Free Men (18 page)

She started the field this year and I don’t ask how it is because I know. Long and hot and the clenching pain in the back moves to the thighs and the knees and the taste of your own sweat is a sustenance. My mistress said she could find a place in the kitchen, but I thought the men would lash her less. And they do, because they are waiting for her to stop being a girl. When that happens, I have no plan. So they pull her shirt up to beat her every now and then, so they check for breasts. They haven’t yet done more.

And Bob
left
us to this?

I don’t know if I love him, but he looks like my daughters, and I’ll be damned if he gets away while I have to watch my children get churned under whatever wickedness we’re given.

Polly is asleep now, her hand still stuck to her face.

“Anyone touch you today?”

Delphy turns to me, reaches her fingers to my back. Rests them like little moths on the welts.

“Delphy?”

“Do you know where she keeps the key to the stables?”

I can’t ask her more. I don’t want to know how close her life is to mine. I want to give everything to her and then let her decide. “You miss him?” I ask.

“I guess I liked him better than you did.”

“That is entirely possible.” I untuck the blanket from Polly’s neck. She always wraps it around herself so tight that I worry she can’t breathe. “So this is what you want.”

Delphy’s hand is a five-legged animal that canters up and down my arm. A trick her daddy taught her.

Family, is it? That’s what’s being asked of me? I can’t figure how my girls got to thinking they weren’t just slaves, weren’t just going to settle. There was none of this a week ago, even with the preacher’s talk of Moses. We were all the way ordinary. Did the work, fell back to the cabin after dark, squabbled. Woke up and did the work.

What is my life? I’m up before the rooster is, gathering food from the scraps that have been handed out five days before and the meager greens my garden makes. By first light there is a poor breakfast for my girls, and they are out, Polly to the granny and Delphy to the fields, a trowel in her hand that she has promised not to break. Her shadow walking away from me looks like no more than candle smoke. Don’t know where in her small body she fits the muscles that will pull up the earth, chop back the cane. I’m in the master’s house before anyone stirs, a bowl of warm water ready for my mistress on her stand, her skirts laid out and ironed, lavender rubbed into her underthings to cut the stink of sweat till wash day. She is up and I am kneeling—sponging her, dressing her, brushing out the night-knotted hair, mixing the rouge for her cheeks. She rattles on about her father or her father’s father, the glory of Spain with all that citrus, what she would do if her husband woke up dead one day. I’m given a lash once across each palm for pulling at her scalp. She says there are places where I wouldn’t be a slave at all, though what use would I be. I top her hair with a lace mantilla and not till she’s left the room to start her day do I take up her chamber pot and carry its slopping stench down the back stairs. And all this before the white folks’ breakfast.

I turn back to my daughter.

“You want your daddy,” I say again.

She smiles, my oldest girl, who hardly ever smiles. The longer she lives, the more things she won’t be able to tell me. And then she’ll have babies of her own and know what it’s like to watch your children hole up their black secrets. Though it is no secret; I too am black. I know.

“And Polly?” I ask.

“Oh, she’ll be quiet. We’ve been practicing being quiet.”

WHAT I REMEMBER
about meeting Bob is that my master, who was not Josiah but a man named Cunningham, sold me from his farm because I spit in his daughter’s pudding. There weren’t any witnesses, so I don’t know what evidence they had. I was angry and young enough and not especially patient toward men. And what was Bob but a man being thrown at me. They set us up in our own cabin and said, “Have at it,” and now that I’m more grown I can recognize that I wasn’t entirely kind. I was tired, and I couldn’t explain this to him. It’s different for a woman. He wanted to flop his arms around me, even when he was mad, and all I saw was another weight. Without saying anything, he begged me to love him and I said no.

I was pleased when he started riding to the Indians because it gave me time alone, but that passed when Delphy came. Though she was not a trouble but an ally. A girl who’d grow up and know what it was like for me when I was ten, and fifteen, and twenty years old. This was selfish, to want that, so I did what I could to turn her path different from mine. I made her daddy hold her. I kept her from the kitchen. I talked to her about her grandmas and great-grandmas, even when I had to make it up. I sewed all the holes in her clothes so nothing could be seen.

