Free Men (2 page)

“Next summer we’ll go again, the
mico
said.”

“Not that way, our treaties there are done. We’ll go west if we go any way at all. The Caddo are bumping against the French.”

“They’re an ugly lot!” says the third.

“He means you’ll find no woman there.”

“It’s not any bit I want, it’s the one I already found. You’re not listening.”

“Whoever she was, a year goes by and she’ll have found a dozen men instead, and taller too.”

“Only Iroquois I saw was very short,” says the third.

“Was he a child? Listen, brother, don’t be a fool. There are plenty of girls within throwing distance who would take you into their beds. What about Sehoy?”

“But you didn’t see the Iroquois girl. They look very different up there. I think she’d even refused an Englishman.”

“So she has sense; doesn’t mean she’ll wait for a gawky Muskogee.”

“I heard there’s a spell to put muscle on your arms,” says the third.

The slave, through all of this, is silent.

“Listen, give her up. Be sensible. Did you even—”

“Yes! I’m not entirely without talent. I tell you, she loves me.”

“She said so?”

“Her eyes, that’s where it was. But very clear. She wants me to come again.”

“For another tumble in the longhouse, I’m sure, between tumbles with proper warriors.”

“I’ve fought too.”

“One summer.”

“And with a scar! This one.”

“From a falling walnut.”

“She’ll wait. She’ll want me again.”

“And you’ll learn the language? Bundle up on those winter nights next to a nasty fire smelling of fat, with all her cousins crammed around you lovers, so you couldn’t grab her bottom without pulling her sister’s hair?”

The third laughed out loud.

“That’s it, you have no sympathy.”

And they didn’t speak for ten minutes, during which I reminded myself to add this exchange to my section on inter-Indian relations.

Do I wish they included me in their banter? Perhaps for the same reason I don’t engage the silent slave bringing up the rear, the Creeks keep me well out of their conversation. Though Donne may have claimed that every man is a piece of the continent, I’d wager he never visited this one.

The afternoon is a pleasant one for riding; the sun comes in
warm through the beeches and oaks, still mostly defoliated from the winter, and the new jacket my wife made me keeps the wind off, so that I exist in that perfect state of intermediacy wherein I neither sweat nor shiver. If I stopped my horse, I believe the air would feel like nothing on my face, as if there were no elements at all.

Some ground bird, a robin or towhee, hops before us through patches of light, flitting through the fingers of a low palmetto. I give my whip a light crack and it startles off, and I promptly regret this. Wherever I am, I can hear the calls of birds too afraid to show their feathers. Some of the men we pass on the trail know who I am and keep a generous berth or else nod extravagantly. Each one of them has some sin in his heart he wouldn’t wish me finding. But my primary role is not that of embodied justice but exploration. If they knew me better—if anyone did, from my mother to my wives to these half strangers—it would be evident that I merely wanted to understand them. Give me your actions for a day, and I can find the thoughts to match them.

I already picture the treatise this will make: three men of diverse but foul character have forged a union out of mutual greed—the Indian providing stealth and forest knowledge, the white man serving as both intelligence and firepower, and the negro with his black heart spurring them on—and have thereby revealed the various motives that make the American backcountry a landscape of merciless individual pursuit. My readers will blush to learn of this breed of criminal, of the tenor of this young nation, bumping along as it does without the comfort or cohesion of monarchy and of each man residing within his sphere: the poor thieving from the poor, and the rich imprisoned in their ancestral gardens. Readers will wonder what sort
of future such a nation can anticipate; there will be a clamor for more
rapportage
. Will the Royal Society be taken aback when they learn that the author who holds this fresh mirror up to the machinations of humanity is not a pale pedant but the gentleman adventurer Louis Le Clerc Milfort?

That these three men will die at my hand at the end of this journey needn’t be included in my account. No matter how lawless the country, freedom must be contingent on innocence.

