Читать книгу Freeman Walker - David Allen Cates - Страница 6

WHEN I WAS A boy I had little interest in freedom, but my father did, so when I was seven years old he freed me, and I was sent across the sea with a change of clothing in a little black maw and a rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence that I could not read.

That’s true, and so my story begins.

Or I could begin earlier, say, at my conception. There, you might say, if you were the kind to say it, is the Original Sin. The cause of it all! Because my father was the legal owner of my mother, you presume her consent, being unnecessary, was not given. But that would be like saying that songs, being unnecessary, aren’t sung.

(Your father, after all, might have taken your mother by force, but do we presume it?)

Of course I’m aware that the Sweet Grass Farm, like the rest of the world, was a place of pain and difficulty, indeed horrors of human suffering—but these horrors happened to other people and not to me. Mama and I lived in a cabin along the river bottom. Our job was to tend the dairy cows, milk them, make butter, and take care of the calves. My parents loved one another and they loved me—I knew that the way a child knows anything, in my body—and I loved them, and was happy for a while.

But all happiness ends. What is unique is the cause. In my case, it was my father’s love and aspirations for me, his only son, combined with his obligations to his legal wife and his desire to please my mother that moved him to strike the fetters from my limbs, as he said, and send me to England to study.

The first hint that the day of my new life had arrived—that I was being conceived again—was the carriage. My father was a walker. He rarely even rode a horse. So to see him arrive at the cabin that morning in a carriage pulled by a splendid team of grays was indeed different.

Excited, I ran to greet him, and there received the second hint: a package with new clothes. He lifted me up onto a large flat sitting stump in our yard and helped me dress. I remember his big fingers doing a lot of buttons on the shirt and trousers, but mainly I remember him slipping on the boots. I loved how they looked and smelled, shiny and tall, and I loved how they looked like his boots, but I hated how they felt to stand in. They separated my feet from the earth with a thick sole and heel, and boxed in my toes and weighed down my step. They felt as unnatural to me as a mouth full of cotton.

Nevertheless, enjoying the novelty of the occasion, I happily stepped up into the carriage and took my place across from my father on a soft leather seat. He was dressed in an identical black suit and wore a high beaver-felt hat. He held another one on his lap, which he handed to me. It was a miniature version of his, and I took it with more pride than you can imagine. I put it on. I tilted it at just the same angle as his. The carriage smelled of oil and smoke, and seeing me sitting across from him, booted and hatted just as he was, my father smiled at me in a tight, uncharacteristic way that might have been my third hint.

But what happy child can anticipate losing everything he’s ever had? Especially wearing such a respectable hat and hearing the driver click his tongue and feeling the team suddenly lurch forward? Here I must have asked where we were going, because I remember him saying, “To say good-bye to your mother.”

Which still did not make me worry. I assumed we were going on an errand, on an outing, and I imagined myself waving from the carriage and Mama looking at me wearing my hat with the same pride and love I sometimes saw in her face when she looked at my father. I imagined all of that, and hoped for it as the carriage followed the trace down to the run where the cattle lolled in the cool shade. Auntie Luck told us Mama was in the field, but when we went there we were told she was in the woods on nature’s call. We waited; she did not return. I begged my father to direct the carriage one last time to the cabin, where I was sure she must be by now. I wanted to see her face when she saw me step out of the carriage and walk tall in my new boots and hat.

As we approached, I thought I saw smoke rising from the chimney. We stopped, but instead of making the dignified entrance I’d imagined, I jumped off the carriage and ran through the grass to the cabin door. I opened it and waited a moment while my eyes adjusted to the dark. Was that her bent by the fireplace stirring coals? Before I could call out, she disappeared and the coals turned to ash. My heart dropped and I was about to turn, but she appeared again suddenly, this time standing at the basin, her back turned.

Mama? I didn’t recognize my voice. I was not unaccustomed to seeing spirits, but I was used to them being dead. And just that morning, my mother had been alive enough to tickle me awake.

Look at me, Mama, I said, but she disappeared again. I could smell her, though—so she was close, or her ghost was. Then I saw her on a bench before me at the door shelling peas, her brown face bent over her work.

Mama?

She wouldn’t look up. Her fingers worked the pods. I wanted her to look up and see my new stiff white collar and black suit, see what she’d call my tall civ’lized hat and tall civ’lized boots, see how much I looked like my father.

Look at me, I said again in my new voice.

Finally she did, but her eyes were black and empty. She touched the scar where her left ear should have been. I’d seen the scar but never until that moment understood that there used to be an ear there, that once upon a time she’d had two, just like me.

Where’d your ear go, Mama?

I ran, she answered, and I pictured the ear coming off by the sheer speed of her running.

Ran? Where?

“Not here?” It was my father, and at the sound of his voice—he sounded terribly sad—Mama disappeared again. The bench was suddenly empty, no bowl of shelled peas, either. Where had she gone? Had I merely imagined her? I felt his hand on my shoulder, then on my hand. I looked again at the empty cabin but felt my father pulling me away. I glanced up at his face, at his long dark nostrils and the cloud of anger on his brow, his slit-mouth deliberately calm. I was disappointed that Mama wasn’t there to see me in my civilized clothes, and we hadn’t said good-bye, but I couldn’t have suspected then what I do now—and what most likely my father knew—that his legal wife, out of respectable spite, had sent my mother on an errand hours ago.

He asked me to close the door and come along. Asked, not commanded, and that was a crucial difference. Because regardless of the fact that I was a seven-year-old boy and did not have a choice at all, it was with my own hand, the one not being held by my father and master, that I closed the door on the old-wood-and-mildew smell of the cabin. Closed the door and turned away from the phantom flesh of my mother.

We got back into the carriage and the driver clicked his tongue and the team began to trot. I watched my father’s face as he turned to look out the window at the passing trees and fields in the glaring light of midday. I was waiting for him to tell me something but for a long while he seemed unable to speak. He was not, generally, a distant man. He was playful and quick to wrestle, to tickle, to kiss me. He was a flesh-and-blood body to me. When we walked in the woods, he held my hand. When we sat in the shade, I sat so close his sweat was my sweat, his smell was mine. I can still see his green eyes lively as new leaves and the full flush of his cheeks beneath his thin blond beard. When we played whaler in the creek (I was the whaler, he the whale) he’d throw me in the air and I’d laugh to see water roll off his big white back and monster head.

But that moment, in the carriage, I saw his face as I had never seen it before and his sadness scared me. Maybe because of that fear, and maybe because after too much silence I was suffocating for the sound of his voice, and maybe because when he finally did speak he deliberately touched each of his fingers and thumb before each sentence, and maybe because he used the pronoun we, which served to intensify our intimacy as the horses broke into a gallop and the carriage began to sway—maybe for all of those reasons I have never forgotten what he said to me.

“We,” he said, and he touched his little finger, “all suffer.”

Then he touched his ring finger, bent it back almost ninety degrees before straightening it again. “And we are all going to die. It’s a law of nature. You know these things already.”

He swallowed. I swallowed. I watched him touch his middle finger and pause as though he found this one the most difficult to contemplate. He blinked rapidly, nodded beyond me to the passing world out the window, the world we were leaving behind—my mother?

“We are not in control,” he said.

I could not take my eyes off him. I tried to swallow again but my throat felt dry and swollen. I was dying to unbutton my collar but dared not.

“It will take becoming a man,” he said, “to learn these last two. First—” He touched his pointer. “We do not live for ourselves.” Then he made a fist and shook it slightly as if he were holding something precious that he could feel and did not want to let go.

He lifted his thumb and whispered, “But we are free!”

I blinked back tears, swallowed hard, and turned my gaze to the window. That’s when he explained where I was going: to the port, to board a ship that would sail with the tide at dawn. I didn’t know what to say. The sky was a magnificent blue and the breeze bent the crowns of the trees along the road. Sail with the tide. I had only the vaguest notion of what that might mean.

He pulled some papers from his pocket and showed them to me, although I could not read. One was the rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence. He slipped it into my pocket and said it was civilized law—the law of men aspiring to be divine. He said I should keep it and learn to read it. Then he showed me other papers that were folded in an envelope.

“Men’s law,” he said.

I started to take the envelope but he said he’d keep it for now and give it to the captain. Before he slipped it back inside his coat, he pointed to the two words on the envelope: “James Gates,” he said.

I had always been Jimmy. He had always been Mr. Gates.

“James Gates.” The words felt odd in my mouth.

“Because you’re my son,” he said, and smiled.

I wanted to smile, too. He must have sensed my confusion, for he patted the papers in his coat pocket. “Your free papers,” he said. I might have asked why I needed those, why they were mine, because he said a word that I don’t remember ever having heard before, at least not applied to me. I repeated it, feeling my tongue slide easily across the surface of the sound, closing it with my teeth and lip.

“Slave?”

He looked at his watch, seemed for a moment to be calculating the time, and said he’d show me.

So before we boarded the ship he took me to a crowded market. He held my hand as we pushed our way through more people than I had seen in my entire life. I was overwhelmed by the smells and colors, by the sound of so many voices and the sheer variety of the human face. Who were these people? Where did they come from? Were they also going to sail with the tide at dawn?

To abate my confusion, I looked straight up at my father’s face, his slit nostrils and long thin nose and the blue sky beyond his head, and that was how I kept my balance.

Soon he halted and lifted me by the armpits up over his head to his shoulders, where I straddled his neck and peeked around the sweat-stained crown of his tall civilized hat to see a barely dressed—naked, really—Negro man and woman and two children on a raised wooden platform. Chains connected shackles from their necks to their ankles. I’d never seen shackles before and they terrified me, as did the man pointing to the people wearing the shackles with a long stick and calling out numbers to other men who called out more numbers.

