Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

But if Gil en worked him as he would a sim, would he not think of him in the same way, instead of as a person? He might never get free then!

Why, his master had already turned his back on him and was talking politics with Stowe as if he were not there. "So whom will you vote for in the censoral elections this fall, Harry?"

"I favor Adams and Westerbrook: two men from the same party will work together, instead of us having to suffer through another five years of divided government like this last term."

"I don't know," Gillen said judiciously. "When the Conscript Fathers wrote the Articles of Independence after we broke from England in '38, they gave us two censors to keep the power of the executive from growing too strong, as it had in the person of the king. To me that says they intended the two men to be of opposing view, to check each other's excesses."

"To check excesses, aye. But I'm partial to a government that governs, not one that spends all its time arguing with itself."

Gillen chuckled. "Something to that, I suppose. Still, don't you think, "

Jeremiah stopped listening. What did politics matter to him? As a slave, he could no more vote than a sim could. His head hung as he made his slow way back to the house.

Mrs. Gillen saw him dawdling, and scolded him. She kept an eye on him the rest of the day, which meant he had to work at the pace she set, not his own. That, he thought resentful y, was more trouble than a ten-sester was worth. To make things worse, he burnt the ham the Gillens, Stowe, and he were going to have for supper. That earned him another scolding from his mistress and a contemptuous stare from the overseer.

At sunset, Stowe blew a long, unmusical blast on a bugle, the signal for the sims to come in from the fields for their evening meal.

Their food was unexciting but filling: mostly barley bread and salt pork, eked out once or twice a week, as tonight, with vegetables from the garden plot and with molasses. The sims also ate whatever small live things they could catch. Some owners discouraged that as a disgusting habit (Jeremiah certainly thought it was; stepping on a well-gnawed rat tail could be counted on to make his stomach turn over).

Most, like Charles Gillen, did not mind, for it made their property cheaper to feed.

"Never catch me eating rats, not if I'm starving," Jeremiah said as he blew out the candle in his smal stuffy room. He listened to make sure the Gillens were asleep. (Stowe had his own cottage, close by the log huts where the sims lived.)

When he was sure all was quiet, the slave lifted a loose floorboard and drew out a small flask of whiskey. Any sim caught with spirits was lashed till the blood ran through the matted hair on its back. Jeremiah ran the same risk, and willingly. Sometimes he needed that soothing fire in his belly to sleep.

Tonight, though, he drank the flask dry, and tossed and turned for hours al the same.

Spring gave way to summer. The big sim Joe stepped on a thorn, and died three weeks later of lockjaw. The loss cast a pal of gloom over Charles Gillen, for Joe was worth a hundred denaires.

Gillen's spirits lifted only when his son and daughter returned to the farm from the boarding schools they attended in Portsmouth, the commonwealth capital. Jeremiah was also glad to see them. Caleb was fourteen and Sally eleven; the slave sometimes felt he was almost as much a father to them as Charles Gillen himself.

But Caleb, at least, came home changed this year. Before, he had always talked of what he would do when the Gil en farm was his.

Jeremiah had spoken of buying his own freedom once, a couple of years before; Caleb had looked so hurt at the idea of his leaving that he never brought it up again, for fear of turning the boy against it for good. He thought Caleb had long since forgotten.

One day, though, Caleb came up to him when the two of them were alone in the house. He spoke with the painful seriousness adolescence brings: "I owe you an apology, Jeremiah."

"How's that, young master?" the slave asked in surprise "You haven't done nothing to me." And even if you had, he added silently, you would not be required to apologize for it.

"Oh, but I have," Caleb said, "though I've taken too long to see it. Do you remember when you told me once you would like to be free and go away?"

"Yes, young sir, I do remember that," Jeremiah said cautiously.

Any time the issue of liberation came up, a slave walked the most perilous ground there was.

"I was too little to understand then," the boy said. "Now I think I may, because I want to go away too."

"You do? Why could that be?" Jeremiah was not pretending. This declaration of Caleb's was almost as startling as his recalling their conversation at all. To someone that young, two years was like an age.

"Because I want to read the law and set up my own shingle one day.

The law is the most important thing in the whole world, Jeremiah." His voice burned with conviction; at fourteen, one is passionately certain about everything.

"I don't know about that, young master. Nobody can eat law."

Caleb looked at him in exasperation. "Nobody could eat food either, or even grow it, if his neighbor could take it whenever he had a mind to.

What keeps him from it, even if he has guns and men and sims enough to do it by force? Only the law."

"Something to that," Jeremiah admitted. He agreed only partly from policy; Caleb's idea had not occurred to him. He thought of the law only as something to keep from descending on him. That it might be a positive good was a new notion, one easier to arrive at for a free man, he thought without much bitoerness.

Enthusiasm carried Caleb along. "Of course there's something to it!

People who make the law and apply the law rule the country. I don't mean just the censors or the Senate or the Popular Assembly, though one day I'll serve, I think, but judges and lawyers too."

"That may be so, young master, but what will become of the farm when you've gone to Portsmouth to do your lawyering, or up to Philadelphia for the Assembly?" Jeremiah knew vaguely where Portsmouth was (somewhere southeast, a journey of a week or two); he knew Philadelphia was some long ways north, but had no idea how far. Half as far as the moon, maybe.

"One day Sally will get married," Caleb shrugged. "It will stay in the family. And lawyers get rich, don't forget. Who knows? maybe one day I'll buy the Pickens place next door to retire on."

Jeremiah's opinion was that old man Pickens would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into his grave before he turned loose of his farm.

He knew, however, when to keep his mouth shut. He also noticed that any talk about his freedom had vanished from the conversation.

Nevertheless, Caleb had not forgotten. One day he took Jeremiah aside and asked him, "Would you like me to teach you to read and cypher?"

The slave thought about it. He answered cautiously "Your father, I don't know if he'd like that." Most masters discouraged literacy among their blacks (sims did not count; no sim had ever learned to read). In some commonwealths, though not Virginia, teaching a black his letters was against the law.

"I've already talked with him about it," Caleb said. "I asked him if he didn't think it would be useful to have you able to keep accounts and such. He hates that kind of business himself."

The lad already had a good deal of politician in him Jeremiah thought.

Caleb went on, "Once you learn, maybe you can hire yourself out to other farmers, and keep some of what you earn. That would help you buy yourself free sooner, and knowing how to read and figure can only help you afterwards."

"You're right about that, young sir. I'd be pleased to start, so long as your father won't give me no grief on account of it."