This Strange New Feeling

by Julius Lester

  If anyone from that life had seen him now, they would not have recognized the erect man in the dark suit with the cravat at his throat. And if they had asked his name, he would’ve answered proudly, “Ras McMahon.” His landlady called him Mr. McMahon, and only occasionally did he forget that she was speaking to him. Once, while walking along the street, he happened to see a smiling reflection in a store window and walked half a block before realizing that it was him. That’s what freedom looked like, he concluded.

  The days passed with a leisureliness that was almost mysterious. It was a curious feeling to sleep as long and as often as he wanted, to eat fish until his stomach ached. With the money Uncle Isaac had given him Ras would not have to work until spring, at least. Calais was a lumbering town, and he knew he could swing an axe as good as any man. Being free now, he thought he could fell a tree with a single swing. Free! It was such a tiny word for something so big.

  It was early on a cold morning at the end of November when the door of his room was flung open suddenly. Ras awoke immediately and sat up in bed to stare at a gun in the hand of Master Lindsay.

  “There you are, you scoundrel!” Lindsay exclaimed.

  “I told you! I told you!” came a voice from the hallway, a voice vaguely familiar to Ras. But before he could remember where he had heard it, Jakes Brown walked hurriedly into the room.

  “That’s him!” Jakes said excitedly, his eyes going nervously from the still and silent Ras to the room’s pink wallpaper and back. “I saw him walking down the street one day, dressed as fancy as a white man. Now, where’s that reward money you mentioned when I wrote you?”

  Lindsay reached in his coat pocket and handed a pouch to Jakes. “Twenty-five silver pieces, like I promised.”

  Jakes grinned greedily, opening the pouch and thrusting his fingers inside. “Thanks, Ras. I might’ve starved to death this winter without you.” He laughed nervously and hurried from the room and out the door.

  “Well, Ras. What you got to say for yourself?”

  Ras’s eyes widened as he looked at his master, and suddenly tears rolled down his face. “Oh, Master! Master!” he sobbed. “Master Charles! You don’t know how glad I am to see you. You don’t know!”

  Lindsay was startled. “What’re you talking about?” he asked warily.

  “Oh, Master! Running away was the biggest fool thing this here black boy ever did. It’s so cold up here, Master! And the white people up here, they don’t treat a black man good like you do. Master, I’m so glad you come for me! So glad, Master!”

  Ras sprang from the bed and ran across the room, where he threw his arms around Master Lindsay’s knees and hugged him. “Oh, Master! I just didn’t know what to do without you telling me. I didn’t know when to get up and when to go to sleep.”

  Master Lindsay laughed with delight.

  The day Ras returned to the plantation with Master Lindsay, the slave owner called all the slaves together. “You know Ras. He ran away up North. I want you to listen to what he has to say.”

  Ras stood on the porch of the big house and looked out over the crowd of slaves gathered in the yard beneath him, and at Sally directly in front with tears in her eyes.

  Ras forced his mouth into a big grin. “It sure is good to see you all. You don’t know how much I missed you. I didn’t know how good living here was until I got up North. I didn’t know how much I needed a good master like Master Lindsay to tell me what to do until I went up North. I’m so happy to be back here with Master, who’ll put a roof over my head, and food in my belly, and tell me what to do. And if I need anything, all I got to do is ask Master, and if he thinks I need it, then he’ll give it to me.” Ras looked at his master. “Thank you, Master. Thank you for giving this ignorant slave one more chance. Thank you, Master.”

  Master Lindsay smiled. “That’s a good boy, Ras. Now, I hope you all heard him,” he declared to the slaves shivering in the chill of a cloudy autumn afternoon. “Ras is a smart boy and I hope you all will be as smart. Now, to celebrate Ras being back, I’m giving you all the rest of the day off.”

  Lindsay was surprised that his announcement was not greeted with cheers and grins. The slaves moved away quickly. Some glanced over their shoulders at Ras as if he were a dead man they wished had stayed buried.