I focused on the children, a boy slightly older than I, and a girl a bit younger. The girl had scabs on the right side of her face and the boy had long muscular arms and black skin shiny as tar, an empty socket where his right eye should have been. The two of them sat in the heat and stared with three spooky yellow eyes at something above our heads.

“Your mother,” my father said, “was auctioned away from her parents as a girl, and that’s why—”

He squeezed my ankles hanging down on each side of his neck and then turned and walked away through the crowd. I was confused. Was he thinking what I was thinking? Of Mama running, of her ear flying off? From his shoulders I could see down the long street to white gulls flying arcs over the blue harbor.

Just before dusk he said good-bye to me on board the ship. The pier smelled of fish and tar. He assured me that he’d come to visit at the end of the school year but that seemed so far in the future as to be irrelevant. He told me that miserable as it might feel to leave, staying at Sweet Grass would in time make me more so. He said this country was diseased, and he was sending me away to save me. He said he used to think civilization moved west until he’d been to the jungles of Mississippi to visit his brother and seen the horrors of what men do to other men when they can, when there’s nothing to stop them. He told me the school in England would take care of me—I’d be taught to read and think, and have a chance to become the free man God meant for me to become. His kiss on my forehead left a wet spot that I resisted wiping even as I stood at the rail and watched him hand my papers to the captain, walk down the gangplank, and disappear across the crowded dock.

It was the close of a hot July day, not unlike the day before or the day that surely followed. Yet when the cool spot of his kiss finally dried, I found myself separated from everything I loved and everyone who loved me.

ON BOARD SHIP I was given my own compartment and then left alone to mourn. In the dark I could feel the pitch and roll of the ship, hear the creak of the timbers and the occasional shouts of the crew. The first morning I dared a peek out on deck, but the sight of the gray sea and the sky forever in all directions frightened me and I quickly threw myself back onto my bunk. I slept and cried all day and night and day and night again. My grief must have alarmed the captain, for he sent for me to be picked up by the ears and carried into the dining area. When I refused to sip the wretched soup, an old man with the dirtiest fingers I’d ever seen pushed rancid chunks of cod into my mouth while he proclaimed over and over again that a boy like me ought to be grateful.

This happened often enough during the voyage that for many years afterward I confused the words grateful with nauseated.

The difficulty of this trip cannot be underestimated. It marked me forever, and even when I say or write the words ocean or ship, I think of that experience and feel again the yawning solitude that swallowed me. I didn’t want to cross the sea. I didn’t want to study—whatever that meant. And what good was freedom if I had no control?

We all suffer. My father had assumed I already knew this. But I didn’t. I was a child. I only knew that I suffered.

I arrived so ill that I remember nothing of my transport from the ship to Hodgson Academy, a half day’s carriage ride from London. I remember only waking from my fever on a comfortable bed in a small white room with a table, a chair, and a lamp. Here I was brought regular meals and a change of sheets by a woman with what I assumed must have been a great fear that if she moved her mouth to speak, or smiled, her hard white face would crack like an egg. In silence I was served, in silence my bed was changed, and in silence I was peeked at and prodded for signs of the lingering disease of my diseased country. Night followed day followed night. Had I dreamed water as far as I could see, water that touched the sky? I remembered the plantation and its grasses and trees, the cool stream where I played with my father, the taste of bare dirt outside our door and the salt on my mother’s skin, the sound of voices, dogs, cows—the smell of my mother and the cabin: these things had been separated from me by ocean and by time. How much? I didn’t know. Did it matter? Once I closed the door on the cabin, the door was closed. It happened—or did I dream that, too?

All I knew for sure was alone in that room I sometimes felt a wind race through my empty body, around and around, and I was afraid if I opened my mouth the wind would pour out and my scream would fill the world. I hated freedom, and I wanted to suffocate, to waste away with hunger.

But not quite. It has been my experience with despair that even if in our conscious mind we race to embrace it, there is something deeper inside us, and wiser, that will do anything to maintain hope.

For me it started with my body. Specifically, with the food I was being given to eat. Healthy again, I had a huge appetite—and I really liked toast with orange marmalade. I had never had either before, and I loved the smell and look of the marmalade, and I loved spreading it so thickly that the toast became simply a platform on which to hold all the marmalade. I was given a boiled egg every morning with salt. And pieces of chicken or beef or pork with my rice or boiled potatoes in the evening, with butter, and more salt, and a pot of tea, all for me, with biscuits, always with biscuits. And because there wasn’t much to do but eat, I looked forward to each meal with passion. At first I ate my meals fast, in as few bites as possible. I was afraid the woman—Miss Crinkle, I called her, for the many tiny wrinkles in her face—would take my plates away before I was finished. But after a few days, when I realized she would not come back until the next mealtime, I began eating very slowly, holding each mouthful for as long as I could before swallowing, trying in vain to draw out the meal until the next one came.

But I couldn’t, of course, so in the too quiet time between meals, I restlessly paced my room. I could walk the loop of my room with my eyes closed, counting breaths, counting steps. From one corner of the room to another. From that corner around the bed and past the night-stand to the other. And from that corner past the door to the first corner. Over and over again. I learned when to shorten or lengthen my step to avoid a creaky board, how to make the entire loop without making a sound or bumping against a table or bedpost or wall. Or where to step so that each footfall caused the floor to creak. I began to know my steps, and my breaths and the dimensions of my space, and from those truths I could invent the rest. Soon there was no difference between what I remembered and what I dreamed, between what I saw—the pale woman who brought me food and took away my waste—and Mama’s laughing face behind her, Mama standing at the door with her back turned, Mama carrying a wooden milk pail on her head. I could hear her breathe in the dark behind me, in front of me, and I could hear her laugh joyously, and often laughed with her. She was here, there, touchable like a warm meal, or visible like a ray of light under the door. Home was a warm cabin I could imagine, my sunny memories sometimes as real as the cold room I occupied. Mama was at once a dream, a memory, and someone who actually lived and breathed with me. In. Out. In. Out. My nostrils filled with the smell of her flesh. I imagined we were breathing at the same time, and even breathing the same air. In. Out. In. Out. And so like that, exhausted from a day of walking, I’d fall asleep with the feel of her fingers in my hair.

During such moments of happiness, I began to make assessments. Childish as they were, they formed the shape of my ambition. If I could conjure the past, certainly I could conjure the future. And if love had sent me here, might not love send me home again?

I SET MY SIGHTS on the only human being I knew: Miss Crinkle. Her thrice-daily food deliveries were like visits from the dead. If I said before she was silent, let me correct that. She didn’t talk, but she did make odd groans deep in her throat like a spirit, or an old dog. I tried speaking to her. I said thank you and good morning, but she didn’t even turn her head. I asked if she had grandchildren. I asked if she made the toast herself. I asked what the weather was like outside but she only clamped her wrinkled face between her two palms and let loose a moan as though she were freeing the very wind from where it had been caught in her throat.

Did I say she frightened me? Did I mention I had nightmares in which we had entire conversations where she would only make that fierce sound?

Indeed. But we all risk death by monster rather than stay home alone. Especially if beyond the walls of your room you sometimes hear other children laughing.

One night I lay in bed and determined I would sing for her in the morning. I could not sleep with anticipation. I waited all night until I saw the yellow lamplight under the door, which for me was dawn. I heard the sound of her shoes, and the key in the lock, and I leaped up to a standing position on top of my bed when the door swung open. And as the light of her lamp filled the room, I spread my arms and opened my mouth and began to sing “O Thy Joy Has Come to Me.”

She might have paused—how could she not have? The sudden volume must have startled her. But if so, I didn’t see it. I watched her carry the tray with my toast and marmalade and tea and set it on the end table, and then she turned, without looking, and walked over to the corner, where she stooped to pick up my chamber pot, and then she let herself out, closed the door, and locked it.

More miserable than ever, I spilled my tea and threw my precious toast against the wall and waited for her to come back at midday. I stood on the bed again like a little emperor, silent this time, with my arms folded, and watched her stoop to sop up the spilled tea and scrub the wall where the toast had stuck. I tried to satisfy myself with the fact that at least I had delayed her. Rather than come and go, she’d come and gone, and come back with a mop and bucket, and only after cleaning did she go for good.

So I tried the same thing with my dinner, tossing it all over the room, here and there, sticking it to the walls and ceiling. As you can imagine, this was not an easy sacrifice. I waited hungrily (and guiltily) for her to come back in the evening. When she did, I was once again up on the bed (closer to her eye level, was my reasoning) and I immediately spoke.

“I’m terrible sorry, ma’am, for the accident.”

She ignored me. She surveyed the mess to determine tactics, left, and returned with the appropriate cleaning devices. I stood on the bed and watched the back of her neck as she scrubbed. She was an old woman, and I could hear the difficulty in her breathing as she worked. No sighs, but a change of breath, at least. I asked her if she had a dog, for I could hear one barking just then, and it scared me. I asked her if she liked molasses on sweetbread, my favorite back home, and then, scratching myself and lowering my trousers sufficiently, I asked if she wanted to see my do-jiggy.

No answer. Not even a turn of the head. I watched her on her knees scrubbing, and she didn’t even pause. I moved close to the edge of the bed, struggled slightly with keeping my balance on the soft mattress, and did what comes naturally to a boy standing on the heights with his pants lowered. I pointed toward the ceiling and peed a pretty yellow arc onto the floor. She paused in her scrubbing when the room filled with the smell, but she still did not look at me. When she finished in the corner, she cleaned up my puddle with a mop, and then she left me again, closing the door with a firm click, no more loudly or angrily than any time before.

