Free Men (3 page)

I think this was once a longer story, with more tricks and turns, but it had settled down into the kernel of itself, which was no more than good and bad, and the triumph of the weak. We were the weak, and weakness to us just meant that we couldn’t admit to our muscle. I adored playing Antelope by the creek and would not have wanted to be Panther, who for all his speed and strength and clawed paws never climbed up the baby’s shoulder to heaven.

WHEN WE WERE
a few years older and Primus was already in the fields, stripping the yellow leaves with the others, collecting his hate, we’d play at building houses in the evening—maybe because our own was so crowded and damp—him lying in the scrabble outside our cabin, his arms worn out but not his mind, directing me from the blueprints in his head. I made rooms for him out of bark and corn husks, two and three stories high, far grander even than the big house. I wallpapered them with our
mother’s hair rags, stuffed inside for color. When I was finished, he’d idle his eyes over and tell me what was missing, and then he’d be the one to find the donkey. It was usually a scrap of our dinner, or the dried-out canoe of a pecan hull, and Primus’d set it up alongside the twigged front porch so it was just right for whenever the owner decided to swagger out the door. We never really put a man inside, for we were the men, and it was our house.

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?

On the trail spiraling down from Virginia to Florida, us hobbled to the wagon and the whites on horses, I saw things I’d never seen before: low mountain passes and flat dry land and earth that looked solid till you put your foot in and water came seeping up or the sand dropped out from under you or you found your leg in a fox den, and anything that didn’t look like the three
hundred acres of forest and tobacco fields where I’d spent all my years now took me by surprise. I saw Indians for the first time, and they too struck me strange, for I never knew there were such things as Indian women, but there they were in the uplands, riding horses by themselves with baskets of baskets behind them. Treehorn and the other man bought their liquor from a Catawba near Columbia, and the three of them drank together round a fire while the rest of us were chained to trees outside the circle of light. I had thought Indians were just like us, but they’re not at all. Their place is by the fire, but it’s a fire they have to build themselves, so I don’t know what they are.

When it rained we got wet, and when the sun baked, our skin started peeling in sheets, and when the horses were tired from pulling the wagon, we walked until our feet had burred soles. When the men with branded cheeks tried to escape before dawn, they were beaten until their backs matched their faces, and when the women dragged slow behind, the chains were tightened round their necks. And still I talked, and still I mumbled out all I saw for people who didn’t care to understand a word I was saying, leaving out the sorrow, leaving in every bright thought I ever had. They could’ve whipped me for never shutting my mouth, and I sometimes looking back on it wonder why they didn’t, and I figure they must could have used the sound.

We got to the farm in the warmest part of the late afternoon, when all the January sun seemed to have puddled in that one place, and it looked like a dream with trees I’d never seen, some with spiky leaves and some with branches longer than the trunk was tall, and moss hanging over everything so that things sounded softer, but there was a white wood house big in a clearing and shacks far behind it and behind them crops in the same
rows and rows I’d seen before, and nothing was really so different after all. Only the air hung heavier here and was saltier and the cabin they put me in with some other slaves smelled sweet.

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.