Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
it felt as if I were bathing in warm waves of love.
There are more scenes I remember from my years of school—but this one still stands out most vividly because the two things I learned that morning correspond with the two big things I learned at Hodgson. The first was Oh, the mystery. Mr. Collins said it with wonder and sadness and love, and so I learned that even teachers thought the world was mysterious, and could be struck dumb or sad and amazed by their inability to understand.
And the second thing I learned was that I could make people laugh.
In the days that followed, my accent and novel background provided great entertainment for my classmates, an entertainment I enjoyed providing. I was asked all sorts of questions regarding the difficulties of slavery—ironic for a boy who hadn’t even known he was a slave until he was being freed. I was asked if I’d ever been whipped? (No.) Had I seen others whipped? (Yes, I lied.) Had there been much blood and wailing? (Yes blood, no wailing—in fact it was quiet except for the cut of the whip and the harsh breathing of both whipper and whipped—I was a good liar, even then.) Why had the man been whipped? (I didn’t know—lying or stealing, probably.) Where did I see it? (Sitting on my mother’s lap. We had taken a walk and stopped in the shade and one fellow came past whipping his slave, who was wearing chains.) Did I think it would have been better to have been a slave in Egypt, Roman times, or America? (Because I did not know what Egypt or Roman times were, I said America.) Had I seen lions in America? (No, but a bear, yes.) Was it true full-grown adult Negroes smelled like tigers? (This asked with such glee that I was tempted to say yes but had to admit I didn’t know, as I’d never smelled tigers.) Never? I was asked again, as though that fact, coming from an ex-slave, was extraordinarily disappointing. (Well, maybe once or twice.) Had I any brothers or sisters sold off before my eyes? (No.) Ever seen families torn apart by slavery? (I imagined torn apart as in torn apart by claws, and so I said yes, I’d seen a slave girl who’d lost half her face to a tiger and a boy who’d lost an eye.) That impressed everyone so much that I added that my mother had lost an ear, sliced off by a tiger’s claw when she ran.
Soon enough, though, my novelty wore off and my classmates and I were playing together as though our mothers had been sisters. I kept my hair short, not to make less visible my mother’s blood but because their hair was short and combed and I wanted to look like them. I was given the gift of mimicry and fairly quickly even spoke as they did. And for all we soon remembered, I always had.
School, then, was a place of comfort. The beds were warm and the food filling and good, and I was cared for and treated with kindness. I learned to read and was often praised for my diligence and intelligence. I was rarely alone, but when I had a chance, I would study my little rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence because I thought that if I learned civilized law, my father would be proud of me—would remember how much he loved me—and so take me home to see my mother again.
In its words I searched for a reason for my banishment, and was encouraged by the first sentence, which says sometimes it is necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. But I understood little of politics, or what followed in the document, and remember being especially puzzled by the fact that I’d been sent to be free in England, of all places, whose monarch (the document asserted, though I had yet to meet him) was the source of absolute tyranny.
At Hodgson I learned to write letters. I knew Mama couldn’t read but I trusted that my father would read them to her. I have no notion whether or not he did. In his monthly letters to me, he only thanked me for mine and said my mother was well. I continued writing nonetheless. I wrote of my days, of what I ate, of my studies. I did not complain, as I had little to complain about save the ache in my heart. I reported my good marks in my studies, and felt that if I did well enough, and put my very best face forward on the page, perhaps I’d be able to go home again.
But in the spring, despite my earnest efforts, I learned that illness (from the diseased country?) had postponed his visit, and so another year passed, and another and another, and it wasn’t until after my fourth year of schooling that I received a letter from him informing me of his imminent arrival. I don’t think I can describe properly my emotion at receiving such news. Part of me didn’t believe it, but the part that did hoped beyond hope that he would arrive and see what marvelous (for I was always at the head of my class) progress I had made, see that even though I was still a boy, I’d miraculously become the free man God meant for me to become. Overjoyed, he would decide to take me home again to my mother—or even better, the most optimistic part of me hoped beyond hope that he would bring my mother with him and we could all live disease-free at Hodgson.
His letter didn’t say. It said simply, I am to board the ship Wilton Mare on the First of August and expect to help you celebrate your Twelfth birthday on the First of October.
I received the letter after he had already set sail. I lay in bed with the envelope in my hands and imagined him in the same cabin I had been in when I’d crossed the ocean. I imagined the sad sea spreading out forever, and the big sky, and the toss of the waves, the snap of the sails, and creak of the timbers as he lay in bed at night. And because I did not like thinking of him alone, I imagined Mama with him, too, although I’d never seen them together anywhere but in our cabin and on the bottomland below it. I imagined them standing at the rail of the ship looking outward, thinking about me. I imagined them holding hands as they sometimes did when we’d go down to the run to picnic in the afternoon. I could imagine the shapes of their bodies, and the heat between them that I could feel when I squeezed between their thighs, but I could not see their faces, and I worried endlessly that I would not recognize them, or that they would not recognize me.
But days before he was to arrive I became ill with fever again and was removed from the other children to a back bedroom, where I lay alone again, dreaming and fretful through the night, into a day, and into another night. Strangely, words from the Declaration of Independence kept running through my mind. I cursed England for having plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. I dreamed of the large armies of mercenaries completing the works of death, desolation, and tyranny. I imagined our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, and most frightening of all, I dreamed of the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
One evening, awakening from a fit of fever, I overheard a discussion between the rector and Mr. Collins about whether I should be sent back to isolation. The word isolation frightened me so much that I conjured old Miss Crinkle’s face—and as though she were God I prayed to her. I told her I would do anything if I could get well and rejoin the other children. I told her I would learn by heart the law of men aspiring to be divine. I told her I would give up anything.
And then I conjured my father’s face and green eyes and longed for him and hated him, too. I saw him standing at the rail of a ship in a storm. With my mind’s power, I lifted his booted foot over the rail and then lifted his hands as though to touch the tempest itself. He straddled a wooden rail and, reaching for the heavens, teetered one way and then the other. I played with the image in my mind and found I could make him lean farther toward the deck, then toward the sea, his hands still reaching upward and his face aimed at the storm.
Then, just to see if I could do it, I tilted him so far toward the sea that he lost his balance and his body carved a graceful arc, backward, into the foam.
By the time morning broke, so had the fever.
If my spirits soared with my improved health, imagine the crash a few days later when I was told that the ship on which my father had been crossing the ocean had sunk, and he’d drowned at sea.
I DON’T REMEMBER the pain of his death as perhaps I should. For three years in a row he’d said he was coming and then changed his plans, so in the fog of my grief perhaps I was able to fold the horror of his drowning into the more mild disappointments of the past few years. I’m only speculating. But