As we got older, I didn’t mind him so much. He was like a
pup, and harmless. He wanted big things and I wanted to keep us all alive, but he was lovable and I don’t lie when I say that it got to where I loved him. If love is relief when they come home in the dark in one piece.

We kept finding each other. Holding on tight. There was a baby that didn’t make it past the first day, the baby that died of the cough, and Polly. And the beginning of another one who decided, before she even saw this misery, not to live at all.

If you add it all up, with Bob in there too, it really does have the look of a family. No, I have no memory of my own kin. Unless this is it. What I’ve been given to defend.

ONLY WHEN MY
mistress is in her nap can I sit and not move for a minute. A siesta, she says, for beauty. Each time she wakes up I widen my eyes as if sure enough, she’s already looking better. This day is the same as other days except I’m not thinking about what else can be made with a handful of yams and an egg but about what my plan would be if I was going to make one. Stupid that I didn’t sit in on Bob’s planning. I might’ve learned a few tips. Maybe I can visit Mingo. They were always whispering.

But this is what a woman can come to on her own:

One, kill myself and my children. This is not a good idea because it doesn’t bring them closer to their father (though I don’t know, maybe it does) and I’m squeamish. And can’t help believing sometimes in God, who maybe is wrathful about such things. Two, kill my owners. Or wait till Josiah—or José, or Master—is visiting some other rum dealer and just kill my mistress, which would be easy with a little oleander tea, she even showed me which it was. Or tying her to her bed while she siestaed and setting the bed on fire. Which might be difficult unless
I stacked the bed with kindling and even then, I’m squeamish. Three, run the hell away. Not on foot because of the girls, but I guess on a horse. Pack some bags with food (yams, an egg) and head out at night when there’s some other commotion, like one of the fancy parties they sometimes have for the diplomats and the soldiers, or ex-soldiers, depending on which war. Once you’re over the Florida line, the slave patrols stop knowing who you are, especially if you’ve got papers written in Spanish with words that look like
libre
. And then the only trick is finding where my husband went. Not to the Indians, I know—they checked. It’s got to be west, to that made-up farm. Somewhere west. Well, I can follow a sun and ask people politely if they’ve seen a black man who talks too much, and as long as the horse I pick is the fastest in the stable, we’ve got a chance for a while. We’ll get to the Mississippi, and if we’ve had no sign of him, maybe we’ll think about starting up our own farm. When he hears tell of the rich negress and her wild plow-pushing daughters, he can come find us. If he’s listening for us.

My mistress grunts and heaves herself over on the mattress like a grub flopping out of the dirt. She thinks being fat is pretty, and so she is mighty pretty. She once asked me what I dreamed about and when I said I was usually too tired to dream, she scolded me. “I am always tired,” she said, “and I have most wondrous dreams! Castles and cold rivers and many, many kittens. People don’t dream only because they don’t think, they’re stupid. I do not say you are stupid, but.” I could have told her what I dreamed about, but the shock would’ve kept her up at night and it was best for me if she slept sound.

I know she wants to leave too. I could write her a note, tell her where the keys to the stable are kept.

That afternoon we feed the birds in the dovecote, which aren’t doves at all but blackbirds who are happy to have found a steady supply of crumbs.

In the evening, my back somehow unbroken, I pass Mingo’s cabin on the way to my own. He’s carving at the posts holding up his roof. I stop, see a man who’s a husband too, who talks big but hasn’t left, isn’t missed. I look hard at him, trying to think of what it is I really miss about Bob. How open the man was. How honest, and needy. If I had clutched him back in those first days, maybe we’d have grown into each other. Put all our griefs in the same basket. Don’t know why I never thought how much my own children would love him.

“You need something?”

I shake my head. I don’t have many friends on this plantation, but not enemies either. “What kind of foolishness are you doing to that post?”

“Rot,” he says. “Digging it out.”

“Thought you were making some kind of statue.”

“Any word of Bob?”

“No word. And good riddance.”

He seems a little more surprised than he should. “They send out the dogs yet?”

