by Londyn Skye
After witnessing what another man had just been subjected to, James felt he had no right to be bothered by his father’s physical abuse. In fact, the pain was the furthest thing from his mind after he was dragged to the wagon by the arm. I let him die, I let him die, I let him die, I let him die was the only thought rolling through James’s head as he sat in the back of his father’s wagon on the way back home that night, with urine-soaked pants and remnants of digested food splattered on his shirt.
Despite arriving home covered in his own bodily fluids, James did not even bother to change his clothes when he finally made it to his bedroom. I let him die, I let him die, I let him die, I let him die was all that eclipsed his thoughts as he sat rocking on the edge of his bed, banging his fists against his temples, weeping and mourning the unspeakably horrific death of a man he did not even know. I let him die, I let him die, I let him die, I let him die … How could I just let him die? The “should’ves,” “the could’ves,” and the extraordinary guilt of just standing cowardly by and watching a helpless man suffer to death, had young James so drenched in overwhelming sadness that he was unable to sleep the rest of that night.
The sun came up and he still could barely force himself to get up from where he had sat crying for nearly four hours. In fact, he did not move until his father finally came in and manhandled him from the bed. “If y’ur late f’ur school, I’ma beat y’ur ass in every corner ‘a this plantation!”
James stared at his father without a hint of life in his swollen, bloodshot eyes. His expressionless face riveled that of a catatonic asylum patient as he emptily glared at the savage monster in front of him. The fact that he showed no fear, inwardly affected Jesse. He wanted to see terror in his son’s eyes. He enjoyed the look of horror on his face. He needed to see those things to satisfy his addictive desire to instill fear in everyone in his life. When James failed to react, it made Jesse even angrier. Before he could do or say anything to garner the reaction he craved, though, James quietly walked away to find something to wear for school.
James went downstairs when he was finished getting ready. He sat at the dining room table directly across from his father with his head hanging low, just staring at his breakfast. He did not feel even the slightest twinge of hunger, especially after briefly glancing at the bloody bandage wrapped around the knife gashes on his father’s hand. He nearly threw up again while watching how his father effortlessly shoveled food into his mouth, despite being covered in the blood of a man he had psychotically dismembered just hours before. The sight of it was sickening to James and kept his appetite at bay.
“You betta’ eat that goddamn food!” Jesse demanded before rising from the table and heading into town. James never even lifted his head.
After sitting there motionless for several more minutes, James finally stood and began walking toward the front door. He stopped just before he reached it. From the hallway, he gazed at Lily. She was in her own world quietly doing dishes with her back to him. James stared at her for the longest time with a barrage of extraordinarily happy memories surfacing of the previous six years that he had spent with her. But, on this dark morning, the thought of those moments lacked the power to make him smile the way they usually did. Instead, tears began to trickle down his face. His tears were brought on by the fact that he had never confessed to Lily how deeply he had fallen in love with her. He left the house that morning without ever resolving that regret and walked solemnly to school. He spent the entire journey there trying to harness the bravery to express how much he loved Lily in what he knew would be the most cruel and unusual way.
James sat in school all day in a trance, not aborbing a single word from his teacher. Lily inundated his mind. When the school bell chimed at the end of the day, he nearly jumped out of his skin. The sound felt to James like his signal to force himself to begin showing his love for Lily in a way that he knew would crush her. Since Lily had come into his life, James had never walked so slowly on his way home from school. On this day, however, a turtle would have beaten him. Despite his slow pace, James’s heart was beating like stallions in the home stretch of a derby. When he reached the entrance of the farm, he lingered outside of the gate, trying to settle the tidal wave of tears that had flowed on and off throughout the day. He was trying to find the last little bit of courage to face the young woman he used to run home to see every day, the young woman who always put a smile on his face as soon as he saw her, the young woman whom he was convinced – even at the age of sixteen – was the love of his life.
Despite not being prepared emotionally, James took a hesitant step through the entrance of his home, ready to force himself to express his feelings for Lily in a manner that he had been dreading. With every step toward the house, he was fighting the desire to flee. He won the battle and eventually forced his feet to take him up the porch steps. He stopped and lingered outside of the door, searching for the strength to turn the knob. With sweat rolling down his temples, he exhaled and reached his hand out for it, but jumped back quickly when his father yelled his name from the barn. James happily abandoned the porch and quickly trotted over to see what his father wanted. It was then that James learned very quickly that his father was not about to let him spend any more unattended time with Lily after school. It was the first day that he was forced to work alongside his father while listening to him infuse all sorts of racist nonsense into his head. They were ideals that James mentally regurgitated quicker than his father could feed them to him. For James, the rejection of his father’s way of life was easy, but the mere thought of having to reject Lily sickened him beyond what words could explain.
