Katy Smith - Free Men

I got there in time to start planting, and though I didn’t recognize the thick stems I was shuffling into the ground, I kept my eyes down and moved my hands the way the men in front of me moved theirs, and by the end of the first week, my back felt the same as it ever had. Treehorn and his bullwhip stayed with us in the fields and he was just as quiet as he had been driving the wagon, though his dog laugh came out sometimes. I learned he liked jokes and dirty songs and whipping folks. We nursed the big pole plants all through the summer and at some point I learned to call them caña or sugarcane and to lie down flat between the rows when Treehorn had left and suck the cut stems until the sweetness hurt my teeth. In the fall, we toppled the shoots, giants now that knocked and whispered when you smoothed the ground beneath them, and we fed them into great grinders, where the pulp of a man’s arm now and again was stirred into the syrup. The liquid we caught we kept in kettles and boiled and skimmed and reboiled and mixed and waited and with tired arms moved iron ladles from pot to pot and boiled some more and always, always threw wood to the fire, which burned for weeks and never slacked until the land around the fields was bare of timber. From the sugar my master sold in barrels came the drippings he turned to rum; the barrels he rolled downhill to boats in the Escambia, the liquor he distilled and packed in stone jugs for paths north. After living there a year, I could not stand the smell of sweet.

My master I only saw a few times a year when I was run up to the house on some errand or other and on Christmas when he came to the cabins to give us our gifts. He was a small man with a fat Spanish wife, and when they shouted at each other, they moved between their languages like they were searching for high ground. This used to be her farm, or was her father’s, and when the English traded for West Florida a dozen years before, she held on to it by marrying this half-man, and no wonder they didn’t much get along. Her family had kept cattle — we’d sometimes find pancakes of old dung in the turned-up earth — and she didn’t understand why he’d switched to cane in this wilderness. They didn’t have any children. His only friend was Treehorn, who he must have trusted like a brother for all he let him do, and him slipping his own bottles in to soak up some of Master’s juice, which all saw and none spoke on.

Only when I turned sixteen did I learn Master’s first name. The man he used to send to the Creeks with his rum had been shot dead through the gullet by the Choctaws and he needed a new one to ride his horse and carry his burdens — I’d caught his eye for seeming cheerful, there being nothing left to grieve over — and while I was standing in his front hall with my hat in my hands, being told of my new duty, his wife heaved onto the upstairs landing and said, “Josiah!” except it sounded to me like “Hosea.” I was given a fast horse and a pass scrawled in two languages and was told which paths to follow to the Indian towns and I was never once told not to be afraid, so I went ahead and was. I’d been in Florida six years, and still didn’t know where I stood.

My first trip, he launched me off at night. The crowding black trees on the trail looked so heavy I ducked my head for a mile, thinking they’d topple down, press me to death, at a single wind. I wasn’t used to being sent out on my own, responsible for my own body but on behalf of another man. I had borrowed myself. The farther I got, of course, the straighter my head sat and the more I looked around at the wildness that swallowed the air, that choked it with musk and weeds. It didn’t escape me that I was a black man on a horse. Would Primus be proud of me, or would he know something I didn’t, about how the horse knew not to take me anywhere free, or about how I myself wasn’t yet brave enough to run? I whistled so the owls wouldn’t dive for me in the dark. Master had given me a note for a tavern that stood partway along the route, but I didn’t trust this, so I took my horse two inches off the trail and burrowed behind a palmetto stand so that anyone who tried to get me would first send up a holy clatter. It was cold, and I was frightened of all the things I didn’t know, and I thought of how my brother, long dead, would be halfway to freedom by now, how any red-blooded dark-skinned man would be leaping through swamp and bramble, scotch-hopping over alligator heads to get away from the scent of slavery. The bottom of a bog would be better land to stand on than this path that unrolled like a limb from a sugar plantation. But there I was, arm’s-length from the trading road, nervous to stray farther. I couldn’t sleep that night, not knowing what my body should be doing.

But the morning brought other things to fuss over and fear, like the Indians that were waiting at the end of the path to take my master’s rum and hand me money, and I didn’t have high hopes for how that transaction would go. Master, who I now sometimes called Josiah in my head to bring him down to the size of other men, had told me not to mind about the language, that they would know what I was there for and as long as I didn’t make a fool of myself I’d get out scratch-free. Don’t move quickly, he’d said, and don’t smile overmuch, for those teeth of yours are liable to fright them. I did in general smile more than I should, for it was easier than sorrow, of which there was enough to drown us if we opened our mouths to it. So all I knew was to stand still and frown and if they raised their bows at me I’d drop to the ground and cover my head so the arrows at that angle would have a difficult time finding purchase. This last I had thought about plenty.

As it turned out, the Indians were not wild animals, and they didn’t have fangs or bared bottoms, and I saw no children boiled for supper. The men were mostly the same height as me and some smiled and some didn’t, and one even shook my hand like an Englishman. I stayed with them for two days and though I only heard my language spoken a few times, we understood each other — they pointed where the river was for washing and showed me how to eat the acorn bread and in the evenings I played a game with the young ones where I threw a spear at a rolling stone, and every time it went sailing far past, they all laughed so hard that I thought I’d won. I even got to sample Josiah’s liquor, which no white man would’ve ever let me do, so by the time I saddled up for home I had come to think of these men — not red at all but copper and brown, like the rest of us — as something more akin to me. They had slaves, but who didn’t have slaves?

Those trips became dreams, where I like a witnessing bird could fly over strangeness, but it wasn’t home, and it wasn’t real. I was still mostly a boy, my heart still empty from my mother, and I thought finding family again was anyone’s only intent. As far as I knew, life was just a rotten thing, and finding another person to take care of you — to cook your grits and comb out your hair and patch up the knees of your pants and maybe, if there was time, to sneak you a soft kiss — this was the only thing that made it bearable, for white and black men both. What was liberty without that? As I’ve said, I was very young and hadn’t thought much through.

HER NAME WAS Beck, and she was more a woman than a girl, for she was older than me and had already had a husband, wed and buried. I would be gone to the Indians for a week once a month or so, and when I was home, in the time between stripping cane and sleeping, it wasn’t hard to fall in love. She wore her hair in a purple wrap that came from I don’t know where but it made her look like a queen, and she walked as tall and straight as one, no matter the curling lash marks round her calves. She took an interest in me in a motherly sort of way, but not at first seeing the mother in her sweetness, I took her gifts in the evening, biscuits and blue flowers and the fallen palm spines that looked like daggers.