Katy Smith - Free Men

“Because he loves you,” I say. I know she knows about love, because Jesus says it all the time.

Polly squirms to get down and bends over, squeezing her legs together. I send her outside to pee.

“If he loves us—”

“All right, listen.” I kneel down in front of her and reach up to her ears. I hold them in my hands like shells. “There is being a father, and there is being a man. And sometimes what makes sense to one isn’t right for the other. Sometimes you’re my daughter and have to think of me, and whether I’d like you to be getting the potatoes done, and sometimes you’re just a girl and you want to go climb the pecan. You hear?”

“So daddy wasn’t thinking of us when he left.”

“Well.” I want to say no, he was being a selfish son of a bitch, but I don’t know if that’s the whole truth.

Polly creeps back in — she’s always pleased with herself after peeing — and lies down on the mattress with a smile. “He plays hide and seek,” she says. “We find him.”

Delphy leans down to me and whispers. “You don’t even care that he’s gone.”

I have never heard such a cruel voice out of my girl. After all that, and he was being a son of a bitch, she’s disappointed not in her daddy but in me. How I failed to give them some kind of damn Holy Family. I am too tired to correct her. Tomorrow she’ll find another way to ask about him, and I’ll try to pretend that it doesn’t matter. Slaves don’t get families. There’s nothing to fight for.

I SHOULD BE grateful to be out of the fields, away from the kettles, but my mistress is near as dangerous as the boiling sugar. She doesn’t want a foot rub today but a stroll in the garden, me carrying the wooden buckets sloshing with water to refill her tiny can. She likes to be the one to water her roses. They don’t do well, maybe because of the salt and sand in the dirt, maybe because she’s a fickle waterer. It comes out in five little streams from the wide head, sprinkling the limp petals, the curled leaves. Nowhere near the roots, but I don’t say anything.

“They have made nothing at all nice,” she says. The English, now Americans, are a favorite subject. The Spanish have had Florida again for a half-dozen years, but she can’t stop railing. They are all rural, knock-kneed, buck-toothed. “You go south more, or west, and see what the Spanish have built. No lazy farms. And you, you could walk to town in a pretty dress and no one to say a word. You are black, yes, but not that dark. Here is boring, all the same, nothing but master and slave.” She holds out her can for me to fill it. “I am sick of here.”

She always says she’s been here too long. She was born here, is what she means, though she likes to pretend she is true Spanish and not a colonial. Married off at fifteen to an Englishman because that’s the way the wars seemed to be going. She hates the blacks with dark skin, the Indians in our fields but not the princesses that visit with their chiefs, all the English, most of the French, and the convicts and the runaways and the hungry. She hates the poor and people who are richer than she is. She tells me all the time about the free blacks, how they’re soldiers and shopkeepers, all over Florida. She wants me to complain as much as she does, but I won’t out loud.

A wasp hovers down to see what’s going on with all this loose water. My mistress lets out a shriek, ducking away, and her short curls bounce. Her stomach leaps along with her. I wave my hand in the air a few times, and the wasp sighs and moves on. I am sick of here too. Maybe always was, but didn’t know the words to say it. Is it being a woman? Was I raised to bear things as they came? I take pride in putting up with shit. But I’m afraid to think what it would mean if Bob wasn’t a coward taking the easy way out, but a man finding a solution. Maybe being a woman isn’t the same as setting your teeth and taking what’s coming to you. Though I am a strong believer in that. Not because God tells us to, but because someone’s got to take the shit of the world, and I still think it’s a sneak who lets someone else carry that burden. But in my strength I seem to be carrying my children down with me. And I am not sure if that is being safe or being wrong.

“Have you ever thought to be prostitute?” She laughs. We have moved on to the yellow rose that she waters twice as much as the others. It was a cutting from her mother’s garden, back in Spain. “It is not so bad as you think, and money is good. Being wife is just the same, but no money. Look at these, my lands! What did my husband have? And everything he takes. Your husband just take himself, not so bad.”

I heave up one of the buckets to fill her can again. “You’d tell me if they found him?”

She pauses, clutches at the bag that dangles from her elbow. She is looking for her half whip, a lady-sized thing that some man before Josiah had made for her. Is it lambskin, even? I shift a few steps to the side, stare down at the gravel path. She can’t find it and moves on to the oleander flopping against the old brick wall. She pulls off a leaf and looks at me. “Poison,” she says. I wish she wouldn’t laugh so much.

That night in bed while I arrange the cookies on her tray, my mistress says she’s written a letter to her cousin in Seville and is done with this petty New World, it is too confusing and she is given no respect.

“Where would you go?”

She considers this as I rub a cream into her plump cheeks, along the lines in her forehead. “To a true city,” she says, “or the Indies. Rich, rich.”

My back aches from where she whipped me two hours ago. Her little crop was hanging in the pantry, of all places.

“And the plantation?”

“Sold to high bidder!” Her laugh is more like a cackle. “Cane goes away, it doesn’t grow good here anyway. Slaves go away. My husband shrivels, comes begging for me. Don’t mistake me, I am a woman in love. It is right to make them work hard.”

Slaves go away . It’s a miracle that after changing hands from Spanish to British to Spanish, my family has not already been broken down, sold in pieces. Though now, of course, I’m not sure about the word family . But my children. One more whim, one more shift in hands, and they’re gone. Shipped to Louisiana or Virginia, as Bob was once sent from Virginia to Florida, or as I was sent from — I don’t even remember where. Family for us is just what we can count today. It’s not memory, and it’s not future. And this is what I have given my children.

What is there to be practical about?

THE GIRLS ARE in bed when I get home, late, but not asleep. Polly is sticking her finger in and out of her nose, waiting for something to appear. With narrowed eyes, Delphy watches me undress. I crawl in.

She started the field this year and I don’t ask how it is because I know. Long and hot and the clenching pain in the back moves to the thighs and the knees and the taste of your own sweat is a sustenance. My mistress said she could find a place in the kitchen, but I thought the men would lash her less. And they do, because they are waiting for her to stop being a girl. When that happens, I have no plan. So they pull her shirt up to beat her every now and then, so they check for breasts. They haven’t yet done more.

And Bob left us to this?

I don’t know if I love him, but he looks like my daughters, and I’ll be damned if he gets away while I have to watch my children get churned under whatever wickedness we’re given.

Polly is asleep now, her hand still stuck to her face.

“Anyone touch you today?”

Delphy turns to me, reaches her fingers to my back. Rests them like little moths on the welts.

“Delphy?”

“Do you know where she keeps the key to the stables?”