“Is it true? Is the president shot?” A white woman, old and stooped beneath her black shawl, intercepted him. Her voice was a whisper. Her eyes shone with the hope he would say no. And with the dread that he would not.
“Yes,” he heard himself say. “He died just an hour or two ago.”
She began to cry. “What will happen to us now?” she implored. The question wasn’t rhetorical. She stared up at him with gleaming eyes. She waited for him. She needed his answer.
“I do not know,” he said. He walked on.
All about him people were beseeching one another for news. Women cried. Men did the same.
Someone brandished a newspaper. “It says here he was shot last night. Maybe he is only wounded.”
“No,” cried another man. “He died this morning.”
“Stop saying that!” ordered the first man. “Stop spreading rumor.” He pushed the second man, but it was a weak and peevish gesture and the second man did not respond.
“That’s what I heard,” the second man protested. “I heard that he died.”
Sam found it unsettling, this new idea that a president could die, that an entire nation could be left abruptly leaderless, rudderless, like an uncaptained ship drifting on mountainous seas. He paused a moment to find himself and realized that without meaning to, he had returned to the field where the unfinished monument to Washington jabbed a stubby finger toward the sun. The White House was just visible through the trees to the north. Sam could only imagine the scene inside.
He wandered south, looking for a bridge to cross the river. “Is it true?” Another woman approached him.
“Yes,” he said. He barely slowed.
What would happen now, he wondered. It was Lincoln who had prosecuted the war in the face of epic resistance and hardship. With him dead, would the war flare up again? Would the Negro be enslaved again? And if so, was Sam unknowingly walking headlong back into the old life he had found so intolerable, the life where your goings and comings, your very personhood and dreams, were circumscribed by another? He should turn back. Common sense and self-preservation demanded it. He could be back in Philadelphia in a few days, back at work in his beloved library by Thursday, surrounded by books, by knowledge, by the accumulated wisdom of a thousand great men.
He continued south. Tilda pulled at him.
At length, he came to a bridge spanning the Potomac River. The river was broad and placid here, lapping peacefully at the pilings below. Two
Union soldiers watched him approach. “What is your business?” one challenged when he stood before them.
“Nothing,” said Sam, surprised. “I am just walking.”
“What’s your name?”
Sam stiffened. His head came up. “My name is Sam,” he said.
“That’s all? Sam?”
The soldier—a boy, really, shaggy blonde hair, chin whiskers still wispy—was spoiling for a fight. Sam considered his responses carefully. He thought of saying he was Sam Wilson, after the man who had owned him last, but something in him fumed against the thought. He had a self and it was one he wholly possessed, one that was not tied to a white man who had once considered him his property. Otherwise, what was the purpose of his escape to freedom? What was the purpose of these last four years of slaughter and privation? What was the purpose of the president’s murder? He was an individual, not a nameless, interchangeable part of some infernal white man’s machine.
So he looked the white boy quite deliberately in the eye. “Free man,” he said. He pronounced the syllables separately, distinctly, stopping between them, making them a statement in themselves. “My name is Sam Freeman.”
The boy’s eyes widened, then hardened. The next thing Sam knew, he was lying on the wooden planks of the bridge, his hand to his bloodied mouth, his eyes flashing light that was not there. Instinctively, Sam reached behind to push himself back up. He stopped when he saw the pistol leveled at him, the boy’s hand so tight on the trigger that in some part of his mind, Sam marveled that he was not already dead.
“You sassin’ me, nigger?” From somewhere beyond the pistol that filled his vision, the white boy’s voice came to him, high and shaky, as if the boy could not suck in enough breath.
All at once, Sam’s bladder felt urgent and full. He fought down an urge to let it go. He would not give them the satisfaction of urinating on himself like a baby. What had he said that was sass? What had he said that was anything but true? This was a new day. He was a free man. Did they expect him still to cower? To duck his head and grin like a child? No. He had done enough of that. He had done years of that.
“You asked who I was, sir,” he said, and was pleased to hear that his voice was quiet and reasonable and did not shake. “You asked my cognomen. You asked my appellation.” Big words the boy soldier would not know.
“I asked your
name
!” the boy thundered, and Sam was distantly gratified by this unwitting confirmation of ignorance.
“And I gave it to you,” he said. “My name is Sam Freeman.” He spoke evenly. He did not separate the syllables this time.
“Jakey, what are you doing?” The second soldier, a voice from far away, attempting to soothe his friend. “Put the gun down!”
“Did you hear him?” Jakey’s voice had risen yet higher in indignation. “That’s what it’s going to be like from now on, don’t you know? You mark my words. Niggers sassing white men, putting on airs.”
Sam ventured to speak. “I was not sassing you, sir.”
“You shut up!” The gun hand jerked. Sam flinched instinctively, hands leaping up of their own accord. It was a moment before he understood that there had been no shot, that he was still alive.
“This is what Lincoln has loosed upon us, you know,” the one called Jakey was saying. “Niggers will think they’re good as white men from now on. That’s what comes from all this. I tell you, Matthew, that’s not what I signed up for. That’s not what I fought for.”
“Jakey, put the gun down. Come on, now.”
The gun came closer. It shook. “You can live with ’em treating you like there’s no difference. I’ll be damned if I will.”
“Marse?”
A new voice had entered. Sam risked turning ever so slightly to find the source. His gaze fell upon a dark-skinned Negro who approached cautiously, palms up. It was Ben. He was smiling. His smile was blazing, teeth dazzling white and every last one on display.