  Ras followed slowly, and when he reached the slave quarters, everyone had gone into their cabins. The closed doors looked like walls to him. But as he went up the steps to the cabin he had shared with Uncle Isaac, he heard a door open. Turning, he saw Sally running across the clearing toward him.

  He smiled. “It’s good to see you, Sally.”

  She slapped him so hard, he tasted blood in his mouth. “Listen good, Ras!” she said angrily. “Listen good, because this is the last time you’ll hear my voice or that of any other slave around here. I just hope you feel good after walking over a dead man’s grave the way you did up there at the big house.”

  “What’re you talking about?” he asked, holding his cheek and swallowing a thin trickle of blood.

  “Don’t you know?” she exclaimed loudly.

  “Know what?”

  She laughed harshly. “Well, this is going to be a pleasure. That Monday morning after it was clear you’d run away, Master Lindsay come down here to the quarter and asked Uncle Isaac where you were. Uncle Isaac say he don’t know. Master Lindsay didn’t believe him. He tied Uncle Isaac from that big oak back of the big house, tied him upside down by his ankles, and then whipped the black off him. Blood was dropping off him so fast, it sound like rain. You hear me? But every time Master Lindsay ask him where you were, Uncle Isaac don’t say a word. And when he died, he still hadn’t said one word.” Tears of anger and sorrow poured down Sally’s face. “So I hope you proud of yourself. You better be, ’cause you gon’ be one lonely man around here.”

  She spun away, but Ras grabbed her arm and pulled her back to him. She raised her free arm to strike him, and Ras grabbed that arm and held her tightly.

  “Now you listen!” he said in a low and ominous voice. “I’m real sorry about Uncle Isaac. Real sorry. But I ain’t got no time for tears now. If you believed all you heard me say up at the big house, then you a bigger fool than Master Lindsay.”

  “What?” Sally exclaimed softly.

  “What do you think he would’ve done to me if I hadn’t said all that? He would’ve sent me to join Uncle Isaac in the boneyard! Don’t you have any sense, woman?” he said fiercely, flinging her away from him.

  Sally looked at him, unable to believe that this was Ras standing before her, his body bursting with strength. Freedom must be more wonderful than she had ever dreamed.

  “Ras?” she offered timidly. “I—I’m sorry. I should’ve known better.”

  He nodded and Sally returned to his side to let her hand rest softly in his. He said, “I knew about Uncle Isaac. Master told me on the trip back from the North. I didn’t cry then. I’m not going to cry now.” Then, looking deep into Sally’s eyes, he said firmly, “Ain’t none of us gon’ cry anymore, Sally.”

  IV

  Charles Lindsay was furious when he discovered five slaves missing a month after Ras returned. Ras was furious, too, and when all the slaves had been called to the big house, he gave an even better speech than the first one.

  “Them slaves what run away was just ungrateful! Master done taken care of them when they was sick, given them food, a place to live, and work to do. I met white folks up North that would be happy to have what we got down here.”

  The slaves nodded in agreement, and that night laughed themselves to sleep.

  Lindsay and other planters searched for a week for the missing slaves. In the course of one day’s futile searching a planter mentioned that Thomas McMahon had gone to New York to sell more of his tobacco. “I wish he would stay there,” another planter commented bitterly, and thought no more of it.

  Through the mild winter and into early spring slaves continued disappearing, and Ras sympathized with Master Lindsay. �
��They just hardheaded, Master. I feel sorry for them.”

  “Speaking of being sorry,” Lindsay began, “I been meaning to tell you something. You remember Jakes Brown, don’t you?”

  Ras would never forget him.

  “I got a letter recently from someone I met up there in Maine, and he told me that Brown killed himself. Shot himself in the head. I feel more sorry for him than I do for those dumb slaves who think they’re going to be better off in the North.”

  The next month, five more slaves disappeared one night. Master Lindsay was afraid now. That many slaves couldn’t disappear without help from someone. The other planters agreed, and one rainy night they met at Lindsay’s to talk the matter over.

  As they sat around the long oak table in the dining room after dinner, they scarcely noticed Amos pouring the snifters of brandy and passing around a box of cigars. Since the death of Uncle Isaac, the gray-haired old man was the oldest slave on the plantation. He was butler in the big house before Charles Lindsay was born, and was as much a part of the place now as the tobacco in the fields. That was how the planters regarded him, forgetting that tobacco didn’t have ears.

