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Katy Smith: Free Men

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Katy Smith Free Men

Free Men: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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From the author of the highly acclaimed comes a captivating novel, set in the late eighteenth-century American South, that follows a singular group of companions — an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian — who are being tracked down for murder. In 1788, three men converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man from South Carolina, is on the run after abandoning his home. Bob is a talkative black man fleeing slavery on a Pensacola sugar plantation, Istillicha, edged out of his Creek town’s leadership, is bound by honor to seek retribution. In the few days they spend together, the makeshift trio commits a shocking murder that soon has the forces of the law bearing down upon them. Sent to pick up their trail, a probing French tracker named Le Clerc must decide which has a greater claim: swift justice, or his own curiosity about how three such disparate, desperate men could act in unison. Katy Simpson Smith skillfully brings into focus men whose lives are both catastrophic and full of hope — and illuminates the lives of the women they left behind. Far from being anomalies, Cat, Bob, and Istillicha are the beating heart of the new America that Le Clerc struggles to comprehend. In these territories caught between European, American, and Native nations, a wilderness exists where four men grapple with the importance of family, the stain of guilt, and the competing forces of power, love, race, and freedom — questions that continue to haunt us today.

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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.

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.

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