"Where was I?" Tobias asked. But we knew it wasn't for us to answer him. "Oh yeah. Slim was a good boy ..." He called him boy but Ned was nearly as old as Mud Albert. "... better than some white men. Take that no good lowlife Andrew Pike. From the looks of him you'd think that he was better than any nigger. But it ain't so. That man right there sold me a horse that he said could work pullin' a plow or a carriage. He took two good slaves for it but it wasn't four days before Dr. Boggs told me that the horse had heartworm. When I complained, Pike didn't
even apologize. Took my niggers and left it for me to put his horse down.
"Ned, you can go up to heaven knowin' that you were a better man than that."
Tobias slapped his hands together as if he had dug the grave himself, or maybe it was that he felt dirty having to speak at a slave's burial. Anyway he walked away from the grave and up to his mansion. He left Mr. Stewart and nine or ten men armed with rifles to guard us while we sang over the death of our fellow man and friend.
Seeing those armed men was the first time I ever entertained the notion that white people were afraid of us. As I said, there were plenty of black folk at that burial. We could have overrun those few white riflemen and killed the Master and his plantation boss. We could have taken the Corinthian Plantation for our own.
For a moment I imagined screaming black men and women overrunning the riflemen, beating them with their own weapons and burning down the mansion. I saw the overboss and his men on their knees, begging for their lives like Pritchard had done when Tobias considered killing him. I saw us all sitting in the Master's dining room, eating ham, and putting our bare feet right up on his table.
I knew it was a sin to have these thoughts and it scared me to the bone. I started shivering, fearful that someone could see the blasphemy in my eyes. And if they did, and they told Master, I'd be in Mr. Stewart's killin' shack quicker than they could call my number.
"Are you all right, babychile?" Mama Flore asked.
She had come up beside me while I was having my evil thoughts and while all the other slaves were singing.
"Fine," I said, letting my head hang down and holding my wounded hands behind my back.
"Mud Albert told me that that dog Pritchard knocked you down and branded you," she said.
"It's okay. Albert put some lard on it and it hardly even hurt except if I move." I shifted around, making sure to keep my hands behind me.
"What's wrong with yo hands, sugah?"
"I got to go back to the cabin," I said. "Mud Albert said that he wanted me to clean out from under his bed."
Most of the slaves were singing "Blessed Soul." Flore reached out for me but I moved away and she only grazed my cheek with her finger. She called after me but I just ran, crying bitterly at my sad fate and for the soul of the slave they called Nigger Ned.
5.
Nobody tried to stop me when I ran away from the funeral. That's because I was so small that I was still seen as a plantation child and not of an age to try and escape. And neither did I consider flight because where would I run? There was nothing but plantations for hundreds of miles and if ever a white man saw me he was bound by law to catch me and beat me and return me to my owner.
My hands were hurting and so was my heart as I walked through the piney path that led from the colored graveyard to the slave quarters. The sun was setting and birds were singing all around. Big fat lazy bugs were floating in the air on waxen wings, and a slight breeze cooled my brow. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered that times like that were magic and if you looked hard enough you might just see some fairy or saint in amongst the trees. And laying eyes on such a magical creature would change everything in your life.
But that was the first day of my transition from childhood to maturity. Between the death of Ned and the callous manner of Master Tobias I was beginning to see that there might not be magic in the world after all. The man we called Nigger Ned was in his grave with no one to give him the proper words to see him on to heaven. Big Mama Flore had abandoned me and my hands were red and swollen. I was a slave and I was always going to be a slave until the day that I died. Better that I died soon, I thought, before I had to endure too much more sorrow.
It was then that I noticed a sound that no bird or insect could have made. It was a thrashing in the woods. It could have been a badger or an armadillo, but it might also have been a boar or bear or wildcat. I was small enough that a fearsome creature like that could see me as prey and so, even though I had just been contemplating my death, I became afraid for my life.
