Freedom Stone

by Jeffrey Kluger

  From behind the cabins, they could soon hear a clopping of hooves, and the Master and the slave appraiser, mounted atop their horses, trotted into view. The appraiser was dressed in old and worn traveling clothes, with a slouchy leather hat on his head and boots so scuffed that it wasn’t easy to say what their original color had been. The same clothes would not have looked out of place on a slave. The Master was dressed in a fine morning suit—much finer than he would wear on any ordinary day. Such fancy clothes meant a prosperous man, one who didn’t need to sell off any of his slaves unless he could get a top price for them. Of course, the appraiser would not have been there at all if the Master were really as wealthy as he was trying to appear—something everyone assembled today knew.

  “Impressive crop o’ workers,” the appraiser said as the men’s horses slowed and they dismounted. He scanned up and down the line, casting a practiced eye over them and making a brief notation in his ledger. “You look after ’em well.”

  “Fair portions of food and lots of hard work,” the Master said. “That keeps them strong.”

  The two men began to pace the line while Bull, Louis and Willis stood nearby. Lillie squeezed Mama’s hand, and Mama squeezed back. Then Lillie craned her neck forward, looking left and right, in the hope of getting a glimpse of Cal. Cal was a boy about her age whom she’d never much noticed in the past, but was becoming fonder of lately. Like Lillie, he was growing this year, and she reckoned he was turning out handsomer—if skinnier—than she’d thought he would. Cal had a quiet, sometimes worried way about him, which she found dear, as well as a quick temper and a taste for trouble, which she found less so. Plato had seemed to have taken a shine to Cal too of late—ever since Papa had died. Sometimes, he’d trail after the bigger boy when they were walking to work in the tobacco fields, and Cal would pick him up and swing him about till he giggled—which figured high in Lillie’s estimation too. As always in the last few years, when there was a slave lineup, Cal would be standing not with his own family, but with another one that had taken him in.

  Cal’s mama had died giving birth to him—her first child and, as it turned out, her only one. Cal’s papa never quite got past the death of his wife, reckoning that if the Master had allowed a doctor to tend her properly, she might have survived. Ever since then, he’d had a hot turn of temper, and four years ago, during a lineup just like this one, the Master had sold him South to Louisiana, far enough away that he was never likely to see his son again.

  Cal moved into the cabin next to his family’s, where a couple named George and Nelly lived. They had never had children of their own, and now that they were getting old—past forty, most people reckoned—were not likely to. Cal accepted the bed they gave him, ate the food they made him and minded them as well as he could. Now and again, he even looked as if he cared for them. One sleepy afternoon, Lillie spotted him napping on the porch of his cabin with his head in Nelly’s lap and her hand smoothing his hair, like a real mama and her real boy.

  As the slave appraiser paced the line, Lillie spotted Cal far at the left end, and she didn’t like what she saw. He was looking down—not straight ahead as the slaves were supposed to so that the appraiser could examine their eyes and teeth—and he was looking cross. This was just how his papa used to behave himself, and though George and Nelly warned the boy to mind himself better, he never seemed to listen. Even at a distance, Lillie could see Cal’s jaw working and his hands clenching. George and Nelly were standing on either side of him and both nudged him to soften his expression and unknot his hands. The appraiser saw all this too.

  “Who’s that boy?” he asked, pointing Cal’s way.

  The Master, who didn’t hold on well to names, glanced questioningly toward the overseer.

  “That one’s called Cal,” Willis said.

  Even on hearing his name, Cal did not change his pose.

  “Boy . . . ,” rumbled Bull. He gave off with a small snap of his whip and Cal raised his head and looked forward. The appraiser and the Master approached him.

  “Looks like a strong one,” the appraiser said, “and he ain’t near full growth yet.” The man took Cal’s chin in his hand and turned his face right and left. Cal’s expression was stony. Lillie watched and held her breath.

