Katy Smith: Free Men

Who I should be thinking about is the men who’ll be following us. Not just the one Istillicha named — the Clerk, who gets paid by the chief and is some kind of slow bloodhound, too fancified to tramp after us, provided we tramp far enough — but also the men whose only job is to find slaves who think they’re better than slaves. I’m still walking on my master’s pass, good for a week, and I’m out of West Florida now, where patrols only look for their own lost negroes, but I am surely leaving a blazing trail behind me: first the horse that went missing, which probably trotted back home to sound the alarm, and then all those bodies stacked in the sand by the creek, with black witnesses in the trees beyond. We talked for half a minute about whether to kill them too, but I said I’d been put where I didn’t want to be often enough to know it wasn’t their fault they were forced to watch a murder, so we tied them up, strung rope around wrists that — I know — are so familiar with rope it starts to feel like skin. I gave them a wink, but they didn’t wink back.

When they come for me, they’ll want the story. They’ll want to know whether I was stolen by traders, in which case maybe only an ear needs to get lopped off, or whether I ran off with intention, leaving behind a whole family of women whose rights of running are far greater than mine. In which case the body deserves the worst, from skin peeled off to tongue cut out to feet set on fire, all of which my daughters will be asked to watch like a bloody pageant. So no, it’s not the Clerk I’m worried about; he’s a white man from somewhere else, he doesn’t know what all a black man who steals himself deserves. I’m just trying to figure what kind of a story I can tell that will make my hunters see me as a man.

Istillicha, who knows nothing of me beyond my four limbs, is taking us to see a doctor who will fix the hole in my arm; he drew a line between bodies that needed saving and bodies that didn’t, and for some reason my black self wound up on the right side of the line. This is part of what I’d tell.

A quick rain shower comes in the early morning, not hard enough to shoo off the birds that still twitter at us, but just enough water so we start rubbing our hands together, smearing the dirt and the blood off whatever parts of us we can reach.

“Hold still,” I say to Cat, and wipe my sleeve across the back of his neck so that a little of his white skin shines through.

Istillicha runs his fingers through his hair and ties it back again in a knot. The rainwater is replacing the creek water.

We hear a rumble from far off, not a scary kind, just like the sky was starting to get peckish, but Cat looks quick over at the Indian.

“You scared of storms?” I ask. He’s like a child that way. Though he may have been a murderer long before we were, we’re the ones who look after him: wipe his neck, give him food, let him sleep close by so he doesn’t get lonely. If I could crack him open and get whatever secret’s lying curled up inside, we’d probably spend less time fussing over those sad eyes.

“There was once a boy on a hunting party,” Istillicha says, “who heard the same kind of noise and didn’t know what it was.”

The rain catches in my eyelashes, making little bubbles of the road, the pines, the palmetto spikes. I don’t brush them off right away but let them play around with my sight, ballooning some things, washing others away.

“He went to find the sound, leaving behind his uncles and his brothers, and came upon a creature by a riverbank struggling to breathe. It was Thunder, and he had a snake wrapped around his neck.”

That’s the way you take the teeth out of something scary: make it pitiful. Sure enough, Cat’s face shrinks, goes from fear to worry.

“Thunder begged the boy to save him, and the snake begged the boy to help him kill the creature.”

“Couldn’t save both,” Cat says, but I can’t tell if it’s a question. The Indian keeps on.

“He pulled out an arrow and shot the snake clean through, which dropped to the ground and left Thunder to breathe again.” Istillicha pauses, listens for something, which he does often enough that I sometimes think he’s just trying to make us jumpy. “Thunder promised to help him, sending lightning to strike his enemies whenever he wished.”

“What would the snake have given the boy?” I ask.

“We don’t know,” he says.

The rain’s drifting east now, and Cat lifts his open mouth for the last few drops. “He made a choice,” Cat says. “Saved someone.”

Another rumble comes at us, but it’s quieter now, rolling around in some faraway hills, and Cat doesn’t even notice, his face twisted around some new thought.

We hear cart wheels coming down the trail, but they’re close enough that we can’t crawl up the bank without getting caught, so we keep walking forward as innocently as our wet red shoes allow. The man pulling the cart, woolly-haired and beard-tangled, is no cleaner than us, and his wagon is filled with stacks of papers smudged by the drizzle. As he tugs one of the papers free and waves it in front of his face, saying something about the news from the stars, heaven’s own report, listen for your fate , I feel the rat in my arm clamp down on a new nerve, and all I wish is for my body to be pulled safely out of this.

MY MOTHER ALWAYS said my mouth was too loud for what little I had to say, but she was the one who sat us down under the shake roof under the black night and gave us stories like they were rare sugar. What she talked of was all gone past, for that was all that was worth telling. Nothing happened day to day that we cared to stick in our memories for later, and the things that stuck we wished wouldn’t’ve. It was Virginia, south of Petersburg, and a hungry belly was at least a sign you were alive. The stories filled up the holes, made our sorrow step back for a spell, though sorrow’s maybe too grand a word, us being children then and feeling more boredom than grief at our endless captivity. Like a winter without any thaw, on and on. My own chatter I can’t explain, but I did talk too much, my mother was right. I was a boy, I liked the sound of my voice.

She was a light-skinned woman who wore her hair in stripped rags, two teeth missing, and she had a pocket in her apron where she slid crusts and old biscuits for me to find. There were hills humpbacked on hills and trees so green they looked like moss underwater, like both sides of the earth were the same. But I didn’t think it was beautiful then, and she didn’t raise me. The granny was a soot-black woman who hunched on an old churn in the yard near all the women’s children and hollered so loud every time we neared the fences that the crows would shoot out of those wet-green trees. I’d watch my mother in the fields out of one eye, her hair dancing like colored finches in the big yellow leaves, and the brick house out of the other, where buggies rode up every hour carrying men and ladies, white as sunlight, and my ears perked back the whole time to hear Granny jabbering about the dark country, from where she was nabbed ninety-six years ago, naked as the day she was born. I saw how those with the good tales got listened to, and so early on I started practicing my talking, empty though it was.

When Granny was tired of watching our games, she sent us into the near woods to fetch kindling, the oldest of us carrying the babies on our backs, the toddlers stopping to pee on sycamore leaves to hear them crackle. I didn’t dig for worms or play hide-the-switch or even wander farther than I should, but I did tell the others the littlest things I saw and felt, thinking they’d enjoy the words. They were friendly enough about it, maybe because I always carried the fattest baby, but other than Primus none of them thought much of me. If it sounds like we children in the woods made for a charming scene, then you were never a child.