Yasmine sucked in her breath. Why did he always have to tell them things that they weren’t ready to hear? But then, as soon as the thought entered her mind, she heard his voice, They ain’t really children, Yaz, not the way this slavery thing done them. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, but that’s the way it be. And that’s the difference between us and the white folks: We can see things for what they are and not turn away. And that’s why we’ll make it to the Last Day, and why God, in His Almighty wisdom, will strike them down—all of them with their depraved ways. James had started to shake then. She remembered that she had taken his hand to steady him. Then he had come back to himself and addressed her once more. “They boys. They going to see things . . .” He shook his head. “We ain’t going to help them from shielding them. We ain’t no kind of shield for them.” She had known then, down deep, that he was right, as she knew now, deep down, that he was right. It was just that there was such a distance between realizing a thing and acting on it.
The two older boys, drawn by the spectacle of the proceedings, and Nolan, drawn, as always, by the movement of his older brothers, moved toward the auction block. Yasmine wanted to tell them to stop, that there was nothing to see, that it was too dangerous, that they could get snatched and sold downriver to some eagerly enterprising slave catchers who were bound to be in the vicinity, but James was still with her, in her, and she knew that they needed to see, that they needed to understand why it was they were leaving, understand with every fiber of their still mostly innocent bodies. So she crept behind them, shushing the suddenly restless Lani and directing the boys to a spot she decided was safest, behind a small shed, close enough to the main road that they could run to safety if they needed to.
“Chattel number twenty-nine!” the slave auctioneer shouted, and rapped a stick on the stage. He was a middle-aged man dressed in clothes that might have looked decent if they had been recently washed. He spit tobacco frequently out of the side of his mouth, constantly churning the wad between his molars.
Nolan pressed his narrow shoulders into her stomach. Yasmine rubbed them reassuringly, glad that he was young enough to still be able to show that he needed her.
“Goddamn,” Little George said softly, but not softly enough that she couldn’t hear.
Yasmine slapped him lightly on the back, more out of instinct than anything.
The auctioneer’s assistant led a gaunt and sickly-looking man onto the stage. The man looked to be in his mid-forties, and he towered over the other men. His shoulders were the broadest Yasmine had ever seen, and his feet absolutely thudded on the pine stage.
“He a giant!” Big George hissed to the rest of them. Something was building in his body, Yasmine could see it. Some kind of malignant response to the horrors he was witnessing. His shoulders squared, and his fists tightened. He wanted to do something, to stop it. It was hard to watch it and not want to intervene. His whole body leaned forward, ready to act.
Yasmine’s stomach filled with panic. Nothing good would come of this—nothing at all. James had left her; she was now suddenly sure of it. Wordlessly she reached over and grabbed Big George’s arm and squeezed it.
Big George flinched in surprise.
Yasmine shook her head slowly, while her eyes screamed, “No!”
Her eldest son frowned, his eyes popping with anger. But then he exhaled, and all of the energy went out of his body. His shoulders sagged, and he looked away from her.
“No, he was a giant,” Little George hissed, still watching the progress of the sale of the wasted man on the block. “They worked him to death. Now he just a shell of a giant.”
Satisfied that Big George had been quelled, Yasmine turned back to take in the terrible spectacle before them. The man’s gait looked pained, his every movement impossible. Where a normal man would have had gleaming pectoral muscles, this man had only a dry cavity that heaved up and down with great effort. And where a calf should have been fierce and made the white men tremble in their effort to subdue it, the giant’s were so narrow that they almost did not exist. Although Yasmine would never admit this to anyone, the bodies of black men were one of her great pleasures in life—admiring them, watching them work, and, when she’d had James, touching one. Seeing a black body abused in this way seemed an abomination to her. God would never have made something so beautiful in order to have it defiled.
“He’s healthy, gentlemen,” the auctioneer shouted out into the audience of at least fifty finely dressed white men. The auctioneer got down off his podium and walked around the man, pointing to an emaciated rib cage here, a sunken cheek there. “He may not look it, but he’s healthier than most of us standing here today!” He paused to spit, to the side of the stage. The sound of it was almost enough to cover up a few guffaws from the audience. Almost, but not quite. The auctioneer balked and peered into the crowd, trying to spot the offending individuals. “If you don’t believe me, believe this: This buck can stem and tie tobacco hands faster than any in the county, and can pull in four bushels of cotton. His master is here and will attest to this fact.” He pointed his long white cane toward the side of the stage, where a white man with all the trappings of a tobacco aristocrat stood, casually smoking a cigar. The white man nodded toward his brethren, and another snicker flew out of the crowd. The auctioneer faltered; his face was visibly red.
“The only thing that nigger’ll be picking is his own skin off his dried-up bones,” someone shouted. This outburst was met with a smattering of appreciative laughter, which made the seller’s face redden as much as the auctioneer’s. The Dead Giant just stood there, if you could call it standing, hunched as he was, chin almost swallowed up by the pit of his throat. Yasmine knew he wasn’t really there anyway, that the part of him that was real had been beaten out of him long ago, and that it was already somewhere else, living a new and better life—possibly where they were headed, back home in the motherland. This thought comforted her, and she pulled Nolan closer to her. He sniffled, happy to be deep within her skirts. Big George kicked absently at a stone.
