Katy Smith - Free Men

“But I don’t know how to make shoes,” I said, and he leaned back in the one straw chair and fiddled along his legs for ticks.

“They probably teach you. Or you do something else, something you’re good at.”

“I’m fair at planting cane,” I said.

He shook his head and said, “You’ll learn something. They’ve got plenty of boats up there that need loaders, if nothing else.”

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the everything else out west that sounded better than the nothing else up north, and hauling cotton bales from shore to ship didn’t ring the same as tilling my own land and resting in the evening in a house I built myself and owned and the wages of it all coming to me and no one else. I had inherited that want. He told me about the houses in Boston, which were back-to-back brick, and the harbor that was always moving and the white men that spent all day in thought and the black women that walked about free and fancy. By then the candle stub was worn out.

I snuck out the same way I came in, on paws, and they were asleep then except the littlest, who was sitting up in a pile of blankets and sucking on the end of her shirt, eyes looking like it was morning. I kissed her nose and nudged her with my foot into lying down and crawled in beside my wife, who was new-asleep and still breathing shallow and her body was so warm I wrapped around it like moss, wishing never to leave, and outside the man who’d lost his mind went by singing songs no one understood.

In the morning I said we needed to talk once and for all and if it was the last time, that’s the way it was, and that night we asked Granny to sit with the children and I held Winna’s hand and walked her to the near woods, where, under the pines, the new March leaves of the turkey oaks shone like falling stars: yellow-green, with catkins for tails.

SHE LET ME go. She said in the woods that she loved me fine but she already made a life and it was here and it was in those two children and her duty to them was holier than any desire of her own. I understood, because it was those children who had shown me what a rotten wheel this all was, and if my needs were precious, so too were theirs. I said I’d come back for her some day and she smiled and said not to bother, that she’d probably have a new man by then, and she tucked her head into my chest and kissed my chin under the last longleaf pines not cut for timber, just a stand of them and our love underneath, and I knew it was love after all.

Winna had these eyes that looked like someone dropped honey in molasses — they had shots of golden all in them. Primus had the same eyes, striped eyes, and I didn’t know where they got them, except that maybe they were just shards of white folks creeping in, but those eye sparks always made me think that they knew something I didn’t, that they’d come to a purpose that I hadn’t. And for all Winna and Primus weren’t anything alike — one just a woman after all and the other the best man I knew — they sure did know what they were after, and knowing was most of the way to having.

Though my eyes were as muddy as the rest of me, still I was moving myself, picking my body up out of the days of kneeling and cutting and stirring and not feeling much one way or the other, and taking it to an elsewhere that was unknown. I was making a choice, and if I never saw Winna or Primus’s ghost in my dreams again, I’d find them in the place where people go who move their life with their own hands.

I DIDN’T WAIT for Mingo. The night after I talked with my wife and held her head under my head, Master sent me to the Indians with only one stone jug and a sheaf of letters that he called important. I stuffed my sack with boiled eggs and lace cookies I’d snatched from the kitchen and a stolen knife, and I rode that horse slow up the trail that led from Master’s sugar fields through the cotton of his neighbors who weren’t so foolish and money-hungry as to plant cane on these sandy flats, and our steps fell into the dust prints of all the other steps I’d taken this way, and to the horned owls watching, it looked like this journey was no different from the others, that my horse and I would come back in a few days the same as ever. But I went slower. Maybe so as to look less like a runaway, but maybe so now I could watch everything that went past.

I didn’t have much of a plan, for I thought that my mission being as righteous as it was, fate or something similar would point me where I needed to go, would guide me past the traps and men waiting with nets, right up the shoulder of a child to safety. In my mother’s telling, Antelope made it to heaven every time.

I figured I had a week before they came after me. The slower I rode along this road, the more I thought to myself how I looked like a justified man, a man with rights of riding, and beyond the fact that this perhaps drew no suspicion, it made me feel like I had chosen justly. I was a just man riding a right path, and the burning of my blood kept me from falling weary. When the dawn reared up, I was halfway through the now-Spanish lands, trailing the Escambia and unperturbed. Once a burned-looking man passed on horseback and we nodded and I kept on walking that horse slow and I was beginning to be almost certain that I was the owner of this road, that river.

I never noticed how many kinds of trees there were along that path — not just the trembly palmettos, but taller palms, and low, bendy oaks, and trees with smooth bark and toothy leaves. I still didn’t know most of their names, after living among them for how many years. They could’ve been my children, clearly different one from the other but only if you looked close, and still in all their beauty they didn’t mean anything to me, didn’t do anything but shade me on the path, and me not even grateful for the shade. I would make a point to write her and say I was sorry, once I made it someplace where they could teach me to write.

When the sun was straight up, I fell back from the trail into a patch of scrub to eat the hoecakes Winna made for me, and I wondered why she didn’t cry and I wondered if I wished she would’ve. It was a warm day with clouds, which I noticed when I was thinking of things to be grateful for. When the sun sank again, I was back in an English world. Turns out all you needed was a knife and an open road and a choice. I passed a group of boys, six or seven of them, who were laughing and leaping on each other and tripping along the sides of the trail and I wasn’t sure whether they were white or Indian, but they were headed south and unconcerned, and even when their small bodies were gone I heard their voices like they were caught in the brambles, slowly unraveling.

That night, I tied my horse to a branch before I lay down in the lap of a live oak and burrowed my legs in wet leaves, for in March the night still had wind in it. I slept for a little while, then woke to rustling, then slept longer and dreamed of treeless land stretched out like a green quilt forever, past the edge of any land, so there wasn’t even a horizon, just land and land.

I woke into full sun and I opened my still-tired eyes into the blue eyes of another man who had my arms clamped to my chest between his knees and was crouched over me like a lover, holding my knife to my throat.

HIS EYES ARE blue as beads and his wrist bone so small I think of biting to snap it but his chest is going fast and I reckon he might have the dog madness so I stay rock still and let his short breaths puff in my face, the knife dizzy in his hands. He doesn’t speak and I don’t speak and we sit there for a while, each figuring, and when his face goes in shade from the sun passing behind a cloud, his knees droop and he drops his hand down and with his un-knifed hand he wipes beneath his nose like a boy. I breathe in big to watch his thin self rise on my chest and he looks such a sight perched like a bird with one claw that I try not to laugh, though having a white man this close has dried up all the shit in me. I roll him over and we stand up and brush our dust off and his hand is loose enough that it doesn’t seem to mind me easing the knife back into my own.