The gun swiveled toward him, returned to Sam. “Who are you? What the hell do you want?”
Impossibly, the smile broadened. “You ain’t want to shoot ol’ Shine, sir. Shine, that’s what they calls me. And I was just trying to explain, this boy here ain’t meant no harm. No, sir. See, family he used to belong to, they’s called the Freemans. But they’s a white family, you see? Lives down near N’awlins. He just figure, with the fightin’ over, he go down there, see if they got any work for him. ’Cause he miss the old place, you see. Miss his white folks. Plumb sorry he ever run off, that’s what he told me.”
“Is that true?” the boy soldier demanded of Sam.
“
’Course
it true,” said Ben. He was next to Sam now, had his hands under Sam’s armpits and was pulling him to his feet. He never stopped talking,
never stopped smiling at the boy soldier. “We was traveling together, in fact, but Sammy here, he walk so fast, he so impatient to be there, he run off and left me. Ain’t that right, Sammy?” He smiled up expectantly.
It took Sam a moment. “Yes,” he finally managed. “Yes, that is right.”
Shine clapped him on the back hard enough to jar his bones. “See? There you go. This weren’t nothin’ more than a little misunderstandin’, is all.”
The soldier Jakey regarded them dubiously and for a moment, Sam was sure the lie had not worked. Then the second soldier took over and waved them through. “Go on, get out of here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Shine promptly. “Thank you, sir.” And, clasping Sam’s neck as if he were a troublesome child, he steered him past the guard post.
He let his hand fall away a moment later, but the two men did not speak. They walked in silence for long minutes as the bridge fell further behind them. Finally, Sam spoke. “I want to thank you for what you did.”
Ben snorted. “You mean, you couldn’t get yourself out of it with your ‘proper English’ and talkin’ like you got marbles in your mouth? No, I expect you couldn’t. Like to got yourself killed back there, mister
free man
.” He drew the syllables out scornfully. “How long you been a nigger anyway, mister
free man
?”
“I have never been that,” said Sam, not bothering to hide his scorn.
“You know what I mean,” insisted Ben. “You just woke up black this morning for the first time? Only thing I can figure for how you think you gon’ look that white boy in the eye and tell him you’s a free man.”
Sam felt his temper rising. He fought it down. “Well, as I said, thank you.”
“Old Abe a blood sacrifice, way I figure. Like Marse Jesus.” Sam looked at him, not comprehending. “Jesus, he died for the sins of the world,” explained Ben. “This man died for the sins of this country. Ain’t fit to waste such a sacrifice on no foolishness.”
It was not foolishness
, Sam wanted to say. He let it go. “Why did you give him that name, Shine? Why not give him your real name?”
“That one real enough.” He chuckled softly. “Ain’t you never had to put white folks on? White folks likes a name like Shine,
free man
. Puts ’em at ease.”
“It seems to me that a man’s name should do more than just put white folks at ease.”
This earned him a sly glance. “How you talk,
free man
. You ain’t careful, your name gon’ get you killed.”
They were silent together for a moment. Then Ben glanced up. “So,
free man
, I ask you again: you want to walk along here together for awhile? Like I told you, seem to me, we maybe might need each other.”
Sam nodded. “Yes,” he said, “maybe you have a point.”
And maybe they both were fools. This whispered up from some dark and frightened place in his heart before he could think to tamp it down. It was a ghost of a thought, gone almost before it was there. But it was there. Had been, off and on, ever since he left Philadelphia. More than once, he had thought of Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha, and the mad adventure he’d set off on that existed mostly in his own mind. More than once, Sam had decided to turn back.
But he pushed on. He had no choice, felt himself drawn toward her in some fundamental, mysterious way impossible to understand or resist. He had to see her. He had to know. It was as if he could not go on until he had heard her verdict on his life.
Sam had no idea what that verdict would be. Probably, he thought, she would hate him. And how could he blame her? He was responsible for the death of their son. If he had not been so determined, if he had not been so mule-headed, if he had simply
listened
to her, the boy would be alive to this day—indeed, the boy would be a man, maybe with children of his own—and they might all have been together right up til the emancipation, owned by a mistress who was good enough as mistresses went, who didn’t allow beatings and didn’t believe in separating families.
And it would have been all right. He could have lived on that. It hadn’t seemed so at the time, but now he knew: he could have lived on it.
Instead, he had filled the boy’s head with freedom. The boy had listened. And the boy had died.
And now, Sam was going back for the first time since it happened. To say what? That he was sorry, though Lord knew he was? To ask forgiveness? To say he never meant it to happen? To tell her that he never once, not for one moment in all those years, stopped loving her? The Lord knew that all this, too, was true, but what did it matter? What could he say, what words existed, for when he laid eyes on her for the first time after so many years?
None. None at all.
And what words existed for a world that had changed so profoundly as to be unrecognizable in the space of just days? They were free now.
Free
. And yet, if freedom didn’t mean you could choose your own name or walk where you wanted without challenge, then what did it mean? If it still required you to smile smiles you did not feel, to duck your head like a bashful boy and to put white folks on, maybe it had no meaning at all.
Just then, Sam and Ben had to jump into the mud by the side of the road to allow a calash to rush by, a well-dressed white man at the reins, chattering amiably with a woman at his side. Shine smiled that smile that made it seem as if a lamp had been lit inside his skull, then touched his forehead in greeting. Sam stared at his new companion in wonder and distaste.