The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  “I’m looking for Cato,” I insisted. “I’m not—”

  “You ought not be here, Miss O.” Cato came forward.

  “Cato, I didn’t mean to intrude,” I said. “Only it is the most wonderful poetry!”

  “Go on back to the house. I be up. Please, Miss O. You ain’t supposed to be here.”

  Why stay when you are not wanted? Why did I bother to protest? Has it not always been my lot to be Apart?

  Cato soon returned to the Great House, wavering in the bedroom doorway, contrite. “They ain’t mean to go rough on you,” he said.

  I was sitting by the window. I kept my back to him, saying, “I had but little reason to expect otherwise.”

  “She didn’t wanna hurt you none.”

  “There are few who don’t,” I said.

  “Well I reckon I never knowed what folks is gonna do but I knows what you done for me. I told them how good you be—you an Marster Fred—how you done freed me.”

  I leapt up and shut the door. “Cato,” I hissed, “no one is meant to know that! You could be in danger now.”

  “Miss O, I seed your heart and knowed you what they been praying for. Your reading in a few days?”

  “Yes . . . why?” I asked.

  “You seen what devilment that overseer up to. All my born days I met up with devils like he. They gon run, Miss O, but if we ain’t help our brethern they can’t ever get loose.”

  “Why? Isn’t the Widow a kinder mistress than most?”

  “But that damned overseer do as he please. He shot a nigger like she a horse. They mistress don’t see what she don’t care to. But all the white folks round here gon come hear you read.”

  “Don’t remind me.” I groaned, sitting back down by the window.

  “They won’t be recollecting their slaves, be busy listening to what joyment you gon preach. And since you a famous nigger, nobody but the house slaves set to watch you.”

  Our eyes met. “We can’t. Not without—Cato listen, we have to wait to talk to Crawford. He’ll help.”

  “They can’t wait.”

  I looked away. “Well then they will be ravaged by dogs.”

  “You a mighty clever gal,” he said.

  “Is my vanity so transparent? Cato, I’m not that sort of clever. I’m a poet for Godsake. What on earth can I do?”

  He stepped closer to me. “They needs guns,” he said.

  Outside, the slaves’ singing stretched across the fields, catching and hanging in the trees.

  “They’ll be caught,” I said.

  Cato waited like he waits for Heaven.

  “We might as well slit our necks tonight,” I said.

  Cato’s face can have this embalmed despair.

  “No women or children will be hurt?” I asked.

  “I sees to it myself,” Cato said.

  Yours, &c.

  Orrinda

  Two new lines:

  Hearing them hounds let loose in the night

  Chasing the slave with the broken jaw

  September 6th, 1836

  A ghastly series of events. Where to begin? I suppose my tête-à-tête with the Widow Turnwood. She was greatly desirous of speaking with me before the reading. Again, I sat across from her in the parlor, the house women listening at the lock.

  “Tonight at your reading there may be those very much opposed,” she said.

  “You must assure your neighbors it is only poetry,” I said.

  “I have tried to console myself with that very reasoning,” she said, looking down at the fingers she had picked raw. The hem of her dress was filthy. “But you must realize that in these parts nobody lets their Negroes read or write, some even refuse to let them pray.”

  “Will they come then bearing clubs?” I smiled.

  “Gracious, no! Not to this house. They have too much consideration for the memory of my husband. What I mean is that in their hearts, Orrinda, they are good people, and I have ever regarded that there are those among them, Christian souls, who deplore barbarity toward their slaves, and indeed, care for them as their own.”

  “Yet, I have heard that here a man was flogged for carrying a book which opposes slavery. I must tell you—I do not understand why you have asked me to come here.”