Boom! Boom! Boom! The auctioneer pounded his cane into the stage. “There will be order here, or there will be no further sales this morning!” Sweat was starting to pour down his brow in rivulets, and he blinked rapidly, the salt clearly burning his eyes. Just like that, the men were quiet again, blowing smoke out of their pipes and cigars as if nothing had even happened.
The seller tipped his hat to the auctioneer, and the auctioneer tipped back. “We’ll start the bidding at three hundred,” said the auctioneer, turning back toward the audience.
A short man with a disheveled wig raised a finger. “Three hundred,” he said.
“We have three hundred!” the auctioneer exclaimed, suddenly animated. He almost glided across the stage, the primary actor in this theater of commerce. The cane lifted, he made a wide arc in front of him. “Gentlemen, don’t be bested in this contest! This is a fine deal we have for you this morning, a fine specimen! Do I hear three fifty? Three hundred and fifty dollars, gentlemen, for this investment in the future of your empire!”
“Three hundred and fifty dollars for that half-dead thing?” Little George spit out of the side of his mouth. He peered at his older brother. “He ain’t worth even a hundred. Shoulda listened to them hecklers.” Then he chuckled.
Yasmine would have cuffed him if she were able to reach him.
“Why doesn’t he cut all the fancy talk and just sell us our niggers already?” they heard a young white man not far from them tell his older friend. “We didn’t come here for no lecture.” His friend nodded.
“We have three fifty!” the auctioneer shouted, his pupils dilated. White foam gathered at the corners of his mouth, a sight which made Yasmine’s stomach churn. “Do I hear four hundred?”
“Four hundred,” said the same short gentleman at the back.
“Idiot,” the young white man told his friend, who nodded agai
n. “He’ll get him home just in time for him to die.”
The auctioneer paused for dramatic effect, a bit sober in the knowledge that this particular act was coming to an end. “We have four hundred. Do I hear four fifty?” Boom! The cane came down with the finality of a shut door. “Sold, for four hundred dollars to the gentleman in the back!”
Yasmine had seen enough. She grabbed the boys and, despite Little George’s protestations, pushed them away, back toward the road to the guesthouse. “This ain’t our business,” she told them. “We got more pressing things to attend to.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A SMALL BRICK HOUSE nestled between two colored churches. I have never been there, but everyone says that it is the most hospitable and clean-looking house in the whole part of town. The white man from the colonization society had laughed when he said that last part, his generous stomach jiggling and threatening to burst his shirt. Yasmine hadn’t understood exactly what was so funny about that, but she surmised that it had something to do with the notion that a Negro home could actually be clean. If you can’t find it for some reason, just ask anyone over there for the Medger family, and they will direct you. But I don’t think you will have any problems, there or in the voyage back home.
They had been walking for some time, farther and farther away from the slave auction, until the whole affair became a tiny dot on the horizon and, she hoped, in their collective memory.
They passed the shipyards, where poor white men worked alongside poor, but free, black men. The smell of the wood, oakum, cotton, and putty was overpowering, as was the foul language the men spit at one another.
“You half-witted bitch,” a squat man with far too much hair yelled to his humongous counterpart. “I told you that treenail was bad! But like a nigger girl’s cunt, you just had to stink up this whole process because you thought you knew better than the rest of us, didn’t you, you goddamn piss-for-brains piece of shit.”
Yasmine couldn’t help it; she stood there gaping at the man with the indecent mouth.
“Mama, when we gonna eat?” Big George asked, yawning. Yasmine broke from her reverie and started walking again, Nolan in tow, fervently hoping that the boys had heard none of it. “I need me some food,” Big George said again, the incident at the slave auction, and his overpowering need to act, clearly gone from his mind.
Yasmine felt the few coins in her purse and sighed. She hoped they would be enough to buy them a few items for the journey to the other side and whatever they might need once they arrived. She knew, however, that it would not be nearly enough to feed all of them well in the interim.
“Dinner at the guesthouse,” she told him simply, and began to walk faster. The Medger family, while being blessed enough to be free, was obviously not blessed enough to avoid working for the likes of the men in the shipyard. She shook her head; the more she saw of this state, this country, its cities, countryside and plantations, the more convinced she became that there was, in fact, no place for them here. Coloreds were like fish out of water, and she would rather eat refuse than spend a lifetime trying to learn how to swim on land. She could see the logic of the white man at the podium that day last spring, talking about how coloreds and whites were two completely separate beings who could and should never try to live together.
And just like that, they turned the corner, almost running into the African Methodist Church and its colorful cloth sign that read, WELCOME, BRETHREN, ONE AND ALL! SERVICE A HALF HOUR AFTER DAWN AND DUSK, EACH DAY. Indeed, at this hour of the evening the small, square edifice was packed with bodies, some praying and singing up front, others standing quietly in the back. Across the way, a Baptist church also overflowed with the faithful and their music. Yasmine was about to conclude that the Baptist congregation was winning the musical and spiritual battle, when she noticed a modest brick structure wedged between the two churches. It had tiny windows that looked like the eyes of a badger within the entire face of the house, a long, thin chimney, and curiously, a bright red door. They had finally found it!