  “Good eyes, good skin,” the appraiser said. “How’s his spirit? ”

  The Master again turned to Willis.

  “High sometimes,” the overseer said. “He needs some breaking still, but that’s always the way when they’s this age.”

  The appraiser turned Cal’s face forward and regarded him closely once more. Then he let go of his chin, made a notation in his ledger and turned away. Lillie released her breath.

  The appraiser now walked slowly back up the line. There were three other boys Cal’s age on the plantation, and they all drew his interest. Men much beyond their middle thirties were less valuable; they’d been worked out or would be soon enough, but the Master might add one to a sale of two or three other slaves if that would round out the price he was getting. Girls a little older than Lillie were of special interest since they were almost as strong as boys their age and had all their baby-making years ahead of them. Buy a slave girl who later had three children and you got four workers for a single price. There were four girls on the plantation about this age, and the appraiser stopped in front of them all.

  Finally, he approached Lillie and her family and, as Lillie had hoped, did not show much interest. Mama was too old for his needs, Lillie was still a little too young, and a boy as small as Plato was all but useless. The appraiser passed them by without slowing, then stopped. He turned back and looked squarely at Plato. Lillie snapped her head from the appraiser to Plato and back again, and then moved as if she were about to jump at him. Mama squeezed her hand and kept her still.

  “How old’s the boy?” the appraiser asked.

  The Master shrugged. “Seven?” he guessed.

  “Six,” said Willis. He ticked his head at Bull, who moved a step closer.

  “What’s your name?” the appraiser asked Plato.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “It’s Plato,” said Willis.

  The appraiser laughed at that.

  “His papa give it to him,” Willis said. “You can change it if you like.”

  “Plato’ll do for now,” the appraiser said and turned back to the boy. “You look like a strong, boy. Are you?”

  Plato looked to Mama, who glanced fleetingly toward the appraiser with ice in her eyes. Then she turned to the boy and nodded for him to answer.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Then how ’bout you jump for me?”

  “Sir?” Plato asked.

  “Jump,” the appraiser repeated.

  Mama grabbed Plato and pulled him back to her.

  “Franny ...,” Bull said, staring at her hard and flicking his whip.

  Mama looked at the whip, raised her chin and held the boy tighter. Bull then smiled thinly, turned his eyes to Plato instead and flicked the whip again. Lillie drew a small gasp. She’d seen Bull give a child Plato’s age three hard strokes for stealing, and she didn’t doubt he’d do it again. Neither did Mama. She released him slowly.

  “Jump, baby,” Mama said softly.

  “Why?” Plato asked.

  Mama smiled but her eyes looked wet. “The man’s got a son just your age at home. He’s bettin’ my boy can’t jump higher than his.”

  Plato smiled, crouched down and jumped back up as high as he could.

  “Again,” the appraiser said, and Plato obeyed. Then the man waved the boy absently back into line and made a notation in his book. Mama pulled Plato to her hard, and he looked up at her, smiling.

  “Did I jump higher, Mama?” he asked.

  “I believe you did, child,” she said, fighting to give him a smile.

  The appraiser turned to the Master and spoke quietly. “Boys his age can go for more’n you think,” he said. “Useless for farm work, but merchant ships like ’
em as cabin hands. Train ’em early and you got a proper sailor when they’re growed. I sold a child his size for two hundred dollars down in Cuba last year.” The Master smiled.

  Even with the appraiser’s soft tone, Lillie could make out a few of his words, especially “merchant ships,” “cabin boy” and, most awful of all, “Cuba.” She couldn’t place Cuba on a map—having never seen a map—but knew it was a distant place where the slave trade was hard and cruel. Mama heard the words too, and the pair of them exchanged a terrible glance.