  She reached forward and picked up a copy of my book from the table. “When my husband died last year, I was wholly alone. A cousin of mine in New York sent me books, yours among them. Your words seemed to understand just how alone. Imagine my disbelief to find that you were a slave! And when I wrote to Mr. Crawford, he was convinced that we must meet. I can tell you that you have my word as a Christian that I will safeguard you tonight. And if something were to befall Mr. Crawford, I will see you and Cato safely to Boston. For it wouldn’t be safe for two slaves to travel there alone.”

  “Yes,” I said, staring at the wall.

  There it was again.

  “You are too kind,” I said.

  That word again.

  “I must go,” I stood.

  O I had heard it the first time she had said it, but now there was no mistaking that the Widow Turnwood believed me a Slave.

  I found Crawford convalescing in the library, his feet up, and the sun a bright square on his chin. I shut the door, my stomach in my chest.

  He turned his head, and there is no more overworked, apt word for it—he looked quite beautiful there in the light.

  “You seem severe,” he said. “What have I done now?”

  “Are we free?” I asked. “And I beg you will tell me the truth.”

  “What’s the matter?” He set his feet down. “Are you crying?”

  “Is Cato truly free? Did you free him?”

  “Of course,” Crawford said. “I thought we agreed not to publicize it until safely above the Mason-Dixon. For Godsake, Orrinda, if you are going to have some sort of hysterical outbur—”

  “Am I?” I pressed my hand to my heart and could feel the beat in my head.

  “Is this a fit of nerves?” he smiled.

  “Crawford,” I said. “Crawford.”

  His face was all eyes. “Why on earth are you asking me that?”

  “I’m not.” I covered my face. “Oh God, I’m not . . .”

  I turned into a blunt gas meant to wander for all eternity in a sick fog.

  Crawford was up on his feet, bustling me away from the door, whispering fiercely: “Listen, I will explain it. Listen, in Boston, what did it matter? Being a free state: you were free. It was my intention to get the papers, I swear to you, but out of sheer neglect, sloth really! I didn’t. A sin for which I pray you’ll forgive, and you will, Orrinda, you must. For it was not to own you, never to own you. I didn’t even remember that you were anything but free until Anthea, I mean, Mrs. Turnwood invited us South. My deceit, my only deceit—for to utterly protect you as you are not kin to me—was to leave you a slave so that no one here can lawfully harm you. I realize the false wisdom of this but—”

  “Crawford,” I said, “you are telling me that you haven’t found the chance to file my papers in sixteen years? How can I believe you even if I wanted to?” I turned from him and back toward the door.

  He stepped in front of me. “Orrinda, you needn’t be jealous.”

  “O but who could come between us?” I pushed past. “We are joined by the letter of the law.”

  “We can leave,” he said to my back.

  I stopped.

  He came to me and took my hands. “Listen.” He squeezed. “Listen.”

  “Let go,” I said, but my arms were too weak to pull away.

  “We will leave right this moment,” he said.

  I stared at him. “Are you mad? The reading is in a matter of hours.”

  “Whatever you want, I shall do it. I swear.”

  I tried to read his face. “But you lie so easily,” I said. “You are a liar. You would leave without the money? You?”

  “I will do as you wish. I swear upon my life.”

  Of course, I wanted
to run. Run until we can’t, until we fall into the sea and are extinguished by unforgiving waves. But I thought then of the slaves laboring in the fields, blood flowing as freely as heat, and how only I could give them guns.

  I pulled my hands out of his. “I’ll do the reading. We’ll get our money. Then we leave.”

  “Good girl.” He smiled, drying my cheek with a handkerchief that smelled faintly of eggs.

  I hate him. He purports to be my liberator, my ever-abiding champion, but it has never been true. A slave can be beaten, branded, flogged, shot, raped, maimed for the slightest infraction imagined or real. A slave is starved of all sustenance, body and soul, which would allow them to feel free to be human. I have never not been this thing—slave—that corrupts all things. How is it that I love the man who keeps me a thing, which can be beaten, branded, flogged, shot, raped, maimed, burned, gouged, flayed, killed . . . ?