M
Y SHOULDER FEELS
like an angry rat has burrowed in and is nibbling on the nerves. Cat got the bullet out, bless him, but something alive’s still in there, feeding itself. The others are walking faster than me now, for the rat in my arm doesn’t care for the silver on my back. Think of all the shit I’ve borne for twenty-eight years, the pounds and pounds of cane I’ve cut and lifted and boiled down, think of the scars on my skin that have grown on top of scars like a new language building itself, all put there by men who never cared to hear my own tongue, and you’d think the way those wounds burned into my innards would’ve prepared me for one gunshot to the shoulder, one heavy bag of coins. But since taking my own body out of Master’s reach, this is the one thing I’ve done. Those murders the one action on my new-freed soul. I twist my arm across my chest, stretch it back, roll my wrist a couple times. The day’s waking up, and all the little birds are coming out to scold us.

Though the new man of me is already damned, I am used
enough to finding the good of things to be glad those two men are walking with me. We could’ve split after the creek, but that would’ve been a further ruin, and somehow they knew this too. I never learned how to be easy alone. My voice needs ears to hear it, even past when there’s nothing to say. Like now.

Cat’s carrying our knapsacks, since me and the Indian, being bigger, offered to take the silver. But he looks back once and sees a hiccup in my step—under the weight, he thinks, but really it’s the damn rat eating my flesh—and calls out in his soft sad voice, “You all right?”

Istillicha glances back, but I say, “Mm-hm, mm-hm, just got to get where we’re going,” and we keep on moving, and the only thing keeps me from setting down the bag is the sight of their shoes ahead. The Indian in his quiet moccasins, the white man looking like he wrapped a bunch of random leather around his feet.

We didn’t eat breakfast, being still fuddled from having taken men’s lives—lives that if we had the chance we’d patch back together with our own muscle and bone, or maybe that’s only me—and my stomach is doing somersaults, trying to figure out if it wants some food or wants to puke up all the food it’s ever in its whole life had.
I’m just a man
, I keep telling myself, which is to say,
It’s all right to be hungry
and
It’s all right that I’m still walking while some men aren’t.
What I love about the Indian is how good he is at catching meat. And he knows which parts of the pigeon taste better than you think they would. See, I’m already making a future for myself where I sit down for dinner, move my fingers to my mouth to fill my belly on purpose to keep living.

The red dust from the road has stuck to my wet legs, like I dragged blood out of that creek, and the grit is rubbing at my
ankles. I set down the bag to scratch the muck off, and the others stop and wait. Cat comes and drops the sacks at my feet and lifts the bag of silver that’s about as big as he is, hoisting it on his back with a grunt. I make a half-hearted grab at it.

“I got it,” I say, and I think it’s a sign of something that after just three days no one’s suspecting that one of us’ll run off with the coins while the others aren’t looking.

Cat walks on with it, and I pick up our own small bags, filled with blankets and biscuits and a knife and whatever soil accompanied us from our various homes, soil that maybe our wives once walked on, though one of the many things I don’t know about these men is whether they left behind any ladies. I shake my head a couple times so I won’t start remembering mine.

Who I should be thinking about is the men who’ll be following us. Not just the one Istillicha named—the Clerk, who gets paid by the chief and is some kind of slow bloodhound, too fancified to tramp after us, provided we tramp far enough—but also the men whose only job is to find slaves who think they’re better than slaves. I’m still walking on my master’s pass, good for a week, and I’m out of West Florida now, where patrols only look for their own lost negroes, but I am surely leaving a blazing trail behind me: first the horse that went missing, which probably trotted back home to sound the alarm, and then all those bodies stacked in the sand by the creek, with black witnesses in the trees beyond. We talked for half a minute about whether to kill them too, but I said I’d been put where I didn’t want to be often enough to know it wasn’t their fault they were forced to watch a murder, so we tied them up, strung rope around wrists that—I know—are so familiar with rope it starts to feel like skin. I gave them a wink, but they didn’t wink back.

