Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
would bring an as yet unimaginable hardship that I anticipated with foreboding as well as excitement. If my current misery were to make any sense at all, I had to see myself as training for an even more difficult adventure. I had to see myself as waiting for my big black stallion to arrive. Every saddle I made was practice for the one I would make him, for the one I would sit in when I found my mother, rescued her from slavery, and lived with her again in happiness.
I continued to write to her, although I did so with discretion, as the rest of the boys at Sunny Side were orphans and I did not wish to distinguish myself. Writing to her was a private comfort. Although I never received an answer, I calmed myself by telling her things that were in my mind and heart. I felt less alone writing the letters and imagining my mother’s loving face listening while Auntie (who couldn’t read either) read her my words aloud.
The months and years passed this way. I will not deny the occasional day of rage when I never heard anything from her, rage at her powerlessness and at mine. Rage at my dead father. Rage that I tucked away like a fearful, secret weapon. But most days I was sustained by gentler feelings. Our lives at Sunny Side were sheltered—we worked by day and slept by night, and ventured onto the street only for necessities.
Alas, some ignorance ends, and so its peculiar sustenance.
Five years after my father’s death, when I had just turned seventeen, a letter arrived from America addressed to me. It had been sent to Nigger Jimmy, Sunny Side Saddlery, London, and the date on the letter indicated that a year had passed since it had been written.
Dear Jimmy, it said. Your Mama Jennyveeve was sold years ago to a slaver near Centreville. Don’t write here no more as she ain’t never come back nor will.
It was signed, Mr. G. R. Norton, a name with which I was unfamiliar.
THIS NEWS SENT ME into a bitter melancholy as gray and deep as the sea I’d crossed when I was first set free. If my mother was no longer at Sweet Grass, where was she? And if I had lost her, who loved me? And if no one did, who was I?
And what about my idea of the future? If I didn’t know where she was, how could I set her free?
I tried reading the Declaration of Independence again, but it only drew me further toward despair. Why did I have no right to happiness, only a right to pursue happiness—isn’t that a torment? To have the right, without the means?
Civilized law, my father had said. But how could men aspiring to be divine invent such a torture?
I spiraled downward, and if it weren’t for my special relationship with Mr. Perry, I might have been tossed out into the street. For I’d sit at my work station and do nothing but stare through the dirty window at the putrid river. I was alone at the saddlery by then. In recent years my colleagues had come of age and drifted off—out of the workhouse to the army, the navy, or the merchant marine. I dreamed of where they were and what they were doing. The saddlery was limping along. Mr. Perry had gambled it away, and Le Chat had taken possession of it piece by piece, and he didn’t seem to care if he made any money or not. I’d gaze and dawdle, and finally I stopped getting out of bed altogether. I stayed upstairs in my closet, and I dreamed of death. I wondered how long it would take to drown if I were to jump into the river.
I don’t know how long this lasted. Mr. Perry visited numerous times, so perhaps weeks passed, or perhaps he came to see me more often. I don’t know. I do know I tried to conjure my mother, as I had always done. Yet knowing she’d been sold, and knowing that for years I’d been fool enough to commune with a mere figment, made imagining her difficult. I was stripped of my ability to cope, so Mr. Perry’s touches became an exquisite torture that illuminated a broad path toward self-destruction.
Why didn’t I take it? Again, the antidote to despair began with my body.
I’d grown tall, and my lean limbs bristled with strength. I could run fast and jump high, and a physical restlessness began to rule my days and nights. In the growth of my body, I felt new power. My hands, my shoulders, my thighs . . . I could lie in bed and feel the pulsing demand . . . for what?
Gradually my mind turned from the river and its cold death to something else. I went back to work making saddles. And on three consecutive evenings, I was awakened by a bumping on the pilings beneath my bed and Mr. Perry and I fished out a couple of good logs and a dead horse. But instead of using my share of the money for books, I visited the prostitutes across the street.
One in particular. A stringy-haired girl not much older than I who talked like Miss Bridget but whose name was Nancy. Her room was a tiny closet much like mine and we lay on a mildewed pallet soaked with the moisture of countless bodies. But I liked the smells there. I liked the smell of the candle, and of her often unwashed skin. I liked the smell of our sex and our breaths, and her hair. As often as I could afford it, I made the trip across the street and handed over my money and cleaved into her until I felt myself disappear. I have no certainty of her feelings, of course, and I distrusted mine, but she tolerated me with grace and even, on occasion, with affection. I liked her pale skin and the blue veins in her hands and temples and breasts, and I liked the look of her tiny shoes against the wall, and the clothes she took off folded neatly on the stool. And how her thin arms wrapped around my neck, and how her lower lip quivered when I plunged into her, and her chin would lift, and her eyelids drop wantonly. I liked to open my mouth against her neck and close my eyes and taste her salt—and there, like that, I could be quite certain there was no suffering that I could not endure as long as I could do this.
Even after climax I stayed close. She’d hold perfectly still, and I would, too, entwined in her arms and legs. She breathed quietly through her nose. She turned her face and neck to accommodate my kisses.
Although her general state was one of silence, she never hesitated to say in her pretty accent whatever words, fair or foul, I asked her to say, and sometimes just saying the words seemed to animate her and she’d begin to talk and tease.
Once I asked her to call me her wee monkey.
She petted my head. “Me wee monkey,” she said. “Why me wee monkey?”
“Because I’m a nigger,” I said.
“Nigger?” she said. “Is ye?” We were lying on our sides. She raised her head to look at my face in the candlelight. “From this side, I suppose one could say so. Or not. I thought ye might be a Spanish.”
“When my hair is longer it shows,” I said.
She rubbed her hand over my head. “What’s it like?”
“Curly.” I pulled her close to me on the bed and pushed her hand down between us. “Like this.”
She smiled. “I mean what’s it like being a nigger?”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know you are one?”
“My mother’s a slave,” I said.
She laughed in my ear. “And mine’s a good Irish wife!”
I didn’t speak. She took my hand in hers and kissed the tips of my fingers where they were cracked and stained brown from work.
“And yer da?” she asked.
“Drowned in the sea.”
“Ahhh,” she said. “Then maybe you’re drowned, too?”
I stayed quiet. I could hear her breathing in my ear.
“He freed me before he died,” I said.
“Why would he do that?”
“So I’d be free. A free man.”
“Man ye are.” She squeezed me gently.
“I’ve got papers to prove it.”
“Sure you do,” she said. She held me in her hand, eyes locked on mine, until I began to grow again.
“Is that the wee monkey, then?”