  He picked up the novel he had been reading off the floor. “Charlotte Temple again. Dreadfully overblown.” He tried to laugh.

  “I want to go to my room.”

  He stepped aside and I went toward the door. “Wait,” he said. “You will forgive me, eventually, won’t you?”

  I kept walking.

  “You should know my will says you are to be emancipated at my death.”

  “O?” I whispered without turning, “Is that what it is to be adored?”

  I felt I was walking over glass to get out of the house and into the sun where somewhere in the sugar a slave was screaming. O for a life where I were invisible! Where I were the color of air! But I am the nethermost of all the earth’s creatures: a Brown Woman. And how the world wishes to punish me for being born to these two sins!

  When the housekeeper secreted me a set of keys, I marched into the Widow Turnwood’s bedroom and searched it from top to bottom. For tomorrow’s moonless night, I gave the slaves three guns.

  I don’t care what they do with them. I don’t care if they shoot us all. Such is the daily horror of their existence, which so we passively witness, that they should make our world a hell and then we will know what God is.

  Yours, &c.

  Orrinda

  September 7th, 1836

  I have come to my Bad End.

  Tonight thirty-odd neighbors gathered. Expectation riot in the parlor. A room holding villains and well-wishers both. I stood at the podium where too many men eased near, their eyes telling me of a cold desire to mutilate my flesh. The Widow Turnwood hovered in the corner by the tea, aghast at her own misbegotten temerity. But all the flaxen hair in the world could not hide her.

  Crawford, the showman who figured himself the conduit, the vampire who flattered himself a prophet, delivered an introduction evoking me as a stunted Athena, an obedient goddess, never surpassing the miniature form born of his thigh.

  We had agreed that I would perform only Nature poems: those limited, early works of lyrical mimickings and indulgent odes to America’s landscapes. Verse which asks no questions, has no economy, and is but a blundered attempt at metaphysical complexity—the dregs of my youth.

  After my first poem, not a soul clapped but the Widow: my graceless, beleaguered benefactress whose mind is not half as sharp as her heart. In the ensuing silence after my second poem (the Widow having exhausted her defiance), I paused, spying a black man at the back of the audience. This man was not known to me. I wondered why had he not gone with the other slaves and prayed Cato far afield.

  Yet this did not occasion my revolt. For indeed, even in that horrified delay did I intend to be good. Did I not open with “I Walked in Cambridge” followed by “Thou Art My Ode”? I would have been a perfect paragon of black redemption had I not seen a slave child darting down the corridor of oak trees after his elders through the window behind the rows of simmering white faces. I knew then why I am here. Knew I must speak, though it bring the walls down about me. Knew I have been afraid to be seen fully, to have my heart exposed with all its merciless sorrow for unnamed blood spilling even now, easily and unjustly, into the ground.

  “I hope,” I said without looking at the crowd, “you will humbly permit me to share my newest work. It is an early sketch. I beg you will pardon its rough edges.”

  Then I looked at the one I thought I loved most in this world, my master, Mr. Frederick Crawford, whose gray eyes communicated a horror transparent.

  Lord, You alone have chosen me, yet

  This ornate darkness keeps me from sleep

  Hearing them hounds let loose in the night

  Chasing the slave with the broken jaw

  Who was salted in the sun.

  You will know him by his sin

  Tell the Lord, he is coming,

  Tell his son he is dead and gone

  Throw his boy three times over him

  Gather stones to hold down his grave

  Because it has begun to rain

  I did not see the man who sent his fist. I tasted only the blood he left. I buckled under the bitter heat in my mouth. I screamed for Crawford, but people swelled the room. Down behind the podium, a man caught me about the neck. He was older than I had imagined my murderer to be. With deaf blue eyes and a grandfather’s belly, his knees went between my legs as he punched me in the head. But there was a gunshot and my would-be murderer released me. As I raised myself to my elbows I saw the slave who had been at the back of the audience holding a gun. He shot the overseer then fired wildly into the crowd. A neighbor shot him in the chest, but the slave only fell to his knees and with a jubilant scream found and shot his mistress. The Widow Turnwood fell like a child slipping down the stairs. Crawford ran to her and the neighbor shot him in the head. Crawford landed on his back, his leg bent under him, bleeding onto the already crimson carpet.

