Katy Smith - Free Men

By the time Beck was sold, no one knows where, I had settled my heart enough to say goodbye without any scene, because this was familiar after all, this was just the wheel turning. I saw her most days in the field and we said hello and asked the simple questions but that was all. You know how you can love someone for years without any hope, and this is all right, a little pain but mostly pleasure, and how you just wait for it to grow old like a dog and pass on? And it does, it weakens and turns to normal, and you and the woman you love are old friends after all, though sometimes when you see her breasts exposed to the whip for rudeness, your sorrow is struck through with a rare tenderness that goes past friendship. So maybe love never passes on, maybe it just covers itself over, curls into a seed, waits.

With her gone, all the strong feelings in me were sleeping.

WHEN OUR YOUNGEST baby was just a few months old, she got a coughing sickness that scared the granny enough to tell Treehorn, which I don’t know that Winna would have done. Treehorn was fickle, but he had a fondness for babies. Master being in a good mood, he sent the white doctor to our cabin, a man who showed up not when the dysentery came or when a field hand got caught in a bear trap, but when Master had woken up in a sunny patch and was feeling kindly.

Me and Winna stood in the corner, arms crossed, as the doctor turned our baby over and patted her back, looked in her mouth, felt for lumps along her side. The baby cried the whole time, and I knew without looking that Winna was crying too. The sight of those white hands, clammy as skinned fishes, on the cool dry brown of our baby — it seemed like he’d leave a stain on her. He wasn’t there for long, and after he named the sickness and dropped our baby back on the mattress like a corn sack, he gave us a rub to put on her chest and left the way he came, without looking at any of our eyes.

We sat down, and Winna was small and hunched, so I put my arm around her and then scooted over so my shoulder would warm up her shoulder. She was still crying, so I patted her back and then squeezed her neck, and when I bent my head to kiss her cheek, she just snuffled, so I kissed her face all over until she was crying harder, and for some reason this was a good thing. The baby was quiet now and we were the noisy ones. Her face all wet in my hands was like a body fresh from swimming, pure and good, and it made me think how right it was for Primus to do what he did over a creek, so that his shape would be reflected in the water and would be made innocent again. And I felt a wash of love for him that carried over to the woman beside me, the way you can see a rabbit in the cane and it’s so rounded and sweet that when you turn back to see the broken-in face of the man next to you, it doesn’t seem as cruel. All our bodies are curved by God the same way he curves everything else good in the world.

Her body was round and fit in my rounded hands, and I tried to promise myself that I’d always treat her like she was my only true love. She wasn’t like Beck, she didn’t humor me, she didn’t listen when I talked, but so be it, maybe I talked too much.

The baby was asleep, and we were down beside her, our arms tangled up and Winna’s face smooth now, shiny with old tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said, quiet.

“You didn’t do anything.”

“For putting you in this place. For being a woman that a man had to marry.”

I hushed her and pulled her close, but I didn’t say, “Not your fault,” or even “I accept your apology,” because a little pinch of me still felt that maybe she was right to say she was sorry, so I wasn’t going to stand in her way.

The baby wouldn’t live through the week, but we didn’t know that then, thinking we were lucky to have had the white doctor, loathsome as he was. Lucky for the scrap thrown our way.

That night when the man outside wandered by with his Spanish song, I mumbled some of the words along with him, keeping my voice low so as not to wake all the women in my house.

I HAD HEARD of slaves who lost their limbs one at a time for missing tobacco leaves in the field, men who were bred with women like bulls, women who were bent over by white men and taken like whores, children whose knuckles were broken by white women with canes and irons and rocking chairs. I had heard of slaves who were brought into the great house and given new clothes and fresh meat three times weekly and passes on Saturdays to see kin and were trained to make a living, the coins for horse-shodding and gun-fixing and egg-selling being their own. I was not the one or the other. I would not make a tale for the ladies to weep over, nor could I buy my freedom after three years and build a house next to my master’s and share carriages to town. I had heard just enough through field tales and night meetings to know that I was not so good or bad off, which should have been something to find comfort in except it meant I had nothing much to complain about and nothing much to hope for. I was the ordinariest of slaves. (If white men were ever so ordinary, they’d die in a day.)

Four more years passed, and two more children, one that stayed alive and one that grew in Winna’s belly and then shrunk again and let herself out of the womb in a little sweep of blood. You learned where to step and what to say, and when the whippings came, you took them because that’s just what white men did. They couldn’t tell what you were thinking of when your back was being split: what color welts a brand might raise on their own grub-pale skin. You treated your wife good, you chased the little ones in the yard at night so they’d get worn out before bed, you ate as much meat as you could get on Sundays but not enough to hurt your belly. Some did it as a way to get to heaven, since God seemed particular about those things; the way I acted, you’d think I listened hard at church. I was old enough now to see both the wrongness in a life and the comfort that comes from staying in it. “You want to make it alive each day,” Winna would say, “that’s it.” But I knew that wasn’t all anyone ever wanted, because my brother’d had a burning wish, and it had nothing to do with being alive, because he’d scratched that off quick.

Sometimes I thought back to those black men in uniforms, those handsome men who had held guns during the siege and won. They were a piece of something beyond this broken wheel. The way they carried their guns in my head, I could tell they were on their way to farms out west, land they owned because they owned themselves. Whether they died at Pensacola or not, they had those guns, had themselves.

I wouldn’t know my heart from my hands till I was gone from this. Free , I started muttering quiet in the rows. Free , though I didn’t know how to get it.

It was a small step from thinking about it to talking about it, my mouth being what it was, so I started sharing little bits with Winna, trying to figure out where she stood. Well, she stood firmly in that cabin with those children, that’s where. She took to knocking me on the head whenever I started out with “But what if—,” and told our two girls not to pay any heed. The more she said no, we’d be dead before we were free, the more I thought about Primus and knew that being dead and being free were just about equal, and both better than what we had. I was like a man with a pick, just whiling away the time on a block of stone.

“If the moon were—,” I’d say, and “Master’ll be traveling next—”

I started talking to other folks: a man named Mingo who knew the roads, and a woman who’d seen her son slip beneath a wagon blanket and get trotted off who-knows-where.

“But he hasn’t sent word?” I’d say.

“He hasn’t wound up back here, has he?” she’d say. “That’s all the word I need.”