Katy Smith - Free Men

Sometimes that story ended with the truth, which was that my great-grandfather was eventually snatched from the fields and led gibbering in an African tongue and limping with age into a tobacco barn, where a white man cleared away the dry litter before painting him with pitch oil and setting him alight. This is not a story to tell to children unless they need to be taught to hate, a lesson that, of all of us, Primus learned best.

THE NIGHT WE knocked down the posts was a treasure to me, and I held on to it like truth, so when someone asked me about my brother I told them that, about our victory over our master’s fence and Primus mapping all kinds of worlds for us, and I didn’t tell them the end of the story, which is that we didn’t wake up in time, and when the sun rose and we were scurrying along the line propping up the posts and stacking the rails as fast as our hands would let us, Farlan came picking through the woods on his big black horse. Our mother hadn’t wanted to say about our not coming home, because better us dead somewhere from snakebite than dragged in by white hands, but Granny in the pen had a job to do and couldn’t be losing little ones, so she told on us, and there Farlan was, reins in one hand, whip in the other.

He didn’t want a story, so we saved it for Master. The cows had gotten to the fence, we said, and in all their lusting for each other had toppled a whole stretch of it, which we found when we were picking sticks for kindling. We’d shooed them away and were working hard to put the posts back up so none of the cows would come trampling into the tobacco fields, which we knew Master wouldn’t like. “Did we do a good thing?” we said, our little hands pressed together like prayer.

I was too young to get anything more than ten smacks on the bottom. Only later did I hear from Primus about Master’s small knotted whip, and how he made my brother stand in the broad hall away from the fine things, and how he whipped him hard, but not hard enough so blood would get on the new-varnished floor, polished the day before by black hands and too fine now for black blood.

That’s when the big house stopped seeming like a grand place, one I’d like to live in, and turned into someplace haunted. It swallowed up screams and breathed them out in little whispers through the day, so that walking past made your ears hurt, though you couldn’t tell why. I didn’t tell the end of the story to people who asked, because the best part of my brother was the bit that lay dozing on the far side of the fallen fence, his land still whole and perfect in his head.

THE STORIES WERE what reminded us that what seemed real was just a passing fancy; this bound land, our broken cabins, the way we couldn’t see our mother but at night, these were not all of what could happen. The best of life was not what we were living, but something already past, or up ahead. When Primus snuck out to the far creek Sunday evenings, I followed him, chattering away, carrying my shoes by their worn heels and sometimes a stick to fight off the panthers I knew were hiding and which my brother would be too creek-minded to notice till they were pouncing. My limbs turned into antelope legs; I bounded the way our mother told us Antelope bounded when he was climbing up toward heaven. He was a grandfather to us, same as Abraham but even further back, a thousand generations. Antelope was small, like us, and all the other animals wanted to eat him so that he was always running, never resting. He even ran at night, through the dark, dark forests and fields, and we all put our hands over our faces at this part, because Panther was right behind. She showed us how close with her hands: her right was Antelope, with four finger legs galloping hard, and her left was Panther, slinking as fast as the other could bound. She ran her hands all around the cabin floor and we followed with anguish until the left hand toppled the right and the baby started wailing. But just as Antelope stopped his spasming and Panther loosened his tight grip, lo! the right hand slinked up fast from the hold of the left, and Antelope scampered up the side of the baby, tickling her shoulder and onto her head, and when the baby laughed, the rest of us started to breathe again. Sure enough, Panther couldn’t climb up where Antelope was, so he plopped down and waited and waited, and since there was no purpose to coming down, Antelope just kept on climbing, up off our baby sister’s head and right up to heaven, where our mother’s right hand balled up and drifted away, like a star.

I think this was once a longer story, with more tricks and turns, but it had settled down into the kernel of itself, which was no more than good and bad, and the triumph of the weak. We were the weak, and weakness to us just meant that we couldn’t admit to our muscle. I adored playing Antelope by the creek and would not have wanted to be Panther, who for all his speed and strength and clawed paws never climbed up the baby’s shoulder to heaven.

WHEN WE WERE a few years older and Primus was already in the fields, stripping the yellow leaves with the others, collecting his hate, we’d play at building houses in the evening — maybe because our own was so crowded and damp — him lying in the scrabble outside our cabin, his arms worn out but not his mind, directing me from the blueprints in his head. I made rooms for him out of bark and corn husks, two and three stories high, far grander even than the big house. I wallpapered them with our mother’s hair rags, stuffed inside for color. When I was finished, he’d idle his eyes over and tell me what was missing, and then he’d be the one to find the donkey. It was usually a scrap of our dinner, or the dried-out canoe of a pecan hull, and Primus’d set it up alongside the twigged front porch so it was just right for whenever the owner decided to swagger out the door. We never really put a man inside, for we were the men, and it was our house.

I’d recite little stories about the owner, about how he’d had a long day building houses (my imagination was small) and what kind of dinner he’d eat, with plenty of beef and gravy, and sometimes he’d nap because the houses would be so easy, but he most looked forward to his evening donkey ride, when he’d roam around the land he owned, too big for fences, and if he was feeling handsome would go visit the lady who lived down the road. (“What lady?” Primus asked.) She was very fair, almost white, and had long, long hair that never broke off in the brush or had to be wrapped up in cloth, and her fingernails were little pearls, not a trace of dirt. Our man would lift her up on that donkey and when they went galloping off across the dry plain, no trees in sight, her hair flew out behind her like the donkey had two tails. I could go on and on.

He kicked the house down and scattered it before we went in for the night so that no one would find it, least of all our mother, who might think that we wanted something better than what we had. Sometimes I’d save the donkeys, would sneak the sponge of lichen that had been our steed into my pocket and then underneath my pillow, where I’d feel it all night between my finger and thumb.

I told him he should be a builder, for he had fine ideas of space and how to use all the corners of a structure handily, and some nights he’d smile at this and agree, and we’d picture how he’d make mansions for white folk from Boston to Charles Town, marking his name above the lintel in half-sized letters that only we could make out. But other nights he’d tell me to hush up.

“But your name—”

“My name’s in the back cover of Master’s Bible, same as yours.”

“Master isn’t giving you a donkey.”

He’d tap his head. “That’s in here, little brother. That’s all.”

I thought he was getting used to being who he was, but all the talks we had were just him fighting around his own captivity. The whole time I was making houses for him, he was feeding all the little insults to his anger, soaking up the cuts and bruises and spit until the bark house wasn’t just what he wanted, but was what he couldn’t have, what some men owned but not him, not Primus, because he didn’t even belong to himself. I didn’t know this, like most things, until the time for knowing it had already passed.