That night I thought of defecating on the floor in front of the door so that she’d step on it when she walked in—then of standing on the bed and urinating on her when she knelt to clean it up.

But in the morning the door opened, and again I was petrified by her presence—this time with shame, not with fear. Shame likes company, though, and so I also began to feel anger. When she came in I concentrated all of my loathing in the hope that she would feel it and so do something that might make me stop hating her. I stared at her coldly but she didn’t seem to notice. So I unleashed a torrent of all of the worst words I had ever heard anybody speak, and she still refused to look at me. Oh how I hated her! And for a few hours hate was my companion. I paced the room and hated Miss Crinkle. I wished her dead. I thought about killing her. How? Beating her with my pillow, suffocating her, pounding her with my fists, stabbing her with a fork. We are all going to die, my father had said. So why not her? Why not now?

Why not, indeed.

Because the very next morning, to my horror and amazement, as she stooped to get my bedpan her face contorted, and her lips parted and issued a horrendous groan before she collapsed.

I sat up in the bed and looked at the floor where she’d crumpled in a pile of dress and hair—her gray hair had come all undone and splashed about her face. I believed I must have been dreaming, so unreal was the scene. I walked over to her, stooped to touch her head, and pushed the hair off her ashen face. It was the first time I had ever touched a white woman’s face or hair. I looked at the spittle in the corners of her mouth, and I laid the flat of my hand on her forehead. The hundreds of wrinkles seemed to have relaxed and the heat was already leaving her cheek. She wasn’t breathing, yet for a few moments she seemed conscious. There was a question in her eyes, and I could have sworn she looked at me for the first time. Did she know I’d wished her dead? Yet there was no anger in her look, no reproach, as the light in her eyes blinked out.

After the initial shock, I felt afraid. Who would bring me my food? Would I ever see anybody again? And would they know I’d wished her dead?

I crawled back up onto my bed. The door was open—why didn’t I go out? Perhaps I heard the dog barking. I must have been very tired because I fell asleep instead.

When I woke the body was gone and the door closed. There was food on my tray that I ate without pleasure. That night I couldn’t sleep. I paced the room with the restless step of a murderer. I walked and breathed, and stifled the desire to scream. For what? Perhaps I had only dreamed her dead body?

Regardless, I carefully stepped over the spot where I had dreamed her.

I felt my body get hot and then cold, and my brow sweat profusely. Suddenly I felt fine again, and I kept walking. Then I felt the chill return. Was that her spirit? So be it. I was too light-headed to be afraid. I remember feeling as though I were walking differently than usual. Walking just a few inches above the floor, but a new blast of sudden cold shook me to my bones and I lay down in bed. I curled up under my covers to get warm but her cold ghost was there, too.

Is this what it felt like to be a killer? Is that what I’d become?

Despite my chill, I can’t say I lay awake over it. In fact, for a brief moment before drifting off to feverish sleep, I admit the possibility thrilled me.

I WOKE UP IN a pool of wet sheets and a young woman was in my room with a stack of clean ones. I slipped off the mattress and watched as she made my bed. She had hair like orange rust, eyes green as grass, and freckles like flecks in cream. She kept her eyes averted, but she did not terrify me. I could see the slight flush of her cheek when she became aware I was watching her. I seized my advantage and ran past her as fast as I could to jump up on the bed.

I said, “Yiiiiiiiii,” and jumped so high I thought I might touch the ceiling, and this caused her to look at me with wonder. She stood with a hand on her hip for a moment and watched me and I thought I saw her lips change shape. A smile?

Again, I yelled, “Yiiiiiiiiiii!” and she reached for me. I avoided her and kept jumping. She lifted her broom and tried to sweep me off but I jumped to avoid the broom. Despite ourselves, both of us were laughing. She lifted the broom higher and swung this way and that until she finally managed to cock me alongside my head, which caused me to lose my balance and fall to the floor. Unfazed, I wriggled over to try to look up her skirt.

She shrieked, stepped back, and picked me up by my nightshirt and tossed me onto the bed. I bounced once or twice before coming to a thumping halt against the wall. Then she wagged a chubby pink finger at me and accompanied it with a sentence of such music I had to repeat the sound over and over again after she’d walked out and locked the door before I could find the individual words and the meaning became clear.

“You wee monkey,” she said, “is this how the niggers behave in America, jumping and shrieking like banshees and poking their wee mugs where they’re not supposed to be?”

A long way from love, I suppose, but it was a start.

The next morning I lay waiting for her, curled up in bed and pretending to be sorry. She looked at me as soon as she came in the door. I told her I was sorry I’d misbehaved. I told her I’d had a fever the night before and felt bad about the dead woman. I almost admitted to killing Crinkle but dared not. I told her I’d been in this room a long time. I started to cry.

She stood with her hand on her hips, suspicious. But my tears were real—they surprised even me. She sat down. Told me not to worry about Miss Crinkle—Tennyson, actually, Miss Tennyson.

“She’s happier dead, I’m sure,” she said.

“Happier?”

“Deaf and dumb her whole life long, the poor dear.”

“What?” I was having a hard time understanding her.

“As a doorknob!” she said.

I loved the way she smelled. I loved looking at her orange hair and skin like cream. But I couldn’t understand her when she talked.

“Deaf,” she said again, and pointed to her ears, and shook her head. “No hear! No talk!”

Oh! A light went on. I felt a weight lift. Miss Crinkle had never heard a word I’d said. She couldn’t even hear herself moan and groan.

“Why am I here?” I asked this woman whom I had already begun to love.

She smiled. “Poor wee monkey,” she said, “you must be awfully lonely. Ten days here already? Well, there’s been a plague of sorts about and the school doctor’s ran away with his wife’s sister to France and I suspect when you arrived ill from America they didn’t want to infect the others.”

I didn’t speak, I didn’t know what to say. My eyes were overrunning with tears. It wasn’t my fault my country was diseased.

“Be patient,” she said, and she put her arm around me and gave me a quick squeeze. “You’ll be out with your mates in no time at all.”

I didn’t know what mates were, but even if they were alligators I was still pleased they would be mine, and pleased I would be out with them.

She gave me a quick squeeze, called me her wee monkey again, and said a prayer for me when she tucked me into bed that night. Sitting on my bed and bending over me, she asked me about my one green eye and one brown, features to which I’d given little thought. My father had green eyes and my mother had brown, so why shouldn’t I have the two colors? But Bridget—for that was her name—told me she’d seen perhaps a few thousand people in her life and never one with eyes like mine. She asked me how many people I had seen, and she asked me to try to count them, and asked if I had ever seen a person with two different-colored eyes, and I had not, and soon lost count anyway, never having learned how to count past nineteen.

That neither of us had seen another like me was proof then, she said, that two distinctly colored eyes must be a sign for something. She didn’t know what, and yet it was true, and I might learn only as I lived what it was a sign for. She ran from the room and brought back a hand mirror and turned me this way and then that, holding the mirror for me, and said from one side I was practically a white boy except for my hair. It was the first time I’d seen myself that close, both sides like that, and when I said so, Miss Bridget left the mirror with me that evening. It provided some mild entertainment for the next few hours as I moved it from side to side to see the texture and pigment of my eyes and the pores in my skin as well.

The next day Miss Bridget told me she was not from this place either, but from an island country nearby that had been conquered a long time ago, and her people made to suffer for it. She said her parents had died when she was young and she’d been working in other people’s homes since she could remember. Most recently she’d been employed by a Mr. Ryan back home, but he’d left for America, and so she’d lost her position. Being a good man, he’d found her a position here at Hodgson Academy, a place so foggy even the faeries lost their way.

“Foggy?” I told her I’d been confined to my room and not yet seen outside.

“Not once?” she said.

I shook my head. She studied me, laid her creamy hand on my face.

“I don’t believe you have the pestilence anymore,” she said.

I was glad about that and I told her so, and I told her I was even gladder that she didn’t think so.

“Then I’ll be having a surprise for you tomorrow morning,” she said.

And she did, although it wasn’t on the tray when she opened the door. Nor in her apron, either, at least that I could see, and for a brief moment after a long night of anticipation I felt disappointed. I thought she’d forgotten. But she hadn’t. She set the tray down with its toast and tea, but instead of picking up the chamber pot, she took my hand and walked me out of my room and through a large, cavernous hall trimmed with dark wood. I was so shocked to be suddenly out of my room that I couldn’t speak. We paused by a tall window and she urged me to slip behind the heavy drapes. What followed was a pleasure I cannot fully describe. She opened the window for me, lifted the sash slightly so I could smell the fresh air. I was too short to see over the sill, so she bent down and lifted me. The feel of her arms and hands, and the brief moment of being squeezed to her bosom, followed by the touch of new air on my face and the sight of a dawn sky over a grassy garden surrounded by tall trees—all this was a kindness I’ll never forget.

“World,” Bridget said, as though speaking to the great beyond, “’tis James.”

“Jimmy,” I said.

“Jimmy,” she repeated. “He’s wee indeed but a strong and healthy ragamuffin and not too brown for all we call him a monkey. He’s whiter than many a one and yet not as white as you would say. Jimmy, say hello to the world.”

I don’t know that I spoke. I stared and blinked, and felt the air on my skin. I watched the faintest touch of color spread across the sky behind the trees.

“Do you like it much, Jimmy?” she said.

“Very much,” I said.

