Free Men (4 page)

My first trip, he launched me off at night. The crowding black trees on the trail looked so heavy I ducked my head for a mile, thinking they’d topple down, press me to death, at a single wind. I wasn’t used to being sent out on my own, responsible for my
own body but on behalf of another man. I had borrowed myself. The farther I got, of course, the straighter my head sat and the more I looked around at the wildness that swallowed the air, that choked it with musk and weeds. It didn’t escape me that I was a black man on a horse. Would Primus be proud of me, or would he know something I didn’t, about how the horse knew not to take me anywhere free, or about how I myself wasn’t yet brave enough to run? I whistled so the owls wouldn’t dive for me in the dark. Master had given me a note for a tavern that stood partway along the route, but I didn’t trust this, so I took my horse two inches off the trail and burrowed behind a palmetto stand so that anyone who tried to get me would first send up a holy clatter. It was cold, and I was frightened of all the things I didn’t know, and I thought of how my brother, long dead, would be halfway to freedom by now, how any red-blooded dark-skinned man would be leaping through swamp and bramble, scotch-hopping over alligator heads to get away from the scent of slavery. The bottom of a bog would be better land to stand on than this path that unrolled like a limb from a sugar plantation. But there I was, arm’s-length from the trading road, nervous to stray farther. I couldn’t sleep that night, not knowing what my body should be doing.

But the morning brought other things to fuss over and fear, like the Indians that were waiting at the end of the path to take my master’s rum and hand me money, and I didn’t have high hopes for how that transaction would go. Master, who I now sometimes called Josiah in my head to bring him down to the size of other men, had told me not to mind about the language, that they would know what I was there for and as long as I didn’t make a fool of myself I’d get out scratch-free. Don’t move quickly, he’d said, and don’t smile overmuch, for those teeth of
yours are liable to fright them. I did in general smile more than I should, for it was easier than sorrow, of which there was enough to drown us if we opened our mouths to it. So all I knew was to stand still and frown and if they raised their bows at me I’d drop to the ground and cover my head so the arrows at that angle would have a difficult time finding purchase. This last I had thought about plenty.

As it turned out, the Indians were not wild animals, and they didn’t have fangs or bared bottoms, and I saw no children boiled for supper. The men were mostly the same height as me and some smiled and some didn’t, and one even shook my hand like an Englishman. I stayed with them for two days and though I only heard my language spoken a few times, we understood each other—they pointed where the river was for washing and showed me how to eat the acorn bread and in the evenings I played a game with the young ones where I threw a spear at a rolling stone, and every time it went sailing far past, they all laughed so hard that I thought I’d won. I even got to sample Josiah’s liquor, which no white man would’ve ever let me do, so by the time I saddled up for home I had come to think of these men—not red at all but copper and brown, like the rest of us—as something more akin to me. They had slaves, but who didn’t have slaves?

Those trips became dreams, where I like a witnessing bird could fly over strangeness, but it wasn’t home, and it wasn’t real. I was still mostly a boy, my heart still empty from my mother, and I thought finding family again was anyone’s only intent. As far as I knew, life was just a rotten thing, and finding another person to take care of you—to cook your grits and comb out your hair and patch up the knees of your pants and maybe, if
there was time, to sneak you a soft kiss—this was the only thing that made it bearable, for white and black men both. What was liberty without that? As I’ve said, I was very young and hadn’t thought much through.

HER NAME WAS
Beck, and she was more a woman than a girl, for she was older than me and had already had a husband, wed and buried. I would be gone to the Indians for a week once a month or so, and when I was home, in the time between stripping cane and sleeping, it wasn’t hard to fall in love. She wore her hair in a purple wrap that came from I don’t know where but it made her look like a queen, and she walked as tall and straight as one, no matter the curling lash marks round her calves. She took an interest in me in a motherly sort of way, but not at first seeing the mother in her sweetness, I took her gifts in the evening, biscuits and blue flowers and the fallen palm spines that looked like daggers.

