Antebellum

  “Who...who are you...?”

  “You know who I am, son.”

  I spun around and my father stood in front of me.

  “Dad!”

  I ran up to him before I could remember that I wasn’t a kindergartener anymore. When I reached him, I threw my arms around his neck and pulled him close enough to smell his cologne. He hugged me back, and almost took the breath out of me. I didn’t care, though. I would’ve gladly suffocated there in his arms.

  “Dad...what....where....where have you been?”

  “I’ve been away, son. I’ve been far, far away.”

  And we both cried like toddlers after dropping their candy.

  After leaving puddles on the floor for us to leave our shoe prints in, my father slowly pulled away from me. I tried to pull him back, but he easily broke away from me. He was always stronger than I was.

  “Son, listen to me, okay? Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Dad,” I said, wiping the mucus from under my nose.

  And suddenly his tears stopped and he stared me straight in the eye.

  “Son, you can’t go out there tonight.”

  I stopped wiping my nose and looked at my father with shock.

  “What do you mean, I can’t go out there?”

  “I mean, you can’t, Moses. You don’t know what you’re doing. You got power you don’t know how to use yet. You can’t go out there...”

  “The hell I can’t, Dad!” I wasn’t sure when my joy had turned to irrational anger. I just knew I was seeing red through my blurry eyes.

  “You just a boy, son. You don’t know...”

  “Look, nigga, I took care of Mama and Big Mama when you died! I’m the reason don’t neither of ’em have to work no more in they life!”

  “Listen to me, son. It’s not worth it.”

  “Ain’t worth what? Ain’t worth savin’ your mama and wife? Whatever, man. Get outta my face.”

  Dad sighed long and hard, as though he was trying to find a reason not to give up. Finally, he gestured his hand to something behind my back.

  I turned around to see SaTia in an outfit that made my jaw fall so that my goatee nearly hit the plush carpet.

  “SaTia...what...where did you come from?”

  “I just got here, Moe. I came just for you.”

  I didn’t try to hide my confusion.

  “SaTia, what are you talkin’ about?”

  “I think it’s time we made things more serious, Moe. I know how you feel about me, and I’ve loved you since high school. I don’t think we should waste any more time.”

  “Wow...you saying we should...like...get married?”

  “Yes, I think we should.”

  “Where did this come from, SaTia?”

  “You do love me, right, Moe?”

  I couldn’t lie to her anymore. I dropped my head and felt my walls collapse. “More than anything. I...I just never thought...”

  “It doesn’t matter now, Moe. We can be together now. You will marry me, right?”

  My head was spinning. I took a step back and put my hands up to my forehead, trying to steady myself. “I...I don’t know what’s goin’ on.”

  SaTia took a step toward me and grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Moe. will you marry me? Yes or no?”

  I stared her in the eyes. “Yeah, yeah, of course I’ll marry you.”

  She wiped a tear from her left cheek and gave me a deep, passionate hug.

  “I’ll always love you, Moe, I’ll always treat you right, and I’ll always be there for you. There’s just one thing you have to do...”

  Still not completely sure of what was happening, I found myself starting to get excited by the idea of marrying SaTia.

  “Yeah, okay, anything. What is it?”

  She pulled me back to arm’s length from her, so I could see that her face was no longer emotional. It was dead serious.

  “You can’t go out there tonight.”

  I don’t know where my anger came from. One second I heard wedding bells, and the next I was ready to put my fist through a wall.

  “What the hell is wrong with you people?” I screamed. Both SaTia and my father were taken aback. They began backing toward the wall as my father spoke.

  “Listen, son. This girl loves you. All she wants is—”

  “Shut up! You shut up! You don’t know anything about me. And you,” I said, and pointed to SaTia as she winced in pain. “You trying to use my heart to take me from the only thing I love! Take me from the only thing that’s ever mattered to me.”

  SaTia winced again, but this time from a different sort of pain.

  “The hell with both of you! You listen and listen good...I will never stop! Out there, that crowd, they waitin’ on me. They paid their good money to come see your boy, right here. I’ll be damned if I disappoint ’em!”

