Fine, then. Take nothing. Not a single thing from this place. Not even a memory. Too heavy, I guess. Might as well shoulder the burden for the both of us. Always been like that anyway.
Isaiah stopped. He leaned back a bit, sizing Samuel up. “You fixing to be vex even now?”
“Good a time as any,” Samuel said. He turned from Isaiah and looked out of the barn. It vexed him, indeed, how lush the plantation could be: a deep green where reds, yellows, or even purples could pop up any and everywhere without warning. The birds would fly about, swoop and dart in arcs and circles, dodging or crashing into the rays of sunlight, singing songs from the treetops that no one had the right to hear. How dare nature continue on as though his suffering didn’t even make a dent, like the bloodshed and the bodies laid were ordinary, to be reduced to fertilizer by insects and sucked up by crops. No more than cow dung in the grand scheme. Same color, too.
The rain also came down, regardless, right upon the face only to obscure tears, mingle with them, wash them away, yet leave, still, the pain untouched; if anything, it ensured that the pain continued to gleam. The universe would have to pay for its indifference. Or somebody would.
It was creeping up inside him, the thought that peace might have lasted a bit longer had they listened to Amos. Maybe not, though, because you never knew with toubab. They made a lot of ceremony about their treaties, but those pieces of parchment meant nothing other than Be careful. Amos had abandoned them too quickly, yes, but Samuel also felt like Isaiah had been too resolute and forced Samuel to also be that way. What could it have hurt to be a comfort to Puah just once? Isaiah should have known, as he had given Essie hers. Why didn’t Isaiah tell him about that? He talked and talked, and asked and asked, but never word one about what went on with Essie.
Maybe we not nothing better than the people, Samuel thought. Who we to think that because when we lie together it feel like water and moonbeam that we far away from danger? And who come close we put in danger, too. Where this courage come from that we choose beat over quiet? Look at where we at now. Now we might be dead. Yeah. We might be dead.
Samuel headed for the door. He turned back to look at Isaiah. The dead he felt inside didn’t move in Isaiah’s direction. No, there he felt something move and kick. There he felt something tremble and yawn. He had tried to look away from it, but it called to him. It called his name and he was anxious, stumbling over himself to say, “Yes, I’m here!”
It was almost happening. Almost happening in his eyes. Go away, mist! Don’t descend yourself here.
“I don’t wanna,” Isaiah said. He walked up to Samuel and grabbed his hand.
Samuel looked down at their clasp of fingers. He squeezed tightly. “Run,” he said, looking deep into Isaiah, this time without fear. Then he darted into the night, his lantern the only evidence that he was there.
* * *
—
Empty was all Samuel had ever known. His first memory was lying on a blanket, being surrounded by cotton plants, and hearing voices moan out a song. Suddenly, he was at someone’s breast and she was smiling. Then he was among a bunch of children and they took some of the other children away and he was left there with a few to carry water back and forth from the well to the field. Soon, he would carry the food—first for people, then for animals. And all the days ran together, weren’t worth delineating until that boy came, the one with the dry lips and skin as black as the sun could make it. Samuel gave him some water and Isaiah peeked into his soul. It shocked Samuel’s eyes wide open to feel something touch him from the inside, like a song unfolding in his gut. It tickled. He figured that was the day he was truly born, that was his birthday if he ever had one.
How many midnights had they between them? An audience of animals, kinder than toubab, who could keep what they knew to themselves. He and Isaiah had stumbled into something he had never exactly seen before. There was someone called Henry once who would only answer to Emma, but that was different. She wasn’t a man and everybody except toubab knew it. But that wasn’t the same. No one cared much about Isaiah and Samuel, either, until a person thought he could also be a toubab and the two simply couldn’t coexist.
During his endless chatter, Isaiah whined and whined about chains and who held what, but that was nothing but a coward’s deal. Scared men always had silver tongues, and that was Isaiah’s flaw. Still, Samuel would curl into himself only for Isaiah. He had the marks on the inside to prove it. When they were finally beyond this place and out in the world, some place far away where animals were said to run like thunder, he would teach Isaiah how to speak not in metals, but in flesh.
“You don’t never get tired, ’Zay? Tired of begging for your life? Everything you do—the way you smile, the way you walk, where you look and don’t look—just another way of begging for your life. You don’t never get tired?”
He had meant to convey that just with his eyes, but the mouth would have its say.
Isaiah sat down on a pile of hay. He leaned back and then immediately sat up again. He brought his knees up to his chest and hugged them. Then he rubbed his head.
“I get tired. But I wanna live,” he said.
See? That was where Isaiah had faltered. To survive in this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuel’s list of grievances was long: They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn’t breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed “CHAOS!” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.
