Free Men (6 page)

“But he hasn’t sent word?” I’d say.

“He hasn’t wound up back here, has he?” she’d say. “That’s all the word I need.”

ON THE FIRST
night of March, I slid from under Winna’s arm, grabbed my pants and the shirt that used to be a flour sack until it wasn’t even good enough for that, carried my shoes with their tongues flapping, stepped over two sprawled children breathing heavy as pull mules, and made a whistle as I slipped through the door so it sounded like the trees breathing out. I sat on the top stoop with the pipe I’d filched from Master’s nephew, who left his things around when he visited and never seemed to wonder
where they went. The night was warm and jangled with stars, like the Lord was shining a spotlight on me and saying, “Bob, you settle now. You couldn’t move an inch without the whole world seeing.” So I smoked instead, my shoes empty next to my feet.

Just as my eyes were closing, which is easy to do in spring when the air smells soft and bloomy, I heard Winna sneaking out, stepping past those sleeping bodies, slipping through the door with the same little whistle. She squatted down next to me and rocked on her heels a couple times to stretch them out. I smelled the char on her skin from cooking and it smelled like the stars being snuffed out one by one, a silent hand turning the night smoky.

“Boy, you’re a damn fool,” she said. “Where’d you get that pipe?”

“Ain’t no pipe.” I tossed it in the dirt under the porch. Night was the only time we could talk, and it made everything we said sound like the last time we’d say it.

“And where are you going with those shoes?”

I reached my arm out for her arm, but she shied away and stood up.

“Uh-uh, no sir. I’m just about done.”

I rubbed my hands on my face and asked for maybe the tenth time if she’d run with me some day, knowing all the words but needing to hear them to keep my insides from running off without me.

She kneeled in front of me, her dust-blue shift in the brown dirt. “We got two children, Bob, if you don’t recall, and Polly can’t go more than a few steps without whining, and damned if I’m carrying her on my back for a hundred miles.”

“Oh, it’d be longer than a hundred—”

“Hush up. If they go, we’ll all get caught and strung up somewhere, and if they stay— Well, I’m not leaving them here.”

I looked at her hands on my knees and tried to remember why it was bodies like us got married at all, if marriage is what it’s called. Why we let ourselves be taught that this is life, that this is what loving feels like.

She stood up and circled around herself a few times, her hands on that thin waist, her skirt scuffling around her legs. She did this when she was thinking, and sometimes when she was mad and she wouldn’t tell me about what. “Honey,” she said and stopped, and I sat up on my heels to hear her. “I want them to be safe.”

“Not free?” I said.

“Safe,” and she looked at me sad.

I heard her, I did, but we looked at things from opposite sides of the river. I thought I loved my children as much as anyone else, and I wanted them to live on their own land earning their own wage, same as me. If I’d risk my limbs cutting over night fields to earn that other kind of life, I figured the same went for them, and if they were caught and killed God knows I’d weep along with the rest, but wasn’t that the entirety of the point, that we were putting up all we got against the chance of something better? I wanted for them what I wanted for me, but she wanted something else.

In the end they were not mine, they were hers. Being a mother meant that she’d always be a half-step closer to them, and whatever I said on the matter would eventually sink to the bottom of that river we were talking through. I can’t say I understood it. I knew women who had cut for it some night or other with their
babies on their backs, and others who had left theirs behind, and one who stole a white baby to take with her, don’t know if out of love or mischief or both, but I surely knew that mothers were nothing alike.

“Come on back to bed,” she said, and she had stopped circling but her skirts still swayed. “Better go on and enjoy what you got while it lasts.”

I took her meaning and grabbed her ankle and let her drag me inside again.