  SaTia and my father were now standing with their backs flat against the wall. They looked terrified. My dad looked at me as if I was pointing a gun to my head.

  “Son, please, just hear us out...”

  “No! No! This is finished! I’m going out there! Period!”

  Both my father and SaTia dropped their heads and began sobbing, but my anger wouldn’t allow me to care. I turned to the door, prepared to storm out, but Orlando, Brian, Ray, and Henry stood in front of it. They had the same grins on their faces that the man staring at me through the mirror had. They each had on a pair of old, worn down cotton overalls with no shirt underneath. And they each had a thick noose hanging around their necks. The ropes from the nooses hung down at their sides and dragged the floor.

  I walked up to them slowly.

  “Yo, y’all aight?”

  “We good,” Orlando said through his grin.

  “What y’all got on, man? You can’t go onstage like that.”

  “This what we supposed to be wearing, right?” Ray spoke up through his clenched teeth.

  Confused once again, I walked over and braced myself against the wall. I glanced to my right, and my father and sweetheart were still sobbing. Dad was trying to comfort SaTia, but his tears just made her worse. I turned back to the fellas.

  “Guys, man, I have no idea what’s going on right now. I’m not even sure how I got here...”

  I looked at my entourage and their grins had not changed. Brian took a step toward me.

  “Don’t worry about it, Moe. You got a crowd out there, waitin’, and you know we gonna follow you wherever you go, no matter what. Do what you do.”

  I nodded my head and the group of four parted, revealing the door. I turned the knob and stepped through into chaos. People in jeans with black shirts and headsets on were running around, trying to prepare for the show. They all smiled at me, but became hellbent once they passed. I looked behind me to see my crew of four still carrying widemouthed grins, and it suddenly became sickening to look at them. I looked away to keep my stomach from turning and worked my way forward.

  When I approached the stairs to the stage, one of the technicians handed me a huge, gaudy microphone. I looked at it for a while, and then looked back at her.

  “For those great big lips!” she commented as if she was going to pinch my cheek and give me a dollar, but instead she ran past me to take care of some other problem. A tall white man tapped me on the shoulder and began to count down.

  “Three...two...one...go!”

  I ran out onto the stage with the guys behind me, and the crowd erupted. I let the cheers feed me for a few seconds. I let them clear my mind of the craziness that had just happened backstage. When I was ready, I raised the mic to my mouth and began rapping.

  “HOES IN DA ATTIC, YEAH! HOES IN DA ATTIC, YEAH! COME ON TO MY CRIB! I KEEPS SOME HOES IN DA ATTIC, YEAH!”

  I stopped. Something wasn’t right. The cheers were deafening, the music was blasting, but something was off. I listened to the crowd chant as Henry and Ray picked up my verse. Something wasn’t right about it...

  Then I realized the problem. How had
I not heard it before? The words that the crowd was chanting. They weren’t screaming “Nigga,” they were chanting “Nigger.”

  I lowered my mic and looked out over the crowd. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the light, but what I saw eventually made me drop the microphone. Bradley was standing in the front row, centerstage, leading the cheer. I looked around for the security guard to kick him out, and almost collapsed. Bradley wasn’t just front row, centerstage—he was everywhere! It was as if he’d cloned himself a million times and given every version of himself a ticket to this concert. Everywhere I looked, all I saw was the face of the man who’d whipped me.

  “NIGGER! NIGGER! NIGGER!”

  “Wait a minute, who the hell is Bradley?” I yelled, but the wave of memories had already reached their peak. They came crashing down with a force that tried to drive me insane. Flashes came back like punches in a boxing ring. The Phil Winters Show...house in D.C. ...gunshot...empty field...slaves...Bradley...BRADLEY...

  “HELP!” I cried out as my dream faded. I woke up facedown on the floor of a horse stable.

  “Help...”

  The plea carried over from my dream, and I said it aloud as my eyes opened. I felt a lot of sweat on my skin, and noticed how hot it was as soon as I came to. There was something else I felt as well, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. Instinctively, I tried to look around to see where I was and what was going on. As it turned out, that was a mistake.

