Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
what it was a sign for. She ran from the room and brought back a hand mirror and turned me this way and then that, holding the mirror for me, and said from one side I was practically a white boy except for my hair. It was the first time I’d seen myself that close, both sides like that, and when I said so, Miss Bridget left the mirror with me that evening. It provided some mild entertainment for the next few hours as I moved it from side to side to see the texture and pigment of my eyes and the pores in my skin as well.
The next day Miss Bridget told me she was not from this place either, but from an island country nearby that had been conquered a long time ago, and her people made to suffer for it. She said her parents had died when she was young and she’d been working in other people’s homes since she could remember. Most recently she’d been employed by a Mr. Ryan back home, but he’d left for America, and so she’d lost her position. Being a good man, he’d found her a position here at Hodgson Academy, a place so foggy even the faeries lost their way.
“Foggy?” I told her I’d been confined to my room and not yet seen outside.
“Not once?” she said.
I shook my head. She studied me, laid her creamy hand on my face.
“I don’t believe you have the pestilence anymore,” she said.
I was glad about that and I told her so, and I told her I was even gladder that she didn’t think so.
“Then I’ll be having a surprise for you tomorrow morning,” she said.
And she did, although it wasn’t on the tray when she opened the door. Nor in her apron, either, at least that I could see, and for a brief moment after a long night of anticipation I felt disappointed. I thought she’d forgotten. But she hadn’t. She set the tray down with its toast and tea, but instead of picking up the chamber pot, she took my hand and walked me out of my room and through a large, cavernous hall trimmed with dark wood. I was so shocked to be suddenly out of my room that I couldn’t speak. We paused by a tall window and she urged me to slip behind the heavy drapes. What followed was a pleasure I cannot fully describe. She opened the window for me, lifted the sash slightly so I could smell the fresh air. I was too short to see over the sill, so she bent down and lifted me. The feel of her arms and hands, and the brief moment of being squeezed to her bosom, followed by the touch of new air on my face and the sight of a dawn sky over a grassy garden surrounded by tall trees—all this was a kindness I’ll never forget.
“World,” Bridget said, as though speaking to the great beyond, “’tis James.”
“Jimmy,” I said.
“Jimmy,” she repeated. “He’s wee indeed but a strong and healthy ragamuffin and not too brown for all we call him a monkey. He’s whiter than many a one and yet not as white as you would say. Jimmy, say hello to the world.”
I don’t know that I spoke. I stared and blinked, and felt the air on my skin. I watched the faintest touch of color spread across the sky behind the trees.
“Do you like it much, Jimmy?” she said.
“Very much,” I said.
AND SO I WAS held to a woman’s breast, newborn again into a world so different from Sweet Grass—so beyond what I would have been capable of imagining just a few short months before—that I’m sure I would have believed anyone in authority who might have told me that either Sweet Grass or Hodgson Academy were dreams. For how could the same waking world hold both?
But if dreams have purposes, one must be to remind us that what we see in the daytime is only partly true. I lived at Hodgson and dreamed of Sweet Grass—and so I knew the world was bigger than my bounty. And if I ever returned to the shacks and fields of Sweet Grass, I knew I’d carry the dream of this good life, its distinct colors and shapes, stone buildings with sealed rooms and glass windows, a world with measured and counted hours, bountiful food and companionship, and grown people who dedicated their days to teaching me to read, to add and subtract figures, and to recite accounts of Egypt and Greece in stories as beautiful and strange as the fancies Mama had told me about spirits.
I had never spent time with white children before, and although I don’t remember walking into the school or being introduced, I remember sitting at my desk in the back of the classroom and studying the variety of my classmates’ hair, the color of flame, or cream, or various kinds of wood. I remember the light from the high windows falling on the skin of their hands and necks as they bent over their studies. And because my features and hair were a novelty to them, I remember their furtive glances back at me, their curious multicolored eyes.
One of the other boys raised his hand and asked if niggers spoke Arabic, and if that was why I talked so funny. Our teacher, Mr. Collins, took the opportunity to tell us the story of how sugar from the Indies was shipped to England and African people were shipped to the Indies, and there was tea in there somewhere, and the Africans were sold as slaves in America for the cotton brought back to England, but the gist was that we were Negroes or Africans and not Arabs or niggers.
Mr. Collins looked at me when he finished as though waiting for my confirmation, and I was so lost I could only say, “No sir.”
“No sir, what?” he asked.
I swallowed. I could feel all of the boys’ eyes aimed at me.
“No sir, you’re right, we don’t speak Arab.”
The class laughed. “Arabic,” he said.
Confused, I said, “That neither,” and everybody laughed some more.
But it was a laugh without malice. In fact, when the teacher explained that I used to be a slave, their pink mouths opened wide and formed rows of O’s. And when he pronounced me a freed slave, the expressions of admiration could not have been greater if he had said I was a former pirate.
Mr. Collins was asked if there were other Negro slaves with one green eye. He looked at me, and I shook my head no. Then the same questioner asked Mr. Collins if I had been set free because I had one green eye—did a slave have to have two brown eyes to be a slave?—and Mr. Collins again said no, that one never knew or could scarcely guess what it was that caused God to dim the soul of a human being to such an extent as to make him think he could own another human being, or that caused that same God to enlighten that man’s soul sufficiently so he could see to free one of his slaves, and if—
“It was my father,” I said, interrupting him.
All eyes turned to me again. I felt my face get hot with blood.
“Your father?” Mr. Collins said, raising his eyebrows and waiting.
“Who freed me,” I said.
Mr. Collins suddenly smiled as though I’d shone light on him and he was beaming it back at me. “Our Father, our Lord,” he said.
“No,” I said, and his smile disappeared, light out. “It’s Mr. Gates’s green eye I got,” I said, pointing to my right one. I turned and pointed to the other. I could feel every single eye on me, and I took my time to say, “Mama’s brown one.”
Mr. Collins blinked slowly. They all did. The room was absolutely silent. Then Mr. Collins nodded in a way that conveyed that he both understood and did not understand, as though what he’d just heard was perfect proof of how things that seem true often aren’t, and things that seem untrue often are.
“Oh, the mystery,” he said, quietly, almost under his breath, an expression I grew used to him saying in these moments when there was nothing else to say. The other students took it as an end of the discussion. They seemed to collectively exhale before their heads swiveled away from me toward the front of the class.
“Oh, the mystery,” I said under my breath, intrigued by Mr. Collins’s accent and the strange power of his words. All the students’ heads turned back to me. Apparently I’d spoken more loudly than I’d meant to. And in a way that sounded very similar to Mr. Collins. I might have been mortified, but in all of those eyes I saw delight. Even Mr. Collins looked at me with admiration.