Freeman (42 page)

“Ain’t that always the way?” says Honey. “White folks don’t never want us to have nothin’.”

“It says they killed
children
,” repeats Tilda.

“Why you surprised?” demands Honey, and her voice is sharp. “Why you think they won’t kill children? Why they won’t kill any one of us they takes a mind to? Especially now. Slave nigger, that’s one thing. They know that that cost somebody some money. Free nigger, that’s, well…just like it say, that’s free. Ain’t cost nobody nothin’. Kill all of them they please.” Her voice has filled with ashes, her face is stony.

After a moment, Tilda hands her the paper, comes to her feet. She feels the boy’s hands mashing at her breasts. She feels his semen trickling slowly upon her thighs. She feels filthy, slimy with sweat.

And she feels tired. So tired, Lord, she can barely stand. “Going down to the lake,” she says. “Going to wash.”

Honey isn’t looking at her. Her eyes are on the paper. “You chop me some wood when you get back?”

“Yes,” says Tilda. Her voice feels like a dead thing lodged in her throat.

She sees Honey glance up at the sound, makes herself turn away before the other woman can ask her questions whose answers she does not know. Tilda makes her way through the woods. She can barely see. The world has gone gray and watery. And that is when she realizes she is weeping. She is surprised there are still tears in her.

But then, what other sensible response is there to a world where children are killed because they went to school? Or ran away one time, trying to be
free? What other response makes sense in a world where you wake up with some strange boy’s hands upon you, his wet prick burrowing itself against you, and there is nothing you can do and it is forbidden for you even to cry out in your grief and rage and shame?

She is running. Then she is running faster. Then she is tearing at the flimsy, stained dress that sits so heavily upon her skin, tearing it off her, flinging it behind her, plunging through the woods. When she finally reaches the edge of the lake, she is wearing just her petticoat and drawers and she can hear herself breathing.

For a moment, she simply stands there and watches the water. The trees on the distant shore are fuzzy and indistinct, the still water nearly black in the shadows of early morning. She glances back. The woods obscure the house and the kitchen. A thin plume of smoke from Honey’s cook fire lifts lazily above the tree line.

She finds herself remembering the night she stood in Agnes Lindley’s door, Marse Jim snoring, the moon watching, unable to make herself take a step. Unable to make herself seize freedom.

But freedom takes many forms.

The thought propels her forward and she puts one foot in the water. Then the other. She does not hurry, but neither is there hesitation in her step. She walks forward, deeper. The water is blessedly cool, swirling around her ankles, then her knees, then her thighs. She keeps walking. She walks with purpose. She can feel the soil beneath her feet going down, taking her down with it. She can feel fish brushing her knees.

Then there is no more soil beneath her feet and she is floating. The water is up to her neck. She looks around her, turns her body so that she can see it all. The trees stand silent witness. Dragonflies skim the water, searching for breakfast. The sky is half and half, one side blushing pink, the other black as an ink spill. The sun dawns upon a life she hates in a world she cannot abide.

But freedom takes many forms.

Tilda closes her eyes. She stops treading the water and allows herself to sink. She opens her mouth, forcing herself to breathe the water in. The lake closes over her.

He put 20 miles behind him every day, striking out when the first glimmer of pink brushed the sky, ending his days with the sun half-submerged in the western horizon. He walked with great eagerness now, a fatalistic dread driven by watching his friend’s life fall to pieces in an alley in a small Tennessee town. Sam just wanted to get it over with. He had spent weeks in anticipation and that was enough. Whatever was to be, he wanted it to be.

So the miles piled up behind him, pushed him through the hilly country around Chattanooga, down across the northwest tip of Georgia, across northern Alabama into the red dirt hills at the very top of Mississippi and from there, east toward the river. Pine forests gave way to cotton fields. Negro men and women with hoes bent and rising like automatons, chopping weeds from the precious cotton stalks. Just as if there had never been a war, he thought. Just as if they still were slaves.

He walked with a limp now and his foot hurt all the time, even with shoes, even with rest. He had decided the dull ache would be with him the rest of his life, a reminder of the hundreds of miles he had walked on a bare, infected foot before stealing a dead man’s shoes.

He ate what he could beg, slept where he could find whatever meager shelter, slipped invisibly as air past white people driving wagons down dusty roads or congregating on plank-board walks in war-smashed towns barely deserving of names. They didn’t see him. He was a one-armed Negro with bad feet. What was there to see?

Sam watched them from the shelter of his own anonymity and was startled by the nearness of his fury for them. Something got in his throat when they laughed, mouths thrown wide like braying donkeys, slapping one another on the back with percussion you could hear from a block away. Something stung his eyes when they slipped their thumbs under their suspenders and reared back to take a stand on this subject or that. It was as if even in defeat, even in dejection, subjugation, and abject humiliation, it had not yet dawned on them that they were not in fact masters of the known world, the highest expression of God’s art.

Ben had been right. The silence in which he had spent the weeks since they parted gave Sam plenty of time to think while he walked. It was, he came to believe, a sour joke that he had once quoted dead white men to explain life to himself. Now, he simply walked through life and left the explaining for others.

He had changed. Maybe it was the miles, maybe it was wearing Josiah’s shoes, maybe it was having his arm shot off for no good reason. He couldn’t say. All he knew was that he was not the man he had been just a few short months ago. Something had calloused inside him. Some hope, some expectation, some…
thing
had hardened and scabbed. The realization made him sad.