“Hurrumph,” Little George said beside her, and before she even had a moment to process, he had walked up to the door and knocked on it three times.
“Why you do that?” She grabbed his freshly-rapped knuckles, as if to take back the knocks.
Her son looked at her incredulously. “Ma, quit acting. I know you as hungry as we are.”
Yasmine sighed, exasperated. “That may be so, but it don’t—”
Just then, the door flew open, and a short, middle-aged black woman dressed in a well-worn gingham frock stood before them. She had a kind face and warm eyes. “Good evening,” she said evenly. “You must be the folks Edwin and them was telling us about?”
Yasmine nodded.
The woman beamed. “You all look tired and hungry, two things we can change right quick. Come in.”
The pungent fragrance of meat coaxed growls from all of their stomachs. Fresh cinnamon and apples made matters worse. Yasmine felt her face color, but the boys just stepped through the door without hesitation.
“We just sitting down to dinner,” the woman told them. She gestured to a long table in the next room, where a dozen or more people were gathered. Steaming plates of candied yam, gravy, pig’s feet, greens, and boiled beans lined both ends. Plates were half full of the delicious-looking food, and the table’s occupants were quickly packing on more. “Won’t you join us?”
Nolan nodded vigorously, and Big George licked his lips.
“Where they get all this food?” Little George hissed to Big George. Yasmine gave him a disapproving look.
Big George shrugged. “Probably get the churches to pony it up or something.”
“Actually we grow a lot of it in our garden. You wouldn’t know it looking at the house, but there is actually a long yard out back. We grow all sorts of things out there: corn, beans, collards. We even raise chickens and hogs,” the woman said, leading them to the table. She pulled up a few chairs from the corners.
“Amazing you all can get anything done with all that church noise coming from both directions,” said Big George. He sat down a little too quickly, and the delicate chair creaked loudly under his weight.
A graying older man at the head of the table, who Yasmine guessed was the patriarch, raised an eyebrow. She didn’t register clear disapproval in the movement, but she saw it in the eyes of the thin, brittle-looking woman beside him—probably his wife. No one lived between two very active churches like these unless they were involved in them in some essential way. Never speak freely in a house that ain’t yours. How many times had she told that to the boys? Sometimes she really didn’t recognize them. She decided that the best course of action would be to change the subject. But before she could get to it, Nolan said, “They let you grow your own food, even being slaves?”
This stopped everyone at the table. It was as if he had picked up the potatoes in their fine china serving bowl and had thrown them against the wall.
Yasmine bit her lip. She had definitely failed them as a mother.
“Ain’t no one here no slave, boy,” said a sinewy young man who was sandwiched between two young girls in pigtails. “Everyone here make their way with honest, hard work and regular wages. My parents been owning this house going on fifteen years now.”
Nolan’s eyes were getting bigger by the moment. “Own your house? But I never heard of no colored owning nothing!”
This dissipated the awkwardness at the table and made a few people chuckle. The massive heaping of food on plates resumed.
“Then you been sadly lacking in education, boy,” said a frail man of about forty in workmen’s overalls. “We all free peoples here.”
This did not faze Nolan in the least, even as Yasmine shoved him into the seat beside her. “Well, we all free people too, but we still got no choice but to work for Master Scott and take his wages. Mama always says how you can call a fre
edman a freedman, but if he work like a slave, and ain’t got the rights of a freedman, he no better than a slave.”
Yasmine’s breath caught in her windpipe, and she pinched Nolan under the table.
The patriarch at the end of the table raised the same eyebrow again, but this time directly at Yasmine. “That so, boy? Your mama does have some fascinating, if not wholly accurate, ideas.”
The intensity of his glance was too much for her, and she looked down at the tabletop.
“That why we going far across the water to the new land,” Nolan continued, undeterred. “Mama say we can really be free there.” He reached for a steaming-hot biscuit from the platter in front of him.
Mrs. Medger looked vaguely amused as she filled the boys’ plates. Some of the guests around the table nodded their agreement, while others frowned or shook their heads. Mr. Medger even hurrumphed.
“Well, we wish you all the best of luck,” said a young man to their right. “You got quite a journey ahead of you. And you all so brave to be taking it on like this.”
Yasmine nodded at his kindness. It seemed for a moment that the conversation was successfully redirected, as the only sound in the room was that of utensils clicking against plates and Lani fussing for Yasmine’s breast. Yasmine turned her around and faced her toward her plate, spooning small portions of meat in her mouth.
Then Mr. Medger broke the silence. “Either brave or foolhardy,” he said. “Hard to tell without more information.” He worked a tough piece of meat between his molars.
“That fellow we saw in Boston last month say this whole notion of sending coloreds back to Africa just another way for the white man to shore up his power,” said a young man, between bites of greens. He looked to a young woman with two long braids, to his right. “What his name again, Amelia?”
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