Freeman, page 10
Of course, he hadn’t known that then. He had been wounded by her prediction, had drawn himself up and said righteously, “He’s dying every day, just being a slave. If I have to choose between dying slowly as that woman’s property or dying fast trying to be free, I’ll chose the last one every time.”
He had stared at her, daring her to respond, but she had not. For a long moment, they had only watched one another from either side of this gulf that had suddenly opened between them. After a time, she folded her arms over her heart and walked away.
And that had been that, effectively the last words that ever passed between them: her awful prediction, his smug reply. They were still not speaking to one another shortly after midnight that same evening when he gathered their son and slipped away with him, the two of them melting together into the impenetrable darkness of the moonless night. At the last moment, Sam glanced behind him to see her, just a shape, just a different shade of shadow in the blackness, standing in the doorway, arms still barricading her chest, watching them go.
“We ran away that night,” said Sam.
“You weren’t afraid the boy would slow you down?”
“Initially I was. As it turned out, I should have been worried I would slow him down. Luke could run for hours and never get tired. He wanted his freedom, you see. He desired it as deeply as I did, perhaps more.”
“How long before they come for you?”
“Two days.” Pause. “It was the best two days of my life.”
He remembered thinking that he had never really known his son before. How could he? When had he had the time? Sam working the fields all day, his son a houseboy waiting on Mistress and her seven children til all hours of the night. When had they had the time to be just father and son, fishing, talking, roughhousing with one another?
So it was hard not to smile some at the memory of those days alone with his boy. Running for their lives, mind you. Running to escape. But they had laughed as they had never laughed before, Luke imitating Mistress and all those children and their airs and pretensions with devastating accuracy. Late on the night of their second full day of freedom—the last night, as it turned out—they had even wrestled upon a carpet of fallen leaves to settle the question of which of them was the strongest. Sam had been surprised at the strength of his young son’s limbs. Just yesterday, the boy had been thigh high and clinging to his mother’s skirts. Now look at him, tall and straight and strong enough to make his father sweat a little, to make the veins pop out on his father’s arms, before finally giving up. And Sam looking down at him and smiling a private smile, knowing all at once it wouldn’t be long before he wouldn’t be able to pin the boy anymore.
Afterward, they had talked as they lay on their backs and watched the stars make their nightly pinwheel across the heavens.
“Where are we going to, Papa?”
“North.”
“Where in the North, Papa?”
“The Ohio River. You cross that into Ohio.”
“Ohio is in the North?”
“Yes. It’s free there.”
“How long will it take us?”
“Long time. We have a long way to go.”
“But we’ll be free there?”
“Yes.”
He was increasingly confident about that. Sam had forged traveling passes to help him get past any skeptical whites who stopped him and demanded to know what he was about. He had started out on a Friday night and it wouldn’t be until Monday that Mistress could place an advertisement in the paper or have handbills printed up. And it was whispered that there were white people who would help you, who would hide you in their homes, transport you in their wagons. There was said to be such a man in the next county north. Sam just had to find him, that’s all. It was the great unknown of this entire gamble, but if Sam could solve it, he thought they had a reasonable chance of getting away.
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do when you’re free?”
Sam had felt himself smiling in the dark. “Find work,” he said, “and save some money.”
“You’re going to get Mama?”
“Yes,” he said. “Mind you, it’s going to take a while, take a long time. But I’ll save some money and we’ll go back for your mother.”
“Why didn’t she want to come with us?”
The question made Sam’s chest tighten. “She was scared,” he said. “She thought we might get caught.”
“She likes it there.”
It took him by surprise. “No,” he said, “that is not it. She just…it’s just…sometimes, it is easier to stay with something you know, even if you don’t like it. It can be frightening to change.”
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“Are you scared?”
He considered this a moment. “A little,” he finally said, “but I’m excited, too.”
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you brought me.”
This struck some deep chord in him. “I am, too,” he said. “Now, go to sleep.” And they both did.
“The dogs woke us up the next morning,” he told Ben, and it seemed he could still hear them baying in the distance, still feel the freezing sweat that coated his skin in the early chill. They never had a chance. By the time he shook Luke awake and came to his feet, they were surrounded by white men.
There were six of them and they looked enough alike—dark hair, long noses, close-set eyes—that Sam knew right away they were related. A family of slave catchers. Four of them were on horseback and the other two held the leashes on a brace of bloodhounds, the dogs straining forward, barking excitedly. Three of the men on horseback held pistols trained on Sam and Luke. The oldest of the group, the one Sam took for the father, had his pistol holstered and sat his horse as casually as if he were bored.
Luke said, “Papa…” His eyes were wide and panic edged his voice.
“You had a good run, Perseus,” the older man told Sam. “Time to go back.”
“No!” The defiance in Luke’s shout took Sam by surprise. “No!” he cried again, “we’re not going back!”
Sam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Luke, hush,” he said. “We haven’t any choice.”
The man said, “You should listen to your daddy, boy. He knows what’s best.”
