about the pit, about the disease.

She told them everything, the good and the bad, the heroism and the horror.

And she let them draw their own conclusions.

One evening, a young man named Jacob came to her with a wound on his hand.

As she cleaned and bandaged it, he asked, “Miss Ruth, is it true about that man Joshua? Did he really kill all those white folks on purpose? Ruth paused in her work.

I don’t rightly know, child.

I think maybe Joshua himself didn’t know.

I think he was so broken by what they did to him that he couldn’t tell the difference between justice and vengeance, between resistance and murder.

And I think maybe that’s what slavery does.

It breaks people so badly that they can’t be whole anymore.

Can’t make choices that ain’t tainted by the evil that was done to them.

But you admire him,” Jacob said.

“I can hear it in your voice when you talk about him.

” Ruth thought about this.

I admire that he tried to hold on to his humanity by teaching people to read.

I admire that he survived the pit when he should have died.

I admire that he made the masters afraid, even if just for a moment.

She finished tying off the bandage.

But I don’t admire that people I loved died because of him.

I don’t admire that he chose revenge over mercy.

Admiration’s too simple a word for what I feel.

What would you call it then? Understanding, Ruth said.

I understand why he did what he did, even if I can’t say it was right.

And I think that’s all any of us can do.

Try to understand each other’s pain and choices, even when those choices hurt us.

In Alabama, Thomas and Diner had been put to work in the cotton fields of a plantation called Riverview.

The work was hard, the conditions harsh, but they had survived worse.

They had survived Thornhill, survived the disease, survived the separation from everyone they had known.

One night, lying on their cabin floor after a long day’s work, Dinina asked Thomas if he ever thought about Joshua.

Every day, Thomas admitted, I think about the lessons he taught me, the words he helped me understand, and I think about all those people who died.

Do you hate him? Thomas was quiet for a long time.

No, I pity him.

He won in a way.

He brought down Thornhill, destroyed the plantation, made the masters afraid, but it cost him everything, including his soul.

What kind of victory is that? Maybe that’s the only kind slaves can win, Dina said softly.

Victories that cost everything.

Then maybe we need to find another way, Thomas replied.

Maybe we need to find ways to resist that don’t destroy us in the process.

Joshua taught me to read.

Maybe I can teach others.

Maybe that’s the real way to win.

Not through disease and death, but through knowledge and persistence.

Diner took his hand.

And maybe both ways matter.

Maybe we need the Joshua who burned it all down.

And we need the teachers who build something new.

Maybe that’s how change happens.

In town, Edmund Thornnehill descended further into bitterness and alcohol.

He blamed Joshua for his ruin, blamed the bank for foreclosing, blamed his neighbors for avoiding him, blamed God for allowing his wife to die.

But late at night, in his darkest moments, he blamed himself.

He remembered the day he had ordered Joshua thrown into the pit.

He remembered the cold calculation of it, the way he had measured out three days of torment as if dispensing medicine.

He remembered thinking that the punishment would restore order, maintain discipline, protect his investment.

Instead, it had destroyed everything.

Dr.

Callaway, who occasionally checked on him out of professional obligation, found him one evening staring at a medical journal that contained an article about disease transmission.

Did you know, Thornhill said without looking up, that in Europe they’ve documented outbreaks of pestilential fever that originated from rat populations, that the disease can spread from animals to humans through bites or contact with their waste? He laughed bitterly.

I created the conditions for this.

I built that pit.

I let it fill with rats.

And then I threw a human being into it.

What did I think would happen? You couldn’t have known, Callaway said, though without conviction.

Couldn’t I? Thornhill looked up, his eyes red from drinking.

Or did I just not care? As long as the disease stayed among the negroes, as long as it didn’t touch me or mine, would I have done anything differently? Callaway had no answer to that.

I’ve been thinking, Thornhill continued, about all the ways I justified what I did.

Their property.

They need discipline.

The Bible sanctions it.

