Katy Smith: Free Men

MY BROTHER PRIMUS was dark and shiny, like someone had wrapped an old brown sheet around a boy of gold. He would move to the fields that summer, but then he was the oldest in the pen and told us what was up and down with the world and we all believed him, every word. On one of those kindling nights when we did chores for Granny, the children one by one turned home, tipping on their legs with sleepiness, each with a clutch of sticks and some with the babies on their backs, all dreaming of their mothers’ arms. But Primus pulled me back and we waited until the woods were empty and then he shared with me what he knew. He must have been eight or nine.

“Master’s land stretches all the way out.”

“How far?” I asked, following the sweep of his stubby arm.

“That far.”

We were in the middle of a crowd of oaks and the stars didn’t shine too deep there. I looked around and nodded, unimpressed.

“Where do you think our land is?” he asked.

“Don’t have any,” I said.

“Who told you that?”

I wasn’t so much interested in looking at the trees, which seemed scrubby and no-count to me, or the way the dirt buckled up and crawled over roots and dipped thirsty under creeks. So what if this was Master’s land? I didn’t know what to call the birds, or which flowers smelled like sugar and which like rotten cheese. What I was watching was Primus, who shone there in the night and who was the same flesh as me but bolder. He had just lost the little rounded belly of being young and was now straight and strong, already with angry eyes that I tried to mimic, practicing on our sisters, who said I looked sick to my stomach. I admired every inch of him, most of all what I didn’t understand, the secrets of him. I supposed he felt the same about what was past the far fences of the tobacco fields, the blank spaces being always the spaces that can be filled by whatever’s overflowing in ourselves.

We walked out to the edge of the forest where a fence poked around the farthest trunks, cutting off the master’s farm from the clear hills that loped down to the river that fed into the Nottoway, or maybe that glint of silver was the Nottoway — no one ever told us names. You could see a long way here, and though I didn’t mind one way or another how far I could see, Primus’s eyes grew slow and wide at all the land before him. It was thick night by now, but we were lit by the water and the speckling stars and the little campfires that showed in dots where humans were.

Primus kicked at one of the fence posts, which were linked together with half-rotten split rails, and when it leaned away from him, he looked at me with a boyishness that didn’t much show in his face those days. He began kicking again, and I knew, so I started pulling from the top, and between the two of us we levered the post onto its side, the rails collapsing. I would do anything with him, would never need an explanation. We went along, post by post, and wobbled each one out of its hole, pushing and pulling until we were sweaty with laughing, until a whole stretch of them, maybe a quarter-mile long, were lying belly-up on the ground. Now we could run from the master’s land to the open land and back, hopping over a tangle of wood, whooping like we had caught a buffalo, or something larger. When we were winded and collapsed, him on the far side, me on the near, he laughed and said, “ This is our land.”

He drew a kind of vision then, and it was so filled with real things that I knew he’d been dreaming it for years. He was the oldest and didn’t have anything to look up to, the way I did. His farm was spread out, he said, far to the west, empty of trees or fields or crops, and in place of tobacco or cotton there’d be cows, calm lowing things that would grow fat with him taking such good care of them. To get around, he’d have a donkey, not a horse, and he’d train it to know its own name so he could call it from the porch and it’d come trotting up and he’d hop on without ever getting his feet in the mud. (There was mud there, just as there was mud everywhere.)

“A donkey?” I asked, thinking he’d gone too far. “They can’t run like horses.”

“Those belong to white folk,” he said. “Master rides a horse. Farlan rides a horse. You ever seen a black man on a horse?”

I hadn’t.

“A donkey’ll listen to you. They know.”

“Know what?”

“When it’s you and your donkey and that wide-open land, can’t nobody stop you and say, ‘This is mine’ or ‘This ain’t yourn.’” His stubby arms went up again to sweep the country for me, and I waited to see what he saw, but all I got was the little silver glints of the Nottoway, or the river that led to the Nottoway, whichever it was.

I asked if he would have a family, because I was just six years old and the best thing about life still was that I had a mother.

“That’s your land, Bob, not nobody else’s. What’d you want a family for?”

“A wife?” I said.

He shook his head. “Nobody wants one of those.”

And I thought he was right, because he was always right.

We lay there dreaming for much of the night, our bodies just outside the fallen lines of fence, the hoot-owls circling us, wondering if we were overlarge mice. He dozed, and I got up to count each push-and-pulled post; there were a hundred and nineteen down on the ground, and all by myself I wiggled down one more to make it even. The splinters in my hands seemed to me proof that I was a big man.

Primus snorted himself awake just long enough to say, “We better put them back before sunup,” and then we were both asleep, looking to the hoot-owls like rabbits curled for the night.

MY MOTHER USED to whisper to us in the frog-tickled nighttime that we were cut of finer stuff than the folks around us, that we were sons and daughters of an African prince, and I believed her because her skin looked like bright gold and I sure thought myself smarter than everybody else, never thinking what it took to make skin so gold, what kind of stirring of brown and white, what unwilling love. When we talked about where we came from, we had to skip back to Africa to find the stories that made sense.

Primus got big eyes every time my mother started in on the princes of Africa. He’d nod and nod as if to say, Yes ma’am, that’s me , and the older he got the more his eyes narrowed until he knew for sure he was one step next to the son of God, and when Farlan told him to move faster in the rows, he’d turn that shaven head of his most of the way round like a cat in the wild and give such a glare that Farlan would have to clear his throat to get free from the sight of him, and Primus by then all of twelve years. While he was living I thought maybe Mother was right and we were meant for something else.

The tale that always rang in my mind the loudest was of my great-grandfather Abraham, who was eight years old or nine, or — come to think of it — always as old as I was, and had tumbled down to the river with his friends, all brown, all naked, with sticks for spears and string for nets, their goal being to hunt lions, and in the reeds, hidden and laughing like river ghosts, they were leapt upon by a herd of men who wrapped them in real ropes and bound their open mouths and carried them in silent bundles back down the river. My mother said, although she couldn’t have known, that his mother wept for five days to find her boy missing and cut her arms in stripes and burned her foot bottoms nightly until they built her a house beyond the village to hold her madness. I always wanted to hear more about the boys and if there were really lions or only pretend ones, but she would go on about the mother until we started to shift around and grab each other’s bellies. When she got back to Abraham, he was stacked in a boat on an ocean, like a sailor lying down, and then was stood up on a piece of wood in a port town where a field of white men clamored. When he was very old, he told my mother, who was very young, that he had thought there weren’t any women in the country of Virginia and he had come to hell indeed. “Take me back!” he said that he said to the men smoothing his chained small body with palm oil. “I aim to get married!” Even as a young boy, though, I knew my great-grandfather said no such thing, that he wouldn’t have cared if there was a girl in that world unless it was his mother. Because this is how I felt. But my mother always told the story the same way, just as he told it to her, as if in the telling there would survive some frail thread between her soul and his, between all of us little souls and the great lost soul of Africa.