Freeman, page 9
He grunts in response. After a moment he adds, “You were smart.”
It chills her. She waits, but he doesn’t say more. Instead, he finishes the corncake, cups his hand to the pond and takes a drink, then starts off without a word. She takes a drink, then follows him.
After two hours, they reach a town. This is Buford. She remembers this place. She was auctioned here, sold off by a woman who had always claimed she didn’t believe in selling her people. She always called them that—her people, not her slaves or her niggers. Of course, she reconsidered her refusal to sell when money grew tight. Suddenly everything was open to negotiation. So it was that Tilda had wound up the property of this shambling trash-heap of a man, had gone from a place where she was allowed, once chores were done, to sit with a book and read, to a place where chores were never done and there was not a single book in the house.
Marse finds his way unerringly to a tavern, tells her to wait for him outside. “Don’t you get any ideas,” he says, index finger pointing in her face.
She swallows. “I won’t,” she says.
She doesn’t.
For two hours she sits out there, listening to the clink of glasses, the braying laughter of white men. It turns cold, begins to rain. She huddles beneath the awning, watches white and colored come and go. A group of federal troops wanders by, laughing at some joke between them. They stand taller, straighter, than any men she has ever seen and she has to fight down an urge to run to them, tell them everything, beg them to take care of her. But what if they send her away? What if freedom is only a lie? Then she would have only committed suicide, wouldn’t she?
As if in answer to the unvoiced question, the tavern door swings open and Marse comes through, swaying like a tree in a storm. “There they go,” he says, staring after the departing federals. His voice is thick and mushy like porridge. “There they go, the rascals who killed my boy.”
His voice rises on the last words and for a crazy moment, she is afraid he is about to raise his rifle and shoot one of the federals in the back. Instead, he watches after them with his filmy eyes until they are gone. Then he shakes his head and steps down from the porch without a word. Tilda follows.
The rain has turned the street to mud. Tilda thinks it will be impossible for Marse to trail them now. She is wrong. Even though he totters like a baby on new legs, he still does not hesitate. They walk for hours. The rain stops. She builds a fire. He goes out with his rifle, hunting dinner. Running doesn’t even cross her mind. At length he returns, a rabbit’s bloody carcass hanging by the ears from his fist. He hands it to her without a word, followed by a knife, settles himself against a tree, and closes his eyes.
She takes up the knife and goes to work skinning the hare. After a moment, Marse Jim begins to snore. The sound draws her and she pauses in her work to look. His chest rises and falls with a steady rhythm and she marvels that he can hand her a knife and then fall asleep, as if it has never even crossed his mind that she might bury the blade in that heaving chest all the way to its hilt. Then she realizes: the thought has not crossed her mind either, has it? Not a flicker of temptation, not an instant of inducement. Nothing. And he knew this about her, didn’t he? Knew it before she did. This is why he could give her a knife, then go to sleep.
She returns to her work, hands working with a brisk, mindless efficiency, lopping off the head, cutting sinew, separating fur from flesh. She is angry with herself, embarrassed by herself. When did she become so old? So old and riven with fear? She knows she has not always been this way, but she cannot recall when she was something other, cannot even remember what it must have been like.
Marse wakes to the sizzle of fat dropping into the flames. When the food is done, she hands him the makeshift spit. Without a word, he pries off a large piece of meat. She eats what remains. They sleep that night on the dirt.
The next morning, they come upon Wilson and Lucretia. They are sleeping in a clearing, curled together against the cold. Marse Jim raises his rifle. Tilda follows. Her throat is stiff like parchment. Her stomach is a rock. Wilson and Lucretia begin to stir at the sound of Marse Jim’s approach, slowly at first, then all at once as realization arrives like a thunderclap.
Wilson taps Lucretia’s shoulder. “Marse Jim,” he says, and there is gravity in his voice, none of the false cheer he usually uses to put white people at their ease.
“Think you can run out on me?” Marse Jim growls from behind the rifle.
Wilson says, “Marse, we is free now.” He is coming to his feet as he speaks. He never gets there. The rifle barks and the blast hurls him against a tree. He does not move.
Tilda does not realize she is screaming until the white man slaps her. “Shut up, goddamn you!”
He has thrown the rifle down, pulled a pistol from his belt and trains it now on Lucretia. She is shrieking, crouched over the bloody dead thing that was her Wilson less than a minute ago.
“Marse, don’t!” cries Tilda.
He does not acknowledge her. They stand frozen in that blood-stained tableau for a long moment, until finally Lucretia turns on Marse Jim. The hatred glares from her eyes with a force that is almost physical. “You ain’t had to do that,” she says. Her voice is scalding.
“Think you can run out on me?” he repeats.
She stands with deliberate slowness. “We’s free now,” she says. “You heard it same as we did.”
“Yankee lies.”
“How you talk? Wasn’t no Yankee told you that. Was a reb, one of your own kind.”
“Yankee lies,” he insists. “How are they goin’ to free my niggers? How are they goin’ to take from me something I paid good money for, something I bought fair and legal? I own you.”
“Don’t nobody own nobody no more. That’s the law now.”
