- Roxy meets a distraught Tom in St. Louis. She comes up with a plan for him to get the money to pay off his gambling debts: sell her into slavery!
- Say what? Even Tom is skeptical of this one. But Roxy explains that he can sell her to get the money and then in a year he will buy her freedom.
- Tom sells Roxy to an Arkansas cotton planter for just over six hundred bucks.
- Wait a minute, Arkansas... is that... down the river?? Hmm, time for us readers to pull out our trusty U.S. map.
- OMG.
- The planter assures Tom that Roxy won't even know where she is at first. Tom's okay with that.
- Roxy boards the boat in St. Louis and immediately realizes she's headed down the river (and, duh, how could they think she wouldn't know? The woman worked on a steamboat, for Pete's sake!).
- Roxy is straight-up terrified.