  The slave owners smoked cigars, sipped brandy, and admitted that if someone was running slaves off the Lindsay place, it was only a matter of time before slaves started disappearing from their plantations. After more cigars and more brandy, they agreed that they had to hire armed guards to patrol their plantations every night from sundown to sunup. It would be expensive, but losing slaves was disastrous.

  “Sometimes I wonder if Tom McMahon isn’t the smartest one of us all,” a planter commented.

  “What do you mean?” another asked sharply.

  “Well, sometimes I wonder, who is the real slave? Us or them? We’re as much enslaved to them, if not more. How many of you go to sleep at night worrying if you’re going to wake up in the morning and find your barns burned down, or the legs of your mules busted.”

  “You got a point there,” someone else put in.

  “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what Tom figured out forty years ago, and that’s why he let them prime slaves go free.”

  Another man chuckled. “Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know that ol’ Tom must have himself a lady friend up there in New York.”

  “How so? Tom McMahon with a lady friend?” somebody laughed.

  “I know it don’t make sense, him with a lady, but seems like every month here recently, he’s been going up to New York. All his tobacco was sold last fall. So what else would take him to New York if not some lady he met up there?”

  “Just goes to prove what we’ve known all along. A Yankee woman will love anything.”

  The men started to laugh, but the laughter was stopped abruptly by the sound of Charles Lindsay’s fist hitting the table so hard that cigars perched on the edges of ashtrays fell off.

  “We’re a bunch of fools!” Lindsay exploded. “A bunch of fools!”

  There was a stunned silence as the realization settled through the room that McMahon had been running the slaves.

  “Well, if it wasn’t raining cats and dogs, I’d say let’s go to his place now and burn everything we can set fire to,” someone said finally.

  “There’s always tomorrow night,” Lindsay said with finality.

  On that the meeting ended, and the planters dispersed quickly into the stormy night.

  It was late before Amos was able to sneak away from the big house and go down to the slave quarters, where he told Ras what he had overheard.

  “Thank you, Amos,” Ras said when the old man finished.

  “I’m not doing it for you,” the old man said haughtily. “I know what you been doing. Master Lindsay don’t know about your part in it, yet.”

  “You going to tell him?” Ras asked menacingly.

  “If it was just you, I would’ve told him a long time ago.”

  “Then why?”

  “This is for Isaac. Master Lindsay shouldn’t have done that. I’ve known him since he was a little baby that wasn’t able to turn from his back to his belly. I never thought he’d grow up to do something like he did to Isaac.”

  “Thank you anyway, Amos. And if you don’t hurry back to the ‘big house,’ Master Lindsay might do something to you.”

  Amos smiled at that. “Oh, no. Not me. I practically raised him.”

  While Amos was passing his information to Ras, Charles Lindsay lay awake in his big feather bed, thinking about Thomas McMahon’s trips to New York and wondering if McMahon had made a trip around the time Ras ran away. He wondered, too, why no slaves had run away while Ras was gone, and so many since he had returned.

  He would have gone to sleep with these thoughts if he had not heard a door closing on the ground floor of the house. He got out of bed quickly, slipping into his bathrobe. Lighting the candle on the nightstand beside his bed, he took his pistol from beneath the pillow and went rapidly and quietly down the stairs. There, in the kitchen, water dripping off him, stood Amos.

  “I didn’t mean to make so much noise as to wake you, Master,” Amos said with a smile.

  “Where you been?” Lindsay asked roughly.

  Amos took off his wet coat. “I thought I heard some noise coming from the quarter. I thought some of them trifling slaves might be trying to make off in the rain.”

  Lindsay grabbed Amos by the arm and put the pistol to his head. “Amos, I know you better than you think. And I know you wouldn’t go out in the rain if it was Judgment Day. Now what were you doing down in the quarter? You weren’t telling Ras about the meeting tonight, were you?”

