Katy Smith - Free Men

Primus had it right. Get yourself a new life, a free one, make things that no one else can claim. Don’t give your hands to any man; don’t give your heart, which is worse. What was he doing, wherever he was, now that he was dead? It wasn’t what I was doing: giving, giving, and hurting. No, he had it right. Not the rope around the neck, but the farm out west. So what if you were alone? You’re always alone. Out there, won’t be any scarecrows to fuddle you. I had to stop letting these worms in my heart.

I wiped my nose on my wrist, leaving a little slug trail, and started tracing my house in the dust on the floorboards. The men kept snoring. It would be this wide, and this long, with a porch along the south edge and a pen for the mule. Here was the blueberry field, and here the lake for swimming. Here were the miles and miles of emptiness all around it, not a white man or Indian in sight. Did I really believe it, even then? Remember that I was a cheerful boy.

SO A WOMAN was brought from Mr. Cunningham’s like a mare on a rope, and we were given our own cabin and the master’s blessing and left alone to carry on our fine bonded race. Her name was Winna and she was about my age and I couldn’t love her quite the same, though I don’t think she knew, or maybe minded.

Turns out a body can’t get settled into aloneness at the tip of a hat. I hated Master for pairing me up with a woman I’d never seen in my life, but damn me if I didn’t try to cling to her those first few weeks. Poor child, I’d hug on her and tell her stories and then next thing, I’d be kicking her and telling her no, get out, she wasn’t real and didn’t hardly matter. She had a worse temper than Beck, and didn’t just hum along when I got in a mood. Those early months we picked at each other and fussed and did our own chores not speaking, and sometimes talked about general things, and once she let me try to braid her hair, which was a challenge but I never balked at learning something new.

I had just gotten back from another trip to the Indians when she told me she was pregnant. This was an ordinary thing, it was no mystery what had brought it about, but we both looked at each other like we had found something dead in the room and we didn’t know which of us had killed it.

“When’s it coming?” I said.

“In a bit.”

I put my satchel on the chair and pulled out my road-soiled clothes and the husk doll some Creek child gave me and then shook out the crumbs of biscuit from the bottom of the bag.

“You better sweep that up,” she said.

“Is it jumping around yet?” I pointed at her belly.

She looked down, surprised.

Did my father, whoever he was, have this conversation with my mother? Were children always such dreaded things, like the other side of ghosts? I didn’t ask how Winna felt, or if she’d had a father.

Going to sleep that night, or trying to go to sleep — shutting my eyes tight against the sounds outside, the katydids and the man who wandered sleepless, muttering in a Spanish that was part African — in the trying to sleep I often found half truths, or quarter truths, like colored beads in my head. Wasn’t this seed of a baby a sign that I was grown now, that I had no more need to be lonely of my mother or my lost siblings, but could find company in the family I built my own self? Isn’t this what happened to people who lived long enough to get older? The man outside was chanting now. I understood when he said Dios and caña , but otherwise nothing.

When I thought about a little person coming into this world who would see things as I saw them, who would crouch in a pen looking at the far fields for a glint of his mother, it grew in my head that this life was not just a single thing, mine alone, but was a big circle that rolled over on itself again and again, that what struck me with pain would strike my child too, that this was not a life but a system, and for the first time my boyish grief took on the color of rage. I didn’t just want my people back; I wanted out.

This was what Primus meant by the farm. How to get free of everything that made you not yourself but something else: a slave, a husband, an orphan, unloved. Primus’s dream, then, wasn’t only his. He wouldn’t mind if I stole it.

I was still young, nineteen maybe, and so these thoughts were just quarter thoughts there in the smoke-smelling night, they’d take years still to grow, but that’s where they came from: those women and that first whisper that I had made a whole other life again out of nothing. Damn me and every other slave that had done it, but there it was. The wheel rolling over on itself again.

IT WAS WHEN she was full with the second baby, and I was maybe twenty-one, that the unsettlings of the white men boiled over. And the Indians, I should say. I had picked up a few words by then, but while I was saying hesci and estonko , the Creeks were raising the conversation to something I couldn’t make sense of, other than that war was involved, which all the musket-cleaning made clear. I still couldn’t have told you their names, but being in their town with no fences, with folks who didn’t want anything from me other than my master’s drink, this let me step back a little and breathe something close to free air. They started sending me home with messages along with the skins, and if I knew anything about reading, I would’ve learned that the fighting that had been surging around to the north of us was headed south, and that the Spanish wanted their land back.

Standing in the hall of the big house, waiting to be sent home to wash the road off my clothes, I could hear Master and his lady squabbling upstairs, fast-talking over each other about who owned what and whether they still had friends in the West Indies.

The Spanish came, spring of 1781, just when the baby was ready to pop out. We were north enough of Pensacola to escape the siege, though Master had to stop carting things to the port for a few months. We waited and got news from folks who’d fled, black and white alike, war being the time when what you were supposed to do melted into what you could do. A woman snuck into the quarters one night and was queen for the evening as she told us all she’d seen. Cannon aimed both north and south, ships in the bay shooting at the forts (which we heard all the way from here), storms lashing about (which wetted us too), Indians running supplies both ways, not having decided who would be best for neighbors. “I even saw black men,” she said, “in uniforms ,” and she stood up with her arm across her chest, formally, to show us she knew what a uniform was. “All six feet tall, and handsome .” They were fighting for the Spanish, so we cheered for the Spanish, not knowing the difference but what we saw in our owners: our British master pale and simmering, his wife a round ball of fire.

Soon the sky to the south quieted down and the low booms stopped keeping us up at night, and then the barrels of sugar that came out of our farm were stamped with different words. All our neighbors moved to islands in the Gulf or back to England, while we pretended we were always Spanish, our mistress suddenly the figurehead again on her own farm. We lived because we pretended to have always been what we were not; we were spared because we spoke their language and were content. And so the lesson of the slave became the lesson of his master.

THE SECOND BABY came as soon as the British left, like she was waiting for quiet, though she died before the day was out, and a year or two later there was another baby, and still I bent every day in the fields with my cane knife, still I carried the hot ladle of syrup from kettle to kettle, still I waited for Master to send me to the Creeks with a wagon of rum, and still I stuck to that northward path, only pulling off to sleep in peace. Winna and I settled into ourselves and became friendly, for of all the things we were fighting in our lives, it wasn’t worth fighting each other. I came to have a great affection for her, which some days is better than love.