Everyone does it.

They’re not fully human.

He set down the journal.

All of it was lies I told myself so I could sleep at night, and now I can’t sleep at all.

5 years after the Thornhill outbreak, the story had taken on the qualities of legend among the enslaved communities of the South.

It was told in different ways depending on who was telling it and who was listening, but certain elements remained constant.

A man named Joshua, a pit filled with rats, a disease that had brought down a plantation.

In some versions, Joshua had magic powers and had deliberately brought forth the plague.

In others, he was a prophet chosen by God to punish the wicked.

In still others, he was simply a man pushed beyond endurance who had made a terrible choice.

But all the versions agreed on one thing.

The masters were not invincible.

Their power could be broken.

Their world could be destroyed.

This knowledge spread through the enslaved population like a low fever.

never quite erupting into open rebellion, but changing the texture of resistance.

People were more willing to risk punishment, more willing to learn forbidden knowledge, more willing to hope that change was possible.

Ruth, now in her late 60s, had become a keeper of stories.

She traveled between plantations with her master’s permission.

He found her healing skills valuable enough that he hired her out to neighboring properties, and this gave her unusual freedom of movement.

Wherever she went, she told the story of Joshua and Thornhill Plantation, adding details she had remembered or heard from others.

One evening, at a plantation in Louisiana, she told the story to a group gathered in the quarters.

Among them was a young man named Frederick, barely 20, who had been born free in the north but kidnapped and sold south.

He had a sharp mind and a hunger for knowledge that reminded Ruth painfully of Joshua.

After she finished the story, Frederick asked, “Miss Ruth, do you think what Joshua did was right?” Ruth had been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and her answer had evolved.

I think Joshua did what he had to do to survive.

And I think when you torture a person, when you try to destroy their humanity, you can’t control what comes back at you.

Thornhill wanted to make an example.

Well, he got one, just not the one he intended.

But the other slaves who died, Frederick pressed, the innocent ones.

How do you justify that? I don’t justify it, Ruth said firmly.

I just understand it.

There’s a difference.

When you live in a system built on violence, violence touches everyone.

The masters understand this when they whip one slave to keep the others in line.

Maybe Joshua understood it, too.

So, we’re all just caught in cycles of violence? Frederick asked.

Is there no way out? Ruth looked at the young man carefully.

You thinking of ways out, child? Frederick met her eyes.

Always.

Then remember this, Ruth said.

Joshua’s way worked, but it cost him and everyone around him.

There might be other ways, ways that don’t involve everyone dying, but those ways take time, patience, organization.

Joshua didn’t have those things.

He just had his rage and his suffering.

Maybe you could do better.

Frederick nodded slowly, absorbing this.

Years later, after he had escaped to freedom and taken the name Frederick Douglas, he would write about the complexities of resistance and the moral ambiguities of violence against oppression.

And though he never mentioned Joshua by name, those who knew the story recognized its echoes in his words.

In Mississippi, the physical evidence of the Thornhill outbreak had largely disappeared.

The plantation had been rebuilt under new ownership.

The tobacco barn had been burned down, and the graves had been plowed over to make room for more cotton fields.

But the memory persisted.

Local white people spoke of it in hushed tones, a cautionary tale about the dangers of disease and the unpredictability of negro slaves.

They didn’t like to dwell on the deeper implications that cruelty had consequences, that the enslaved were human beings capable of both suffering and agency, that the system they had built contained the seeds of its own destruction.

But some understood.

Dr.

Callaway, now in his 60s and semi-retired, had spent years studying the outbreak and its aftermath.

He had come to believe that it had been a form of pestilential fever transmitted by infected rats, likely a variant of what Europeans called jail fever or typhus.

The symptoms matched, the transmission pattern made sense, and the high mortality rate was consistent with historical records of similar outbreaks.

What he could never quite reconcile was the question of intentionality.