AND SO I WAS held to a woman’s breast, newborn again into a world so different from Sweet Grass—so beyond what I would have been capable of imagining just a few short months before—that I’m sure I would have believed anyone in authority who might have told me that either Sweet Grass or Hodgson Academy were dreams. For how could the same waking world hold both?

But if dreams have purposes, one must be to remind us that what we see in the daytime is only partly true. I lived at Hodgson and dreamed of Sweet Grass—and so I knew the world was bigger than my bounty. And if I ever returned to the shacks and fields of Sweet Grass, I knew I’d carry the dream of this good life, its distinct colors and shapes, stone buildings with sealed rooms and glass windows, a world with measured and counted hours, bountiful food and companionship, and grown people who dedicated their days to teaching me to read, to add and subtract figures, and to recite accounts of Egypt and Greece in stories as beautiful and strange as the fancies Mama had told me about spirits.

I had never spent time with white children before, and although I don’t remember walking into the school or being introduced, I remember sitting at my desk in the back of the classroom and studying the variety of my classmates’ hair, the color of flame, or cream, or various kinds of wood. I remember the light from the high windows falling on the skin of their hands and necks as they bent over their studies. And because my features and hair were a novelty to them, I remember their furtive glances back at me, their curious multicolored eyes.

One of the other boys raised his hand and asked if niggers spoke Arabic, and if that was why I talked so funny. Our teacher, Mr. Collins, took the opportunity to tell us the story of how sugar from the Indies was shipped to England and African people were shipped to the Indies, and there was tea in there somewhere, and the Africans were sold as slaves in America for the cotton brought back to England, but the gist was that we were Negroes or Africans and not Arabs or niggers.

Mr. Collins looked at me when he finished as though waiting for my confirmation, and I was so lost I could only say, “No sir.”

“No sir, what?” he asked.

I swallowed. I could feel all of the boys’ eyes aimed at me.

“No sir, you’re right, we don’t speak Arab.”

The class laughed. “Arabic,” he said.

Confused, I said, “That neither,” and everybody laughed some more.

But it was a laugh without malice. In fact, when the teacher explained that I used to be a slave, their pink mouths opened wide and formed rows of O’s. And when he pronounced me a freed slave, the expressions of admiration could not have been greater if he had said I was a former pirate.

Mr. Collins was asked if there were other Negro slaves with one green eye. He looked at me, and I shook my head no. Then the same questioner asked Mr. Collins if I had been set free because I had one green eye—did a slave have to have two brown eyes to be a slave?—and Mr. Collins again said no, that one never knew or could scarcely guess what it was that caused God to dim the soul of a human being to such an extent as to make him think he could own another human being, or that caused that same God to enlighten that man’s soul sufficiently so he could see to free one of his slaves, and if—

“It was my father,” I said, interrupting him.

All eyes turned to me again. I felt my face get hot with blood.

“Your father?” Mr. Collins said, raising his eyebrows and waiting.

“Who freed me,” I said.

Mr. Collins suddenly smiled as though I’d shone light on him and he was beaming it back at me. “Our Father, our Lord,” he said.

“No,” I said, and his smile disappeared, light out. “It’s Mr. Gates’s green eye I got,” I said, pointing to my right one. I turned and pointed to the other. I could feel every single eye on me, and I took my time to say, “Mama’s brown one.”

Mr. Collins blinked slowly. They all did. The room was absolutely silent. Then Mr. Collins nodded in a way that conveyed that he both understood and did not understand, as though what he’d just heard was perfect proof of how things that seem true often aren’t, and things that seem untrue often are.

“Oh, the mystery,” he said, quietly, almost under his breath, an expression I grew used to him saying in these moments when there was nothing else to say. The other students took it as an end of the discussion. They seemed to collectively exhale before their heads swiveled away from me toward the front of the class.

“Oh, the mystery,” I said under my breath, intrigued by Mr. Collins’s accent and the strange power of his words. All the students’ heads turned back to me. Apparently I’d spoken more loudly than I’d meant to. And in a way that sounded very similar to Mr. Collins. I might have been mortified, but in all of those eyes I saw delight. Even Mr. Collins looked at me with admiration. For a moment it was silent, and then sudden laughter broke the tension, and it felt as if I were bathing in warm waves of love.

There are more scenes I remember from my years of school—but this one still stands out most vividly because the two things I learned that morning correspond with the two big things I learned at Hodgson. The first was Oh, the mystery. Mr. Collins said it with wonder and sadness and love, and so I learned that even teachers thought the world was mysterious, and could be struck dumb or sad and amazed by their inability to understand.

And the second thing I learned was that I could make people laugh.

In the days that followed, my accent and novel background provided great entertainment for my classmates, an entertainment I enjoyed providing. I was asked all sorts of questions regarding the difficulties of slavery—ironic for a boy who hadn’t even known he was a slave until he was being freed. I was asked if I’d ever been whipped? (No.) Had I seen others whipped? (Yes, I lied.) Had there been much blood and wailing? (Yes blood, no wailing—in fact it was quiet except for the cut of the whip and the harsh breathing of both whipper and whipped—I was a good liar, even then.) Why had the man been whipped? (I didn’t know—lying or stealing, probably.) Where did I see it? (Sitting on my mother’s lap. We had taken a walk and stopped in the shade and one fellow came past whipping his slave, who was wearing chains.) Did I think it would have been better to have been a slave in Egypt, Roman times, or America? (Because I did not know what Egypt or Roman times were, I said America.) Had I seen lions in America? (No, but a bear, yes.) Was it true full-grown adult Negroes smelled like tigers? (This asked with such glee that I was tempted to say yes but had to admit I didn’t know, as I’d never smelled tigers.) Never? I was asked again, as though that fact, coming from an ex-slave, was extraordinarily disappointing. (Well, maybe once or twice.) Had I any brothers or sisters sold off before my eyes? (No.) Ever seen families torn apart by slavery? (I imagined torn apart as in torn apart by claws, and so I said yes, I’d seen a slave girl who’d lost half her face to a tiger and a boy who’d lost an eye.) That impressed everyone so much that I added that my mother had lost an ear, sliced off by a tiger’s claw when she ran.

Soon enough, though, my novelty wore off and my classmates and I were playing together as though our mothers had been sisters. I kept my hair short, not to make less visible my mother’s blood but because their hair was short and combed and I wanted to look like them. I was given the gift of mimicry and fairly quickly even spoke as they did. And for all we soon remembered, I always had.

School, then, was a place of comfort. The beds were warm and the food filling and good, and I was cared for and treated with kindness. I learned to read and was often praised for my diligence and intelligence. I was rarely alone, but when I had a chance, I would study my little rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence because I thought that if I learned civilized law, my father would be proud of me—would remember how much he loved me—and so take me home to see my mother again.

In its words I searched for a reason for my banishment, and was encouraged by the first sentence, which says sometimes it is necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. But I understood little of politics, or what followed in the document, and remember being especially puzzled by the fact that I’d been sent to be free in England, of all places, whose monarch (the document asserted, though I had yet to meet him) was the source of absolute tyranny.

At Hodgson I learned to write letters. I knew Mama couldn’t read but I trusted that my father would read them to her. I have no notion whether or not he did. In his monthly letters to me, he only thanked me for mine and said my mother was well. I continued writing nonetheless. I wrote of my days, of what I ate, of my studies. I did not complain, as I had little to complain about save the ache in my heart. I reported my good marks in my studies, and felt that if I did well enough, and put my very best face forward on the page, perhaps I’d be able to go home again.

But in the spring, despite my earnest efforts, I learned that illness (from the diseased country?) had postponed his visit, and so another year passed, and another and another, and it wasn’t until after my fourth year of schooling that I received a letter from him informing me of his imminent arrival. I don’t think I can describe properly my emotion at receiving such news. Part of me didn’t believe it, but the part that did hoped beyond hope that he would arrive and see what marvelous (for I was always at the head of my class) progress I had made, see that even though I was still a boy, I’d miraculously become the free man God meant for me to become. Overjoyed, he would decide to take me home again to my mother—or even better, the most optimistic part of me hoped beyond hope that he would bring my mother with him and we could all live disease-free at Hodgson.

His letter didn’t say. It said simply, I am to board the ship Wilton Mare on the First of August and expect to help you celebrate your Twelfth birthday on the First of October.

I received the letter after he had already set sail. I lay in bed with the envelope in my hands and imagined him in the same cabin I had been in when I’d crossed the ocean. I imagined the sad sea spreading out forever, and the big sky, and the toss of the waves, the snap of the sails, and creak of the timbers as he lay in bed at night. And because I did not like thinking of him alone, I imagined Mama with him, too, although I’d never seen them together anywhere but in our cabin and on the bottomland below it. I imagined them standing at the rail of the ship looking outward, thinking about me. I imagined them holding hands as they sometimes did when we’d go down to the run to picnic in the afternoon. I could imagine the shapes of their bodies, and the heat between them that I could feel when I squeezed between their thighs, but I could not see their faces, and I worried endlessly that I would not recognize them, or that they would not recognize me.

But days before he was to arrive I became ill with fever again and was removed from the other children to a back bedroom, where I lay alone again, dreaming and fretful through the night, into a day, and into another night. Strangely, words from the Declaration of Independence kept running through my mind. I cursed England for having plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. I dreamed of the large armies of mercenaries completing the works of death, desolation, and tyranny. I imagined our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, and most frightening of all, I dreamed of the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

One evening, awakening from a fit of fever, I overheard a discussion between the rector and Mr. Collins about whether I should be sent back to isolation. The word isolation frightened me so much that I conjured old Miss Crinkle’s face—and as though she were God I prayed to her. I told her I would do anything if I could get well and rejoin the other children. I told her I would learn by heart the law of men aspiring to be divine. I told her I would give up anything.

