Katy Smith - Free Men

ON THE DAY before his fourteenth birthday, Primus crawled out of our cabin shoeless before dawn, which I know because I watched, and moved skink-like across the near fields up the slope to the big house, which I know because I followed, and from the base of a cherry tree I saw his shadow slip inside that wide hall with a flint and a fist of straw, his aim I suppose to burn the master down, and when I saw him come out again and run toward the creek, tall on his toes, I slunk back to bed. When the first bell rang, my mother sent me to fetch him, she thinking he was in the bushes with his stomach trouble, and when he wasn’t in the bushes, I followed his prints down to the creek, his bare foot-marks the only ones in the dawn dust. I wanted to be curled back in my straw, is the only thing I was thinking when I came to the bank and saw his toes dipped in the water and followed them up to his bony knees and on up to his nightshirt that the wind was wrapping around him in a pretty kind of way and up to his face, which was a foreign purple swell, and I stopped looking and started screaming and so never even saw the rope that bound him to the willow, the rope of his own twisting, the knots of his own design. An old woman found me and brought me back to my mother, leaving Primus swinging on the low branch, his toes skating in the creek, making eddies where there were none.

The cook who we called Auntie had found the feeble brushfire in the hallway as she was taking the master up his washing water; she had stamped it out with one foot and walked on.

FEELING IS TOO small a word. Words are too small. We worked in the fields and took our beatings for the extra time we had to stop to hold on to ourselves and at night we gathered again, my mother and all of us, and ate our collards and corn and went to sleep. The next day we’d work and eat our collards and sleep. We could never say it was the worst thing ever happened to us, because who knew what was coming next.

A few months after Primus stole his own body from the men who stole his great-grandfather’s, and before my mother was speaking again, Farlan came to me in the rows and said I was wanted in the big house, that they needed extra hands for bringing noon dinner to some folks stopping from out of town, so I went, happy enough to rest my hoe and not yet too bitter to serve the men who built my sorrow. I was only eleven, and just a mimic of a man.

Turns out there weren’t any guests, no men from up the road or ladies out for an airing, so I scrubbed down the slick cedar-board halls after someone handed me a bucket of sand and a rag. When I was at the window with a jar of vinegar is when I heard her screaming, and I tried the door but it was locked and the key taken, so I stared with my hands spread on the window and my open mouth against the glass and my eyes nearly shut with tears, the shape of her blurred out, and still when I think of my mother I can taste vinegar and salt.

They had her hands bound but her feet were kicking out in a wild dance and though I’d seen my mother proud and worn down and silent with sadness, I had never seen her rage, and after not hearing her words to me for weeks, the sound of her screaming my name made me hope to crawl back in her belly. The trader had come for her and two other women and a man, and knowing her love — and knowing her love — they had locked me in the house to sell her barefaced, as a chair is sold, as a piece of land. The other children were in the pen with Granny and never knew. White men lashed her to the left side of the wagon, which I remember because that was the side shaded by the front drive’s walnut, planted by Master’s long-ago kin, so that though I could hear her, can hear her, screaming still, her face was blacked out in shadow, vanished.

Was that too much for a boy to bear? The next week, the younger ones were split into parcels and sold in town, and when the winter came, they handed me to a young man with black hair standing straight up and a round face red with pimples who said his name was Treehorn and that he had come to take me for his master a million miles away, and laughed like a wild dog, and I willing went, for I had lost all sense of who I belonged to.

A MILLION TURNED out to be a little less than a thousand, and we were two weeks on the road to Pensacola, all crammed in a wagon and some trailing behind. Treehorn didn’t talk much, and the other white man said so little I never heard his name, and of the others they gathered like black flowers along the way, most were boat-fresh and spoke a dozen tongues, none of which sounded like words to me. In all this strange noise and silence, and with the vision of my mother like a heavy brick in my mind to be avoided, I started talking more and more until I was damn near narrating that expedition. I named the trees and the birds and the road animals, even when I didn’t know their names, which was mostly. I asked where we were going and what kind of work we’d be doing and for what kind of man we’d be laboring, and when I got no answers, I described the future to myself and anyone who’d listen, and in this way I built a little room in my head where there wasn’t any sorrow. I had never been much of an unhappy child, and now I was teaching myself not to be an unhappy man, a man being what I thought of myself on the road at eleven years old, approaching twelve, the past being what it was. When you lose what you love and still find yourself alive, what else do you do?

On the trail spiraling down from Virginia to Florida, us hobbled to the wagon and the whites on horses, I saw things I’d never seen before: low mountain passes and flat dry land and earth that looked solid till you put your foot in and water came seeping up or the sand dropped out from under you or you found your leg in a fox den, and anything that didn’t look like the three hundred acres of forest and tobacco fields where I’d spent all my years now took me by surprise. I saw Indians for the first time, and they too struck me strange, for I never knew there were such things as Indian women, but there they were in the uplands, riding horses by themselves with baskets of baskets behind them. Treehorn and the other man bought their liquor from a Catawba near Columbia, and the three of them drank together round a fire while the rest of us were chained to trees outside the circle of light. I had thought Indians were just like us, but they’re not at all. Their place is by the fire, but it’s a fire they have to build themselves, so I don’t know what they are.

When it rained we got wet, and when the sun baked, our skin started peeling in sheets, and when the horses were tired from pulling the wagon, we walked until our feet had burred soles. When the men with branded cheeks tried to escape before dawn, they were beaten until their backs matched their faces, and when the women dragged slow behind, the chains were tightened round their necks. And still I talked, and still I mumbled out all I saw for people who didn’t care to understand a word I was saying, leaving out the sorrow, leaving in every bright thought I ever had. They could’ve whipped me for never shutting my mouth, and I sometimes looking back on it wonder why they didn’t, and I figure they must could have used the sound.

We got to the farm in the warmest part of the late afternoon, when all the January sun seemed to have puddled in that one place, and it looked like a dream with trees I’d never seen, some with spiky leaves and some with branches longer than the trunk was tall, and moss hanging over everything so that things sounded softer, but there was a white wood house big in a clearing and shacks far behind it and behind them crops in the same rows and rows I’d seen before, and nothing was really so different after all. Only the air hung heavier here and was saltier and the cabin they put me in with some other slaves smelled sweet.