A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  [They say you died somewhere up around Fort Wayne, and while they don’t say where you went from there, a lot of us have a pretty fair idea. We don’t know the name of the state, Johnny (let’s just say it hasn’t been admitted to the Union yet), but whatever it’s called, it must be pleasant up there under trees that’ll never be snags or sawyers in some spring flood. Trees must grow better when they know they’ll never be harmed; their fruit must be prime.

  [Are you running short of seed, Johnny? We could each bring you a bag when we come.…]

  O THOSE WABASH BLUES

  They had Johnny Appleseed back where you just come from, and they had Abe Lincoln over yonder where you’re heading for, but don’t go off half-cocked, son, and don’t think this here is only a blank space between the last place and the next: we had Gene Debs.

  We’re not too long on scenery, having mighty little timber that isn’t laid crosswise for crossties, and with hills about as high as wrinkles in a rug, we naturally save our logging lies for the Liar’s Bench; we aren’t old, and we aren’t new, coming later than the Original Thirteen but sooner than your come-lately states; we aren’t rich, and we aren’t pore, and having treated the Indians neither better nor worse (Tecumseh might tell you otherwise), we aren’t proud, but we’re a damn long chalk from meek; we could be smarter, and we could also be dumber, and our weather leaves a lot to be desired, being hot in summer and cold in winter, but if it was the other way ’round, come to think of it, it’d sure be tough on crops; we’ve got two sides of the track here, one for the bums and one for the gents, but we don’t have a third (where the Sambos live); we were Whiggish once, but we’re still a far cry from being Tory, and so, holding our nose at hell-fire and thumbing it at Popery, we worship higher than the kneeling and not quite so erect as the Elect.

  By and large, son, we’re ordinary sweet-and-sour Americans—psalm-singing but sinful, easy-going but tight-assed, bull-headed but right-minded, sore but serene, and mean often but seldom all day long. We aren’t perfect, but God was good to us here in Indiana: we had Gene Debs.

  MARSE LINKUM

  Tell fewer of the funny stories I told,

  And make no further mention of my plug hat,

  My rolled umbrella, and my outsize shoes,

  Bury the legend that I was a bastard deep,

  Let my mother’s sleep be that of the just,

  And if you must be heard, speak briefly

  Of my wife Mary and my wife’s madness,

  But speak not a word of my spoken-for Ann,

  Nor say that I loved her all my life.

  Forget my arms and legs, my awkward ways,

  And the guffaws I caused when I sat a horse;

  Forget the cat-napping pickets I pardoned,

  Forget my Four-score speech, my Bixby letter,

  And my six-mile walk to refund six cents;

  Forget the first house I lived in (let it rot

  And let all the others, but not the last),

  And build me no more monuments, nor cast me

  But as pennies for children and small change.

  Say not that I saw two faces in my glass,

  One like my own and one strange, as if bled,

  And dismiss my dreams of a terrible end

  Such as many now dead dreamed of and found

  On the sunken road before Fredericksburg;

  Make little of my anger at little McClellan

  (Outnumbered! With three blues for every gray!)

  And less of the lie that the slaves went free,

  Because you know better, and so do they.

  Say naught of my high voice and my sad eyes,

  Throw away my relics (the watch and key,

  The muffler, the ox-yoke, and the rock

  On which I scratched my name and Ann’s),

  And retain but a pair of my photographs,

  A Brady for the hard evidence of my looks

  And a Gardner for the books of learned fools,

  And now that only my coat can be pilfered,

  Stop moving my coffin from place to place

  And let the ghouls unfrock these bones.

  Such are the slight favors that I request,

  Yet if it please you not, grant me none:

  Get my old chestnuts off your chest

  Should they still strike you funny;

  And if you like, praise me as Honest Abe

  And raise a log-cabin Christ with nails;

  Re-engrave this grave and homely face

  On your money, preserve the box at Ford’s,

  And make cold fact of the cool fiction

  That my father’s name was In- or Enlow;

  Wring more tears from women on the floor

  For bounty-jumpers and last-remaining sons,

  And count the ones that kissed my hand;

  And if your tongues are slung in the middle,

  Then keep Ann and my love for Ann green

  While you hail the hell I had with Mary.

  Slight favors, and done without with ease,

  For I doubt there’s much I much require

  To lie decently dead save your living long,

  And you will so live, and I will so lie,

  If you know the truth: it was you, not I,

  That Booth was hired to kill; it was you,

  The Union, that he fired at in firing at me;

  And since I died of what went wide of you,

  Please remember all I stood for when I fell.

  LIKE THE SAP IN A TREE

  I was born in the Old Dominion, mother of presidents, but I never got to be president, and for that matter, I never even got to be a Virginian: I happened to be black, and my state was slavery, and wherever I went, a piece of it followed me, the piece I stood on—or so my Master told me (Mr. Peter Blow) when he took me to Missouri to work for his living. He died there, the poor bastard, leaving a few gold trinkets and a salmagundi of trash (including me) to a spinster daughter. She used me till I went out of fashion, or she needed cash, and I was knocked down third-hand to a Mr. Doc Emerson of Jefferson Barracks. Mr. Doc carried me off to Rock Island, Illinois, the first free soil I’d ever set foot on—and right now that freedom began to flow up my legs like the sap in a tree.