And then I conjured my father’s face and green eyes and longed for him and hated him, too. I saw him standing at the rail of a ship in a storm. With my mind’s power, I lifted his booted foot over the rail and then lifted his hands as though to touch the tempest itself. He straddled a wooden rail and, reaching for the heavens, teetered one way and then the other. I played with the image in my mind and found I could make him lean farther toward the deck, then toward the sea, his hands still reaching upward and his face aimed at the storm.

Then, just to see if I could do it, I tilted him so far toward the sea that he lost his balance and his body carved a graceful arc, backward, into the foam.

By the time morning broke, so had the fever.

If my spirits soared with my improved health, imagine the crash a few days later when I was told that the ship on which my father had been crossing the ocean had sunk, and he’d drowned at sea.

I DON’T REMEMBER the pain of his death as perhaps I should. For three years in a row he’d said he was coming and then changed his plans, so in the fog of my grief perhaps I was able to fold the horror of his drowning into the more mild disappointments of the past few years. I’m only speculating. But I do know that the immediate sadness I felt for his loss was absorbed and overshadowed by the knowledge that without support from home (my father’s property, including my mother, had gone to his widow) I would be forced to leave school and sent to a London workhouse.

Again I would be cast out. Again I would be alone.

During my years at Hodgson, I had learned to read and write, and to add and subtract, and to feel comfortable and happy with my companions. Because we lived and studied and slept and ate together, we had become each other’s family, and there was a lot of talk about being in it together through the thick and thin, or being blood brothers—the kind of things boys say when their connection with one another is deep. But as soon as my father died, the camaraderie of fifteen hundred days of playing and wrestling and studying together—fifteen hundred days of alliance against the forces of benevolent rule imposed on us by the rector and teachers—a thousand and a half days of mutual affection engendered by our mutual loneliness, affection I had believed was enduring—ended.

Again I was cast out, again I was alone.

And again it was my fault.

Because we cannot forgive ourselves for being powerless—We are not in control—we conjure our own power even when we have very little. We find patterns in our lives, and turn antecedents into causes when it suits us. If times stay bad, we believe in our bones we might have changed things if only we’d tried harder. And if they do indeed change, we are quick to take the credit or blame.

We are free, aren’t we?

For the second time in three years I’d willed somebody dead and my circumstances had changed. If later I’d do worse, perhaps this was the start. For the time being, however, I refused to be haunted by ghosts, or madness, or a world bigger than anything I could ever conceive. So two feelings began to emerge that would serve both to keep me temporarily upright and to guide my strategies into adulthood: First, I began to fear my deepest desires. And second, I began to think of myself as a heroic figure.

On the morning of my departure, the sky was gray and the wind chilly, and crows gathered on the still green lawn amid a swirl of falling leaves. All the boys came out to wave to me—as though I were off on a splendid journey. Mr. Collins seemed the only truly sad one, and I didn’t like him for that. Because in his face I saw all my fears and sadness, too, and I didn’t want to feel those things. I wanted to leap on top of the carriage and salute, so that was what I did. Even as the team of horses lurched us into motion I kept my balance, to the delight of my classmates, and heard their cheers erupt and fade, erupt and fade. I was frightened and also strangely exhilarated. I carried the immensity of my new sense of power awesome in my breast alongside my sense of powerlessness. Oh, the mystery! I had hated my father for sending me away, and loved him, and I loved my mother and hated her for not being home when I came to say good-bye. I hated myself for closing the door to the cabin, and I hated her for loving my father and him for loving her, and I loved their love for one another, and I hated my father for dying and not rescuing me, and I hated myself for sacrificing his life to keep me well—

And yet I loved being well!

The carriage rocked beneath my feet. I felt strong. A new gust of wind sent more leaves swirling across the lawn, giving me goose bumps of glory before a wall of trees rose up on the side of the drive and Hodgson Academy disappeared forever.

Or I did.

BECAUSE I WAS CERTAINLY a more humble boy just a half a day later down a road that crossed a boggy bottom and followed the river into the heart of a London slum, when I was shoved off the carriage by the teamster’s brawny fist and watched my shiny civilized boots sink ankle deep in mud.

I stooped to grab the handle of my small trunk and drag it to the big front door of the Sunny Side Saddlery, where Mr. Collins had assured me arrangements had been made for my placement. Up and down the narrow street were more people than I had ever seen in my life, more people than I could count, a stream of movement that I could not see the end of. The air was foul with rancid grease, human and animal excrement, and coal smoke.

I gulped down my fear and knocked on the door, determined, as I watched the carriage drive off, to do as Mr. Collins had advised, and “make do.”

While I waited for the door to open, I touched my front pocket where I carried both the rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence that my father had given me and the envelope with my free papers. I wanted to take them out and touch them again, if only to hold something that his hands had held, but the street was crowded and I felt jostled from behind. I thought about life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and if these were truly inalienable rights, why were they so easily taken away? Why did my father die? Why was my mother a slave? And why was I unhappy?

Because we are all going to die; we are not in control; we all suffer.

Or was it because I had sacrificed him and closed the door on her?

We are free!

Again I knocked on the door and again I felt pushed from behind. Next to me an old woman squatted on a wooden block to keep herself out of the mud, and between her feet she guarded a pot of ashes that looked cold enough but might still have given some warmth, for she dangled her gnarled fingers above it. Across the street shrieks of laugher spilled out of a gin house, and a woman with sickly yellow skin passed just in front of me. Her hair was matted and her gray eyes crazed, and two tiny, big-eyed children walked alongside hanging on to her dress, it seemed, for dear life.

I held my little trunk and knocked again and waited for the door to open. Behind me a boy lost control of his apple cart and the cart tipped and the fruit spilled across the street in a spreading pile. What happened next shocked me. It was as though the chaos of the street were suddenly organized by the opportunity to plunder. All passersby within sight of the overturned cart suddenly stopped their activity to run to fill their pockets and aprons and hats, and any other container they found handy, with apples. The boy stood shouting and waving his arms, which had only the effect of gathering even more of a crowd. In the frantic grasping for fruit, I could see a kind of grotesque mob joy—the joy that comes from unearned bounty—a perverse dance of riches. Entranced, I didn’t even notice how I was knocked down, or by whom. I only felt the old woman suddenly under my head and shoulders and her pot of ashes in front of me. I’d fallen onto her bony lap, and immediately felt her arms cradle my head. And so I was lying when I looked up and saw the door of the workhouse open slightly and the head of a man with a shiny pate and long gray beard poke out from the opening.

“Who’s there?” the man called into the din.

The old woman smelled of something horrible, yet the harder I struggled to free myself the tighter she squeezed my head in her bony arms. She said, “If this be the babe you’re looking for, I’ll let him go for a shilling.”

There followed a struggle during which I thought I would be pulled in two. The old woman held my head and the bearded man pulled my legs. Being the stronger of the two, the man pulled not only me but the old woman up off the ground—her still clinging to my head—and all the way to the threshold of the open door.

Still the tenacious old woman would not let go, and my face was contorted in her grasp, my hair pulled, until finally, I suppose, because of the fortuitous arrival of a visitor, who must have given the old woman the coin she was so diligently demanding, my head was released.

The door closed behind me and suddenly I was in a quiet, dark hallway, dangling upside down, with my feet in the bearded man’s hands and my head toward the floor.

“It’s how she lives,” I heard the other man say. His speech was both accented and slurred, and even upside down I could tell he walked with a limp.

The bearded man continued to hold me like that. Was he going to shake me down? Had he forgotten about me? I struggled to make him let go, but his hands on my ankles had the grip of iron.

“My trunk,” I finally managed to say. “It’s in the street.”

“Mon dieu,” the visitor said, and the door opened again, and the bearded man let go of my ankles. I caught myself with my hands and struggled to stand upright again and make a dash for the trunk. But I paused. The street was back to its original moving chaos: men and women and children, horses and dogs, and a pig on a leash. Everything looked the same but the specifics. The boy and his cart, for example, were gone. As were the apples, the smelly old woman and her pot of ashes—and of course my trunk with its precious books and the few pieces of clothing I owned in the world.

SUNNY SIDE SADDLERY was a private work home on the banks of the Thames where eight parentless waifs and I cut and softened and stretched and molded and sewed leather into bridles and saddles. The first months of my time there were as bleak as any in my life. My twelfth birthday came and went without notice, and then winter followed quickly and brought its perpetual darkness and cold. When we did manage to warm up with enough wood or coal to stoke the fire, hundreds of flies would emerge from the woodwork and cluster on our one grimy window. The food was bad—gruel thickened with various crawling insects—yet we worked long hours in bad light, half out of our minds with both fatigue and the strange effects of chemical fumes while Mr. Perry, the man with the bald pate and beard who’d pulled me from the street woman’s arms, paced back and forth telling and retelling the story of his life (as though this time, finally, it might make sense) to a lanky Frenchman named Le Chat, who limped the floor besides him sipping brandy from a pocket flask as though condemned to it.

Mr. Perry’s story went like this: he was been born in Newfoundland and there blossomed into manhood on grog, codfish, and a passion for poker. Running from a bad debt, he slipped away from the banks and took to the world at large. It seemed he’d been everywhere with everyone—in opium dens with thieves, in cabarets with ballet girls, on tropical islands with bare-breasted women, in jungles with crocodiles and snake charmers. He traveled the world until almost twenty years ago he found himself in the town of David, Panama, where he fell in love with an Indian girl, whom he married on sight. He adored her as the perfection of beauty, and she, in return, adored him as all that was chivalrous and fascinating, until one sad day Tragedy struck.