He had survived two years of war without a change, without even a scratch, really. Oh, he had taken a fever and almost died, yes. But it had not marked him, had not
changed
him in any fundamental way. Other men had left pieces of themselves lying on the field to rot under the sun, other men had charged forward only to be hurled back by explosions, other men had been reduced to weeping and drunkenness by the nearness and inevitability of death. He had come through Minié balls swarming thick as bees without ever being touched, raced past explosions without a scrape, beheld carnage without tears.

He had never truly been wounded, whether in body or in spirit, and had never understood why. He was no better than other men, no different from other men. Why had the great Maker spared him?

And an answer suggested itself. It was a bitter thought as he walked unseen down those country roads watching colored people bend their backs to the hoe in this first summer of freedom, but he thought it anyway: maybe God was only just now getting around to him. Maybe—and was God really this cruel?—this was the price he owed, the penance to be paid, for losing Luke, for leaving Tilda.

And maybe, bad as it was, all this was only a precursor to what was yet to come. He had worried that she might not be where he had seen her last, or that she might have herself a new husband or new children like Ben’s wife Hannah. But even that was not the worst, was it? No, the worst was that she might be right there where he had known her last, that she would not have a man, not have a child, be perfectly free to be his Tilda again—and choose not to. Because she would hate him.

That day in April when he had started out, he had stood there at the Schuylkill River wondering if this were not the most foolish thing he had ever done in his life. But here in June, there was no longer a need to wonder, because he knew it was.

But he walked anyway.

And three weeks after he and Ben parted at a river in Tennessee, Sam’s walking brought him at last to a big yellow house that had haunted his memory for a decade and a half. It stood at the end of a long, sun-dappled lane lined with trees, wending back from the main road. There was a sense of lonely inertia to the place, and he recognized it for what it was almost at once: the slaves were gone, taking their industry with them.

Sam forgot himself for a moment. His feet began to move without command and they wandered about the property, carrying him along like a passenger on a train. He remembered this place so well.

Over there was the coach house where he had lain in the back of a wagon and heard a white woman declare that henceforth, his name was Perseus. Down there were the quarters where the slaves had lived, where he had sat eating cornbread and greens and had his first glimpse of a woman who walked like beauty. There was the tree, a regal oak, where he had stood with his back exposed and the whip coming down. And there were the fields where he had last seen Tilda, who would not look up as the wagon took him away, not soothe him with so much as a glance. Sam staggered under the weight of all that he recalled.

“Stop right there, you scalawag!”

The command drew him around slowly. The old woman stood partially concealed in a copse of magnolia trees that grew around one of the outbuildings. Her face was pinched shut, her hair was a tangle of silver strings falling to her shoulders, and her eyes were made of fire. Sam lifted his one hand before being asked. It was a moment before he recognized her.

“Miss Prentiss?”

She gestured with the rifle. “Are you one of them?”

“One of which, ma’am?”

“You know which!” Her voice was brittle as dried corn husks.

“Ma’am?”

Impatiently. “The army! Abe Lincoln’s nigger army!”

For a moment, he thought he might be mistaken. He had never heard Louisa Prentiss use that word in all the years she had owned him. People who did use it, she always said, were coarse and unrefined. So perhaps this was not her.

But no. A decade and a half had taken their toll, had shrunken her down and whitened her hair, but he was not mistaken. She was definitely his old mistress. But what did she mean by a “nigger army?” Had one of the colored regiments of the Union marched through here? Was one garrisoned nearby? If so, surely it had been here for months, if not years, plenty of time for her to get used to the idea.

He spoke cautiously. “Miss, I was one of your people, a long time ago, before the war. Don’t you remember me? It’s Perseus.”

The gun barrel moved, fractionally. “You’re lying! I don’t know any nigger named Perseus!”

He was surprised to feel himself smiling broadly to reassure her and was glad Ben was not there to see. “Of course you do,” he said. “I was here for fifteen years.”

“Perseus?” She stepped out from the shelter of the trees, walking cautiously as if the ground might give way any second. And then she remembered. “You ran away,” she said. The words were coiled tight around a bright hard knot of accusation.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I took my son”—he stammered, trying to remember which Greek name she had given the boy; finally gave up—“Luke. You sent the slave catchers, but they shot him down when he tried to run. I told the boy not to run, but he got scared and ran anyway. Then they brought me back and you had me whipped.” He pointed with the nub of his left arm. “Right against that tree.”

“I remember,” she said. She came closer. The rifle barrel was down now, menacing only the grass. “I never believed in whipping my people. You were the first one. I hated that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, lowering his hand. “I hated it, too.”

“Then why did you run off?”

“I wanted to be free.”

“‘Free.’” She spoke it like something dirty, like something you pick up with thumb and forefingers and hold at arm’s length.

“Yes, ma’am, free.” He said the word in order to reclaim it. “Now that the war is over, I’ve come back in search of Danae. Do you remember her?”

“Of course I do,” she snapped. “You called her Tilda.”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“It hurt her when you ran off. I expect you know that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It hurt me some, too, to say the plain truth. I never understood how you could be so ungrateful to me. I treated you all well. There were no beatings on my place, I did not allow the overseer to work you to death. I even taught you to read. I was a good mistress, was I not?”