Tom Piazza - A Free State

“Have you been to England?” he said.

“I have not,” I replied. “Why do you ask?” And then, “Oh. Of course.”

“He doesn’t like America much,” he said.

“I think their attitude toward us is mixed,” I said. “Perhaps we exercise a freedom that they wish for, and yet which their sense of manner, or propriety, tells them is somehow vulgar.”

His face registered a degree of amusement at this remark, and I asked him what he had found amusing.

“Dickens always sympathizes with people having a hard time,” he replied.

“Yes,” I said. “That he does.” What a fellow, I thought. “Listen, would you enjoy it if we had cigars later, after dinner? Have you ever had a cigar? I could bring down a pair and we could have a proper visit.”

He seemed faintly stunned by the idea, but he said if that was what I wanted to do he would be pleased to join me.

“Wonderful!” I said. “I’ll bring some brandy as well.”

At dinner, Fanny asked several times whether William would join us again and play the banjar.

“Dear,” Addie said, “the young man is not here for our entertainment. I imagine that he has been ordered about quite enough in his short life.”

Fanny’s feelings were hurt by the remark, and I said to Addie, “Perhaps the fellow can come and sit with us again for a short visit tonight? He is here so briefly.”

When we had finished coffee I invited William upstairs. We all assumed our positions from the previous evening, and there was some stilted talk. I had the sense that the fellow would have felt more comfortable playing music for us. After a few minutes of this, William regarded Fanny and said, “Do you know how to make a fireplace match disappear?”

“Throw it out the window!” she said.

“That’s the best way.” he said. “But what if there is no window?” She appeared to think hard, and after some moments, the fellow said, “Would you like me to show you the best way?”

“Yes!”

“May I take a fireplace match?” he said, addressing Addie.

“They are right there,” Addie said, indicating a shelf to the side of the mantel.

William plucked one of the thin wooden sticks and broke off a stem about two inches in length, displayed it so that Fanny could see it, also meeting my eyes, and Addie’s, with an expression of great seriousness. He situated the match between index finger and thumb, made sure we saw it, and then with a plosive gesture opened his hand and the match was gone. As we fairly gaped, William’s face expressed a degree of discomfort, then pain, and he reached to his ear and pulled, as if a thorn were lodged there, and retrieved the troublesome length of matchstick, displaying it for us once again.

We all applauded. Fanny was in transports of delight, and begged him to repeat the trick, and he did so, this time leaving his chair and retrieving the match from behind Fanny’s ear.

“How do you make it disappear?” she pleaded.

With mock solemnity, he replied that it took long training and great discipline.

At length it was time for Fanny to go to bed, and Addie said she would retire as well. I said that I would be up in a while. William went downstairs, and a quarter hour later I descended the steps into the basement, managing to carry a decanter of brandy and two glasses, with two good cigars in my breast pocket. I opened one of the casement windows, located near the low ceiling and giving out onto the ground level, so that the cigar smoke would not seep upstairs and disturb Addie.

“Do you drink brandy at all?” I asked, arranging things a bit and lighting another candle.

“No,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “Will you have one with me?” I set the glasses out on a little table and poured myself a modest draw, and another for him. “Here’s to your good fortune in the future, William.”

“Thank you,” he said. We took our first sips of the fine, fiery brandy, which blazed a warm trail down the inside of my chest and into my stomach. He examined the liquid through the glass, against the candlelight. I remarked to myself how difficult, perhaps impossible, it was to see into the mind, or through the eyes, of one who had been born a slave. So many things that we take for granted must be nearly miracles to them.

“Here,” I said, producing the cigars. “These are made in Havana. Do you know where that is?”

“Cuba! That’s where Spanish Pete was from.”

“Spanish Pete,” I said. “Tell me who he was.”

“He used to sort the crops for market. Or he’d divide them into house vegetables, market vegetables.” He held the cigar to his nose. “That smells good,” he said.

I was mulling what he’d said, since so many bondsmen were from the West Indies and spoke French, or variants thereof, rather than Spanish.

“Do you know how Pete happened to come to where you lived? It was a farm, of course?”

He nodded and said, “In Virginia. I don’t know how he got there. He was just there. He taught me how to speak Spanish.”

“You can speak Spanish!” I said. “Say something to me in Spanish!”

“Mariposa la basura de quanto varieades de supuesto! ”

“That is not Spanish!” I said. But he was laughing at the expression on my face. His accent, be it said, was perfect, although the words were utter nonsense. I found myself laughing along with him. “I hope you didn’t pay him for lessons!”

“No,” he said. “It was all out in the barn.”

I refilled our glasses and gestured to him to direct the smoke toward the window I had opened. “Addie — Mrs. Seward — does not encourage me to smoke in the house.”

We smoked our cigars and drank our brandy and talked easily, without a fixed direction or agenda, and I won’t be overstating if I say that it was one of the most enjoyable hours I had spent in recent memory. He spoke of seeing and hearing traveling musicians when he was a boy — he was yet little more than a boy, for that — and of being shown the secrets of the banjar by an older man who worked in the wood shop at the farm. He spoke of playing for dances at the farm, and of the river that ran alongside the property, the boats that came and went. The smell of food cooking, and the tasks at the wood shop. When he spoke of the farm, an odd quality of melancholy, or nostalgia, seemed to reveal itself. He spoke of the afternoon sun as it came in through the wood shop door and illuminated the wood shavings on the floor. He spoke of the fellow, Enoch, who came back from being hired out in the city, wearing a red silk scarf, and the wonder this engendered in him, and of hearing the banjar for the first time. The world was a simple one as he rendered it — a place with a wood shop, a dairy, a mansion house. I had the oddest feeling that he, or some part of him, yearned for that relative simplicity, and I asked him about that. “You sound almost as if you miss the place,” is what I said.

He reacted as if I had suggested the most preposterous idea imaginable.“Miss it!” he said. “I would not go back there for anything.” But on his face was the saddest expression I think I have ever seen. We went on to other things, but my mind stayed with that paradox which had presented itself. How would one manage to live in the world, carrying that peculiar burden of nostalgia for an intolerable situation? What were the costs of leaving a place whose familiarity both sustained you and threatened to extinguish you?

He told me he had performed onstage, with a minstrel troupe for which he needed to black his own face, although he was evasive on the topic of where this was. I asked him if he had ever tried to compose a song of his own.

He demurred at first, but at length he agreed to deliver it for me.

“Just not at full voice,” I said. “Let’s not bring Addie’s wrath down upon us.”