Tom Piazza - A Free State

He put the match to a candle stub in a low brass saucer, left there by someone, sometime. In the dark, the past stood on equal footing with the present. In the day the sun cast your shadow and you knew where you were. At night it was harder to tell, easier to slide backward.

He had had no particular plan beyond getting to a free state. They wanted him to go to Canada, but Philadelphia suited him. What they called Bottle Alley was an entire city block carved into a warren of rooms along a network of passageways off Lombard; Mr. Still’s man Sam had told him about it after he had spent some weeks with the Passmores, way out on the Germantown Road. Staying at the Passmores’ had been a temporary measure, arranged by the Vigilance Committee, while he got used to being free. They were good people and generous to open their home to him. Yet when he offered to play and sing for them on the second evening, Mistress Passmore put her hand on his arm and said, “Please. . we can’t have this here.” They said it was a slave instrument, and he had thought, I am nobody’s slave.

During those first weeks in Philadelphia, he had been taken to abolitionist meetings, usually at churches, where he felt himself on exhibit, like a circus oddity. The earnest white people pressed his hand and wished him Godspeed. He did not want to be ungrateful, but “Godspeed” sounded as if they wanted to get rid of him, fast. One Pastor Radford would introduce one Mr. Linforth, a Friend To The Bondsman, from Buffalo, New York. Mr. Linforth would intone: “ Brothers and sisters, how can we, as Christians, as men and women of good conscience, look the other way? Like Pontius Pilate, we find no wrong in the miserable wretches subjected to the daily Crucifixion of whippings, arbitrary separation from loved ones, and worse, much worse, and yet still we remand them to the whims of a murderous mob. Imagine yourself, unable to do the least thing without the imprimatur of a sinful human who crowns himself your Lord and Master. Imagine misery, unalleviated by the slightest glimmer of hope. Beauty, the joys of a family, the very basis of humanity a closed door to you, reduced to the level of animals by the inestimable cruelty of the lash and the branding iron. .”

Henry, or Joseph as he had been called, was not whipped. He had not worked in the fields, not slept on a mud floor, had not spent all day picking, lifting, carrying. He had, perhaps, a special perspective. But in his experience, even the lowest field Negroes at The Tides weren’t animals and didn’t think of themselves as animals. In fact they had a kind of contempt for Master James and the others of his class. To the abolitionists, Henry was a representative of a subjugated people, nothing less, and nothing more. It was his role. Certainly the idea that there was any fun to be had in the world seemed to be taken as an affront.

He reached for the banjo leaning in the corner, lifted it into his lap. Deep midnight, but day would come. Touch of the wood, the taut strings. Softly, he thumbed the lowest string, and it warmed the room. Thumbed the next string, then the two again, a note between, quiet so that only he could hear. Playing, he knew he was there; it put him in time, yet out of time, too, the pattern now buoying him like a tide, like a river, like the river. .

Banks of the Rappahannock in the chirping noonday. Bulrushes, frogs. Those are boats that come and go.

Through the woodshop door the bright sun, and a juneybug crawling through the wood curls. Tiny blocks, sanded for no splinters. The horse was a horse. Enoch made the horse.

This is the Bible. These are words. God is a Word and He is all around. They lived in a garden and there were snakes down by north pasture. All the animals went on a boat when it rained. There was a frog in the puddle. Found him later dried and dead.

Plates go here. Napkin there. Knife and fork and spoon. Here is a cup; here is a glass. This is a broom. Sweep like this toward the middle of the floor. Like this.

The table set for dinner and a cloth that Mother sewed. Gold sun outside and tree shade at dinnertime and then He blocks the door. We about to eat. Joseph go outside go play. Go now. Later Mother did not talk.

This is how you hang Master’s shirts. This is how he likes his tea. This is how you shine his boots. Always in a row like this. These are Master’s breeches. That is Master’s coal and that is Master’s bucket and that is Master’s fireplace and that is Master’s table and those are Master’s footsteps. Master likes his hoecakes nice and brown and why did Penelope laugh at that. Atticus didn’t laugh. Marcellus brought the coal in.

In the Mansion House there was a room with books and he said, So many Bibles, and Mother said, No they are different. Each one is different. Every day was the same but every book was different. Every day they had the chores. It was better than the fields; he heard that more than once.

Enoch made a table, made a chair, made the shelves for Master’s books. The table was from a tree. The wood comes from Richmond. This is maple, this is walnut, this is cherry, this is pine. This is hard, this is soft — look how you can do with your fingernail. Hold the rasp this-a-way. You see? Like this. Hold the saw like this. Cut away from your hand. Look how I learned that lesson. He held up his hand where one finger was gone.

Enoch made a wooden rose. Enoch made a horse and carriage. Enoch made a banza with a gourd and a goat skin. The strings were fishing line. Joseph made a table leg and Enoch said that was good. You getting big enough to handle that saw.

The book was from a tree. Davey was a boy in a story and he loved his mother, and his father died and another man came to the house. Mistress taught Mama to read and Mama taught Joseph. Mistress hung herself over the barn rafters.

The world assembled itself slowly. He was twelve. Master James said he was getting tall. Put his hands in his hair and said, “Bushy, bushy,” and laughed and laughed. Not too tall for me to go bushy bushy. “Irish eyes and Mandingo hair.” Funniest damn thing ever. Joseph didn’t see what was so damn funny. He learned to say damn from Cassius at the stable. Master’s breath always smelled of the whiskey he drank. Joseph knew because he had tried it himself one time out of the glass decanter on the silver tray and he got sick and his mother said she would have whipped him but it looked like he didn’t need a whipping, that whiskey had whipped him plenty.

Enoch was hired out to a man in Baltimore for a year. By then Joseph could do the necessary small repairs in the wood shop. Better than folding Master’s shirts and shining Master’s boots and hauling Master’s damn coal and smelling Master’s breath. He liked being alone in the shop, and now he had other things on his mind. Like watching Aurora switch under her skirt as she carried the milk from the dairy. He felt his blood burning him alive from the inside out. Was careless one day and damn near cut his little finger off, cut it almost to the bone. Mama put something on it made it sting worse than the cut and wrapped it up in gauze. Looked at him while she was wrapping. Something took your mind off what you were doing? Looked like she knew.

The boats went up and down, and he had a week to watch them while the hand healed. Everything was alive and everything spoke to him, and down by the river sometimes he would take care of himself in the rushes, and afterward he would watch the tow boats and the barges and the steamers and wonder what they saw when they went where they went. Everything bothered him, and his mother watched him and seemed to know something about him that she wouldn’t say.

He mimicked people to make her laugh, and then to make the others laugh. The laundry women with their West Indian accents—“Dem two head cabbage,” he would say to the men at the stable. “Dem ten pound potato in a five-pound sack,” and they would laugh and let him get up on the horses. Spanish Pete, who got things ready for market, had a music Joseph could copy in his voice, nonsense syllables that Master found especially hilarious—“ Cuesta la bombolino de los frijoles! ” he would exclaim to howls of laughter. Cassius might say something to one of the other men, and Joseph would repeat it back in Cassius’s voice. “I come up behind her when she washin’ Massa’s dirty drawers and tell her how I likes it,” and the other men would laugh and laugh, and Cassius would, too, unless Joseph did it a couple or three times and then Cassius would say, “What are you? A God damn mockingbird?”