‘You think I won’t kill you, just because you’re a woman?”
“You can kill me,” she says, and her voice is level, “but you can’t kill the truth. We is free now.”
His mouth works soundlessly. Then he shoots her. She looks down at the red hole blossoming in her stomach, then back up at him. She seems surprised. Her gaze falls on Tilda and there’s something else there. To Tilda’s horror, it is accusation. And then, close on that, pity. Lucretia’s legs give way and she crumples. Her eyes are still on Tilda. And then, they are on nothing.
“You didn’t have to shoot them,” Tilda hears herself say.
He brings the gun around. “Are you next?” he says. “Are you plannin’ to run out on me, too?”
It takes her a moment. Finally she says, “I’m just saying you didn’t have to shoot them, that’s all.” She resists an urge to squeeze her eyes shut against the coming muzzle flash.
It doesn’t come. He stares at her a long time. A very long time. Then he lowers the gun. “We’re goin’,” he says. He stoops to recover the rifle.
“We’re not going to bury them?” She is appalled that they will go to eternity with no one to speak words on their behalf.
“We’re goin’,” he repeats.
Still she does not move. “There was too much work on that place for four people,” she says. “How are we supposed to manage it with two?”
“We’re not goin’ back there,” he says, walking away from her.
“What?”
“We’re goin’ west,” he says. “Someplace new. I will not live in a country dominated by the Yankee race.” He is already halfway across the clearing.
She stands there for a long moment after he has disappeared, wrestling with the implications of what he has said. She is so tired. She feels as if the ground has risen up, taken her by the ankles, and will not let go. What a wonderful thing it would be to stop fighting it, just to stand here and never move again.
She looks around her. Wilson lies with his head against a tree, his chest a bloody mess, one leg drawn up in a grotesque posture of repose. Lucretia’s head lies at his feet, her eyes still staring down infinity. Tilda kneels and gently, gently, lowers Lucretia’s lids. Her hands linger there a moment, soft against the cooling skin. Then she stands and follows her owner.
It rained a lot.
It was a mean, cold rain that sent fingers of ice trickling down your back, into your shoes, that turned the roads into swamps. You had to make sure your shoes were tightly laced or the mud would suck them right off your feet, like meat right off a bone. The calendar said spring had arrived, but winter clung hard to the land. As did the war.
They began to see it as they inched south. The cratered farm fields, the black trees, the fields still so littered with Minié balls they crunched beneath your feet, the decomposing hand sticking up from a shallow grave as if the occupant were trying to claw himself free, eager to join one last doomed charge against one last sunken road. They saw it, too, in the mean, miserable eyes—white people’s eyes—that sometimes marked their passage, eyes that had taken in defeat and humiliation and hunger and did not yet know what to do with them. These things were still too new, too raw.
Resentment of those things leaked out of a white man who watched Sam and Ben go by from atop his roof, then went back to hammering wood across a hole left by shell shot. Out of a white woman with a plow who watched them pass, then went back to following a rangy mule across an unkempt and overgrown field. Out of a white boy who stood by the road, barefoot and dirty, in clothes that were little more than tatters, his eyes following them down.
A man approached them once, an imperious white man on a horse, with a Spencer carbine hanging from his saddle. His beard reached to the middle of his chest, his teeth were the color of bark. “Who you niggers belong to?” he demanded.
“We belong to no one,” said Sam.
Ben got in front of him, blazing a path with that smile. Sam was coming to hate that smile. “What he mean to say is, us used to belong to the Pattersons down in Mi’sippi. Yankees come an’ got us. We tryin’ to make our way back there now. Get back to our white folks. Only true home us know.”
“I’ve some work needs to be done on my place,” said the man. “Hauling and patching and like that. Couple weeks worth. Pay you a dollar a day. You can sleep in the barn, take your meals on the back porch.”
A bow. “We thank you kindly for the offer, suh, but us is pow’ful eager to get back to Mi’sippi. See the Pattersons.”
The white man gave them a hard look. Ben smiled into it. Finally, the white man’s mouth twisted and he spurred the horse so abruptly Sam had to jump aside. “Free niggers,” the man muttered as he rode away.
At night, they found somewhere just off the road and made camp, eating whatever they could catch in the woods or beg from somebody’s back door. They rubbed and wrapped their feet, which had become hard where they were not blistered, the toenails turning black and peeling off, a hard ache hammering from inside the very bones.
And as they sat there they talked, mostly about how it would be, the things they would do, the lives they would build themselves, in this brave new time when nobody owned anybody anymore. It would be better, Sam said. Yes, white people would need some time to get used to the new order of things, but soon enough they would accept it. What choice did they have? Federal troops would be there to enforce federal authority. So while white people might not like it, they would soon enough get used to it, soon enough begin making work contracts with the people they had owned until just a few weeks ago. A black man would have a chance to put some money in his pockets, advance as far as his strength and ingenuity would carry him, sell his services to the highest bidder, move around as the mood struck him, maybe save and buy a piece of land all his own.
It would be good, he said. Ben would see.
“You still plannin’ on bein’ a Negro in this here new world?” Ben asked him one night.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, long as you’s a Negro you best get over this idea white folks gon’ ever treat you like a man.”