  The appraiser now turned away, scanned the remaining slaves and at last appeared to be done with his morning’s work. He might have gone on his way too if Cal, who had been standing still with his eyes to the ground and his fists still balled up at his sides, hadn’t reckoned he’d had enough. The slaves weren’t permitted to leave the lineup until the overseer dismissed them—all the more so on a day like today when the Master had a visitor who needed to be impressed. Cal, however, did not much care about making an impression, and he suddenly turned hard on his heel—so hard that he made a loud crunching sound in the dry dirt underfoot. The overseer, the slave drivers and everyone else turned to look. Cal proceeded to stalk away without a glance back. Lillie’s mouth dropped open and she had to hold down the urge to call him back. The overseer needed show no such restraint.

  “Boy!” he shouted. “You turn back!”

  Cal ignored him.

  “Boy, you heard Mr. Willis,” Bull bellowed.

  Cal walked on.

  “Cal, come back here, ’fore they whip you!” Nelly cried.

  But Cal still walked on.

  Bull glanced at the overseer, who nodded in approval, and the big, muscled driver bounded toward Cal’s retreating back, spinning his whip in a fierce, loud whirl. Nelly and George made a move toward Cal.

  “You two stay where you are!” Willis commanded.

  Lillie looked on in horror as Bull snapped his arm back and the whip emitted a sound like a board snapping. He then flashed the lash forward again with a speed and ferocity that would surely flay the very flesh off Cal’s back.

  But the whip never touched the boy. As Lillie and the others watched, Bull’s arm suddenly seemed to seize up—or, Lillie realized, to slow, as if it were all at once not moving through air, but through molasses. The whip itself, which had been snapped so fast it was nearly invisible, seemed to slow down too, and for an instant moved with the gentle, flowing motion of a length of cloth being twirled underwater. The scene was at once graceful and mystifying and utterly terrifying. No sooner had things seemed to slow down this way, however, than they sped back up again. The slave driver’s arm snapped forward, pulling him violently off balance—so violently that with an audible pop, the bone of his shoulder jumped free from its socket. Bull dropped the whip and fell to the ground, howling in pain and clutching his shoulder as his arm hung limply by his side. Cal walked on, untouched.

  For the second night in a row, Lillie took to her bed but got almost no sleep, spending the night living and reliving the events of the day. Bull’s arm had been set right as quickly as it had been hurt. Louis and the overseer needed merely to pull it hard and twist it proper for the bone to pop back into place—just as they sometimes did when a slave dislocated his shoulder in the field. The arm would be fine again in time, but it would be weeks before Bull would be fit to whip anyone. No one could quite explain what had made his whip slow the way it had, but most people reckoned it had simply been caught by the wind or a muscle had seized up in his arm. Bull himself was in too much pain to think about the matter much.

  Cal was flogged as Lillie knew he would be, but it was Louis, with his much lighter lash, who administered the punishment. What’s more, with the appraiser still on the grounds, the Master wanted to appear stern but humane, so Louis was told to apply just three strokes. The pain was still terrible—judging at least from the way Cal cried out—but any damage to the skin of his back was small and would heal quickly.

  Far, far worse was the matter of Plato. No one knew precisely what happened to slaves who vanished into the Cuban shipping trade, mostly because they were almost never seen again. They led a hard life that—with the threat of shipwreck, drowning and disease—often ended early. Plato himself had not understood the day’s goings-on and had chattered for much of the afternoon about the fine jumping he’d done. He now slept peacefully beside his sister. Mama refused to discuss the matter, but she did close the curtain in the cabin tonight after getting in bed.

  As Lillie lay awake, her thoughts finally turned to her papa. If he’d come back from the war, they would all be free today. And if he’d not been found in possession of the coins at his death, the same freedom would at least have come to his family. Instead, the family—like the coins themselves—remained the property of the Master. But that was a terrible injustice. Of all Papa’s qualities, he was first of all an honest man, one who’d come by the coins in an honest way. If someone could prove that, Lillie, Mama and Plato could leave this place together—and Papa’s name would be cleared.

