When Amait was six she tried to talk her great-grandmother into releasing their slaves. Her great-grandmother pulled her up on her lap and bounced her and shook her head. "Then we would be poor and no one would take us seriously," she said. 'You'll understand when you're older."

When Amait was seven she sat down with the household accounts and tried to figure out a way for them to afford all the manumissions. With enough generous leaning on 'and my mother can invent things and sell them for a lot of money' it wasn't impossible. She took this to her great-grandmother, who tapped her knee (Amait sat) and looked and said that Amait was very clever and very optimistic but would leave no money for her little brothers and sisters not to go to bed hungry.

When Amait was eleven she took another, more pragmatic shot at the household accounts. It couldn't really be done. She read for a while about ways to reorganize a plantation to make it more profitable and then decided that was the entirely wrong track and then moped for two weeks. Her great-grandmother was annoyed with her.

She grew up. She stopped being annoying.