They praised every daisy and then called every blackberry a stain. They bled the color from God’s face, gave it a dangle between its legs, and called it holy. Then, when they were done breaking things, they pointed at the sky and called the color of the universe itself a sin. And the whole world believed them, even some of Samuel’s people. Especially some of Samuel’s people. This was untoward and made it hard to open your heart, to feel a sense of loyalty that wasn’t a strategy. It was easier to just seal yourself up and rock yourself to sleep.
But Isaiah.
Isaiah had widened him, given him another body to rely upon, made him dream that a dance wasn’t merely possible, but something they could do together, would do together, the minute they were free. A dreadful thing to get a man’s hopes up that way. Hope made him feel chest-open, unsheltered in a way that could let anything, including failure, make its home inside, become seed and take root, curl its vines around that which is vital and squeeze until the only option was to spit up your innards before choking on them. Foolish Isaiah.
But how tender his affection.
When Samuel reached the Big House, it was dark. There wasn’t even a single candle lit. The back porch door was open just like Timothy said it would be. Maggie was on a pallet in a small side room just off the porch. Her fists were tightly balled and pressed against her chest like she was ready for something.
“He told me leave this door open. Why I ain’t lock it I don’t know,” she whispered.
Samuel was only half surprised that she was still awake. He moved closer to her with his lantern held up in front of him. Her face was screwed into distrust. Samuel loved her for it. She would be the one he missed most.
“You warm,” Samuel said, which made Maggie smile. “I go this-a-way?” he asked, pointing toward the kitchen.
“You need to go that-a-way,” Maggie replied, pointing outside, toward
the river.
“You sound like Isaiah,” he grunted.
“Sound like Isaiah got sense. Where your’n?”
“I got sense, Miss Maggie. Just this one last thing and then I heed you.”
“You listen to me, now,” Maggie said softly. She held on to a nearby wall and lifted herself up. Samuel extended a hand to help her, but she refused it. “You in this place, but you ain’t of it. You hear what I telling you? Neither you or Isaiah—what you call him, ’Zay?—ain’t neither one of you belong here in this place. Now, I ain’t saying that you ain’t welcome. No. What I saying is there be a whole better place for you, maybe not somewhere, but sometime. Whether that particular time is in front or behind, I ain’t got the power no more to tell. When you don’t use a thing, you lose a thing, you know. But I know for true it ain’t this time. So you gotta make a place to find the time where you belong. That’s what they tell me.”
“That what who tell you?”
Maggie pointed outside, and Samuel saw a shadow flash.
“Uh huh. You seen it, too. I can tell by your eyes,” she said. “That mean you got it.”
Samuel was still looking outside, but that shadow had already passed. “Got what?”
“The favor. It something that get passed down. Sometimes skip a generation, but you got it anyhow.”
Samuel looked at Maggie. “Where I get it from?”
Maggie looked outside. “From them, I reckon.”
Samuel didn’t understand. His gaze returned to the outdoors. He had hoped that by now Isaiah was halfway across the river. There was only a beat in between patrols.
“Miss Maggie, I gotta . . .”
“I know.” Maggie smiled. “A shame, but you gotta.”
She took a couple of broken steps over to him and she threw her arms around him. Samuel stiffened up. He was afraid that the shadow might ride her back again and grab him along with her arms that were holding him now. But he didn’t see it, which gave him the room he needed to bend a bit into Maggie’s embrace. She patted the top of his head.
“Foolish,” she said softly. “But if you finna go this-a-away . . .” She pointed toward the kitchen and the doorway on its right. Then she stopped. “You know something, you remind me of somebody. Man called Ayo Itself, but toubab called him Daniel.”
Samuel smiled at that first name because it sounded like it meant something important. He looked at her. “You warm, Miss Maggie. Always been.”
Then he walked off the porch.
He walked through the house slowly, straining to see the rooms filled with stuff—lots of things he couldn’t imagine the use for. And so many looking glasses, which didn’t surprise him in the least. He looked into one and thought he saw two faces. Maybe that other one was his mother’s?
He climbed the stairs and the shadows flickered and faded, grew and shrank as he ascended and made his way down the second-floor hallway. When he reached Timothy’s room, which was right where Timothy said it would be, Timothy was standing there, not far from the door, naked as day one, in the dark. Samuel nearly dropped the lantern.
“I’m not certain when my father will return, but I imagine it will be soon.” Timothy smiled. “He didn’t take James with him, so I don’t know if he’ll stay out as long.”
He pulled Samuel close to him and planted a kiss squarely on his mouth. Samuel jerked a little, revolted by how catfish it felt. Timothy, noticing his shock, slowly pulled away.
“I imagine you’ve never been in a bed like this before,” he said, pointing at it. He moved closer to Samuel again now that he could see that the ice had been broken and perhaps the bulge in Samuel’s pants wasn’t a trick of shadows. “Have you?” Timothy whispered in Samuel’s ear.
Samuel shook his head.
“Come.”
Timothy walked him over to the bed.
“You can put the lantern down over there,” he said, pointing to a desk in front of the windows.
