It is more than their land that you take away from the people. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to seeing, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes. Isabelle grew up with her eyes open. Her father was a very clever businessman and led a very ordered existence starting with himself to his plantation. She took after her father and was very independent from the earliest of ages. Feigning and improvisation became two of her more prominent subtexts and she used them with the skill of a wunderkind.

A man’s center of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in his life. The young man was the master of vast acres of sugarcane fields. He had married his childhood love. They grew up together and knew each others deepest secrets and most angelic prayers. As she lay dying, her last request to her young husband was to raise their daughter to be a Southern Lady. He whispered, “I promise.”

Although the ache lay deep in his heart, his reserve lay in his little girl. He gave her the name Isabelle Louise, the name he and his wife had decided on. He did love little Ishy. He showered her with the best of everything. She worshiped him. He hoped that by treating her like a Southern Lady, it would be his best effort to keep his promise to his wife. Ishy matured quickly likely because her father spoke to her like she was an equal. She had the beauty of her mother and the vigor of her father.

Life and death are like two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other. In the time between the birth of his daughter and the resulting death of his beloved wife, the young man had doted on his beautiful little girl but in his gut he felt the resentment.

People work much in order to secure the future; however, the man, perched on his horse, gave his mind much work and trouble, trying to secure the past.

But with the bright sun overhead and the song of cicadas, such annihilation seemed far distant to the young man surveying his plantation.