When they come for me, they’ll want the story. They’ll want to know whether I was stolen by traders, in which case maybe only an ear needs to get lopped off, or whether I ran off with intention, leaving behind a whole family of women whose rights of running are far greater than mine. In which case the body deserves the worst, from skin peeled off to tongue cut out to feet set on fire, all of which my daughters will be asked to watch like a bloody pageant. So no, it’s not the Clerk I’m worried about; he’s a white man from somewhere else, he doesn’t know what all a black man who steals himself deserves. I’m just trying to figure what kind of a story I can tell that will make my hunters see me as a man.

Istillicha, who knows nothing of me beyond my four limbs, is taking us to see a doctor who will fix the hole in my arm; he drew a line between bodies that needed saving and bodies that didn’t, and for some reason my black self wound up on the right side of the line. This is part of what I’d tell.

A quick rain shower comes in the early morning, not hard enough to shoo off the birds that still twitter at us, but just enough water so we start rubbing our hands together, smearing the dirt and the blood off whatever parts of us we can reach.

“Hold still,” I say to Cat, and wipe my sleeve across the back of his neck so that a little of his white skin shines through.

Istillicha runs his fingers through his hair and ties it back again in a knot. The rainwater is replacing the creek water.

We hear a rumble from far off, not a scary kind, just like the sky was starting to get peckish, but Cat looks quick over at the Indian.

“You scared of storms?” I ask. He’s like a child that way. Though he may have been a murderer long before we were,
we’re the ones who look after him: wipe his neck, give him food, let him sleep close by so he doesn’t get lonely. If I could crack him open and get whatever secret’s lying curled up inside, we’d probably spend less time fussing over those sad eyes.

“There was once a boy on a hunting party,” Istillicha says, “who heard the same kind of noise and didn’t know what it was.”

The rain catches in my eyelashes, making little bubbles of the road, the pines, the palmetto spikes. I don’t brush them off right away but let them play around with my sight, ballooning some things, washing others away.

“He went to find the sound, leaving behind his uncles and his brothers, and came upon a creature by a riverbank struggling to breathe. It was Thunder, and he had a snake wrapped around his neck.”

That’s the way you take the teeth out of something scary: make it pitiful. Sure enough, Cat’s face shrinks, goes from fear to worry.

“Thunder begged the boy to save him, and the snake begged the boy to help him kill the creature.”

“Couldn’t save both,” Cat says, but I can’t tell if it’s a question. The Indian keeps on.

“He pulled out an arrow and shot the snake clean through, which dropped to the ground and left Thunder to breathe again.” Istillicha pauses, listens for something, which he does often enough that I sometimes think he’s just trying to make us jumpy. “Thunder promised to help him, sending lightning to strike his enemies whenever he wished.”

“What would the snake have given the boy?” I ask.

“We don’t know,” he says.

The rain’s drifting east now, and Cat lifts his open mouth
for the last few drops. “He made a choice,” Cat says. “Saved someone.”

Another rumble comes at us, but it’s quieter now, rolling around in some faraway hills, and Cat doesn’t even notice, his face twisted around some new thought.

We hear cart wheels coming down the trail, but they’re close enough that we can’t crawl up the bank without getting caught, so we keep walking forward as innocently as our wet red shoes allow. The man pulling the cart, woolly-haired and beard-tangled, is no cleaner than us, and his wagon is filled with stacks of papers smudged by the drizzle. As he tugs one of the papers free and waves it in front of his face, saying something about
the news from the stars, heaven’s own report, listen for your fate
, I feel the rat in my arm clamp down on a new nerve, and all I wish is for my body to be pulled safely out of this.

M
Y MOTHER ALWAYS
said my mouth was too loud for what little I had to say, but she was the one who sat us down under the shake roof under the black night and gave us stories like they were rare sugar. What she talked of was all gone past, for that was all that was worth telling. Nothing happened day to day that we cared to stick in our memories for later, and the things that stuck we wished wouldn’t’ve. It was Virginia, south of Petersburg, and a hungry belly was at least a sign you were alive. The stories filled up the holes, made our sorrow step back for a spell, though sorrow’s maybe too grand a word, us being children then and feeling more boredom than grief at our endless captivity. Like a winter without any thaw, on and on. My own chatter I can’t explain, but I did talk too much, my mother was right. I was a boy, I liked the sound of my voice.