IN THE MORNING,
windy warm, we rose up like children still sleeping, our actual children out cold on the dirt floor, and with our pudding arms we dressed and fried quick cakes. On those mornings I could never quite tell when it was that my eyes first opened. I thought it was just in time to see Winna stir the hominy with her snake-brown arm, her eyes still closed, and then the first bell rang and I kicked the little ones awake with a soft foot and I thought,
Today is the last day
, which is what I now thought every morning that rose with a sun. We were sowing in the fields today, and the women weeding, and my arms went out and down into the dirt and my legs stretched to hold me and sometimes bent and my head was heavy and flicked around to keep the flies from settling and my hands flinched in cramps every now and then so I had to stop and squeeze them, which was what we all did, in stages, so the whole long line of us was like a caterpillar heaving.

When the sun crawled a foot farther above the low stepped hills leading down to our flatness, the women broke for feeding and I saw Winna walk back as straight as a paling to the yard where the little ones were lined up at the fence beneath the
shaking palms, staring out like they expected to see a shower of squirrels fall from the sky, and they reminded me of something, all in a line like that, their hands wrapped around the rails, their bare toes fiddling around in the sand. Our youngest was on her bottom, arms stretched up like two sunflower heads turning in the midmorning, searching out her mother. I stopped long enough to see Winna cradle her up fast, like business, if there was a business that lasted your whole life long, and I thought,
God damn it, that woman is no longer mine.
And then Treehorn stood between me and the vision of her and spoke through a pink mouth and my mouth replied—words used so often they didn’t even make sounds in my head anymore—and I moved on down the row without looking at her again, the bent back in front of me filling my sight, turning the yellow day cotton-colored.

At the noon bell we laid our tools down, all whole and new since the last breakage half a year ago for which Cuffee took all the blame and the whipping, and I took my bowl of ladled greens and sat next to my wife and looked at her straight, my two eyes in her two eyes, and I said, “What keeps me here?”

She shook her head. I waited for her to speak, but she just looked at me with sad eyes that were masking as sure-of-themselves and I nodded and touched her knee and let it go and lifted my spoon to my mouth. “I’m not going to give you speeches,” she said, and I knew.

THAT NIGHT I
left Winna with the children, she stitching shirt-holes shut by candlelight and them wrestling and tugging at each other’s pigtails, and I moved like Panther chasing Antelope, creeping on paws to Mingo’s cabin. We shared a cup of parched-corn coffee and talked in whispers about the long
roads north and west and even the boats he’d heard about that would take a man wrapped up in the hold over water. I said it sounded too risky, putting your black body in white hands on a white boat, and he said he knew plenty who had done it and one who forged his papers and now tailored in Baltimore. I voted for west; I didn’t walk around calling myself a clever man, but what little I knew about this world was that east was just ocean and then the darkness again, where boys got snatched riverside and brought right back over.

But Mingo had a cousin in Boston. He was firm bound to get up there and had gotten hints where to stop along the way, like “this barn” and “that creek hollow,” though it seemed to me if enough people knew about it then they all probably did, slave-snatchers included. I was listening, though, for I wouldn’t know enough to get myself out of gunshot range, north or south, but would probably follow a possum instead, let her lead me in circles till we were all perched in a pine, me nursing her young. He said his cousin ran a shop where colored folk bought shoes and sometimes got their hair cut all at the same time. Said he had a sign out front that hung by a gold chain, “T. Brown, Cordwainer, Tonsor,” and that when you moved to Boston, you could claim a surname, could draw one up out of thin air and even call your own self “mister.”

“But I don’t know how to make shoes,” I said, and he leaned back in the one straw chair and fiddled along his legs for ticks.

“They probably teach you. Or you do something else, something you’re good at.”

“I’m fair at planting cane,” I said.

He shook his head and said, “You’ll learn something. They’ve got plenty of boats up there that need loaders, if nothing else.”

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the everything else out west that sounded better than the nothing else up north, and hauling cotton bales from shore to ship didn’t ring the same as tilling my own land and resting in the evening in a house I built myself and owned and the wages of it all coming to me and no one else. I had inherited that want. He told me about the houses in Boston, which were back-to-back brick, and the harbor that was always moving and the white men that spent all day in thought and the black women that walked about free and fancy. By then the candle stub was worn out.