Samuel looked out at the moon, a bright white half circle in the dark. He hadn’t realized before that Timothy was the same frosty color, and he wondered if that was where all toubab came from, if they fell here by accident or punishment, and that was why they were all so troubled: they were merely homesick.
Samuel looked in the mirror that stood in a corner of Timothy’s room. Isaiah once told him that he might find his mother’s face in his own. So when he would go to the river, he would look at his reflection to see. There was his face, only slightly distorted on the water’s skin. When he smiled, he thought that maybe the dimples that appeared on his cheeks were where he could see her. Locked in a grin, he found her where he had never before thought to look. And perhaps in the way his nose flared and spread across his face with that knowing, perhaps that signaled his father, from whom he was certain he received his impatience and stubborn clinging to love.
In the mirror, the image was much clearer than that of the river. He looked closely. Something tumbled from his eyes that was not tears. War maybe, the wild. There was a time and place for wild, but it mostly had to be curbed, reserved, set aside to keep from interfering in the moments when he had to be tender. Or wily.
He thought about what his father must have been like, whether he was forced upon his mother in some other Fucking Place. Some of them forced, anyway. He wondered if they had, instead, stumbled upon each other, clumsily, but of their own free will, pulled together in an awkward movement and slightly averted gazes, but smiles nonetheless. Free as will could be under the circumstances. Like him and Isaiah.
What Samuel didn’t know, he invented. His father’s name, then, was Stuart, a name he had heard Paul call a friend of his once. Samuel liked it immediately because it reminded him of hock-spitting, something he imagined his father to have done in the face of his own master, which explained his absence. He probably got his strength from Stu, Samuel figured, though he imagined it was his mother who survived.
“I know you’re not as shy as you seem,” Timothy said to him, breaking Samuel’s concentration. “I’ve seen you and Isaiah, you know. At night, I’ve seen you.”
Samuel shifted uncomfortably. The blade dug into his back.
“Take off your clothes, Samuel. Or should I call you Sam? Come lie with me.”
Slowly, Samuel removed his shirt. Timothy shuddered.
“You’re a different color than Isaiah.” Timothy’s eyes softened and he stroked his own cheek. “He said purple was the one he liked most. I thought he was just repeating my words back to me.” He rose from the bed and moved toward Samuel.
“In the North, it snows in the wintertime. You know what snow is? Have you ever seen it? No, probably not. Doesn’t happen here much.” He touched Samuel’s chest. “It’s what happens when it rains, but it’s so cold outside, the rain freezes and comes out of the sky like tiny pieces of cotton. It’s a beautiful sight. The ground gets coated with it and somehow, things get so quiet. Children love it. They play and laugh and throw it at one another. Makes it hard to walk around, though. Wagons can’t even come down the road. You can’t even see the road actually because it’s all covered in snow. The whole world, it seems, turns white. It’s so peaceful.” He traced his finger down to Samuel’s navel. “But after a few days, after people have trampled through it and it has started to melt, everything gets so messy. And it musses your clothes and you tramp the mess into your room and all you start to do is long for the spring again. I swear, you’d sell your soul just to see a flower bloom somewhere. That’s what made me miss home. Up in Massachusetts, the winters are so long and brutal you start to think you’ll never see a flower again. That’s not true, of course. But for a little while, you think that the color won’t come back ever. Maybe one day you’ll get to see the North in the winter.”
Samuel didn’t want to be anywhere where the white fell out of the sky cold and frozen, laying its claim over everything.
“When my father dies, I inherit all of this.” Timothy looked around the room and seemed disappointed. “All of it. The house, the land, the Negroes, everything.” He stared at Samuel as if expecting a response. Samuel stood unmoved. “You know the first thing I’m going to do when it’s all mine? I’m going to set every single slave free. Well, maybe not every single. I will still need some to do the housework and harvest cotton, but I know I don’t need as many as my father has now. He’s overcautious.”
Samuel made no gesture.
“Manumission, Sam. That means I’ll set you and Isaiah free—that is, if you want to leave. I imagine it will be much harder out there than it will be on the plantation with me in charge. I don’t want the responsibility, to tell you the truth. I’d much rather be somewhere earning a commission for my artwork. But my father is depending on me, you understand.”
Man-u-mission. The word echoed in Samuel’s head, rang bells, and made him vibrate within. In the tolling, Samuel allowed himself to think about how weeds feel between the toes of a free man. He might rip them up out of the ground or leave them be on a whim, all without having to worry about whether his choice would disturb the already tenuous balance and incite some fool to violence for something as simple as consideration. Color would be different, too, mainly because he would finally have a chance at figuring it out, detecting the tiny differences in shades moving one into the other. He would have the gumption to pick a favorite since there would be a reason to, might walk into a tailor’s store and buy a pair of britches for his trouble. Pardon me, kind sir, I take this pair right here. Nah, I won’t need no box for them. Do you mind if I wore them right now? And those shoes—yes, I take those, too.
The Prophets Page 30