After the physical and mental torture of working alongside his father that day, James prepared himself to face a reality he had been dreading all day. Despite his jitters, he walked somberly into the kitchen to clean up for dinner. Within Jesse’s presence, Lily knew the rules about how to address James. She was formal and never made eye contact with him, as all slaves were supposed to do. As soon as the pair were alone, though, the warmth between them would always instantly return. Lily expected nothing different on this eve. After dinner, Jesse retired to his room. As always, Lily thought James would sneak and help her finish the dishes while they whispered back and forth about anything on their minds. But on this day, that would not be. James swore he could feel his father’s presence everywhere, as if he was lurking in corners watching him, testing him, wanting to know if he needed to take him out into the woods and teach him another graphic lesson, or worse yet … take Lily.
Even after his father was long gone, James continued to sit at the dining room table. He was emptily staring at his half-eaten meal, listening to the grandfather clock ticking nearby, marking every second that he cowardly hesitated to face the inevitable.
“James,” Lily whispered, frightening him from his contemplative trance. She stood in the doorway of the dining room, forcing him to face the inevitable, long before he was mentally prepared. He glanced up at her without saying a word. She turned and looked upstairs to be sure Jesse was nowhere in sight. When she was convinced they were alone, she felt free to turn back and smile. “Aren’t you comin’ to help, silly?” she whispered, her smile still in place.
James did not return the smile. He just continued to stare at her in silence, noting the brightness of her smile, the curvature of her lips, the evenness of her features, and the flawlessness of her honey-glazed skin. He was recalling how all of those incredibly attractive outer qualities instantaneously drew him to her as a child, and how he had learned since then that her inner qualities were equally as beautiful. As he quietly admired her, he finally blinked. The sub-second bodily reflex was like flipping a switch in his damaged mind. When he looked at Lily again, she was marred and disfigured in the way his father had promised she would be if their friendship continued. Along with that delusion came the sudden paranoia of his father standing in every corner of the room. It all felt very real to James. His eyes darted to the left and there his father w
as. He turned to the right and he was there too. No matter where James looked, Jesse was there, staring at him with a bloodstained face, holding a hunting knife. James began to sweat and hyperventilate, terrified over the fact that his mind was unable to decipher reality from illusions.
“James? Y-you okay?” Lily finally asked after watching his bizarre behavior. She walked closer to him and tenderly placed her hand on his shoulder out of concern.
James looked down at Lily’s hand. It was missing fingers. He immediately jumped to his feet and then looked up at her face. It was still charred, blistered, and disfigured. He knocked over his chair in his haste to step back, but he did not take his eyes off her.
“James, wh-what’s wrong?” Lily asked, extreme concern in her tone.
Mortified that his mind may have permanently cracked, James blinked hard trying to erase the visions. He turned his head in all directions again, but still his father seemed to materialize in every corner of the room. His breathing visibly quickened each time he turned his head and saw yet another illusion of Jesse.
“James? A-are you okay?” Lily asked, starting to panic along with him.
James closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. When he opened them, he was relieved to see that his mind had stopped playing its cruel trick. His father was gone, and Lily’s beautiful features had returned, but still he continued to stare at her oddly.
“James, are you all right?”
A cold look suddenly settled into his features. “That’s masta’ James to you,” he finally said after pulling himself together. He pushed his dinner plate forward on the dining room table. “Do the damn dishes, ya’self!”
“But James…”
“I said! That’s masta’ James to you! Now do as I said!”
Instant tears welled in Lily’s eyes. The devastated look on her face was just as unsettling for James to look at as her face was while in his paranoid state. Lily’s mouth gaped open and her bottom lip began to quiver as she stared at James in shock. “Y-yessa’,” she replied, as one of the tears she was fighting to hold back finally overflowed from her eye and slid down her cheek. She picked up the plate and walked solemnly to the kitchen … alone.
Ironically, the very moment Lily turned her back to walk away precisely marked the fateful turning point in their relationship. James’s cruel and unusual punishment had begun. It was a punishment that Lily was unaware had everything to do with the fact that James loved her so selflessly. He was selfless enough to begin pretending to be the man his father wanted him to be, just to ensure that he never made good on his barbaric promise. His father’s promised butchery not only destroyed their friendship but even destroyed James’s ablity to adequately sleep. Lily’s blistering burning body, her lifeless eyes fixated on him, morphed into recurring nightmares that jarred James from his sleep for years. The night terrors felt real enough to compel James to check on Lily afterward, thus beginning his tradition of going to her bedside on those nights. His dreams were a constant reminder to never break character while playing the role of a hateful master, not even when his father’s back was turned. He feared that a momentary lapse could be a fatal mistake, one he was certain he would never recover from. Despite feeling as though he was doing the right thing, James still lost weight, lost hope, lost his ability to feel happiness, simply because he had lost his very best friend. And, for young James Adams, that was equivalent to losing everything.
