"Life with Pa and my brothers were bad. No love for the findin. But all the time the bad happened I hoped that someday I could be free. Zenobia, Brightwell, and Armour, they never felt that hope. They was slaves. Bought, sold, and owned like they was no better than a hogshead of molasses. They didn't have no hope for nothin more. I didn't know if I could go on livin without the hope for more."
Later in the book, as the runaways are sheltered by Quakers working with the Underground Railroad, her new friends Zenobia and Brightwell reveal the other kinds of damage done by slavery. Lark promises to do whatever it takes to help them get to Canada and free soil.
"Free soil. Freedom," Zenobia said. "Nobody tearin our families into pieces, work a good job, hold up our heads like peoples."
Brightwell paced back and forth, starin at the emptiness between me and Zenobia. "Sometimes I think I be tore in so many pieces I ain't never gonna be a real man. How you fix yerself when you're tore at and tore at again and again?"
I thought about how I mended my skirt and my pa's and my brothers' clothes, and how I darned socks and stitched together old Hannah doll from all the tore-up pieces of my mama's wore-out quilts.
"You just keep mendin and darnin, stitchin and stitchin. At first, things look all pieced together, but after awhile, you don't even notice the stitched-up spots everywhere; they just look all of a piece. Never like new, but all of a piece and good enough to last a life," I said.
Brightwell looked down at me, his pacin stopped. "Then I best start piecing myself back together. Me and Zenobia have a new life comin on quicker than leaf drop, and we want to be near good as we can be."
Near the end of the book, Lark is surprised to learn that her heart holds forgiveness as well as anger toward her abusive father.
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