After Wiley, the Duke, the King, and Huck disappear down the road, James feels the shock of being separated from Huck and handed over to yet another white owner. Wiley tells James that good work will earn good treatment, then leaves for breakfast, pleased at how easily he acquired him. Left alone with Easter, James learns that Wiley expects three sets of horseshoes by sundown, even though James knows nothing about blacksmithing.

Easter begins teaching James the basic steps of the work: building the fire, using the bellows, heating the rod, and shaping it on the anvil. As James sweats through the labor, Easter asks whether James taught Huck how to “pass” and hints that Huck may not know something about himself, but James does not understand what Easter means. Their talk quickly widens into a bleak exchange about slavery, suffering, and what white people refuse to see.

Easter then tells James about a lynching upriver over a stolen pencil, which startles James because he is carrying the pencil Young George gave him. The two men speak bitterly about white promises of heaven, the danger of thinking while enslaved, and the ways white people ignore Black inner lives. They also discuss Denmark Vesey’s failed revolt and the betrayal that led to his hanging, underscoring how resistance is always shadowed by informers and violence.

As James continues learning the forge, he asks whether Wiley would chase him if he ran. Easter warns that Wiley may not think in legal terms and would likely shoot James on sight if he saw him escaping, though Wiley mainly cares that the work gets done. Easter’s injury makes James newly useful, which could either reduce the urgency of pursuit or make Wiley want to keep him. While shaping, reheating, and quenching the first shoe, James and Easter compare hardening steel to their own lives and briefly share memories of slavery’s origins in birth, sale, and the ship.

James finally shows Easter the pencil and admits that he can write. Easter treats that fact as a responsibility, telling James that if he can write, he must write, and James agrees. By midmorning, Wiley returns, checks James’s progress, and orders the men to sing while they work; James hates performing for him but joins Easter in the hammer song, finding some ironic fellowship in it. The chapter ends when a stranger arrives with a troupe in dark suits and introduces himself as Daniel Decatur Emmett of the Virginia Minstrels.