  Like the sap in a tree!

  The arms I had grew longer, and I grew new ones, like branches, and I owned forty hands of forty fingers each, and when that freedom-juice gave me speech, I spoke in words that only whites (and flights of birds) had used before: I said, “I’m free!” I said it to myself once, trying it for flavor and finding it salt, and then, aloud, I said it to a cloud in the sky, and now I said it to snake-fences and smoke-stacks, to steeples and green corn, to the railroad tracks and dogs dozing in the shade, to people (whites, blacks, and in-betweens), and in the end I said it where it hurt, to Mr. Doc—and when I spat out my last Illinois dirt, it went to waste on Missouri, but not on me, because I walked on it, and it grew me great enough, even in the Show-me state, to keep on saying, “I’m free!”

  I said it to slaves, to Lovejoy’s friends, to Osage braves, to boys in the street, to stars and walls and stern-wheelers, to the buffalo-blood on the plains, to the up-and-down rains and the flood of mud named the Mississippi. I said it for twenty years (for ten of them to meeching Christers who looked the other way or laughed, and for ten more to a raft of shysters scared stiff by the South). I said it to deaf ears, plugged ears, and what was left of ears slit for lying; I said it to the well, the sick, the dying, and the dead; I said it (“I’m free!” I said) to frontier pimps and waterfront tarts, to sloe-gin drunks and greasy gunmen, to hound-dog handlers and easy marks, to brass-knuck punks and squatter-sovereigns, and now and then, meaning once or twice, to someone nice enough to call me Mr. Scott.

  The Supreme Court said otherwise in ’57. It said I was a nigger (it used fancier guff), and a nigger, if he acted tough, was apt to finish up a tree with a bigger neck than when he started. It said I was inferior. It said I was a chattel. It said
I had an owner (or, worse, the owner had me), and it said he could sell me, swap me, give me away, or stick me like a hog. It said all this God damn slop about being free would have to stop. It said I’d be free some time, but not this side of the grave. It said my case had been tried, and being still alive, I was still a slave.

  But I said, “I’m free!” and I never quit.

  The word was like the sap in a tree!

  HAD I SO INTERFERED IN BEHALF OF THE RICH

  You’re on the far side of the grave now, Dred

  (You’ve been dead a year), but you’re freer

  Than I am—and I’m white and still living.

  I won’t be living long, though, friend,

  And I’ll end as black in the face as you:

  They’re going to hang me high in an hour,

  And I’ll draw my last breath where you drew your first,

  And I’ll rejoice, as if they’d given me my choice,

  That my place of death was your place of birth—

  Virginia.

  I could’ve lived to be older than fifty-nine;

  I could’ve lasted out this merchant century:

  I had the frame for it—but not the frame of mind.

  If I’d been blind to you and deaf to God,

  If I’d loved myself more and money most,

  If I’d kept my nose clean and my soul snotty,

  If I’d valued my skin, if I’d thrown no stones

  At the sin of slavery, if I’d passed the buck

  And left such truck as bravery and broken bones

  To fools—in short, if I’d been a sleeping dog—

  They’d’ve let me lie till the nineteen-hundreds.

  I die sooner, but with nothing done that I’d undo

  If my life were spared: the slavers slain

  On the Pottawatomie would be slain again,

  All five, and more if found; the battle

  Once won at Black Jack Oaks would be twice won;

  The raids made on Sugar Creek and the fight lost

  On the Marais des Cygnes would be made and lost

  In the future as they were in the past;

  The same slaves would be taken by force

  From Messrs. Hicklin, Larue, and Cruise,

  Of Missouri,

  And Cruise would be shot dead a second time

  If he cocked his Colt in his second life;

  And lastly, the same treason would be committed

  At Harper’s Ferry, and when brought to book,

  I’d give the same reason that I gave

  In Kansas:

  Nits grow to be lice!

  Knowing that delay would merely change

  The number of the day and the name of the month,

  Knowing that at some later date, as the same

  Traitor, I’d dance on air for the same crimes,

  I say let them crack my spine now and here.

  Commend me to your only Master, Dred, and mine.

  POSTCARD FROM COLORADO SPRINGS

  “Your son’s a waiter here at the Antlers Hotel, so take that map-tack out of wichita and move it about three hundred miles further west. Altitude 5980 feet in the Grill where I work, slightly higher under the rafters where I sleep. Can see Pike’s Peak from my window, but no bust. Send mackinaw. Love. Dan.”

  MILE-HIGH WINTER

  When Dan came from the side door of the hotel, a dry and fine-feathered snow was falling, and it fled before the wind to make concave strips of molding along the curb and the building-line. Underfoot, it packed without melting, and it lay long on clothes, like crystals of camphor, and spinning through areas of light around the street-lamps, it was a vast skirt passing in a waltz. Few people were about, and few cars, and the store-fronts, except for an illuminated name here and there, were dark. From the roof of the depot, a railroad herald wrought in neon reddened the down-drift and the nap of snow now beginning to cover the pavement.

