Under a Painted Sky

Samantha stands outside the destroyed store in shock until her landlord, Yorkshire (the man she kills 12 hours later), offers her a room in the hotel that he owns. She has never been to the hotel before, as it exudes “bad energy.” She is eyed suspiciously by the front desk clerk, Miss Betsy, and helped into the bathtub by Annamae, an enslaved girl similar to her own age. Samantha thinks of dying by suicide in the bathtub.

Although young and uneducated, Annamae is intuitive and understands that Samantha is contemplating suicide. Left alone to bathe, Samantha is interrupted when the landlord bursts into the room and demands that she become a sex worker in his brothel. She thinks of jumping out the window to escape him but decides instead to hit him on the head with her scrubbing brush, the only weapon that she can reach. He loses his balance on the wet floor and smashes his head on the tub. Annamae returns to the bloody scene and helps Samantha lift the dead man onto the bed so that his blood does not leak into the room below and alert someone. When Annamae tells her that, at 15, Samantha is old enough to be hanged for the murder, Samantha decides that, instead of returning to New York, she will head to California and try to catch up with her father’s best friend, Mr. Trask, who left only a few weeks earlier.

The enslaved Annamae had plans of her own to head West to try to find her brother who had been sold to another enslaver. She was supposed to meet up with her “Moses train” that very evening and would already have been on her way to freedom if she had not been required to prepare Samantha’s bath. Realizing that they will stand out, as Samantha is Chinese and Annamae is African American, they decide that it will be safer to travel together disguised as boys: Sammy and Andy. They hide in the wagon provided by a man called Mr. Calloway and luckily are transported across the river on the last ferry out of town that night.

Samantha and Annamae are not safely away from St. Joe yet, as a racist deputy stops the wagon to question Calloway about two missing girls: one who is wanted for murder and the other who is escaping slavery. He insists on inspecting the wagon, but the girls manage to slip away and hide under a nearby weeping willow tree. Annamae tells Samantha that she has plans to meet her brother, Isaac, at a place called Harp Falls. She needed to leave St. Joe because the same brothel owner whom Samantha killed planned to force Annamae to become a sex worker. Annamae cuts Samantha’s hair and makes her look grubby so that she will pass more easily as a boy. Annamae’s and Samantha’s beliefs deviate: Annamae believes in Christianity, while Samantha also has Chinese cultural belief in fate.

The girls continue to work on their male disguises, trying to walk more like boys. The narrative discusses the three groups of people who are travelling West at this time in American history. The first is enslaved people like Annamae, liberating themselves from enslaving states like Missouri to the free territories of California and Oregon in the West. The second is Argonauts—temporary migrants who often plan on moving home once they have become rich. The third and most populous group is the pioneers or families moving West to take advantage of land grants from the federal government. Three older teenage boys appear at the end of the chapter, putting the girls’ safety in jeopardy.