I snuck out the same way I came in, on paws, and they were asleep then except the littlest, who was sitting up in a pile of blankets and sucking on the end of her shirt, eyes looking like it was morning. I kissed her nose and nudged her with my foot into lying down and crawled in beside my wife, who was new-asleep and still breathing shallow and her body was so warm I wrapped around it like moss, wishing never to leave, and outside the man who’d lost his mind went by singing songs no one understood.

In the morning I said we needed to talk once and for all and if it was the last time, that’s the way it was, and that night we asked Granny to sit with the children and I held Winna’s hand and walked her to the near woods, where, under the pines, the new March leaves of the turkey oaks shone like falling stars: yellow-green, with catkins for tails.

SHE LET ME
go. She said in the woods that she loved me fine but she already made a life and it was here and it was in those two children and her duty to them was holier than any desire of her own. I understood, because it was those children who had
shown me what a rotten wheel this all was, and if my needs were precious, so too were theirs. I said I’d come back for her some day and she smiled and said not to bother, that she’d probably have a new man by then, and she tucked her head into my chest and kissed my chin under the last longleaf pines not cut for timber, just a stand of them and our love underneath, and I knew it was love after all.

Winna had these eyes that looked like someone dropped honey in molasses—they had shots of golden all in them. Primus had the same eyes, striped eyes, and I didn’t know where they got them, except that maybe they were just shards of white folks creeping in, but those eye sparks always made me think that they knew something I didn’t, that they’d come to a purpose that I hadn’t. And for all Winna and Primus weren’t anything alike—one just a woman after all and the other the best man I knew—they sure did know what they were after, and knowing was most of the way to having.

Though my eyes were as muddy as the rest of me, still I was moving myself, picking my body up out of the days of kneeling and cutting and stirring and not feeling much one way or the other, and taking it to an elsewhere that was unknown. I was making a choice, and if I never saw Winna or Primus’s ghost in my dreams again, I’d find them in the place where people go who move their life with their own hands.

I DIDN’T WAIT
for Mingo. The night after I talked with my wife and held her head under my head, Master sent me to the Indians with only one stone jug and a sheaf of letters that he called important. I stuffed my sack with boiled eggs and lace cookies I’d snatched from the kitchen and a stolen knife, and
I rode that horse slow up the trail that led from Master’s sugar fields through the cotton of his neighbors who weren’t so foolish and money-hungry as to plant cane on these sandy flats, and our steps fell into the dust prints of all the other steps I’d taken this way, and to the horned owls watching, it looked like this journey was no different from the others, that my horse and I would come back in a few days the same as ever. But I went slower. Maybe so as to look less like a runaway, but maybe so now I could watch everything that went past.

I didn’t have much of a plan, for I thought that my mission being as righteous as it was, fate or something similar would point me where I needed to go, would guide me past the traps and men waiting with nets, right up the shoulder of a child to safety. In my mother’s telling, Antelope made it to heaven every time.

I figured I had a week before they came after me. The slower I rode along this road, the more I thought to myself how I looked like a justified man, a man with rights of riding, and beyond the fact that this perhaps drew no suspicion, it made me feel like I had chosen justly. I was a just man riding a right path, and the burning of my blood kept me from falling weary. When the dawn reared up, I was halfway through the now-Spanish lands, trailing the Escambia and unperturbed. Once a burned-looking man passed on horseback and we nodded and I kept on walking that horse slow and I was beginning to be almost certain that I was the owner of this road, that river.

I never noticed how many kinds of trees there were along that path—not just the trembly palmettos, but taller palms, and low, bendy oaks, and trees with smooth bark and toothy leaves. I still didn’t know most of their names, after living among them for how
many years. They could’ve been my children, clearly different one from the other but only if you looked close, and still in all their beauty they didn’t mean anything to me, didn’t do anything but shade me on the path, and me not even grateful for the shade. I would make a point to write her and say I was sorry, once I made it someplace where they could teach me to write.