  Through the glare and the grain in the air, the steamed windows of an all-night diner were dim. There were no other patrons in the wagon when Dan entered, and climbing a stool at the curve of the counter, he ordered a cup of coffee, added sugar from a shaker, and then let it stand before him untasted while he stared at a distortion of himself in the bright nickel urn behind the bar. [How often would you have to see her before speaking, you wondered, and when you finally spoke, what would you say, and what would she answer if she heard? Would she seem the same then, you wondered, would you like her voice, and would you still admire her face, and her hands and feet, and the way she dressed, and the flavor of the powder she wore? Would you care for her name when you learned it, would there be more to her than you could see and hear, would you want to touch her after touching her once, and would she be better or less than a dream? Would the wondering end tonight, you wondered, or would the words to end it with come too late if they came at all…?] The door opened, and Dan turned to it, and the door closed, and he turned away, and now when he gazed at the urn, there were two faces in the shining cylinder. [Would you speak, you wondered, and if you did, what would you say…?]

  “Can’t you think of a single thing?” she said.

  He looked at her for a moment, and then he smiled, saying, “I’ve been thinking all week, and if I had any thoughts, I can’t remember them. I haven’t any right now. I don’t know what to say next.”

  “If you expect to get anywhere with me, you’d better say that I’m pretty.”

  “I don’t expect to get anywhere with anybody, but I’ll say even more: you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”

  “If I’m all that, why did it take you a week to say it?”

  “If you hadn’t spoken first, I’d never’ve said it. I’d’ve gone all my life regretting it, but it wouldn’t’ve done any good.”

  “Now you’ll have to regret the opposite—that you did say it.”

  “If I have to regret anything, let it be that.”

  “You’re simple, Dan. You’re simple enough to break anyone’s heart but mine, and I’ll tell you why: I haven’t got one.”

  “Who gave you my name, and what else do you know?”

  She nodded at the counterman, saying, “Where you come from, what you’re doing here, and your age. I also know that you never asked him about me. Why not? Didn’t you want to know who I was—the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen?”

  “I wanted to hear about you from yourself. It wouldn’t’ve meant much to have him tell me.”

  “It might’ve meant more than you suppose,” she said. “He’s known me for a long time, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you where you’re going. You wouldn’t look at me like that if you knew.”

  “I’ll look at you like this as long as you let me, and all the while I’ll be trying to guess what you’ve done that you can’t forgive.”

  “He’d’ve warned you to watch out for the cars,” she said. “Aren’t you afraid of the cars?”

  “What do you find that’s so hateful in yourself?”

  “Would you like to walk me home, Dan?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d like it very much.”

  The wind had died away, but snow still fell, more heavily now and straight down, and they intruded on a night so entirely quiet as to make it a matter of respect to speak in lowered voices, as if all that they passed—the many houses, the many trees, the many streets—were entitled to be undisturbed. [You thought of Miss Forrest, and the sole image you were able to see was the last she had left with your mind. All the rest, the whole four years of fancy, was suppressed by that one overwhelming imprint, and you shivered, because you knew that nothing would ever remove it, and you said] “When’re you going to tell me your name?”

  “What’ll you do when you know it—speak in rhyme?”

  “If I could, I’d do that now. You make me lighter than air.”

  “My name is Julia Davis. Are you still in the sky?”

  “I’m a mile up, and I’m never coming down.”

 
“Would it give you any pleasure to kiss me?”

  “A great deal—if it gave you the same.”

  “Never mind me. I live on the ground.”

  “In more ways than one: you eat it.”

  “I’m waiting for you to take your pleasure.”

  “You don’t want to kiss me. You only want me to kiss you.”

  “It’ll come to the same. We’ll both get smeared.”

  “I don’t like to stick my face where it isn’t wanted.”

  “Don’t you ever go where you’re not wanted?” she said. “To me, that’s half the fun of going.”

  “What’s the other half?” he said.

  “There’s a big joint up the canyon—the Broadmoor, it’s called. It’s for Gold-Coasters from Chicago, not local phone-operators, but whenever they have a hop out there, I go. I’m not wanted, but I go. Are you still flying around, Dan?”

  “No. All of a sudden, I’m flat on my face in the gutter. My wings came off.”

  “The cars, Dan. Kiss me and watch out for the cars.”

  “I saw you a week ago for the first time, and I haven’t been able to see anything else ever since: you fill the eye. But don’t get smaller, Julia; don’t let me see beyond you.”

  “That makes one warning apiece. What follows?”

  “We try to find out how we come to be walking with each other through this particular snowfall.”

  “Why don’t we just enjoy it? Why’re people the only animals that have to say, ‘Where do you come from?’ It’s where they are that counts.”

  “They get where they are with baggage.”

  “I travel light. I’m not one for going about loaded down with sin.”

  “What do you do to shuck it?”

  “I watch my father: he lugs himself wherever he goes. He can’t get the past out of his mind or off his back. It’s smothering him, but he can’t let go. He used to own a store near Ludlow. That’s south of here a ways. Does the name mean anything to you?”