… Those memories, those fears, and that severe level of mental trauma had returned to James at full force as his father held him pinned against his carriage outside of Winter Garden on Christmas night of 1859. His father’s hands around his neck had instantly unburied his repressed paranoia, so much so that James swore he could feel the wood of a tree on his back again and the cold steel of his father’s pistol tapping against his temple. Suddenly, his father’s face looked bloody through his squinted eyes; he could smell the stench of burning flesh and see Lily’s body in the flames over his shoulder. It all only existed in his damaged mind, but it looked, smelled, and felt as real to James as his father’s hands currently around his neck. The combination of it all was about to drive James to make a series of rapid-fire decisions in the back hallways of Winter Garden that he would ultimately regret.
“Did you fuckin’ betray me, boy?!” Jesse accused, squeezing his son’s neck tighter.
James, however, was unable to utter a word in his own defense. As his father squeezed, his eyes began to turn blood-red and his lips a deep purple. On the verge of passing out, James finally grabbed his father by his coat and found the strength to shove him back several feet. He put his hands on his knees and began coughing and fighting to fill his lungs with oxygen.
“ANSWA’ ME GODDAMN IT!” Jesse erupted after being momentarily stunned by his son’s strength. He realized very quickly that much had changed since that night in the woods, but he was not outwardly willing to show that it had any effect on him.
Still catching his breath, James simply shook his head.
“Then you betta’ start explainin’ this shit!”
“H-how am I s-s’pposed to talk with your goddamn hands around my th-throat?!” James coughed.
Jesse stomped over and got in his face. “You betta’ watch how you talkin’ to me! You got three seconds to start explainin’ why my own son would betray me like this!”
“I didn’t betray you!”
“You didn’t betray me?! This don’t look like no goddamn slave breedin’ plantation to me!”
“And you should be happy it isn’t! You needed money for that shithole farm, didn’t ya’?”
“Show some respect! That so-called shithole is what kept you fed all these years!”
“And it’s barely keepin’ you fed these days! So, it shouldn’t matta’ how I went about gettin’ the money to see to it that it ain’t turned ova’ to the bank!”
“You’re a goddamn doctor! You could’ve made money that way!”
“You said you wanted me to start runnin’ the farm and that you’d let me do as I saw fit with the slaves to make money. And this…” James put his hands up in the air, “is what I saw fit!”
“Afta’ everything I’ve taught ya’, what the hell makes you think I’d eva’ be okay with this?!” Jesse mocked, throwing his hands up in the air in the same manner. “I don’t give a damn how much money Lily’s bringin’ in! Money means nothin’ compared to the repercussions of havin’ that nigga’ up on a damn stage in front ‘a thousands ‘a people! You know that!”
“I think you’d change your mind if you saw how much she was makin’ us!”
“How the hell’d she learn to play a goddamn piano anyway?!”
“Mama taught ’er!” James quickly lied.
His words momentarily stunned Jesse into silence. “Y’ur a goddamn liar!”
“It’s true! I saw mama teachin’ ’er with my own eyes!”
“Don’t you fuckin’ lie to me, boy!”
“I ain’t lyin’! I’d sit on the stairs and watch mama’s face while she was teachin’ Lily. In my whole life, I couldn’t eva’ rememba’ a smile that compared to the one I’d see when she was sittin’ there with ’er. It was like listenin’ to Lily was medicine for her sorrows.”
Jesse just stood there in silence, a grimace cemented on his face.
“Mama said she’d neva’ seen a child who could memorize a piece ‘a music the way Lily could,” James continued. “She told me she had this dream of dressin’ ’er up and havin’ ’er perform at debutant balls, and weddin’s. It was like she was obsessed with the idea, actually.”
Jesse’s face was getting redder with every revelation about his wife’s alleged secret. But despite the look on his father’s face, James nervously continued using his mother to help diffuse what he knew was a literal life or death situation for Lily. He may have looked confident and courageous while concocting yet another epic lie, but inside James felt like that same scared teenager, watching his father torture a man
to death in the woods. Flashes of his recurring nightmare threatened to impede his ability to continue weaving his deceitful tale, but with his eyes fixated on his father and nary a quiver in his voice, he pressed on with a story that he hoped would save the love of his life from the gruesome visions that were currently playing with crystal clarity in his racing mind.
“So, all ‘a this wasn’t somethin’ I planned at first, pa, I swear to you,” James lied convincingly. “I took Lily to the breeda’s, just the way I told you I was. But when I got to Ohio, I’s siftin’ through the newspapa’s to see if I could find a job while I’s doin’ research at the university. While I’s lookin’ through it, I came across an ad for a piano audition. That’s when I rememba’d mama always talkin’ about how skilled she thought Lily was on the piano. It brought back memories of the way mama’d sit at the piano bench with a smile on ’er face while listenin’ to Lily, and how she had that dream for her to play at balls and weddin’s. So, I just couldn’t resist the urge to give Lily a shot at William’s audition.”