Had Joshua known he was infected? Had he understood that close contact would spread the disease? Had he deliberately exposed others? Callaway had read Ruth’s account, which he had asked her to dictate to him years after the fact.

In it, she reported Joshua’s final words claiming responsibility.

But fever dreams were unreliable, and dying men said many things without proof, without certainty.

All Callaway could do was document the facts and leave the interpretation to history.

He wrote a paper about the outbreak which was published in a southern medical journal in 1851.

In it, he emphasized the importance of sanitation, the dangers of ratorn disease, and the need for more humane treatment of enslaved people.

Not for moral reasons, he was careful to note, but for practical ones.

healthy slaves were more productive and brutality created conditions that endangered everyone.

The paper was widely read by plantation doctors and had some influence on medical practices in the South, but it carefully avoided the deeper moral questions, the ones Callaway thought about late at night, but never committed to paper.

In town, Edmund Thornnehill lived out his final years in quiet desperation.

He had become an object of pity and avoided social company, ashamed of his ruined state.

His daughter Rebecca married a merchant son and moved to New Orleans, visiting her father rarely and speaking of her childhood never.

On his deathbed in 1852, Thornnehill called for a minister and made a rambling confession about Joshua, the pit, and the disease.

The minister, uncertain what to make of this dying man’s guilt, offered standard consolations about God’s mercy and the inevitability of suffering in a fallen world.

But Thornhill was not consoled.

His final words, according to the minister’s private journal, were, “I hear them scratching, the rats always scratching.

He died alone, his fortune gone, his family scattered, his name a cautionary tale.

His obituary in the local paper was brief and made no mention of the plantation or the outbreak, as if by omitting it from the official record, it could be erased from memory.

But memory was more resilient than paper.

In 1861, the Civil War began, and the world that had produced Thornhill Plantation began to tear itself apart.

The system of slavery that had seemed so permanent, so fundamental to southern prosperity revealed itself to be exactly what men like Joshua had always known it to be, unsustainable, immoral, and ultimately self-destructive.

Ruth lived to see the wars end and the emancipation of enslaved people.

She was 73 years old in 1865, her body worn by decades of hard labor, but her mind still sharp.

She gathered the younger generation around her and told them stories of the old days, not to glorify suffering, but to ensure they understood the costs of freedom.

And she told them about Joshua.

He was just a man, she would say, not a hero, not a villain, not a prophet, just a man who tried to hold on to his dignity in a world designed to strip it away.

He taught people to read, which was an act of courage.

He survived torture, which was an act of will.

And he may have brought death to his tormentors, which was an act of something.

I still don’t have a word for it.

Revenge, someone would ask.

Justice? Another would offer.

Survival.

Ruth would say just survival.

When you’re drowning, you grab whatever you can reach, even if it’s someone else.

That doesn’t make it right, but it makes it understandable.

The younger generation struggled with this.

They wanted clear heroes and villains, wanted to know who to admire and who to condemn.

Ruth understood this desire.

She had felt it herself once, but she had lived too long, seen too much to believe in simple stories anymore.

You want to know the truth about Joshua? She would say, “The truth is complicated.

He was a victim who became a perpetrator.

He fought back against evil but used evil methods.

He won a victory that looked an awful lot like defeat.

He’s everything we are and everything we fear to become.

Human beings trying to maintain our humanity in inhuman circumstances.

In the years after the war, historians began to document the slavery era, collecting testimonies from formerly enslaved people.

Ruth was interviewed several times, and she always told the story of Thornhill Plantation.

Her accounts varied slightly in details, but remained consistent in their core.

A man named Joshua, a punishment pit, a disease that spread from enslaved to enslaver, and the destruction of a plantation.

Some historians doubted her story.

It seemed too convenient, too much like a morality tale.

Disease didn’t discriminate based on moral worth, they argued.

The idea that an enslaved man could deliberately weaponize his own suffering seemed far-fetched, but other testimony supported Ruth’s account.