The fast-moving sound of crashing was over to my right. I decided not to go off the path because I wouldn't be able to move as fast as a wild animal through the underbrush. I lit out at a run down the path and as soon as I did I heard the creature moving quicker still, and in my direction. I ran even harder and shouted once. Off to the side I could see the bushes being disturbed by the animal chasing me. I ran harder but the beast was catching up to me. Then he was still in the woods but ahead of me. I decided to run back the way I had come but when I tried to stop I was moving too fast and tripped over my own feet.
The creature stopped running and I had the feeling that it had emerged from the bushes, into the path. I looked up
expecting to see the jagged teeth of a wolf or some other fearsome beast, but instead there was a tall colored boy standing there. He was the most beautiful being I had ever seen. I say that he was colored but not like any Negro I'd known. His skin was the color of highly polished brass but a little darker, a little like copper too but not quite. His eyes were almond-shaped and large with red-brown pupils. He was bare-chested and slender, but there was elegance in his lean stance. All he wore was a pair of loose blue trousers cinched at the waist with a piece of rope.
When our eyes met the boy seemed to be looking for something inside me. He peered closer, frowning and straining as if he saw something familiar. Then he broke out into a broad grin. He walked up to me, put out a helping hand, and pulled me to my feet.
"There you are at last," he said as if we were playmates just come to the end of a game of hide-and-seek. "I've been looking high and low for you."
"Who you?" I replied, feeling like a fool after my fearful flight.
"Yes, sir," he said, "I've searched everywhere from Mis-sissip to Alabam, from Timbuktu to Outer Mongolia."
"You crazy, boy?" I asked.
I was a little put off by his obvious lies.
He just stood there nodding and smiling until a sudden seriousness came into his face.
"Did a big white man with a mustache come around here looking for me?" the boy asked.
"Sho did."
"What did they say?"
"I don't think Mastuh liked that man too much," I said. "He told him that he'd tell him ifn he come across a lost slave, but I don't think he would really."
"Never say master," the copper-and-brass-colored boy said. "Not unless you are looking inward or up beyond the void."
Just hearing those words and seeing that bronze boy made my heart race faster than when I was trying to escape him. There was something about the way he talked to me, as if we had always known each other and now we were just taking up a conversation after a few days of being apart. For a moment there I almost believed that he really had been searching for me. For a moment I felt as if I had been found.
"Are you the nigger that Mr. Pike was looking for?" I asked.
"No master," he said. "No nigger either. No cur or demon or weed. Only life and firmament. Only fire and dark."
All his words became a little too much for my ears. I wanted him to make sense so I asked, "What's your name?"
The bright-eyed, slender boy looked puzzled a moment and then he looked sad. "They called me Son on the Barnes Plantation and Petey in the Lawrence cotton fields. Mr. London McGraw called me Two-step on a Virginia tobacco farm and on the Red Clay Plantation they named me
Lemuel. I've been called a thousand names over the years," he said. "But
now, I think, my name is John, Tall John because your head only comes up to my chest."
"Well, Lemuel or John or Petey or whatever it is you wanna be called, we better get off'n this here path 'cause I hear Tobias's dogs comin'. He probably sniffin' 'round for you."
A most beautiful grin spread across the runaway slave's face. He grabbed me by the wrist and, with strength I wouldn't have believed his skinny arms could muster, dragged me through the underbrush and into the woods.
We moved quickly through the trees. My legs were pumping as fast as they could go but it didn't feel as if I were touching the ground with my feet. The slave who called himself Tall John was laughing happily but also as if he was relieved and restored.
We ran a zigzag path through the woods.
"Over this way!" he'd shout, and we'd change direction. "Faster!"
I can't say why I went so easily with the strange boy. Even though he was much taller than I we were probably near the same age. And, like I said before, it seemed as if I already knew him, that we had known each other in another place and time. I knew it was crazy but I had complete trust in the runaway who called himself Tall John.