  The old butler was surprised that he was not afraid. “Are you going to do me like you did Isaac?” he asked calmly.

  Lindsay released Amos and, without a word, returned to his room, where he dressed warmly against the chilly rain outside. Maybe he had lost his touch. Maybe he was getting too old to handle slaves. Come spring he would sell them all, including Amos. Move to New Orleans or Savannah and go into business.

  Shoving his pistol in his pocket, Charles Lindsay went out into the night.

  V

  Though there was no light as yet, Ras and Sally could see the dim outline of the footbridge ahead.

  “How far you think we come?” Sally whispered.

  “Don’t know,” Ras lied, knowing that the heavy rain had made traveling difficult. They had not come very far at all.

  “Are we going to stop and rest soon?”

  “As soon as we cross that bridge, we’ll find a place to hide during the day and get some rest.”

  “I hope it’s a sunny place. I’m so wet and chilly, I’m afraid I’ll catch my death.”

  Ras had awakened Sally minutes after Amos left, and they had started immediately. He would’ve preferred to wait until the next night and get an earlier start. But if Master Lindsay had figured out about Mr. McMahon, it wouldn’t take him long to realize who had been taking the slaves to Mr. McMahon.

  “Let’s go,” Ras whispered.

  They stepped out of the woods, crossed the clearing, and started across the bridge. Beneath them, running through the deep gorge, they heard the thunder-roar of the river swollen by the torrential rain of the night.

  They were midway across when Charles Lindsay stepped out of the woods on the other side and blocked that end of the bridge.

  “Oh, Ras!” Sally screamed.

  “Run, Sally! Run!” Ras yelled, pushing her away as he ran toward Lindsay, his fists clenched.

  Lindsay had just pulled the pistol from his coat when Ras reached him and grabbed his wrist. The two men struggled briefly, but Ras’s bare feet could not grip the rain-wet boards of the bridge, and he slipped, pulling Lindsay down on top of him.

  Lindsay struck Ras in the face and a tiny string of blood dribbled from a corner of Ras’s mouth. The white man grabbed Ras’s throat with one hand and pointed the pistol at his forehead with the other. Ras grabbed the wrist of the gun hand and pushed it up. Lindsay squeezed Ras’s throat tighter
and tighter. Tears came to Ras’s eyes and he began to gag for air. His grip on the wrist of the gun hand began slipping, and he could feel Lindsay’s arm coming lower and lower. The breath in his body became thinner and thinner, and though he knew the sun was rising, everything was becoming black.

  Suddenly there was the sound of a gunshot. The hand at Ras’s throat relaxed and Charles Lindsay fell on top of him.

  “Ras! Ras! Ras!”

  Ras opened his eyes slowly, gasping for air. Through his tears he saw Sally standing above him, Master Lindsay’s pistol dangling from her hand.

  “Ras! You all right?”

  He managed to nod. He pushed Lindsay ’s body off him and got up slowly. Sally dropped the pistol and flung herself into his arms. “I was so afraid, Ras,” she sobbed. “I saw him pointing that gun at your head, and I didn’t know what to do, Ras. I didn’t know what to do.”

  Ras managed a wheezy chuckle. “It doesn’t seem that way to me.”

  She shook her head. “I guess I snatched the gun out of his hand. I don’t know. I just couldn’t let him kill you. I just couldn’t let him kill you.”

  The rain had stopped, and from the rapidly clearing sky the rays of a soft dawn were warming them. Ras lifted the body of his dead master and dropped it over the bridge, watching as it fell slowly through space and into the river so far below.

  They stared into the river for a long while, watching it swirl and crash down the gorge. Sally rested her head against Ras’s chest. Her body trembled with cold and fear and he pressed her to him.

  “Let’s go,” he said finally. “We need to sleep.”

  “Not yet, Ras,” she said quietly. “Not just yet. I—I feel so strange.”

  He looked at her and was surprised to see a smile on her lips. He knew that smile and the tremulous flutterings in the stomach that went with this strange new feeling of freedom.

  “Let’s go,” he repeated quietly, hugging her even tighter. “You’ll have the rest of your life to get used to that feeling.”