  I’ve heard physicians say that your whole body is connected. It’s one of those things you hear and forget, until something traumatic happens to one part of your frame. That’s when you realize it for yourself—when you’ve broken your right arm and discovered that moving your left leg causes you just as much pain as trying to shoot a basketball with the broken arm.

  I discovered, quite coincidentally, that if you happen to be strung up and whipped, all of your body parts react to it. I tried to lift my head to get a glimpse of my surroundings, and acid shot out from my back and into every corner and crevice of my body.

  I felt a hand swiftly cover my mouth before I could release whatever was coming from my throat. The hand jerked my head slightly and made the acid run again. The pain made my fingers shoot out and the hair on my arms stand up.

  I distinguished a voice through the echoing synapses in my head.

  “Shhhhhh! We’s here tryin’ to help you, boy! You gotta be calm, though. We’s friends. We jus’ tryin’ to help.”

  The agony played a constant, steady drum beat in my ear, and I could barely hear the woman speaking over it. I screamed and cried with her hand still over my mouth. She held me gently, but firm.

  “I knows it hurt, son. Feel like you jus’ wanna bend on over and die...”

  I opened my eyes again and looked down at the hands that covered my lips. They looked like they belonged to a man, although it was a woman’s voice that accompanied them. I tried my best to not move a muscle as I let my eyes scan around. I had felt hellfire shoot through my body twice now, and I would try as hard as I could not to feel it again.

  Everything I saw was blurry, but I could make out two female slaves standing in front of me to either side. One looked as though she could have been my age, with caramel skin that had been beaten by the sun. The other was middle-aged, with skin the color of a dark oak tree. They both needed perms as soon as possible. I was still on my stomach, so they seemed like giants. One of them pointed to my back.

  “Lord Jesus, seem like he jus’ got da whip dis mornin’...”

  I began to think of questions that I didn’t have the strength to ask. Where was I? What day was it? What year was it? The fact that this was really happening began to throb almost as much as the pain. How was this even possible? And most importantly, how did I get out? How did I get back to the world I knew?

  I spoke nonsense aloud to whoever was listening. “Cut...the... stereo...off...”

  I tried my best to not move so I wouldn’t cause anymore pain to go shooting through my muscles. The three women in the shed looked at me and sighed. I could no longer scream, but whimpered as I let my cheek rest on the dirt. The woman holding my mouth took this as a sign that I had stopped making noise, and let my mouth go. She stepped over my body and walked in front of me where I could see her. Her blurred figure stooped down to its knees. She was as close to my face as she could get before she spoke. “I’se Aunt Sarah. I used to be a healer fo’ they put me on da ship. I’m tryin’ to help you.”

  I looked up at her while my face still lay sideways on the ground. She was old. If I had to guess, I would’ve said she was in her sixties or seventies. Her charcoal skin looked as if it had been shorn and grown back a couple of times over, and the wrinkles on her face were motionless as she spoke and moved.

  I wasn’t used to seeing people this old doing anything other than gazing endlessly out of an institution window while waiting to die. She had kneeled down to me easy and effortlessly, and her posture made her look more like she was thirty.

  She confused me, but I had neither the energy nor the will to show it. I was trying to stop my eyes from rolling in the back of my head.

  “We don’ know nothin’ ’bout you, but you’se special. Roka been sayin’ it, but we seen how you’se talked to Massa Talbert and Bradley, and we knows you ain’t from ’round here. We’s been guessin’ dat maybe you from way up north, like up far wheres the white folk can’t do nuthin to you...”

  I wanted to say that I was from a place where white people didn’t string up black people and rip all the skin off of their backs. That where I was from, I was a king, a person recognized everywhere I went by both black and white people. I had more money than I could count and more hoes than I could pipe, and my pinky ring (which was lost back in the forest) cost more than all of their lives put together. I wanted to say all of this, but I had just been whipped by a slave overseer. So instead I simply moaned.