She was a light-skinned woman who wore her hair in stripped rags, two teeth missing, and she had a pocket in her apron where she slid crusts and old biscuits for me to find. There were hills
humpbacked on hills and trees so green they looked like moss underwater, like both sides of the earth were the same. But I didn’t think it was beautiful then, and she didn’t raise me. The granny was a soot-black woman who hunched on an old churn in the yard near all the women’s children and hollered so loud every time we neared the fences that the crows would shoot out of those wet-green trees. I’d watch my mother in the fields out of one eye, her hair dancing like colored finches in the big yellow leaves, and the brick house out of the other, where buggies rode up every hour carrying men and ladies, white as sunlight, and my ears perked back the whole time to hear Granny jabbering about the dark country, from where she was nabbed ninety-six years ago, naked as the day she was born. I saw how those with the good tales got listened to, and so early on I started practicing my talking, empty though it was.

When Granny was tired of watching our games, she sent us into the near woods to fetch kindling, the oldest of us carrying the babies on our backs, the toddlers stopping to pee on sycamore leaves to hear them crackle. I didn’t dig for worms or play hide-the-switch or even wander farther than I should, but I did tell the others the littlest things I saw and felt, thinking they’d enjoy the words. They were friendly enough about it, maybe because I always carried the fattest baby, but other than Primus none of them thought much of me. If it sounds like we children in the woods made for a charming scene, then you were never a child.

MY BROTHER PRIMUS
was dark and shiny, like someone had wrapped an old brown sheet around a boy of gold. He would move to the fields that summer, but then he was the oldest in the pen and told us what was up and down with the world and we
all believed him, every word. On one of those kindling nights when we did chores for Granny, the children one by one turned home, tipping on their legs with sleepiness, each with a clutch of sticks and some with the babies on their backs, all dreaming of their mothers’ arms. But Primus pulled me back and we waited until the woods were empty and then he shared with me what he knew. He must have been eight or nine.

“Master’s land stretches all the way out.”

“How far?” I asked, following the sweep of his stubby arm.

“That far.”

We were in the middle of a crowd of oaks and the stars didn’t shine too deep there. I looked around and nodded, unimpressed.

“Where do you think our land is?” he asked.

“Don’t have any,” I said.

“Who told you that?”

I wasn’t so much interested in looking at the trees, which seemed scrubby and no-count to me, or the way the dirt buckled up and crawled over roots and dipped thirsty under creeks. So what if this was Master’s land? I didn’t know what to call the birds, or which flowers smelled like sugar and which like rotten cheese. What I was watching was Primus, who shone there in the night and who was the same flesh as me but bolder. He had just lost the little rounded belly of being young and was now straight and strong, already with angry eyes that I tried to mimic, practicing on our sisters, who said I looked sick to my stomach. I admired every inch of him, most of all what I didn’t understand, the secrets of him. I supposed he felt the same about what was past the far fences of the tobacco fields, the blank spaces being always the spaces that can be filled by whatever’s overflowing in ourselves.

We walked out to the edge of the forest where a fence poked around the farthest trunks, cutting off the master’s farm from the clear hills that loped down to the river that fed into the Nottoway, or maybe that glint of silver
was
the Nottoway—no one ever told us names. You could see a long way here, and though I didn’t mind one way or another how far I could see, Primus’s eyes grew slow and wide at all the land before him. It was thick night by now, but we were lit by the water and the speckling stars and the little campfires that showed in dots where humans were.

Primus kicked at one of the fence posts, which were linked together with half-rotten split rails, and when it leaned away from him, he looked at me with a boyishness that didn’t much show in his face those days. He began kicking again, and I knew, so I started pulling from the top, and between the two of us we levered the post onto its side, the rails collapsing. I would do anything with him, would never need an explanation. We went along, post by post, and wobbled each one out of its hole, pushing and pulling until we were sweaty with laughing, until a whole stretch of them, maybe a quarter-mile long, were lying belly-up on the ground. Now we could run from the master’s land to the open land and back, hopping over a tangle of wood, whooping like we had caught a buffalo, or something larger. When we were winded and collapsed, him on the far side, me on the near, he laughed and said, “
This
is our land.”

