Katy Smith - Free Men

MY MASTER’S SPANISH wife is stretched beneath an open bedroom window, her fat feet propped on the sill so when the wind comes it goes straight down her skirts. I wait in the door until she decides to see me. My husband, who was not of my picking, has been gone more than a week. Someone finally thought to fetch me. She raises a hand, fidgets her fingers. I come over, stepping around the noisy spot where the floor is weak, and sit on the stool that puts my head about at a level with her raised ankles. She plops them on my lap.

I’m the good kind of slave, the kind that doesn’t talk too much or think. I start digging in, my thumb fiddling against the rough ball of her foot. I pull her skin hard enough so it won’t tickle. The bottom of her toes have caps on them, husks or horns that come to a fine edge. When she’s off on her topic and not paying attention, I run my fingers along them because she can’t feel. This time it’s my husband.

“José’s already had a letter from the Creeks; not there.”

“Mm.”

“Out nine hundred dollars, José. He’s a strong man, yes? Which one is he?”

I think of some way to describe him. I don’t think she’d know what a handsome black man is. “Six foot,” I say, “and then some.”

“Scars?”

“Not that you’d know to notice.”

“It does not matter to me, him missing. But José, of course.”

“Me neither.”

“He was a fool to lose the horse. Came right back to where it should. So we know, without a horse, either he is dead or run off. The trail is not that dangerous, so my guess is he went shoo . He say nothing to his wife?”

“He’s not much for talking.”

“Of course.” She frowns, then giggles and jerks a foot away.

I say sorry and lift it up again.

“You ever do this for him?”

I stop, my fingers laced between her toes.

“No, I think not. I wonder why a man run off and leave his lady, and here you go. You don’t serve him well.”

“I served him two babies.” I move up to her ankles, ringed in fine black hair.

“But love, no, that’s not in the bed.”

I cannot tell a white woman, however swarthy, that I do not love my husband, even if it isn’t true. “We get along fine,” I say.

“Mm, yes,” and she closes her eyes, dropping her fat round head to one shoulder. “You want to ask about José, but you are shy.”

I am not shy. I am very practical. I started off in the fields and I worked my way to the kitchen. And then into the house and up the stairs until I got here. The Spanish lady blabbers, but she doesn’t whip, not much. I don’t mind hearing about another country, or even my own country, because whoever it belongs to now surely won’t keep it long. This woman, her head lolling around her neck like an orange about to drop, can name her kings as fast as she can name her husbands. When I’m tired of listening, I just think about other things.

“We talk little,” she says, “but when he visits the bed we say very much. He even likes my horny toes. Like you.”

I glance up.

“If these lands did not belong to me, I think he would like mis piernas less. But who says this is no good? Foolish are the ones who wait, who pine, who say, ‘Is this how you feel?’ If love is not one way, it’s another. Frente al amor y la muerte no sirve de nada ser fuerte. Eh?”

“I agree,” I say.

“But here you are waiting! You Africans think too serious about everything. Think about you, not him. See what I do. Do I let José show me which way? No, no. I make commands.” She draws one of the curls from her head beneath her nose until it is straight, then lets it spring back. “But also do not let them go far, because the rope is shorter than you think and they will be off if you blink too long. Oh, I see. This is your case. Well, it is from being serious. Loving is very push-pull like that.”

I pretend not to hear. Her toenails are grown too long.

“You think he comes back?”

I don’t say anything, because I’m not a fool. But the truth is I don’t know. More importantly, I don’t know if I mind one way or the other.

She doesn’t like it when I’m quiet. She kicks her feet free and stands up, wrapping her shawl around her. “You do a terrible job. I see you tomorrow.”

DELPHY IS PEELING potatoes on the steps. She is nine years old, but looks at me like a grandma would, haughty and suspicious. She hasn’t asked about her daddy today, so I’m waiting for it. The baby is taking the fallen peels and pushing them a few inches into the darkness beneath the house. She says cats live there, but she also says there are rabbits in her mattress.

“Up, Polly,” I say, and she hoists herself off the dirt, wiping at her knees. She gathers up the naked potatoes at her sister’s side and follows me into the cabin, where the fire has almost gone out. I throw some sticks on and poke at it. “Tell Delphy to get the water.”

“Let me,” she says. Her arms shake under the weight of four potatoes.

“Delphy!”

I hear my older girl put down her knife and set out with the pail, and Polly drops her burden and begins to cry.

We’re quiet at dinner. I told them the day he left that family means nothing here. Men move around. They know that. Slave folks are brought together and busted up at the white man’s whim; it’s not our business. They asked didn’t I love them like a real mama would, and I said yes, but different too. I was raised to plant cabin gardens small so the master wouldn’t complain, to look down whenever I was looked at, to help folks around me but only so far. We don’t mourn Papa’s loss, I said, because crying draws attention.

When the plates are clean I wait for it, and it comes.

“You think he made it?”

“He’s only a week gone, Delphy, no telling.”

“But do you think he’ll come back for us?”

“Doesn’t help that he lost his damn horse.” I throw the plates in what’s left of the water in the pail. “Tell me why you want him to so bad. It doesn’t hurt your feelings that he left you behind?”

Polly screws up her face again, and her sister finds a roll of fat on the girl’s arm and pinches it. Polly takes a gulp of breath. “He’s my daddy,” she says.

“And I think he wanted to take us and you wouldn’t let him,” Delphy adds. “I think you were scared.”

“Or sensible. You know how many runaways get killed?”

Polly’s face falls into a shock. Damn it, what kind of mother has to say things like “killed” at supper? In what kind of life is that so ordinary? I lift her and rock her, and above her bawling head I lock eyes with Delphy, who raises her brows at me as if to say, What kind of a mother indeed?

“Your father’s fine. He’s looking for some free land, and knows enough of roads and Indians to get through.”

“Then why can’t we be free too?”

Polly sticks her hand in my shirt, looking for comfort, though she hasn’t found milk there in months.

“If he can go off on his own so easy, then that’s not a family,” Delphy says.

When the señora first allowed the black preacher to visit the plantation, I thought nothing of it. But then the girls came home with stories that didn’t sound much like life. All about daddies looking out for their children, and mamas so sweet they can get a baby without even taking off their clothes. And now our own cabin doesn’t look so shiny to the girls.

With her arms crossed on her little flat chest, and her short hair a ragged halo around her head, Delphy asks me if her father is even a father, and why we give him that name.