  How long I was alone in time. How long held there. Alone.

  There was a corpse near my shoulder. I knew I had to wipe my hands in its blood, to paint myself dead and lay facedown so that when men came across me, I was fortunate that they kicked me until they believed me only a body. Realizing that there was not a living slave left to kill, they ushered out their women and furiously mounted their horses to fetch their hounds for the hunt.

  When finally the Great House went quiet, I crawled out. “Crawford?” I called for no reason at all for I could see him lying in a circle drawn by overturned chairs and the trampled pages of my poetry. He was a heap, made innocent by the hole in the back of his head. His nose and eyes bleeding profusely. I tried to keep in the blood. I tried. But you have to be a god.

  “You ought not move him, Miss O,” Cato said, kneeling next to me.

  I grabbed him by both shoulders. “What are you doing here? They’ll come back!”

  “I ain’t sees George,” he said, looking down at Crawford. “I knew he had a gun so I come back to fetch him. And now Marster Fred bout to go on to his just reward.”

  For a moment I could not get my voice out. “Who is George?” I said.

  Cato pointed to the dead slave. “Ise reckon can’t blame the man.”

  “Listen.”

  He shook his head. “That overseer kilt his wife giving her bout five hundred lashes. Cut to bone.”

  “Cato. Listen. You’ve been very brave. But that’s over now. Get me paper I’ll write you a pass. Perhaps you could make it to Boston, to Crawford’s family. They’ll help you. They’re abolitionists. I’ll write them a letter. There must be paper in the desk.”

  “Laws.” He shooed me.

  “Please do as I say! I don’t want to see what they’ll do to you. George is dead, Crawford’s practically dead, the Widow’s dead—we’re all dead, but not you, not yet.”

  “Can’t run without you, Miss O.”

  I pushed at him. “Go on! You’re free!”

  “We both free,” he said.

  I choked out a laugh. “No, not me. I’m a slave till he’s dead. Crawford never freed me. And the irony is that still I cannot leave him here to die alone.”

  Cato looked down at his hands
. “Ise awful sorry.”

  “I’ll be fine. Just go.”

  Cato nodded slowly. “You right. But could I look at your writings for I go? Always did want to see your words.”

  “But you can’t read,” I said, looking down at Crawford who was not quite dead but so close to dying I could not believe it. “O, what does it matter,” I said to him and Cato. “We must hurry.”

  I found my journal on the floor by the podium. As I picked it up, I turned to see Cato take out one of the guns I’d given him and shoot Crawford twice in the chest.

  I have always thought, well someday he will die, Crawford will die, no matter how I love him he will. But I had hoped it would at least be far away when I would not know it, and here he went and exited without one word to me of how I should live.

  I screamed and dogs howled and Cato rushed me out to where the fields were sweetly burning.

  In the smoke I cried, “Will we get free?”

  “If not in this world then for sho the next,” Cato said.

  And now we run for our lives.

  Yours, &c.

  Orrinda

  James III

  I hustled left at the car dealership, picking my way over the loose gravel in the road, hopping up on the concrete bridge to the safety of the smooth. I stopped running when I got to the top of the station steps and took advantage of my inhalerless wheezing and checked out the platform situation. No one but a dude in a black baseball cap, tattoos up his neck. He was circling the telephone pole, eating (I am nearsighted) fries?

  “Damn,” the boy swallowed at me as I stepped down onto the wooden train platform. I was barefoot in November and way too fat to hide.

  “I’m good,” I said. I even managed to shrug.