  “Don’ you worry none, whoever you is, you jus’ rest. You got da fever, and it gotta break on in its own time. It’s been more n’ a day now, so you may be seein’ things that ain’t really there. Jus’ remember, if it don’ make no sense to be there, then it really ain’t.”

  “I got some salve I put on your back whiles you was sleepin’,” Aunt Sarah finished. “We prays it help, if only jus’ a lil bit.”

  She bent down and lightly patted my cheek.

  “Poor thing! Bradley jus’ a’soon see you dead as be in with the rest a’us. We’s been prayin’, though! ’Cause if you really...”

  There was a noise somewhere in the distance. I didn’t hear it, but all three of the women did. They looked at one another with alarmed faces and frantically began picking up their supplies.

  “I thought you said Bradley was gon’ be gone for hours!” the middle-aged assistant said to the younger one.

  “I thought he was!” the youngest one snapped back. “He musta found himself a white girl this time!”

  “Shush, both of you,” Aunt Sarah snapped at both of the women, and they closed up. “Get all yo’ stuff and move! We gets caught in here and we gon’ be right where he layin’ at!”

  The women gathered everything they had brought with them, and ran over to the far east end of the stable. Aunt Sarah felt three of the wooden slabs before she located the right one. With a tug, she lifted and moved it out of the way so that the two younger women could run out, and then went through herself. Before she shut it, she peeked back through the space.

  “Hang in there, son. You stay yourself alive, and I promise I be comin’ back.”

  And then she was gone.

  It seemed as if days had passed in between the slave women leaving and Bradley showing up in the stable. I knew in my mind that it couldn’t have been as long as it felt, but my teeth were aching from being clenched from so long. I might have passed out again, but if I had, I was unaware. The only thing that seemed real anymore was pain.

  Bradley stumbled through the door, using effort to hold himself up straight and not
lying on the ground with me. I saw him, even though I hadn’t moved my head at all, and my gaze followed his trajectory for as long as they could. He glanced down at me as he entered the stable, then laughed and walked over to the corner where I couldn’t see him.

  I realized at that moment that I hated Bradley. I had never hated anyone before in my life, but I hated the man with everything inside of me. I resolved to kill him the very first opportunity I had.

  Even though Bradley was out of my sight, I still heard his footsteps shuffling around. Immediately, I began to worry about his plans. I imagined myself springing up to my feet, running headlong into his abdomen and knocking him to the floor, and then finding a way out of this warped reality I’d found myself in. I imagined the scenario all the way through, but I wasn’t willing to risk the pain of moving a limb. When Bradley returned, stumbling yet again, and accompanied by a young white woman, I was in the same place he’d left me.

  “Is this here the nigger?” A giggling, high-pitched voice spoke to Bradley as if it was viewing an experiment.

  “Yep, this the nigger right here. I don’ whipped him somethin’ good...”

  “He look like a regular nigger to me.”

  “Naw, sweetheart, he ain’t no regular nigger. You heard what they been sayin’ ’bout him in town, ain’tcha?”

  The white woman continued to laugh as she spoke. “Yeah, but all that stuff is rubbish, Bradley. They sayin’ he could take a bite outta tree and fell it to the ground! Somebody say at the market that he could jump twenty feet and devour a mule! He don’t look like no special nigger whiles I’m lookin’ at ’em.”

  “But you wasn’t here when we caught ’em, Susie. I’m tellin’ ya, the nigger got the strength a’ ten men!”

  Susie laughed at first, but then looked at Bradley, who was keeping as taut a face as he could while being drunk. Her giggles slowed from constant to sporadic, and then stopped altogether as she began to back up.

  “Why don’t you kill ’im then, Bradley?” The concern in her eyes was glossed over from the alcohol. “He could be dangerous.”

  “That’s why I’m breakin’ ’em so hard, sweetheart. See, this nigger could rip me to tiny pieces, but I ain’t yellow, see? And I knows that if we can break a nigger like this, he be worth twenty times any ordinary nigger off the boat. He could do the work of ten bucks in a day!”