Katy Smith - Free Men

I can’t ask her more. I don’t want to know how close her life is to mine. I want to give everything to her and then let her decide. “You miss him?” I ask.

“I guess I liked him better than you did.”

“That is entirely possible.” I untuck the blanket from Polly’s neck. She always wraps it around herself so tight that I worry she can’t breathe. “So this is what you want.”

Delphy’s hand is a five-legged animal that canters up and down my arm. A trick her daddy taught her.

Family, is it? That’s what’s being asked of me? I can’t figure how my girls got to thinking they weren’t just slaves, weren’t just going to settle. There was none of this a week ago, even with the preacher’s talk of Moses. We were all the way ordinary. Did the work, fell back to the cabin after dark, squabbled. Woke up and did the work.

What is my life? I’m up before the rooster is, gathering food from the scraps that have been handed out five days before and the meager greens my garden makes. By first light there is a poor breakfast for my girls, and they are out, Polly to the granny and Delphy to the fields, a trowel in her hand that she has promised not to break. Her shadow walking away from me looks like no more than candle smoke. Don’t know where in her small body she fits the muscles that will pull up the earth, chop back the cane. I’m in the master’s house before anyone stirs, a bowl of warm water ready for my mistress on her stand, her skirts laid out and ironed, lavender rubbed into her underthings to cut the stink of sweat till wash day. She is up and I am kneeling — sponging her, dressing her, brushing out the night-knotted hair, mixing the rouge for her cheeks. She rattles on about her father or her father’s father, the glory of Spain with all that citrus, what she would do if her husband woke up dead one day. I’m given a lash once across each palm for pulling at her scalp. She says there are places where I wouldn’t be a slave at all, though what use would I be. I top her hair with a lace mantilla and not till she’s left the room to start her day do I take up her chamber pot and carry its slopping stench down the back stairs. And all this before the white folks’ breakfast.

I turn back to my daughter.

“You want your daddy,” I say again.

She smiles, my oldest girl, who hardly ever smiles. The longer she lives, the more things she won’t be able to tell me. And then she’ll have babies of her own and know what it’s like to watch your children hole up their black secrets. Though it is no secret; I too am black. I know.

“And Polly?” I ask.

“Oh, she’ll be quiet. We’ve been practicing being quiet.”

WHAT I REMEMBER about meeting Bob is that my master, who was not Josiah but a man named Cunningham, sold me from his farm because I spit in his daughter’s pudding. There weren’t any witnesses, so I don’t know what evidence they had. I was angry and young enough and not especially patient toward men. And what was Bob but a man being thrown at me. They set us up in our own cabin and said, “Have at it,” and now that I’m more grown I can recognize that I wasn’t entirely kind. I was tired, and I couldn’t explain this to him. It’s different for a woman. He wanted to flop his arms around me, even when he was mad, and all I saw was another weight. Without saying anything, he begged me to love him and I said no.

I was pleased when he started riding to the Indians because it gave me time alone, but that passed when Delphy came. Though she was not a trouble but an ally. A girl who’d grow up and know what it was like for me when I was ten, and fifteen, and twenty years old. This was selfish, to want that, so I did what I could to turn her path different from mine. I made her daddy hold her. I kept her from the kitchen. I talked to her about her grandmas and great-grandmas, even when I had to make it up. I sewed all the holes in her clothes so nothing could be seen.

As we got older, I didn’t mind him so much. He was like a pup, and harmless. He wanted big things and I wanted to keep us all alive, but he was lovable and I don’t lie when I say that it got to where I loved him. If love is relief when they come home in the dark in one piece.

We kept finding each other. Holding on tight. There was a baby that didn’t make it past the first day, the baby that died of the cough, and Polly. And the beginning of another one who decided, before she even saw this misery, not to live at all.

If you add it all up, with Bob in there too, it really does have the look of a family. No, I have no memory of my own kin. Unless this is it. What I’ve been given to defend.

ONLY WHEN MY mistress is in her nap can I sit and not move for a minute. A siesta, she says, for beauty. Each time she wakes up I widen my eyes as if sure enough, she’s already looking better. This day is the same as other days except I’m not thinking about what else can be made with a handful of yams and an egg but about what my plan would be if I was going to make one. Stupid that I didn’t sit in on Bob’s planning. I might’ve learned a few tips. Maybe I can visit Mingo. They were always whispering.

But this is what a woman can come to on her own:

One, kill myself and my children. This is not a good idea because it doesn’t bring them closer to their father (though I don’t know, maybe it does) and I’m squeamish. And can’t help believing sometimes in God, who maybe is wrathful about such things. Two, kill my owners. Or wait till Josiah — or José, or Master — is visiting some other rum dealer and just kill my mistress, which would be easy with a little oleander tea, she even showed me which it was. Or tying her to her bed while she siestaed and setting the bed on fire. Which might be difficult unless I stacked the bed with kindling and even then, I’m squeamish. Three, run the hell away. Not on foot because of the girls, but I guess on a horse. Pack some bags with food (yams, an egg) and head out at night when there’s some other commotion, like one of the fancy parties they sometimes have for the diplomats and the soldiers, or ex-soldiers, depending on which war. Once you’re over the Florida line, the slave patrols stop knowing who you are, especially if you’ve got papers written in Spanish with words that look like libre . And then the only trick is finding where my husband went. Not to the Indians, I know — they checked. It’s got to be west, to that made-up farm. Somewhere west. Well, I can follow a sun and ask people politely if they’ve seen a black man who talks too much, and as long as the horse I pick is the fastest in the stable, we’ve got a chance for a while. We’ll get to the Mississippi, and if we’ve had no sign of him, maybe we’ll think about starting up our own farm. When he hears tell of the rich negress and her wild plow-pushing daughters, he can come find us. If he’s listening for us.

My mistress grunts and heaves herself over on the mattress like a grub flopping out of the dirt. She thinks being fat is pretty, and so she is mighty pretty. She once asked me what I dreamed about and when I said I was usually too tired to dream, she scolded me. “I am always tired,” she said, “and I have most wondrous dreams! Castles and cold rivers and many, many kittens. People don’t dream only because they don’t think, they’re stupid. I do not say you are stupid, but.” I could have told her what I dreamed about, but the shock would’ve kept her up at night and it was best for me if she slept sound.

I know she wants to leave too. I could write her a note, tell her where the keys to the stable are kept.

That afternoon we feed the birds in the dovecote, which aren’t doves at all but blackbirds who are happy to have found a steady supply of crumbs.

In the evening, my back somehow unbroken, I pass Mingo’s cabin on the way to my own. He’s carving at the posts holding up his roof. I stop, see a man who’s a husband too, who talks big but hasn’t left, isn’t missed. I look hard at him, trying to think of what it is I really miss about Bob. How open the man was. How honest, and needy. If I had clutched him back in those first days, maybe we’d have grown into each other. Put all our griefs in the same basket. Don’t know why I never thought how much my own children would love him.