Free Men (5 page)

Turns out a body can’t get settled into aloneness at the tip of a hat. I hated Master for pairing me up with a woman I’d never seen in my life, but damn me if I didn’t try to cling to her those first few weeks. Poor child, I’d hug on her and tell her stories and then next thing, I’d be kicking her and telling her no, get out, she wasn’t real and didn’t hardly matter. She had a worse temper than Beck, and didn’t just hum along when I got in a mood. Those early months we picked at each other and fussed and did our own chores not speaking, and sometimes talked about general things, and once she let me try to braid her hair, which was a challenge but I never balked at learning something new.

I had just gotten back from another trip to the Indians when she told me she was pregnant. This was an ordinary thing, it was no mystery what had brought it about, but we both looked at each other like we had found something dead in the room and we didn’t know which of us had killed it.

“When’s it coming?” I said.

“In a bit.”

I put my satchel on the chair and pulled out my road-soiled clothes and the husk doll some Creek child gave me and then shook out the crumbs of biscuit from the bottom of the bag.

“You better sweep that up,” she said.

“Is it jumping around yet?” I pointed at her belly.

She looked down, surprised.

Did my father, whoever he was, have this conversation with my mother? Were children always such dreaded things, like the other side of ghosts? I didn’t ask how Winna felt, or if she’d had a father.

Going to sleep that night, or trying to go to sleep—shutting my eyes tight against the sounds outside, the katydids and the man who wandered sleepless, muttering in a Spanish that was part African—in the trying to sleep I often found half truths, or quarter truths, like colored beads in my head. Wasn’t this seed of a baby a sign that I was grown now, that I had no more need to be lonely of my mother or my lost siblings, but could find company in the family I built my own self? Isn’t this what happened to people who lived long enough to get older? The man outside was chanting now. I understood when he said
Dios
and
caña
, but otherwise nothing.

When I thought about a little person coming into this world who would see things as I saw them, who would crouch in a pen looking at the far fields for a glint of his mother, it grew in my head that this life was not just a single thing, mine alone, but was a big circle that rolled over on itself again and again, that what struck me with pain would strike my child too, that this was not a life but a system, and for the first time my boyish grief took on the color of rage. I didn’t just want my people back; I wanted out.

This was what Primus meant by the farm. How to get free of everything that made you not yourself but something else: a slave, a husband, an orphan, unloved. Primus’s dream, then, wasn’t only his. He wouldn’t mind if I stole it.

I was still young, nineteen maybe, and so these thoughts were just quarter thoughts there in the smoke-smelling night, they’d take years still to grow, but that’s where they came from: those women and that first whisper that I had made a whole other life again out of nothing. Damn me and every other slave that had done it, but there it was. The wheel rolling over on itself again.

IT WAS WHEN
she was full with the second baby, and I was maybe twenty-one, that the unsettlings of the white men boiled over. And the Indians, I should say. I had picked up a few words by then, but while I was saying
hesci
and
estonko
, the Creeks were raising the conversation to something I couldn’t make sense of, other than that war was involved, which all the musket-cleaning made clear. I still couldn’t have told you their names, but being in their town with no fences, with folks who didn’t want anything from me other than my master’s drink, this let me step back a little and breathe something close to free air. They started sending me home with messages along with the skins, and if I knew anything about reading, I would’ve learned that the fighting that had been surging around to the north of us was headed south, and that the Spanish wanted their land back.

Standing in the hall of the big house, waiting to be sent home to wash the road off my clothes, I could hear Master and his lady squabbling upstairs, fast-talking over each other about who owned what and whether they still had friends in the West Indies.

The Spanish came, spring of 1781, just when the baby was ready to pop out. We were north enough of Pensacola to escape the siege, though Master had to stop carting things to the port for a few months. We waited and got news from folks who’d
fled, black and white alike, war being the time when what you were supposed to do melted into what you
could
do. A woman snuck into the quarters one night and was queen for the evening as she told us all she’d seen. Cannon aimed both north and south, ships in the bay shooting at the forts (which we heard all the way from here), storms lashing about (which wetted us too), Indians running supplies both ways, not having decided who would be best for neighbors. “I even saw black men,” she said, “in
uniforms
,” and she stood up with her arm across her chest, formally, to show us she knew what a uniform was. “All six feet tall, and
handsome
.” They were fighting for the Spanish, so we cheered for the Spanish, not knowing the difference but what we saw in our owners: our British master pale and simmering, his wife a round ball of fire.

Soon the sky to the south quieted down and the low booms stopped keeping us up at night, and then the barrels of sugar that came out of our farm were stamped with different words. All our neighbors moved to islands in the Gulf or back to England, while we pretended we were always Spanish, our mistress suddenly the figurehead again on her own farm. We lived because we pretended to have always been what we were not; we were spared because we spoke their language and were content. And so the lesson of the slave became the lesson of his master.

THE SECOND BABY
came as soon as the British left, like she was waiting for quiet, though she died before the day was out, and a year or two later there was another baby, and still I bent every day in the fields with my cane knife, still I carried the hot ladle of syrup from kettle to kettle, still I waited for Master to send me to the Creeks with a wagon of rum, and still I stuck to
that northward path, only pulling off to sleep in peace. Winna and I settled into ourselves and became friendly, for of all the things we were fighting in our lives, it wasn’t worth fighting each other. I came to have a great affection for her, which some days is better than love.

By the time Beck was sold, no one knows where, I had settled my heart enough to say goodbye without any scene, because this was familiar after all, this was just the wheel turning. I saw her most days in the field and we said hello and asked the simple questions but that was all. You know how you can love someone for years without any hope, and this is all right, a little pain but mostly pleasure, and how you just wait for it to grow old like a dog and pass on? And it does, it weakens and turns to normal, and you and the woman you love are old friends after all, though sometimes when you see her breasts exposed to the whip for rudeness, your sorrow is struck through with a rare tenderness that goes past friendship. So maybe love never passes on, maybe it just covers itself over, curls into a seed, waits.