  Lillie herself was not the person to try such a thing. She was just a child—and a slave child at that—one who could never set foot off the plantation without the Master’s permission, and could barely set foot outside the cabin without her mama’s. But who else was there? Plato was too small, and Mama was Mama. Like all slave mamas, she had more than she could manage surviving day to day and seeing that her children did the same. So it fell to Lillie. If she herself did not set things right, they would always be wrong.

  At that moment, in the silence of the cabin, she resolved that setting things right was just what she would do. She would prove Papa’s innocence, she would free her family—and if she did it soon, she would keep her brother out of the appraiser’s hands. Lillie had no idea how she was going to do all that, but she had no doubt that she was going to try.

  Chapter Four

  LIKE ALL SLAVE CHILDREN, Lillie began working around the time she turned seven, fetching water or carrying tools in the field or, much better, chasing off birds that would swoop in to gobble up seeds as they were being planted. Small children loved being assigned to bird-chasing work, a job that kept them running and giggling and would usually turn into a game after the birds were gone—something that was fine with the overseer. Enough slave children engaging in a loud enough chase was more than was needed to remind the birds not to return for the rest of the day.

  Lillie’s mother did the more serious labor of a field slave, sometimes working alongside Plato, who was only beginning his seasons as a bird-chaser. Lillie had grown beyond bird work, and just last year she had been given a job in the nursery cabin, where the slave babies were looked after. Young mothers working in the fields would leave their babies there in the morning, come back to feed them two or three times during the day and fetch them again when the quitting horn sounded.

  The job of caring for the slave babies used to be done by an old slave woman named Hannah, who had a natural gift for the work—able to silence an unruly child with a single hard stare or soothe a weepy one with a single soft touch. But Hannah died before the last planting season began, and there was no other slave woman of suitable age to handle the job. So Lillie was given the nursery cabin work, along with a young slave named Minervy. Minervy was about Lillie’s age and was a hard-working girl, but also a very timid one—so nervous that other children would sometimes tease her by popping out from behind hay bales or wagons just to see who could make her leap the highest.

  “There’s sparrows what can spook that girl,” Lillie’s mama would say, and Lillie was inclined to agree. But inside the nursery cabin, Minervy seemed to have the same natural way with the babies Hannah had, which was why she had been picked for the job. Lillie—who quickly found that she liked chasing birds a lot better than chasing babies—was chosen mostly to help Minervy.

  On the morning after the slave appraiser’s visit, Lillie woke up with her decision to free her family still fresh in her mind
. She had feared that in the full light of day it would seem like a fool idea—the kind of thing that’s good for thinking about in the safety of a dark cabin deep at night, perhaps, but is best left there. Lillie, however, had a plan, one that she’d chewed over for much of the night until sleep had finally claimed her, and she reckoned it was a good one. Today she would set it in motion. The first step in doing that would be to figure out a way to sneak out of the nursery cabin during working hours—something she knew would not be easy.

  Bull and Louis spent most of their time in the fields helping Mr. Willis keep the slaves from slowing down in the blaze of the afternoon sun. But now and then, they’d wander the grounds of the plantation, just to make sure that the slaves who worked in the chicken coops or hog pens didn’t think that their pleasanter surroundings and softer jobs meant they didn’t have to work hard too.Worse than getting caught by Bull or Louis would be getting caught by Mama, who was sometimes sent back from the fields to fetch a tool or a bundling bag or a bucket of drinking water. If she spotted Lillie getting into mischief, she’d likely thrash her harder than the slave drivers would.

  The biggest reason it was hard for Lillie to slip out of the nursery cabin, however, was Minervy. As sure a hand as the girl had with the babies, she never seemed to trust that she could manage them alone. When Lillie left the cabin for so much as a privy visit, Minervy would fret and wring her hands, worrying that things would surely come undone in her absence.

  “I can’t quiet even one baby at a time,” Lillie would remind Minervy. “You can hush a whole cabin of ’em.” Minervy, however, would not be appeased.