She was the only one in the fields who wouldn’t sing, and I figured she was saving her voice for something else, for someone, and I thought this very dignified. Maybe it was her being older that I found most lovable. I trailed her when she walked back to the cabins at night, I stood small behind a tree outside her window, hoping to catch the shadow of her undressing, I wrote a song for her that I never shared, believing she didn’t like singing altogether. I wanted to hear another person’s dreams again, for I had none of my own.

One night she came out with a cloth bundled up in her hand and warm. “For your vigil,” she said, and walked back inside. I was hollowed out with shame; I unwrapped the cloth and found fried plantains, fresh from her skillet. She always knew I was
there, since being a woman she had eyes in a ring around her head and could smell a man at fifty paces, but she didn’t ask me to leave. I knocked on her door and she let me in and we ate plantains because I was too shy to feed them to her. She had skin that looked like she was always sitting near a fire, and I wanted so badly to put both my hands on her cheeks, just to feel them. She let me lie down on her pallet while she cleaned her dishes and tidied the two or three things she owned. It was dark, and the only home I had to return to was full of men, dank bodies stretched out, none of them knowing any piece of my past, despite having heard the whole story a hundred times. Here at least there was a woman, and didn’t women hold the histories of all of us? I told her all sorts of things, stories about catching lizards by their tails, pretending to lose two of my fingers to scare my mother, about being six years old, and seven, and she puttered around, humming a little under her breath, like she knew I just needed to flush it all out of me and once I was done I’d be harmless again. I didn’t even really notice that she was humming, which if I had thought about it was a kind of song. A while later she kicked me awake and told me to get on with myself, to scoot back to where I came from. I leaned in to kiss her, and she pushed me back and herded me right out of her cabin. I wonder what it is about these women that they put up with us for so long, don’t ask for anything, just abide our selfishness. Maybe it’s not so different from having a pet, an old hound dog that just licks itself and barks at snow.

I came back as often as I remembered something I had forgotten to tell her (I kept a list), and she’d listen and scrub her clothes in a pot of water and then hurry me along, and after a few weeks of this I had determined to marry her. She was al
ready family, having all the knowledge now that any of my siblings did, and she was never unkind. This is all a man wants: familiarity and peace.

The first time I asked her I brought a fistful of yellow flowers and sat us down on the stoop of her cabin.

“What is this?” she said, pinning the purple cloth around her hair.

I made swampy eyes at her and handed over the sweat-heavy bouquet. I made more swampy eyes.

“Come on, now,” she said. “Spit it or move along.”

Did I say how kindly she was? Like Mother Mary herself, only firmer. I made my eyes get brimful of intention, I was so intentioned that all she’d have to do was say yes. But she kept looking at me like I was being peculiar, and I figured that maybe we didn’t speak the same eye language after all, which wasn’t a mark against her, it only made her more exotic. So I had to come right out and say it, with a lot of hacking and a hot face, not from being nervous but from being so certain.

“Marry you?” she said. “Marry you?” I repeated it to myself a hundred more times. She smiled and shook her head—not in a
no
kind of way, but because she was charmed—and I decided that we had reached an agreement.

“I’ll call on you tomorrow,” I said, to be formal.

“You can call whenever you like, little pup, it won’t get you very far.”

“We don’t have to marry right away,” I said, “but I’d better go ahead and tell Master, and then we can think about where our house should be.” In other words, should our house be at my house, which was wall to wall with men, or her house, where there was a pallet and a pan for the fireplace and a good broom
she already knew how to use. But I believed it was important to be polite in these matters.

She shook her head again, like a horse at the fence, like a mother over a cradle, and I knew better than to try again for a kiss, seeing as our love was holier than that, so I just squeezed her hand and stood and said, “We’ll be happier than any man and wife has rights to be,” and I marched off into the night again, proud, with only a hint left of loneliness.