“Master’s still on his trip. They’re waiting till he’s back. For all I know, they’ll wait even longer. It’s planting time, and he’ll have visitors that don’t like hearing of runaways.”

“They won’t tell you, but it’s harder to find a man once he crosses out of Spanish lands. Never build a farm near a border.”

“Never dig good wood out of a bad post.”

He throws one of his tools onto the porch. “You ever need
some warming up at night, you know where to come.” He does a little swivel with his hip that I believe is supposed to be sexual.

“I’d bed your wife first,” I say, and walk off.

After a slim supper I make the girls practice their best quiet faces. I sit them in the middle of the floor while I tinker around, cleaning up the dishes, sweeping the dirt out, mending a torn shirt. Delphy must have promised some treat to Polly, because neither are making a sound. When I’m done with this torture, I kneel down in front of them. Between my daughters and my mistress, my knees are as callused and dry as stumps.

“I think you’re right,” I say. “About your daddy.”

“That we need him,” Delphy says.

“That you don’t need all of this.” I mean yams, dirt, cut skin.

“You find the key?”

“The fastest horse?” Polly says, then puts her hand over her mouth, not sure if she’s allowed to be talking yet.

“If we get caught, I don’t have to tell you what happens.”

“Beaten and sold,” Delphy says.

“Or
killed
.” She claps her hand up again, this time smiling. Look at this world they’re in; listen to their jokes.

WE DON’T HAVE
to wait long for the party. Three days later the master’s back from a trip and brings with him a half-dozen Spaniards who are new to the New World and who trip over themselves flattering my mistress. She runs her hands across her belly as if to goad them further. We serve food on trays, fill glasses, carry coats and hats from room to room. Even our children are dressed up and paraded; one of them knows French, I can’t figure how, and she garbles out a few words so the guests
can marvel at the negroes and curse their enemies. After a few hours of this, everyone is very drunk.

The key is kept on a loop by the mirror in my master’s room, which is not my mistress’s room. The only people upstairs are a Spaniard and a slave, halfway to fornication, though I can see that her hands massaging his backside are actually in his pockets, fumbling for whatever’s there, and I keep walking. No one stops me. On my way down the stairs, one man grabs my breast, pressing me hard toward the banister, but I slide limply down onto the step and he assumes I’m as fuddled as he is; unable to reach down for me and still keep his balance, he moves on. The children are in the front room, watching a man snore on the sofa, and I nod at my girls and they follow me out and down the front steps. I stop when I hear her voice from the porch.

“Winna!”

I turn around, my legs prickling.

“Where’s my watering can?”

“Ma’am?”

“Just look at all the sad roses!”

She looks like a white toad dressed in black, happy and sad the way toads sometimes seem, both at once.

“I put it in the attic,” I call back, and she smiles and nods and teeters back inside.

In an hour, they will fall down in their places and sleep until they don’t remember what they swallowed or who they screwed.

“Maybe when you’re a hundred you’ll forget all of this,” I say, but my daughters are too far ahead of me to hear, jogging on their short legs toward home.

I’ve sewn straps onto sacks so they can carry their bags more easily. I don’t know how much food or water we’ll need, not
knowing how far we’re going. I made the bags heavy enough that they’ll feel some confidence, like I’ve provided for them and we’re going to be all right. I feel more like a mother these days, even as I’m sending my children into the wilderness, away from shelter, toward bounty hunters and maybe wolves. I don’t even know if wolves would eat a girl, but I’m sending us toward them anyway.

There’s no way to tell which is the fastest horse in the dark. I let Polly pick her favorite. It’s a black one, sturdy enough, who doesn’t protest as I lead him out and throw a blanket and saddle over his back and slip a bit through his teeth. I learned all this from Bob, who brought me here to show off what he knew. Everything’s heavier and harder than he made it seem. With a little grudge I give him some respect. I pull a stool over to hoist the girls up. Polly is giggling like mad and Delphy’s eyes are wide, scared. I crawl up, the horse sidestepping from the weight of me, and fix myself between them, holding Polly in front of me and making Delphy hold me from behind.

“Now we’re quiet,” I say.