Luke turned to him then, and Sam knew the boy was waiting for him to give the word, tell him what they would do, tell him they would not just give in. His son’s eyes right then broke Sam’s heart forever. They searched him and did not see what they were looking for. They searched him and found him wanting. The failure melted them, urgency puddling into disillusionment.
The boy didn’t understand. You don’t resist when there are six men with guns and horses and you have nothing in your hands but the flesh that covers them. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is submit. Sam wanted to say this to his son, wanted to say something to his son. He hesitated, looking for words. And then the chance was gone.
Luke ran.
It was a forever moment, one that stretched from then til now til always, one Sam still saw in dreams. The boy, arms and legs churning toward the trees, the dogs barking and pulling at their leashes, the gun coming up, Sam crying his son’s name, turning to go after him. In dreams, sometimes, he made it. In dreams, sometimes, he got there in time, brought Luke down before anything could happen. In dreams, sometimes, he saved his son’s life.
But in memory, there was a shot that caught Luke in midstride. One instant his arms and legs working in coordination, carrying him away. Then a bang that echoed, that made birds on the high branches take wing, and each of Luke’s arms and legs was on its own, out of sync, flying in different directions from the center mass of him.
Sam was running before his son hit the ground.
Oh Lord, no. Oh Lord, no.
Oh, Lord.
But there it was, right between the boy’s shoulder blades, a tiny, ragged red hole. Sam turned his son. The life was already draining from the boy’s eyes like sand. “Luke, I’m right here.”
The eyes found him. Luke said, “Papa…” Then the eyes lost their focus and Sam was looking down on a dead thing that one breath ago had been his son.
It would not register. His mind would not take it in. He kept working it like it was a math problem and he couldn’t get the sums to line up properly. Sam shook his son, gently at first, then insistently, then desperately, crying out his name. Behind him, the slave catchers cursed at their brother.
“Goddamn it, Zach, how many times we have to tell you to think before you act?”
“But he was gettin’ away.”
“You damned fool! He ain’t had nowhere to go!”
“You know how much you get paid for a dead nigger, Zach? Nothin’, that’s what! Do you know how much money you just cost us?”
As they argued and cursed, the older one, the father, nudged his horse forward. He came up quietly behind Sam. “Time to go, Perseus,” he said.
Sam looked around. The sun was behind the white man on the big horse, casting them both in silhouette. “My son,” said Sam, helplessly. He could say no more.
“I know,” said the man, and his voice was oddly gentle, “but we can’t help that. We got to go.”
“They tied my hands,” Sam told Ben, “and made me walk behind the old man’s horse. They left my son lying right there in the woods. They did not even allow me to give him a burial.”
“That’s the way they do, ain’t it?” said Ben. “Once a nigger dead, he ain’t got no more value to ’em. Might as well leave him to rot in the woods.”
“It took two days to get back. They kept arguing with the one who shot Luke over how much money he had cost them. I remember, we came to this spring and they untied me so I could get a drink. Instead, I made a grab for the old man’s gun. I did not get two steps before one of his boys clubbed me upside the head with a gun butt and I fell into the water. I still have the scar. The boy said, ‘He was trying to kill you, Pa.’ And the old man said, ‘No. He would have used the gun on himself.’ He was right. I have felt that way a little bit ever since, I suppose.”
Ben spoke gently. “Sam, you can’t…”
“I killed my son,” said Sam.
And what could Ben say to that? After a moment, he got up and put more wood on the fire. It crackled and a thin plume of smoke rose. He sat down.
Sam said, “It was middle of the day when we got back to the quarter. The old man—Ames, was his name—went to the house to report to Mistress. The boys tied me straightaway to a tree. There were no whips on the place. Our mistress didn’t believe in whipping slaves. So one of the Ames boys had to go and get a whip off his horse. Couple of the others went and called all the slaves in from the field. After a moment, I heard Tilda crying, ‘Where’s my son? Where’s Luke?’
“She ran up to the tree where I was tied. ‘Where’s Luke?’ she asked me. ‘What happened to Luke?’ Before I could respond, one of the Ames boys snatched her away and threw her down to the ground. And I was glad of it, because it spared me from answering her. How do you tell a woman you have killed her son? How do you say that?”
A single tear overflowed his eye. He swatted at it impatiently.
“I know not how to say that,” he mumbled. “I was glad I did not have to. Of course, she figured it out on her own when she could not find him. I heard her shrieking and crying behind me. I could not see her, though. I was unable to turn my head, so closely had they pressed me against the trunk of that tree. Then the Ames boys ripped off my shirt and started laying on the licks. And you know, I did not even feel it. I could not even tell you how many times they hit me. I know they hit me; I still bear the scars from that, too. But I had all the pain I could handle, just hearing Tilda cry.”
Another tear. Another impatient swipe.
“When they were done, they threw me in the pest house to heal up. They would not let anyone in there except an old blind woman, Mammy Sue. She tended my cuts as best she could. Once, I asked her how Tilda was doing. ‘Not good,’ she said. I said, ‘Would you tell Tilda something for me? Tell her I’m sorry.’”
Sam’s laugh was bitter as unripe fruit. “Are there any two words in the English language more useless than those?” he asked. “‘Sorrow makes us all children again.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson said that.”