“Aaaahh,” he said, “happiness is but an illusion that lasts precisely until savages emerge from the wood to slay your pretty wife.”

Mad with grief for her, his sugar investments drained of profit by his gambling debts, Mr. Perry learned that a distant relative had died in England, leaving him T’is wretched business, he called it, this saddlery in London.

When I arrived, he’d been there almost a decade, still licking his wounds and still claiming to be gathering himself for a new leap.

Besides making saddles, we boys were assigned other tasks. Mine, as the youngest, was to empty the chamber pots onto the mud that lay outside our back door when the tide was out. The smell of the flat, decorated with the defecations of a thousand neighbors, the haze of flies that such a scene attracted on warm days, and the general coal-fouled air of London produced such a stark contrast to the pastoral world of my past as to cause me to doubt reality. Although I am sure that as a boy I did not think, This is not the real world!—I know I felt that way and I was forced to populate it with figments I conjured from thin air—friends from Hodgson, my parents, my own inventions. Hodgson had taught me to speak like a schoolboy, and my new colleagues derided me for it, so I stayed quiet for a long time, weeks perhaps, deepening my isolation. I invented a game where I could lift myself out of my body and look down on myself hunched over a piece of leather at the long candlelit table where I worked with the other boys. I studied the tops of our heads and wondered at the personal sorrow of each and every one of us. Invariably I would find me, of course, the top of my hatless head, the one with the Negro hair cut so short nobody knew, the one who still had a living parent, and I wondered dispassionately who I was, and who I might become. From this height, my world became scenery in the play of my life, and it gave me confidence that when this act ended another would begin. I didn’t know what would come next, but I knew something would, and in this way I avoided despair.

Then one night I lay shivering on my straw tick. The salt smell of high tide wafted in our window, threatening to make me weep with loneliness. And while I’m sure I meant to merely think the words, I heard them escape my lips in a voice identical to Mr. Perry’s.

T’is wretched business! I said.

Across the dark room I heard my colleagues giggle at my mimicry, so I continued the speech we’d all heard a hundred times. T’is wretched business is only a game I’ll be playin’ til ta woe has settled fully into me flesh, and I emerge a bright new creature, with a bright new plan!

The idea of old Mr. Perry as a bright new creature sent us into hysterics.

THE FRONT OF THE saddlery faced the street and the back was supported by pilings over a place in the estuary where the high tide eddied. While the other boys slept on straw ticks in the big room on the street side, Mr. Perry soon moved me to sleep in the closet directly over the pilings. There were two reasons for this. The first was because on Saturday nights after coming home from another losing night at cards, he liked to kneel beside me in the dark, stinking of gin, and weep while he stroked with gentle hand my face and head.

The first few times it happened I lay awake petrified, and I passed my Sundays in a fog of fatigue. The other boys speculated that I reminded Mr. Perry of his Indian wife, a thought I preferred not to think. In subsequent weeks I gained some relief by imagining my drowned father forgiving me, but the comfort of ghosts is limited, especially to a murderer. Nevertheless I had an advantage over Mr. Perry. Or at least I felt more fortunate. Because while he might have been imagining his dead wife, I soon learned that by picturing the warm face of my living mother I could begin to relax beneath his fingers and sometimes drift to sleep.

The other reason I slept in the closet above the pilings was so I would be awakened by the bump of things floating by in the rising tide. When I heard or felt a floater strike the piling below me, I was to get up and go to Mr. Perry and the two of us would use a grappling hook and line to pull it in. Sometimes it was a log we could sell for timber. Sometimes a broken boat from which planks could be scavenged. Sometimes a dead horse or cow, which we would haul up out of the water by means of a block and tackle, and if it were not too decomposed—or even if it were—we could sell the meat to the butcher for a few shillings. But not uncommonly we pulled out of the black water a bloated man or woman or child. If the body still wore clothes, we’d check the pockets for money, take whatever seemed of value, and then launch the body back out again to be taken away in the current.

We’re milkin’ ta ol’ codfish! Mr. Perry would say, jangling the coins in his hand.

He always shared the profits with me, and urged me to be grateful. I assured him I was, for you’ll remember my confusion of that word with nauseated.

Nevertheless, the money did serve as incentive for me to wake him when I felt the bump of a floating object, and to not protest my unique sleeping arrangements. As my pouch of coins grew, so did my esteem among the other boys. To stem the tide of their envy, I took to buying periodicals and books, and in the evening, especially in the summer when the light lingered late in the sky, I’d sit in the window and read aloud for their entertainment. I read serial stories and used my gift of mimicry to create different voices for the characters. (I also learned to use my one brown eye and one green, and by turning profiles to play different characters.) We took great comfort in these partial hours stolen before the light grew too dim for me to see the words. We imagined ourselves enduring long journeys in small boats, stumbling across deserts, or scaling peaks. We lifted our swords and saw our enemies flee before us like rats at daybreak. We imagined our beloved and their faces lit the darkness, and we basked in their love and light as we pulled them out of harm’s way into the safety of our strong arms.

We do not live for ourselves, my father had told me. Although he’d said I wouldn’t truly understand until I was a man, the stories gave me glimpses. Depending on the tide, we lay awake at night smelling either our own shit or the encroaching salt sea of our grief—so we needed more than ever to cry sweet tears for innocent maidens, and to shiver proudly at the brave deeds of our heroes. If our lives and the lives of our neighbors were indeed wretched, and if we often heard outside our window the wails of gin-soaked rage, if all of us were indeed only playing a game until ta woe had settled, well, we needed to be ready.

For what? Personally I had a vague notion of a great struggle in my future that would determine my fate and the fate of many others. I didn’t picture anything specific—but the struggle would bring an as yet unimaginable hardship that I anticipated with foreboding as well as excitement. If my current misery were to make any sense at all, I had to see myself as training for an even more difficult adventure. I had to see myself as waiting for my big black stallion to arrive. Every saddle I made was practice for the one I would make him, for the one I would sit in when I found my mother, rescued her from slavery, and lived with her again in happiness.

I continued to write to her, although I did so with discretion, as the rest of the boys at Sunny Side were orphans and I did not wish to distinguish myself. Writing to her was a private comfort. Although I never received an answer, I calmed myself by telling her things that were in my mind and heart. I felt less alone writing the letters and imagining my mother’s loving face listening while Auntie (who couldn’t read either) read her my words aloud.

The months and years passed this way. I will not deny the occasional day of rage when I never heard anything from her, rage at her powerlessness and at mine. Rage at my dead father. Rage that I tucked away like a fearful, secret weapon. But most days I was sustained by gentler feelings. Our lives at Sunny Side were sheltered—we worked by day and slept by night, and ventured onto the street only for necessities.

Alas, some ignorance ends, and so its peculiar sustenance.

Five years after my father’s death, when I had just turned seventeen, a letter arrived from America addressed to me. It had been sent to Nigger Jimmy, Sunny Side Saddlery, London, and the date on the letter indicated that a year had passed since it had been written.

Dear Jimmy, it said. Your Mama Jennyveeve was sold years ago to a slaver near Centreville. Don’t write here no more as she ain’t never come back nor will.

It was signed, Mr. G. R. Norton, a name with which I was unfamiliar.

THIS NEWS SENT ME into a bitter melancholy as gray and deep as the sea I’d crossed when I was first set free. If my mother was no longer at Sweet Grass, where was she? And if I had lost her, who loved me? And if no one did, who was I?

And what about my idea of the future? If I didn’t know where she was, how could I set her free?

I tried reading the Declaration of Independence again, but it only drew me further toward despair. Why did I have no right to happiness, only a right to pursue happiness—isn’t that a torment? To have the right, without the means?

Civilized law, my father had said. But how could men aspiring to be divine invent such a torture?

I spiraled downward, and if it weren’t for my special relationship with Mr. Perry, I might have been tossed out into the street. For I’d sit at my work station and do nothing but stare through the dirty window at the putrid river. I was alone at the saddlery by then. In recent years my colleagues had come of age and drifted off—out of the workhouse to the army, the navy, or the merchant marine. I dreamed of where they were and what they were doing. The saddlery was limping along. Mr. Perry had gambled it away, and Le Chat had taken possession of it piece by piece, and he didn’t seem to care if he made any money or not. I’d gaze and dawdle, and finally I stopped getting out of bed altogether. I stayed upstairs in my closet, and I dreamed of death. I wondered how long it would take to drown if I were to jump into the river.

I don’t know how long this lasted. Mr. Perry visited numerous times, so perhaps weeks passed, or perhaps he came to see me more often. I don’t know. I do know I tried to conjure my mother, as I had always done. Yet knowing she’d been sold, and knowing that for years I’d been fool enough to commune with a mere figment, made imagining her difficult. I was stripped of my ability to cope, so Mr. Perry’s touches became an exquisite torture that illuminated a broad path toward self-destruction.

Why didn’t I take it? Again, the antidote to despair began with my body.

I’d grown tall, and my lean limbs bristled with strength. I could run fast and jump high, and a physical restlessness began to rule my days and nights. In the growth of my body, I felt new power. My hands, my shoulders, my thighs . . . I could lie in bed and feel the pulsing demand . . . for what?

Gradually my mind turned from the river and its cold death to something else. I went back to work making saddles. And on three consecutive evenings, I was awakened by a bumping on the pilings beneath my bed and Mr. Perry and I fished out a couple of good logs and a dead horse. But instead of using my share of the money for books, I visited the prostitutes across the street.