I don’t know how long she would have let me believe we were going to be married. When Treehorn found me in the fields and mentioned offhand that Master was going to wed me to one of Mr. Cunningham’s negroes, I said that was all right, I had already picked a woman out for myself. I didn’t know, for no one had ever told me, and my back took the brunt of it. When I slipped into Beck’s cabin to have her hands soothe my wounds, she laughed and looked sad and said she wouldn’t have me on no count and I should’ve made certain before making such a fool of myself. I told her she knew I loved her and she said she knew no such thing and that I better go find myself someone who would suit, for she had given up, at least in this world, on having any feeling again that even tasted like love.

I said I had feeling enough for both of us. And wasn’t it my right, in the end, to love her? What did I know of rights?

On one of our last nights I asked her why she wouldn’t have had me when there was a chance, and she took my chin in her hand and gave me her full direct stare, not swampy at all, but as kind as the best sort of lover. “Bob,” she said, “little Bob. I’ve had my joy.”

“You don’t want any more than that?” I said, having never asked about the man who was her husband, never asked the
widow any questions at all, really. (Months later, I’d learn from a gossipy old woman that Beck had had a baby, that the baby had lasted a year, and then one morning coddled in the quilt the baby just didn’t open its eyes and its little chest stopped going up and down and though Beck and her still-alive husband shook it and shook it, it didn’t wake up again. Oh, what did I know of children?)

“You’ll see,” she said. “Soon you’ll be old enough to know what you want, and it’ll take all of you to get it and hold it. It’ll take all of you to keep on holding it, even after nothing’s left. That’s what all this is, just finding and then holding.”

I thought her very stupid, because being young, I knew that the heart could hold a thousand things, that desire was endless, endless.

A MAN WANTS
to communicate. There’s no such things as stories told to no one. For a week or so after Beck said she wouldn’t have me, I thought my heart would burn out of me, leaving an ashy hole in my chest. I laid down my cane knife so many times in the fields that my back bled each night from Treehorn’s whip. I was in love with her, I told myself, full in love, and this is any man’s broken heart. But that was only half true, because Beck was just a fancy in the end, just a marker I had used to measure how much I belonged, and when she didn’t claim me I was cut loose, my lungs filling with water.

I lay in my cabin at night, cloths pressed to my back to soak up the splits in me, and it came to me that this world was a broken one, that all the humans I had ever loved were scarecrows, that all that was real was your own self. Beck was not a woman but just another test of myself, and I had failed. I didn’t need a
lover, or a mother, or a brother, because I had none and wasn’t I still alive? Didn’t the blood on my back prove it? This was what I learned those nights, that I am the only thing I can ever know. And this life, the way it was set up with its cabins and fields, its rounded women and its whips, this was all meant to put you in a kind of order, to connect you to a bunch of other things with little strings that called themselves fondness and fear. Those strings weren’t real at all, because someone else strung them up.
I
wouldn’t’ve chosen to hack all day at cane stalks with a dull knife. Wasn’t
my
rum or money that went back and forth between white hands and Indian hands. Come to think of it, I thought, bent in a crook of pain between two snoring men, this wasn’t my life at all.

Primus had it right. Get yourself a new life, a free one, make things that no one else can claim. Don’t give your hands to any man; don’t give your heart, which is worse. What was he doing, wherever he was, now that he was dead? It wasn’t what I was doing: giving, giving, and hurting. No, he had it right. Not the rope around the neck, but the farm out west. So what if you were alone? You’re always alone. Out there, won’t be any scarecrows to fuddle you. I had to stop letting these worms in my heart.

I wiped my nose on my wrist, leaving a little slug trail, and started tracing my house in the dust on the floorboards. The men kept snoring. It would be this wide, and this long, with a porch along the south edge and a pen for the mule. Here was the blueberry field, and here the lake for swimming. Here were the miles and miles of emptiness all around it, not a white man or Indian in sight. Did I really believe it, even then? Remember that I was a cheerful boy.

SO A WOMAN
was brought from Mr. Cunningham’s like a mare on a rope, and we were given our own cabin and the master’s blessing and left alone to carry on our fine bonded race. Her name was Winna and she was about my age and I couldn’t love her quite the same, though I don’t think she knew, or maybe minded.