• Пожаловаться

Katy Smith: Free Men

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Katy Smith: Free Men» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию). В некоторых случаях присутствует краткое содержание. год выпуска: 2015, категория: Современная проза / на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале. Библиотека «Либ Кат» — LibCat.ru создана для любителей полистать хорошую книжку и предлагает широкий выбор жанров:

любовные романы фантастика и фэнтези приключения детективы и триллеры эротика документальные научные юмористические анекдоты о бизнесе проза детские сказки о религиии новинки православные старинные про компьютеры программирование на английском домоводство поэзия

Выбрав категорию по душе Вы сможете найти действительно стоящие книги и насладиться погружением в мир воображения, прочувствовать переживания героев или узнать для себя что-то новое, совершить внутреннее открытие. Подробная информация для ознакомления по текущему запросу представлена ниже:

Katy Smith Free Men

Free Men: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Free Men»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

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.

Katy Smith: другие книги автора


Кто написал Free Men? Узнайте фамилию, как зовут автора книги и список всех его произведений по сериям.

Free Men — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Free Men», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

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.

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?

Читать дальше

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Free Men»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Free Men» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё не прочитанные произведения.


Smith Henderson: Fourth of July Creek
Fourth of July Creek
Smith Henderson
Maggie Gee: The White Family
The White Family
Maggie Gee
Charlie Smith: Ginny Gall
Ginny Gall
Charlie Smith
Natashia Deon: Grace
Grace
Natashia Deon
Отзывы о книге «Free Men»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Free Men» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.