One in particular. A stringy-haired girl not much older than I who talked like Miss Bridget but whose name was Nancy. Her room was a tiny closet much like mine and we lay on a mildewed pallet soaked with the moisture of countless bodies. But I liked the smells there. I liked the smell of the candle, and of her often unwashed skin. I liked the smell of our sex and our breaths, and her hair. As often as I could afford it, I made the trip across the street and handed over my money and cleaved into her until I felt myself disappear. I have no certainty of her feelings, of course, and I distrusted mine, but she tolerated me with grace and even, on occasion, with affection. I liked her pale skin and the blue veins in her hands and temples and breasts, and I liked the look of her tiny shoes against the wall, and the clothes she took off folded neatly on the stool. And how her thin arms wrapped around my neck, and how her lower lip quivered when I plunged into her, and her chin would lift, and her eyelids drop wantonly. I liked to open my mouth against her neck and close my eyes and taste her salt—and there, like that, I could be quite certain there was no suffering that I could not endure as long as I could do this.

Even after climax I stayed close. She’d hold perfectly still, and I would, too, entwined in her arms and legs. She breathed quietly through her nose. She turned her face and neck to accommodate my kisses.

Although her general state was one of silence, she never hesitated to say in her pretty accent whatever words, fair or foul, I asked her to say, and sometimes just saying the words seemed to animate her and she’d begin to talk and tease.

Once I asked her to call me her wee monkey.

She petted my head. “Me wee monkey,” she said. “Why me wee monkey?”

“Because I’m a nigger,” I said.

“Nigger?” she said. “Is ye?” We were lying on our sides. She raised her head to look at my face in the candlelight. “From this side, I suppose one could say so. Or not. I thought ye might be a Spanish.”

“When my hair is longer it shows,” I said.

She rubbed her hand over my head. “What’s it like?”

“Curly.” I pulled her close to me on the bed and pushed her hand down between us. “Like this.”

She smiled. “I mean what’s it like being a nigger?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know you are one?”

“My mother’s a slave,” I said.

She laughed in my ear. “And mine’s a good Irish wife!”

I didn’t speak. She took my hand in hers and kissed the tips of my fingers where they were cracked and stained brown from work.

“And yer da?” she asked.

“Drowned in the sea.”

“Ahhh,” she said. “Then maybe you’re drowned, too?”

I stayed quiet. I could hear her breathing in my ear.

“He freed me before he died,” I said.

“Why would he do that?”

“So I’d be free. A free man.”

“Man ye are.” She squeezed me gently.

“I’ve got papers to prove it.”

“Sure you do,” she said. She held me in her hand, eyes locked on mine, until I began to grow again.

“Is that the wee monkey, then?”

“Big monkey,” I said.

She rolled onto me, and her hair covered my face. “Free man,” she whispered, “big monkey.”

THOSE WHO CATEGORICALLY CONDEMN vice have never been saved by it. Regardless of the wretched life Nancy lived or was destined to live—and regardless of how you might judge the value of my life—Nancy did save me. She held me when I needed holding, said the words I needed to hear, and so prevented me from tossing myself into the freezing Thames.

Maybe the problem comes from choosing the wrong vice, like Mr. Perry. His was me, I suppose, and the gambling table—and we both took him down in the end.

But he might have gone down sooner without us.

What do we know? Do we even get to choose our vices? I suspect they choose us.

Like all gamblers, Mr. Perry believed in his bones that a big win was just around the corner. Yet whenever he won, he was quick to desire an even bigger win, and he’d keep playing until all of his winnings had been lost. So it wasn’t really a big win he wanted, it was the idea of one. It was the next one. It wasn’t rebirth as a bright new creature that he wanted, it was the anticipation of that rebirth.

He continued to play. He continued to lose. And he continued to talk about winning. The more he lost, the more obsessed he became with the big one, the big win, the one that would change everything and allow him to sail off into the sunset, to start something, anything new. He’d dug himself a hole, and the deeper he dug, the more desperately he talked of escape.

Which brings me to Le Chat, the lanky Frenchman who’d ransomed me my first day from the smelly bosom of the street woman, and who daily limped the floor sipping from a flask of brandy while listening to Mr. Perry talk. A wiry fellow who often wore nankeen trousers, glazed pumps, and a Panama hat, he didn’t speak much, so his story dribbled out in odd pieces I later put together. He was born in Paris, joined the army at sixteen, and saw action for the first and last time at Waterloo, where a wound took away the full use of his left leg. After the war he moved to Marseille, where, profuse with claret and absinthe, I heard him say, he spent what he called his frolicsome years.

“Running over with song and festive at all hours,” he said, “I was the brightest star of whatever luminous cluster I was a part of!”

Lugubrious and self-pitying, drunken and lame, Le Chat as a frolicsome bright star was amusing to imagine.

But it was in Marseille that he made his fortune selling Dr. Le Chat’s Electric Skin Softening Oil. Until, he claimed, members of the Vigilance Committee of Louis Napoleon, jealous of his growing wealth and social brilliance, hounded him out of France.

Waving adieu to his homeland, he sailed to this land of Alfred and Shakespeare, as he called it, secured a room in this historic district, and continued his tireless efforts (from which he always seemed to be resting) to restore his good name and return to Marseille.

I developed a different theory as to why he’d been chased out of France, which explained why he took to financing Mr. Perry’s gambling debts and why, despite his wealth, he lived in a wretched little flat down the street and spent his intemperate days with us.

He was in love with Mr. Perry.

But Mr. Perry was in love with his dead wife, whom he somehow confused with me, and I was in love with my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in ten years and couldn’t even be sure was alive.

Love, love, love. No wonder we all needed vice, vice, vice.

I LET MY HAIR grow long to see what it would look like, and, woolly and black, it didn’t disappoint. I began to like rolling it in my fingers when nobody was around. Because I was spending all my extra money across the street, I began reading aloud the decade-old newspapers I found stacked against the walls to keep the wind out of Nancy’s closet. Specifically, I read reports about a time when thousands upon thousands of Irish starved because of a potato blight, and the English did nothing to help, and so certain Irishmen rebelled against the crown in an effort to gain their country’s independence.

One of their leaders was a man named Cornelius O’Keefe—O’Keefe of the Sword—and I read and reread his speeches, and I committed to memory his statements on liberty: I am not ungrateful to the man who struck the fetters from my limbs while I was yet a child—my father’s very words!

And on war: There are times when arms alone will suffice. And the King of Heaven bestows his benediction upon those who unsheathe the sword in the hour of a nation’s peril!

These brave young Irishmen defied the crown and rebelled, but the rebellion was foiled, and O’Keefe and his fellow conspirators were caught, tried, and convicted. Before sentencing, O’Keefe was given the opportunity to speak for the last time. The words he said grew in my mind to epitomize courage. I imagined him standing on a raised block before a panel of somber judges, a lone man with perhaps a spot of sunlight coming through a high window to illuminate his face. Waiting to be sentenced to certain death, and speaking to those who would sentence him, he made this tender articulation of self-sacrifice: My lords, you may deem this language unbecoming, and perhaps it seals my fate. But I am here to speak the truth whatever it may cost. I am here to regret nothing I have ever done, to retract nothing I have ever said, and to crave with no lying lip the life I consecrate to the liberty of my country. Far from it, here—even here, where the thief, the libertine, the murderer have left their footprints in the dust—here on this spot I offer to that country, as proof of the love I bear her, and the sincerity with which I thought and spoke, and struggled for her freedom—I offer the life of a young heart.

It thrilled me to contemplate making a similar kind of statement if ever I faced death for something I loved. I wanted to weep for the beauty of such courage. But O’Keefe went even further. Just in case anybody thought he was pandering to the sympathies of his persecutors, he said, On the other hand, my lords, if you will be easy with us this once, and spare us the gallows, we promise on our word as Irish gentlemen, to try to do better next time. And next time—sure, we won’t be fools enough to be caught!

Imagining such impudence made my blood pump hard and fast. Could I ever be so brave? Why not? Just a few months ago I’d been contemplating throwing myself into the Thames. If I could die for nothing, why couldn’t I die for something?

And then, as if to validate such courage, the Queen of England showed mercy and, rather than hang him by the neck until death, she banished him to the far reaches of the earth, to Van Diemen’s Land, for the rest of his days. Yet he’d escaped from there, I learned, and made his way to New York, where he had became a celebrated lecturer—a hero to the Irish and all who yearned to be free.

I reread the Declaration of Independence and an inspired patriotism grew within me. I was an American, after all, diseased or not. And I was becoming a man and knew I could no longer live in my mind. The scene I’d known would change when I’d first come to Sunny Side Saddlery was now changing. To what, I did not know. But inspired by O’Keefe’s soaring rhetoric, I found the hope that I, at least, if not Mr. Perry, might someday emerge a bright new creature and go home again. I would search every corner of my country until I found my enslaved mother, and then I would fight to free her.

That was it. I would become a warrior.

I began to think strategically. What did the warriors I read about have that I did not?

Means, perhaps? I had no money to travel home.

And the willpower to change bad habits? Perhaps that, too.

But it is rarely only willpower that changes habits. Habits change when something unexpected happens that knocks us out of our groove. That forces us to respond, to act without opportunity to think, or prepare, or deliberate—and when we act, well, it is only naked us, after all, naked us stripped of the cloak of habit.