Thomas, interviewed in Alabama in 1867, confirmed the basic facts and added his own memories of Joshua, the teacher.

Diner, tracked down in 1869, described the progression of the disease and the atmosphere of terror that had gripped the plantation.

Even Dr.

Callaway’s medical report discovered in county records provided independent verification of the outbreak’s occurrence and severity.

Gradually, the story entered the historical record, though always with qualifications and questions.

Had Joshua really understood what was happening.

Had he genuinely intended to spread the disease, or were his dying claims the fevered imaginings of a man trying to find meaning in his suffering? The evidence was ambiguous, allowing each generation to interpret the story according to its own needs and values.

In the early 20th century, black scholars studying the resistance strategies of enslaved people pointed to Joshua as an example of the creativity and courage of their ancestors.

He had used the very tools of his oppression, the pit, the rats, the disease, as weapons against his oppressors.

In the late 20th century, ethicists and philosophers debated whether Joshua’s actions could be morally justified.

Was it self-defense? Was it terrorism? Did the extreme injustice of slavery create conditions where normal moral rules no longer applied? In the 21st century, medical historians analyzed the outbreak using modern epidemiological methods.

They concluded that the disease was likely murine typhus transmitted by rat fleas which explained both the symptoms and the transmission pattern.

They noted that Joshua covered in rat bites and living in close quarters with others would have been an ideal vector for spreading the disease whether intentionally or not.

But the question of intentionality remained unanswerable.

The truth had died with Joshua in that tobacco barn in 1843, leaving only stories, interpretations, and the echo of a question that each generation had to answer for itself.

What does it mean to resist injustice? And what are we willing to sacrifice and of ourselves and others to strike back at oppression? Ruth died in 1870, 5 years after emancipation, having lived long enough to see the world she had known destroyed and a new one struggling to be born.

On her deathbed, surrounded by free black men and women who had once been enslaved, she was asked one final time about Joshua.

“Do you think he was right?” her granddaughter asked.

Ruth was quiet for a long time, her breath shallow and labored.

Finally, she said, “I think he was honest.

more honest than most of us can afford to be.

He looked at the evil that was done to him and he refused to pretend it was anything other than evil.

He refused to forgive, refused to accept, refused to survive quietly, whether that was right or wrong.

She trailed off, then smiled slightly.

That’s for you to decide.

Every generation has to decide for themselves what they’re willing to do to survive, to resist, to be free.

Joshua made his choice.

Now you make yours.

” Those were her final words.

She died that evening, taking with her the last direct testimony of the events at Thornhill Plantation.

But the story survived.

It survived in written records and oral traditions, in scholarly articles and whispered legends.

It survived because it asked questions that could never be fully answered, but always needed to be asked.

What is the nature of resistance? What is the cost of justice? What does it mean to be human in inhuman circumstances? The Thornhill Plantation outbreak of 1843 remains a contested event in American history.

Part fact, part legend, part moral parable.

The plantation itself is long gone.

The land converted to commercial use.

The graves unmarked and forgotten.

But the memory persists, a reminder that even in the darkest chapters of human history, individuals found ways to resist, to fight back, to assert their humanity against systems designed to deny it.

Whether Joshua was a hero, a villain, or simply a man pushed beyond his breaking point is a question that can never be definitively answered.

Perhaps that ambiguity is the point.

Perhaps the story endures precisely because it refuses to provide easy answers, forcing each person who encounters it to grapple with the complex moral landscape of resistance, survival, and the human capacity for both suffering and agency.

In the end, what remains is this.

A man named Joshua was thrown into a pit filled with rats as punishment for trying to read.

He survived, and his survival changed everything, for better and for worse, in ways both terrible and necessary, carrying consequences that spread far beyond one plantation in Mississippi.

That is the truth, as much as truth can be known.

The rest is interpretation, memory, and the eternal human struggle to understand what we owe each other in the face of injustice.