“I knew what happened to coloreds who were too curious about the world beyond Virginia,” he says.ĭriving Maynard home one night from the horse races, Hiram is thinking of nothing but his “desire for an escape from Maynard and the doom of his mastery. A naturally smart child, Hiram subdued his thirst for knowledge. Howell Walker’s plan was to prepare Hiram to spend his life caring for his older half-brother, Maynard, the charmless, dull heir to Lockless. Although Hiram worked in the apple orchards and the main house, he had something the other Tasked would never dream of: lessons from the Walker family tutor. The son of an enslaved woman named Rose, Hiram learned early in life that his father was the Lockless master, Howell Walker. Hiram was born into “tasking”-what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls slavery in this beautiful, wrenching novel-but he has always stood slightly apart from the other people who are “Tasked” on the Virginian estate called Lockless.
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