In my case the something unexpected was Nancy being ill on a Saturday night and so causing me to go with another—a bigger, fleshier woman named Joyce. I burrowed into her and would not pull out, and when I grew again, I pushed into her more, and she seemed vaguely bothered by my efforts. I could not suck her neck because it smelled so strongly of garlic, so I attached to her nipple and to my surprise got a mouthful of sweet milk. She pushed me away.

“That’s for me babe,” she said.

Embarrassed and angered, I said, “I paid for you.”

“Not for that,” she said.

I ignored her and pinned her down. She fought under me, scratched my face and back and head, tried to gouge my eyes, but I endured the pain and drank first from one breast and then from the other until she had no more milk to give and I felt her body go completely limp beneath me.

“What kind of man are you?” I heard her ask.

I detached from her and sat up drunk on cruelty and mother’s milk. I could feel blood trickle from the scratches on my face and neck and head. She lay on her back, her hair spread around her head like a dark pool. She sneered and her face contorted in anguish and mirth.

“I see you now,” she said, and gave a scornful laugh. “You’re just a cross-eyed babe yourself and you want for a mum.”

Her words stung, and in my embarrassment and sudden rage I slapped her. She put her hands to her face and rolled away, curled up. I raised my tingling hand to strike her again. And I might have, I would have, if she hadn’t spoken again.

“Go away now,” she said, and the tone of her voice drained me suddenly of my mysterious wrath. “Go,” she said again, and so I lowered my hand, dressed, and left.

Later, the heat of that violence still racing in my veins, my scratches scabbing and my unwashed blood dried on my skin, I lay on my straw mattress back in my closet. I heard Mr. Perry come home singing joyfully. As usual, I lay curled on my side with my back to the door when I heard it open. I heard his breathing change as he lowered himself to his knees behind me. I must have looked the same to him, lying like that in the dark. How could he have known that I’d sacrificed the smooth skin on my neck and the back of my head to the nails of a desperate whore? How could he have known what was racing through my heart and that, instead of a gently curled boy, he was about to touch a tiger crouched and ready to spring?

It seemed forever waiting for that first touch. I knew where it would come, of course. On the back of my neck. His fingers would linger there a moment, and then slowly move up the back of my head, sending tingles down my spine. He would stroke my head slowly, and soon I’d become aware of something else. I’d feel the floor begin to move slightly, hear his rapid breathing. His fingers would stay on my head, stay steady, smooth, while his other hand pleasured himself. That was how it would go. His gentle petting of my head and hair. Our mutual thoughts of someone else . . .

But not this time. This time he paused behind me. I knew he was kneeling and I could hear him breathing. I waited for what seemed an eternity there in the dark. Was he weeping? Praying?

“I’ve won it, Jimmy,” he said. “The big one! And before I could lose it all a fire broke out below and we all ran into the street.”

I stayed still, controlling my soaring emotions, and when I didn’t move, that was when I felt his fingers finally touch me. It was as though he’d flicked a switch and unleashed a physical power I could not control. For I honestly had no plan in my head. But feeling his fingers suddenly on my face, I spun and took his hand with such force that I felt his bones crunch. He sucked in air and I watched the outline of his body shrink.

“I need it,” I said.

I heard him wheeze with pain. “I’ve little with me,” he said.

“Liar.”

He reached into his pocket with his free hand and turned it inside out. A few coins jingled out against the floor.

“I need more,” I said, and squeezed until his body collapsed and he was crippled beneath the pain of my grip.

“Jesus, Jimmy, I’ve given most of it to Le Chat!”

“How much?”

“Enough, Jimmy. Enough to change everything.”

“Get it back.”

“How?”

I thought I heard him sob. I put both of my hands around his one and squeezed as hard as I could and watched his old frame begin to writhe on the dark floor in front of me.

“I’ve loved you, Jimmy, you know I—”

I squeezed harder to shut him up, but it didn’t work.

“Jesus, Jimmy,” he gasped. “You only had to ask.”

A FREE PERSON CAN betray someone. A free person has that choice. To scheme or not. To lie or not. To steal, to flee. These are all choices of free men and women, and so I made mine.

Lying was easy. I loved my imagined future as a warrior hero even more than I loved the truth. Not even close. So I told Mr. Perry I’d meet up with him later and split the loot, although I had no intention of doing that. A ship was sailing that night, and my scheme on the night of the plan was to go directly from Le Chat’s to the ship—I’d already reserved a space in steerage with my own few coins.

“And the rest?” the captain had asked.

Enough, Jimmy—enough to change everything!

“I’ll have it,” I told him.

That night I skirted quickly out the door past cries from the gin house across the street, around the corner and through a pack of children running wild in rags. I stepped around an old man pulling a squeaking cart that carried the stinking dead. At the next corner under a gaslight, a sick dog walked a circle, around and around and around like a drunk. Was it walking after death, or was death walking after it? That was what my mother would have asked. If you knew the answer, you might know your fate. But you also might not. You might need to know if the dog was black or brown or spotted, male or female, and in the dark, passing quickly, I didn’t see. Oh, the mystery!

I climbed the stairs to Le Chat’s flat and opened it slowly—Mr. Perry had left it unlocked—and stepped into the darkness. I could hear nothing—and then movement on the bed. A throat cleared. A cough. I stood perfectly still until my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see a lump under the blankets move.

This was not the plan. They were supposed to be out. They weren’t supposed to be back. But I was in now, and I knew no way to go but forward. I crouched and slid on my belly across the floor, and then slowly, slowly, under the bed. I could taste dust and my heart pounded so loudly in my ears I was sure they’d hear it. And sure enough, one of them woke, for the mattress swayed with his weight and then a pair of bare feet swung down to the floor. It must have been Le Chat, because he limped across the room to the window, and he lifted the sash and stood in front of the open window. I could smell his urine in the fresh air. Then he limped back to the bed, lay down, and made a cat-like noise—was this the sound of frolicking? Indeed. I heard a murmur and then . . . something else. How long could Mr. Perry endure it? I expected at any minute he would bolt, and then where would I be?

I’ve loved you, Jimmy, you know I—

I slid my hands frantically over the floorboards searching for loose ones I could lift with my fingers. I had a knife on my belt, and it had somehow slipped under me and poked my thigh and hipbone, but I dared not lift myself to move it, free it, for fear my movement would be felt under the mattress. To calm myself, I imagined I was rescuing somebody—which of course I was. I took a slow hero’s breath, and slid my fingers once again along the lines between the boards until I found a widening. I wedged in my finger and the board moved. I stopped breathing, then deliberately started again. I tilted the board slowly onto its edge and put my palm under to slide it off. Above me the men moved more briskly on the mattress. I reached into the hole and pulled out a sack of gold coins the size of two fists. I squeezed it hard to keep the coins from clanking together, and also to keep my hand from shaking. Still on my belly, I wormed my way slowly out from under the bed toward the door. I felt that at any moment I’d be seen or heard and so I prepared myself to leap up and kill. I had a knife and would use it. I would not be denied now. I didn’t want to kill—but I knew I could, and I knew I would!

I didn’t have to. We are not in control. The bedposts moaned, the mattress sighed, and indeed I was grateful for the nauseating sounds of love. I stood quickly at the door and slipped out with the gold, took the steps four at a time to the street. A yellow fog lay over the top of the buildings. I ducked into an alley, and then another and another. I jumped over street sleepers, past dark groups of laughing men and a closed carriage pulled by a galloping horse. I turned the corner and narrowly avoided the grasp of a drunken woman leaning against a building. I heard my feet in the street and felt the air burn my lungs as I ran past mad laughter toward the smell of high tide.

At the harbor I boarded my ship and stood breathless at the rail while the gangplank was raised. I was doing what I had dreamed about for years, going home again. I thought I should feel overjoyed, but as the dull lights of London slid backward into inky darkness, I felt oddly disconnected and lost. I knew I stood where I stood, on this ship, as a direct result of my decisions, my actions—and yet instead of pride I felt as powerless and sad as I had the first time I’d boarded a ship, my hand in my father’s, to sail away with the tide.

BUT MY MELANCHOLY WAS fleeting. On the third day out we got word from a passing schooner that Fort Sumter had been attacked and the war between the states had begun. I thought of O’Keefe of the Sword, and of his call to arms—when politics call for a drop of blood, for many thousand drops of blood—and on that long ocean voyage, I dreamed myself a warrior. Each night I gave thanks to Providence for dropping in my lap a righteous war: a fever to burn my diseased country to health. Not only would I find and free my mother but I would now have an opportunity to fight for an even greater cause. I would make available the strength of my arm and the courage of my heart for the just cause of freedom for all.

In this determination I grew happier than I had ever been. In the evening I stood on the deck and watched the sun set into the sea off the bow—the sea that now contained my father’s very bones. I watched wild colors grow upward from the horizon, fill half the sky and the surface of the water before me, and then begin to shrink and fade. Just before the stars came out there was a moment of twilight when all that separated sea from sky was a thin silver line. It was then that the nature of things stood before me as clear as they had ever been. I wished Mr. Collins were there, for the mystery was revealed, or so it seemed, and I was part of the mystery, part of creation, no longer separate. I was my father and not my father, my mother and not her, too. My freedom was everyone’s freedom, and everyone’s freedom was mine and all of us were endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights.

Inalienable because if they were denied I would fight for them. I would kill for them. Die for them.

I breathed all of that new sea air and felt the euphoria that comes with having a purpose, and with having what in my youth I could only imagine to be a realistic chance of success.

Then night fell, full night. Looking west into the darkness across the broad belly of ocean toward the still submerged dreamland of my past and my future, I felt for the first time what I imagined my father must have hoped I’d someday feel when he kissed me on the forehead and sent me away to be free.