“They will give you the treatment you require of them,” said Sam. “Carry yourself as a man and they shall have no choice but to treat you as one.”
“You must done met some different white folks from the ones I been dealin’ with all my life,” said Ben. He chased it with a laugh.
The laugh irked Sam. He did not like being mocked. Then he thought of Billy Horn, and of the white man who snapped at him the night was Lincoln was shot, and of the boy soldier on the bridge. He said nothing.
Ben annoyed him sometimes, but on balance, Sam was grateful for the company. Sam Freeman was not the most voluble or social of men. Still, it was unthinkable to him that he might have spent these long hours trekking across unfamiliar woods and meadows and mountains and valleys with only his own company to entertain him, only his own thoughts to hear. Having Ben along made the journey easier.
Ben had run away from a plantation near Nashville seven years before. He said he had done it for his baby girl. Born and raised a slave, he had thought he’d made—peace wasn’t the right word, he said, but it was about as close as he could come—peace with his lot in life, with waking in the dark and returning in the dark and, in the hours between, being treated like a beast of burden. He had been, he said, sold like a horse, whipped like a horse, and worked like a horse. And he had accepted it, had taught himself to think as a slave must if he is to survive: expect nothing, want nothing, hope for nothing.
Then Leila was born and he made the mistake of holding her, of watching her stretch, tiny little hands balled into tiny little fists, then yawn and fall asleep, content, in her father’s arms. And his reserve broke, cracked open like river ice in the spring thaw. Because he could not abide the thought of her ever learning to expect, want, hope for, and get nothing.
He ran away a year later. He planned to find work in the North, save his money, and buy freedom for his daughter and her mother. Then the war came.
“If I only knew,” he told Sam. They were sitting at the fire, having eaten an evening meal of salted meat from Sam’s old haversack. “If I only knew. I would never have left them. I would have stayed there. I would have waited. We could have been together all along and then freed together. If I only knew.”
Sam recognized in the other man a guilt all too familiar to him, because he saw it reflected whenever he caught his own image in some pane of glass. It was a guilt that isolated you, made you alone. But Ben was not alone, was he?
“You left your child,” Sam told him softly. “I killed mine.”
Ben had been staring into the fire. Now, slowly, he raised his eyes. “What did you say?”
Had it really been 15 years? Suddenly it seemed like last night, the details crisp as fall leaves. The boy, watching from corners as his parents argued over freedom. Tilda asking why Sam couldn’t leave well enough alone. They had a better life than colored had any right to expect, had plenty food to eat, a mistress who didn’t curse them or require inhuman amounts of work from them, who made sure her people were adequately fed and clothed, who didn’t believe in whipping and selling or separating families, who even taught her slaves to read and allowed them access to books.
Tilda, pleading. Talk to slaves from any other owner, she said, and they would tell you how rare that was. “We have everything here,” she said.
And himself, how smug he was. “Everything but freedom,” he replied. The boy, still watching silently from corners, looking so much like his mother, nodding sagely at that.
Sam answered Ben. “I said, I killed my boy,” he said.
“How?”
The boy, coming to him the damn fool night before he did the damn fool thing, declaring himself. Saying, “Papa, I want to be free, too.” Looking up at him with Tilda’s eyes.
“I had the same plan you did,” Sam told Ben. “To run away, save some money and buy my family. But my son—Luke was his name—wanted to come with me. I should have told him no.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I did not. We argued about that, his mother and I.”
Tilda, eyes flashing. “Are you out your mind? He’s just a boy.”
“What she say?” asked Ben.
“She said he was too young.”
“What you say?”
The question brought a rueful smile. “I said, ‘No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.’” He smiled again, this time at the confusion on Ben’s face. “A fellow named Diderot said that,” he explained. “He was French. Tilda and I…she was like me when it came to reading.”
“I see,” said Ben. “And readin’, I guess that explain why you talk like you do. ’Most white.”
“Our mistress had very…radical ideas. She allowed Tilda to learn to read. Tilda taught me. We quoted books to each other all the time.”
“And did this French man you quoted her, did he make her change her mind?”
Sam’s hand, flying to his cheek, cupping the sting.
“She slapped me,” he said.
“But that ain’t stop you,” said Ben. He was feeding branches and twigs onto the fire.
Sam shook his head. “No. She begged me not to take him, but that also failed to persuade me. He was 14 and I felt that was old enough for him to know what he wanted to do, old enough to decide if he wanted to make a try for his freedom. She said…”
For a moment, he couldn’t go on. He paused, looking back 15 years into her desperate eyes. They were pleading with him to listen. Just, for once…listen. But he couldn’t do that. Not him.
Sam broke away from her eyes, forced himself back into the here and now, forced himself to finish the sentence. “She said I was going to get us both killed.” What followed came out of him in a whisper. “Sometimes, I wish I had gotten us both killed, instead of just him.”
The words fell into a silence broken only by the hiss of the damp wood—the rain had finally stopped—feeding the smoky fire. What was there to say? Hadn’t she said it all so long ago? Wasn’t the truth of it proven now, irrefutable now?