He drew a kind of vision then, and it was so filled with real things that I knew he’d been dreaming it for years. He was the oldest and didn’t have anything to look up to, the way I did. His farm was spread out, he said, far to the west, empty of trees or fields or crops, and in place of tobacco or cotton there’d be cows,
calm lowing things that would grow fat with him taking such good care of them. To get around, he’d have a donkey, not a horse, and he’d train it to know its own name so he could call it from the porch and it’d come trotting up and he’d hop on without ever getting his feet in the mud. (There was mud there, just as there was mud everywhere.)

“A donkey?” I asked, thinking he’d gone too far. “They can’t run like horses.”

“Those belong to white folk,” he said. “Master rides a horse. Farlan rides a horse. You ever seen a black man on a horse?”

I hadn’t.

“A donkey’ll listen to you. They know.”

“Know what?”

“When it’s you and your donkey and that wide-open land, can’t nobody stop you and say, ‘This is mine’ or ‘This ain’t yourn.’” His stubby arms went up again to sweep the country for me, and I waited to see what he saw, but all I got was the little silver glints of the Nottoway, or the river that led to the Nottoway, whichever it was.

I asked if he would have a family, because I was just six years old and the best thing about life still was that I had a mother.

“That’s
your
land, Bob, not nobody else’s. What’d you want a family for?”

“A wife?” I said.

He shook his head. “Nobody wants one of those.”

And I thought he was right, because he was always right.

We lay there dreaming for much of the night, our bodies just outside the fallen lines of fence, the hoot-owls circling us, wondering if we were overlarge mice. He dozed, and I got up to count each push-and-pulled post; there were a hundred and
nineteen down on the ground, and all by myself I wiggled down one more to make it even. The splinters in my hands seemed to me proof that I was a big man.

Primus snorted himself awake just long enough to say, “We better put them back before sunup,” and then we were both asleep, looking to the hoot-owls like rabbits curled for the night.

MY MOTHER USED
to whisper to us in the frog-tickled nighttime that we were cut of finer stuff than the folks around us, that we were sons and daughters of an African prince, and I believed her because her skin looked like bright gold and I sure thought myself smarter than everybody else, never thinking what it took to make skin so gold, what kind of stirring of brown and white, what unwilling love. When we talked about where we came from, we had to skip back to Africa to find the stories that made sense.

Primus got big eyes every time my mother started in on the princes of Africa. He’d nod and nod as if to say,
Yes ma’am, that’s me
, and the older he got the more his eyes narrowed until he knew for sure he was one step next to the son of God, and when Farlan told him to move faster in the rows, he’d turn that shaven head of his most of the way round like a cat in the wild and give such a glare that Farlan would have to clear his throat to get free from the sight of him, and Primus by then all of twelve years. While he was living I thought maybe Mother was right and we were meant for something else.

The tale that always rang in my mind the loudest was of my great-grandfather Abraham, who was eight years old or nine, or—come to think of it—always as old as I was, and had tumbled down to the river with his friends, all brown, all naked,
with sticks for spears and string for nets, their goal being to hunt lions, and in the reeds, hidden and laughing like river ghosts, they were leapt upon by a herd of men who wrapped them in real ropes and bound their open mouths and carried them in silent bundles back down the river. My mother said, although she couldn’t have known, that his mother wept for five days to find her boy missing and cut her arms in stripes and burned her foot bottoms nightly until they built her a house beyond the village to hold her madness. I always wanted to hear more about the boys and if there were really lions or only pretend ones, but she would go on about the mother until we started to shift around and grab each other’s bellies. When she got back to Abraham, he was stacked in a boat on an ocean, like a sailor lying down, and then was stood up on a piece of wood in a port town where a field of white men clamored. When he was very old, he told my mother, who was very young, that he had thought there weren’t any women in the country of Virginia and he had come to hell indeed. “Take me back!” he said that he said to the men smoothing his chained small body with palm oil. “I aim to get married!” Even as a young boy, though, I knew my great-grandfather said no such thing, that he wouldn’t have cared if there was a girl in that world unless it was his mother. Because this is how I felt. But my mother always told the story the same way, just as he told it to her, as if in the telling there would survive some frail thread between her soul and his, between all of us little souls and the great lost soul of Africa.

