About this story
You play Robert Johnson, enslaved in wartime North Carolina, carrying news that cannot travel under its own name and trading coded questions about eggs and fish across a market stall while an overseer passes. Newspapers come home under the groceries, and you can read them, a skill the household once granted as an amusement. Boots cross the passage; a flour sack goes over the page.
Who you’ll meet
Linda, the household cook who hides a smuggled newspaper under a flour sack, working urgently with the market porter Tom Anderson as footsteps cross the passage outside.
How it opens
Wartime scarcity filled the market with guarded faces and baskets lighter than their owners wished.
You and Tom Anderson carried provisions home beneath the notice of men who claimed your labor.
Tom AndersonGood morning, Bob; is the butter fresh today?
Market ManFish is fresh too, and the post office faces have gone mighty long.
Tom AndersonThat sounds like more than one good delivery before breakfast.
Choose
Fresh enough to carry the news beyond this street.
Keep your voice ordinary until we leave the market.