With her gone, all the strong feelings in me were sleeping.

WHEN OUR YOUNGEST
baby was just a few months old, she got a coughing sickness that scared the granny enough to tell Treehorn, which I don’t know that Winna would have done. Treehorn was fickle, but he had a fondness for babies. Master being in a good mood, he sent the white doctor to our cabin, a man who showed up not when the dysentery came or when a field hand got caught in a bear trap, but when Master had woken up in a sunny patch and was feeling kindly.

Me and Winna stood in the corner, arms crossed, as the doctor turned our baby over and patted her back, looked in her
mouth, felt for lumps along her side. The baby cried the whole time, and I knew without looking that Winna was crying too. The sight of those white hands, clammy as skinned fishes, on the cool dry brown of our baby—it seemed like he’d leave a stain on her. He wasn’t there for long, and after he named the sickness and dropped our baby back on the mattress like a corn sack, he gave us a rub to put on her chest and left the way he came, without looking at any of our eyes.

We sat down, and Winna was small and hunched, so I put my arm around her and then scooted over so my shoulder would warm up her shoulder. She was still crying, so I patted her back and then squeezed her neck, and when I bent my head to kiss her cheek, she just snuffled, so I kissed her face all over until she was crying harder, and for some reason this was a good thing. The baby was quiet now and we were the noisy ones. Her face all wet in my hands was like a body fresh from swimming, pure and good, and it made me think how right it was for Primus to do what he did over a creek, so that his shape would be reflected in the water and would be made innocent again. And I felt a wash of love for him that carried over to the woman beside me, the way you can see a rabbit in the cane and it’s so rounded and sweet that when you turn back to see the broken-in face of the man next to you, it doesn’t seem as cruel. All our bodies are curved by God the same way he curves everything else good in the world.

Her body was round and fit in my rounded hands, and I tried to promise myself that I’d always treat her like she was my only true love. She wasn’t like Beck, she didn’t humor me, she didn’t listen when I talked, but so be it, maybe I talked too much.

The baby was asleep, and we were down beside her, our arms tangled up and Winna’s face smooth now, shiny with old tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said, quiet.

“You didn’t do anything.”

“For putting you in this place. For being a woman that a man had to marry.”

I hushed her and pulled her close, but I didn’t say, “Not your fault,” or even “I accept your apology,” because a little pinch of me still felt that maybe she was right to say she was sorry, so I wasn’t going to stand in her way.

The baby wouldn’t live through the week, but we didn’t know that then, thinking we were lucky to have had the white doctor, loathsome as he was. Lucky for the scrap thrown our way.

That night when the man outside wandered by with his Spanish song, I mumbled some of the words along with him, keeping my voice low so as not to wake all the women in my house.

I HAD HEARD
of slaves who lost their limbs one at a time for missing tobacco leaves in the field, men who were bred with women like bulls, women who were bent over by white men and taken like whores, children whose knuckles were broken by white women with canes and irons and rocking chairs. I had heard of slaves who were brought into the great house and given new clothes and fresh meat three times weekly and passes on Saturdays to see kin and were trained to make a living, the coins for horse-shodding and gun-fixing and egg-selling being their own. I was not the one or the other. I would not make a tale for the ladies to weep over, nor could I buy my freedom after three years and build a house next to my master’s and share carriages to town. I had heard just enough through field tales and night meetings to know that I was not so good or bad off, which should have been something to find comfort in except it meant I
had nothing much to complain about and nothing much to hope for. I was the ordinariest of slaves. (If white men were ever so ordinary, they’d die in a day.)

Four more years passed, and two more children, one that stayed alive and one that grew in Winna’s belly and then shrunk again and let herself out of the womb in a little sweep of blood. You learned where to step and what to say, and when the whippings came, you took them because that’s just what white men did. They couldn’t tell what you were thinking of when your back was being split: what color welts a brand might raise on their own grub-pale skin. You treated your wife good, you chased the little ones in the yard at night so they’d get worn out before bed, you ate as much meat as you could get on Sundays but not enough to hurt your belly. Some did it as a way to get to heaven, since God seemed particular about those things; the way I acted, you’d think I listened hard at church. I was old enough now to see both the wrongness in a life and the comfort that comes from staying in it. “You want to make it alive each day,” Winna would say, “that’s it.” But I knew that wasn’t all anyone ever wanted, because my brother’d had a burning wish, and it had nothing to do with being alive, because he’d scratched that off quick.

Sometimes I thought back to those black men in uniforms, those handsome men who had held guns during the siege and won. They were a piece of something beyond this broken wheel. The way they carried their guns in my head, I could tell they were on their way to farms out west, land they owned because they owned themselves. Whether they died at Pensacola or not, they had those guns, had themselves.

I wouldn’t know my heart from my hands till I was gone from
this.
Free
, I started muttering quiet in the rows.
Free
, though I didn’t know how to get it.

It was a small step from thinking about it to talking about it, my mouth being what it was, so I started sharing little bits with Winna, trying to figure out where she stood. Well, she stood firmly in that cabin with those children, that’s where. She took to knocking me on the head whenever I started out with “But what if—,” and told our two girls not to pay any heed. The more she said no, we’d be dead before we were free, the more I thought about Primus and knew that being dead and being free were just about equal, and both better than what we had. I was like a man with a pick, just whiling away the time on a block of stone.

“If the moon were—,” I’d say, and “Master’ll be traveling next—”

I started talking to other folks: a man named Mingo who knew the roads, and a woman who’d seen her son slip beneath a wagon blanket and get trotted off who-knows-where.