Sometimes that story ended with the truth, which was that my great-grandfather was eventually snatched from the fields and led gibbering in an African tongue and limping with age into a tobacco barn, where a white man cleared away the dry
litter before painting him with pitch oil and setting him alight. This is not a story to tell to children unless they need to be taught to hate, a lesson that, of all of us, Primus learned best.

THE NIGHT WE
knocked down the posts was a treasure to me, and I held on to it like truth, so when someone asked me about my brother I told them that, about our victory over our master’s fence and Primus mapping all kinds of worlds for us, and I didn’t tell them the end of the story, which is that we didn’t wake up in time, and when the sun rose and we were scurrying along the line propping up the posts and stacking the rails as fast as our hands would let us, Farlan came picking through the woods on his big black horse. Our mother hadn’t wanted to say about our not coming home, because better us dead somewhere from snakebite than dragged in by white hands, but Granny in the pen had a job to do and couldn’t be losing little ones, so she told on us, and there Farlan was, reins in one hand, whip in the other.

He didn’t want a story, so we saved it for Master. The cows had gotten to the fence, we said, and in all their lusting for each other had toppled a whole stretch of it, which we found when we were picking sticks for kindling. We’d shooed them away and were working hard to put the posts back up so none of the cows would come trampling into the tobacco fields, which we knew Master wouldn’t like. “Did we do a good thing?” we said, our little hands pressed together like prayer.

I was too young to get anything more than ten smacks on the bottom. Only later did I hear from Primus about Master’s small knotted whip, and how he made my brother stand in the broad hall away from the fine things, and how he whipped him hard, but not hard enough so blood would get on the new-varnished
floor, polished the day before by black hands and too fine now for black blood.

That’s when the big house stopped seeming like a grand place, one I’d like to live in, and turned into someplace haunted. It swallowed up screams and breathed them out in little whispers through the day, so that walking past made your ears hurt, though you couldn’t tell why. I didn’t tell the end of the story to people who asked, because the best part of my brother was the bit that lay dozing on the far side of the fallen fence, his land still whole and perfect in his head.

THE STORIES WERE
what reminded us that what seemed real was just a passing fancy; this bound land, our broken cabins, the way we couldn’t see our mother but at night, these were not all of what could happen. The best of life was not what we were living, but something already past, or up ahead. When Primus snuck out to the far creek Sunday evenings, I followed him, chattering away, carrying my shoes by their worn heels and sometimes a stick to fight off the panthers I knew were hiding and which my brother would be too creek-minded to notice till they were pouncing. My limbs turned into antelope legs; I bounded the way our mother told us Antelope bounded when he was climbing up toward heaven. He was a grandfather to us, same as Abraham but even further back, a thousand generations. Antelope was small, like us, and all the other animals wanted to eat him so that he was always running, never resting. He even ran at night, through the dark, dark forests and fields, and we all put our hands over our faces at this part, because Panther was right behind. She showed us how close with her hands: her right was Antelope, with four finger legs galloping
hard, and her left was Panther, slinking as fast as the other could bound. She ran her hands all around the cabin floor and we followed with anguish until the left hand toppled the right and the baby started wailing. But just as Antelope stopped his spasming and Panther loosened his tight grip, lo! the right hand slinked up fast from the hold of the left, and Antelope scampered up the side of the baby, tickling her shoulder and onto her head, and when the baby laughed, the rest of us started to breathe again. Sure enough, Panther couldn’t climb up where Antelope was, so he plopped down and waited and waited, and since there was no purpose to coming down, Antelope just kept on climbing, up off our baby sister’s head and right up to heaven, where our mother’s right hand balled up and drifted away, like a star.