“What she say?” asked Ben.
“I asked Mammy Sue the next day when she came in to apply the poultice to my back. She told me Tilda said nothing, not a word. She said it was as if she had spoken to the tree. As I said, the word is useless.”
‘Yeah, but wasn’t too much else you could say,” said Ben.
Sam looked at him. “As soon as I was feeling better, Mistress sold me. One day, she walked into the pest house; it was the first time I had seen her since they brought me back. She faced me with me a sorrowful countenance as if to express to me how profoundly I had disappointed her. She said, ‘Perseus, I never would have thought it of you.’”
“What you say?”
“I said nothing. What am I supposed to say to that? Then this white man entered behind her. He looked me up and down as though appraising a horse. He said to her, ‘Yes, he’ll do just fine.’ That was when I realized I was being sold.
“An hour later, I left there, tied in the back of his wagon. It rolled past the fields where the slaves were working, chopping cotton. Some of them stopped to look as I went by. Tilda never lifted her head, never even looked my way. I wanted to cry out to her, but it would have been useless, and besides, what could I say? I saw them telling her I was leaving, I watched them point toward me. She never stopped what she was doing.”
“Angry,” said Ben.
Sam nodded. “She had a right to be.”
“So why you going back?”
Sam pondered this a moment. Then he said, “I do not rightly know. I suppose I just feel there must be something more I should say, some word I can find that will be more meaningful than sorry.”
He pulled out his watch. It was getting late. “I am going to retire for the night,” he said. He found a likely spot and lay down on the thin spring grass, clasping his hands behind his head as a pillow. Ben did the same and after a moment, Sam heard the other man’s breathing grow steady and deep. Only then did he allow himself to weep. The tears fell silently, his body shaking. He covered his mouth with his hand, lest any sound escape.
Regret ate him like cancer. It gnawed at the very gut of him.
His son, his only child, the quick and lively boy who had looked like him and walked like him, even stood like him…and his Tilda, who had adored him and nurtured him, who had given shape and meaning to his days…why hadn’t that been enough? Wasn’t it more than many men had? Wasn’t it more than he even had a right to hope for? Why, then, had he risked it and ruined it? Why did he need all that, and freedom, too?
God, he had loved her.
Not just because she was beautiful, not just because her thighs were round and strong and her hair thick and long. No, he had loved her laughter. He had loved the quiet moment lying together on a mattress of corn shucks after a hard day, not speaking and not needing to. He had loved holding her hand and watching the rain from the front door of their cabin. He had loved watching her nurse their son, watching the boy tug greedily at her nipple while she gazed down on him with all the tenderness in the world. He had loved reading a book and handing it to her saying, “You should read this,” and then talking about it with her afterward. He had loved her.
He still did.
The knowledge of it brought tears rushing in fresh sheets of pain down his cheek. He wept in silence.
And it began to rain.
They left the steamboat at Memphis in the bright heart of the morning. After two days floating quietly down the sleeping river, they were jolted by the cacophony waiting at the end of the landing stage: whistles and curses, the bleat and squeal and mooing of livestock and the song of Negro stevedores, toting cargo onto and off of the ship. Prudence hired two wagons—one for them, one for crates that had been shipped ahead—and they set off traveling south. On the cusp of twilight they arrived in Buford, an ugly little town of mud streets and clapboard dwellings squatting toad-like against the eastern bank of the Mississippi.
This was where Bonnie was born. But Prudence saw no soft gleam of sentiment in her best friend’s eyes as she gazed about. No, Bonnie’s eyes weighed and judged and, finally, disdained. Something about it made Prudence sad. It was, she thought, as if Bonnie had somehow been separated from herself.
Overhead, a hawk circled lazily in search of a late-day meal. In the homely streets below, one barefoot white boy chased another, their steps landing like hammer blows on the wooden planks of the sidewalk. They barely managed to dodge around two pinch-faced white women who never even saw them, who stared up at the passing wagons with eyes demanding answers.
At the very end of town, just before Main Street surrendered itself to cotton fields, the driver brought the lead wagon to a stop. Time, sun, and rain had scraped most of the paint from its weary boards, but the warehouse was still imposing, lording it over a row of tiny shotgun houses that cowered in its shadow. The warehouse was a remnant of prewar times, when there was commerce here. But commerce had long since died in this part of Buford. Across the street stood what had been a livery. Now boards were nailed across the door and the grass grew tall as a small child around it. Next to that, shadowed and abandoned, stood a stable and harness maker, next to that a cotton broker, next to that a tobacconist, all of them shuttered and abandoned.
Commerce was just a memory. Now this part of town belonged solely to the Negroes who, as if on some silent signal, came to their front doors, gathered in their meager yards, and converged on the two wagons. Curiosity burned in dark faces. No one spoke. Bonnie gazed down at them, eyes still weighing and judging. Prudence did not like that look.
She climbed down from the wagon without waiting for assistance and went to gaze up at the warehouse. It would do, she decided. Not that its fitness had ever really been in question. Her father had chosen it, after all. Still, it was good to see for herself.
