Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
good-bye, but I couldn’t have suspected then what I do now—and what most likely my father knew—that his legal wife, out of respectable spite, had sent my mother on an errand hours ago.
He asked me to close the door and come along. Asked, not commanded, and that was a crucial difference. Because regardless of the fact that I was a seven-year-old boy and did not have a choice at all, it was with my own hand, the one not being held by my father and master, that I closed the door on the old-wood-and-mildew smell of the cabin. Closed the door and turned away from the phantom flesh of my mother.
We got back into the carriage and the driver clicked his tongue and the team began to trot. I watched my father’s face as he turned to look out the window at the passing trees and fields in the glaring light of midday. I was waiting for him to tell me something but for a long while he seemed unable to speak. He was not, generally, a distant man. He was playful and quick to wrestle, to tickle, to kiss me. He was a flesh-and-blood body to me. When we walked in the woods, he held my hand. When we sat in the shade, I sat so close his sweat was my sweat, his smell was mine. I can still see his green eyes lively as new leaves and the full flush of his cheeks beneath his thin blond beard. When we played whaler in the creek (I was the whaler, he the whale) he’d throw me in the air and I’d laugh to see water roll off his big white back and monster head.
But that moment, in the carriage, I saw his face as I had never seen it before and his sadness scared me. Maybe because of that fear, and maybe because after too much silence I was suffocating for the sound of his voice, and maybe because when he finally did speak he deliberately touched each of his fingers and thumb before each sentence, and maybe because he used the pronoun we, which served to intensify our intimacy as the horses broke into a gallop and the carriage began to sway—maybe for all of those reasons I have never forgotten what he said to me.
“We,” he said, and he touched his little finger, “all suffer.”
Then he touched his ring finger, bent it back almost ninety degrees before straightening it again. “And we are all going to die. It’s a law of nature. You know these things already.”
He swallowed. I swallowed. I watched him touch his middle finger and pause as though he found this one the most difficult to contemplate. He blinked rapidly, nodded beyond me to the passing world out the window, the world we were leaving behind—my mother?
“We are not in control,” he said.
I could not take my eyes off him. I tried to swallow again but my throat felt dry and swollen. I was dying to unbutton my collar but dared not.
“It will take becoming a man,” he said, “to learn these last two. First—” He touched his pointer. “We do not live for ourselves.” Then he made a fist and shook it slightly as if he were holding something precious that he could feel and did not want to let go.
He lifted his thumb and whispered, “But we are free!”
I blinked back tears, swallowed hard, and turned my gaze to the window. That’s when he explained where I was going: to the port, to board a ship that would sail with the tide at dawn. I didn’t know what to say. The sky was a magnificent blue and the breeze bent the crowns of the trees along the road. Sail with the tide. I had only the vaguest notion of what that might mean.
He pulled some papers from his pocket and showed them to me, although I could not read. One was the rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence. He slipped it into my pocket and said it was civilized law—the law of men aspiring to be divine. He said I should keep it and learn to read it. Then he showed me other papers that were folded in an envelope.
“Men’s law,” he said.
I started to take the envelope but he said he’d keep it for now and give it to the captain. Before he slipped it back inside his coat, he pointed to the two words on the envelope: “James Gates,” he said.
I had always been Jimmy. He had always been Mr. Gates.
“James Gates.” The words felt odd in my mouth.
“Because you’re my son,” he said, and smiled.
I wanted to smile, too. He must have sensed my confusion, for he patted the papers in his coat pocket. “Your free papers,” he said. I might have asked why I needed those, why they were mine, because he said a word that I don’t remember ever having heard before, at least not applied to me. I repeated it, feeling my tongue slide easily across the surface of the sound, closing it with my teeth and lip.
“Slave?”
He looked at his watch, seemed for a moment to be calculating the time, and said he’d show me.
So before we boarded the ship he took me to a crowded market. He held my hand as we pushed our way through more people than I had seen in my entire life. I was overwhelmed by the smells and colors, by the sound of so many voices and the sheer variety of the human face. Who were these people? Where did they come from? Were they also going to sail with the tide at dawn?
To abate my confusion, I looked straight up at my father’s face, his slit nostrils and long thin nose and the blue sky beyond his head, and that was how I kept my balance.
Soon he halted and lifted me by the armpits up over his head to his shoulders, where I straddled his neck and peeked around the sweat-stained crown of his tall civilized hat to see a barely dressed—naked, really—Negro man and woman and two children on a raised wooden platform. Chains connected shackles from their necks to their ankles. I’d never seen shackles before and they terrified me, as did the man pointing to the people wearing the shackles with a long stick and calling out numbers to other men who called out more numbers.
I focused on the children, a boy slightly older than I, and a girl a bit younger. The girl had scabs on the right side of her face and the boy had long muscular arms and black skin shiny as tar, an empty socket where his right eye should have been. The two of them sat in the heat and stared with three spooky yellow eyes at something above our heads.
“Your mother,” my father said, “was auctioned away from her parents as a girl, and that’s why—”
He squeezed my ankles hanging down on each side of his neck and then turned and walked away through the crowd. I was confused. Was he thinking what I was thinking? Of Mama running, of her ear flying off? From his shoulders I could see down the long street to white gulls flying arcs over the blue harbor.
Just before dusk he said good-bye to me on board the ship. The pier smelled of fish and tar. He assured me that he’d come to visit at the end of the school year but that seemed so far in the future as to be irrelevant. He told me that miserable as it might feel to leave, staying at Sweet Grass would in time make me more so. He said this country was diseased, and he was sending me away to save me. He said he used to think civilization moved west until he’d been to the jungles of Mississippi to visit his brother and seen the horrors of what men do to other men when they can, when there’s nothing to stop them. He told me the school in England would take care of me—I’d be taught to read and think, and have a chance to become the free man God meant for me to become. His kiss on my forehead left a wet spot that I resisted wiping even as I stood at the rail and watched him hand my papers to the captain, walk down the gangplank, and disappear across the crowded dock.
It was the close of a hot July day, not unlike the day before or the day that surely followed. Yet when the cool spot of his kiss finally dried, I found myself separated from everything I loved and everyone who loved me.
ON BOARD SHIP I was given my own compartment and then left alone to mourn. In the dark I could feel the pitch and roll of the ship, hear the creak of the timbers and the occasional shouts of the crew. The first morning I dared a peek out on deck, but the sight of the gray sea and the sky forever in all directions frightened me and I quickly threw myself back onto my bunk. I slept and cried all day and night and day and night again. My grief must have alarmed the captain, for he sent for me to be picked up by the ears and carried into the dining area. When I refused to sip the wretched soup, an old man with the dirtiest fingers I’d ever seen pushed rancid chunks of cod into my mouth while