We moved through the trees so fast that I couldn't mark which way we were going. It felt as if we were flying low like playing sparrows, but I knew that was just my imagination. I was running hard but it didn't make my breath come fast. My legs didn't get tired.
After quite some time of going like that we came to a cliff that looked out over a wide river. Giant herons and eagles flew up above. Down below I could see a she-bear and her two cubs sloshing through the shallow water, pawing the mud for some ort to sustain them in the summer heat. The sun was almost fully set and the sky was red with long black clouds hanging down. A lonely bird cried in the distance and tears sprang to my young eyes. I had never seen anything so beautiful, I had never felt so happy or at peace. I didn't know it at the time but that was my first experience of the feeling of freedom.
"Where is this?" I asked.
"White men named this place Winslet Canyon but the Indians have another name," Tall John said. "That she-bear down there thinks of it as the smell of fish and water with a hint of pine and cougar."
"How far is we from the plantation?" I wanted to know.
"Not far enough," the toffee-colored boy said, and then he added, "yet."
I squatted down at the edge of the ravine and devoured the vision with my eyes. It was so beautiful and serene. I wished that Ned could have been there or at least that he could have been buried there in the peaceful paradise that I never knew existed.
"They're looking for you, Number Forty-seven," the ' boy that called himself Tall John said.
"I don't hear nuthin'," I replied, not wanting to leave and not caring how he knew my name.
He grabbed me by the wrist again and said, "But they are calling. They sure are."
And then we were running again. Again I was floating above the ground, it seemed. Again I was moving ahead of the breeze. Before I knew it I was on the path and there before me stood Master Tobias, holding the leashes of his six slave-hating bloodhounds.
6.
The lead dog leaped at me and snapped her vicious jaws not a hand's span away from my face. I could smell her canine breath and hear the loud clacking of her teeth biting down.
Master Tobias yanked on his dogs' chains but they kept straining to get at me and Tall John.
"What's this?" the irate slave master said in a voice so frightening that I almost fell down from the weight of his words.
"He done arrested me, mastuh," the runaway slave Tall John said. He no longer sounded like the mischievous child I had met. "Arrested'ed me even though I wanted to run. He dragged me out the bushes and said that you was the mastuh and I bettah heed."
John let his head hang down and his jaw go slack. He stooped over and brought his hands together as if he were pleading. I had to blink at him because he no longer seemed to be the boy I had met less than an hour past.
Tobias, who was never at a loss for words in all the seasons I had known him, went silent and furrowed his brows. He looked from the runaway to me, and back again.
"Is that so, Forty-seven?"
"Yessuh," I said. I would have said so no matter what he had asked. I was so frightened of the slavering, snapping jaws of those hounds that all I could do was nod and say yes and hope that those big teeth didn't tear out my windpipe.
"Who are you?" Master asked the bronze cast boy
"They call me Tall John, your honor, suh. I was found in a cave near the Paradise Rice Plantation in South Carolina. They speculate that my mama must'a had me but then threw me down there so that the mastuh didn't kill both me an' her."
"You not Andrew Pike's runaway nigger from the Red Clay Plantation?"
"No, suh. Uh-uh. Naw. The Paradise Plantation burnt down and I was on a raft with Mastuh hisself tryin' to get downstream. But he got a terrible grippe and died and I been wanderin' in the wilderness evah since."
If I hadn't heard the boy describe Pike I would have believed his whopper. But as it was I kept quiet because I knew that what was going on was far beyond my control or understanding.
"So your master is dead and his plantation is burned down?" Tobias asked.
"Yes, suh."
"And how did the plantation burn down?"
"I think it was abolitionists," John said, bugging out his eyes. "Abolitionists and maybe injuns too. They burned down the master's house with all'a his family and then took the slaves and run. But I stayed with my mastuh because you know I loved him because he treated us slaves so good."
I had never seen a slave grease a white man like that. The lie was so bold that I was sure that Tobias was about to release the hounds to tear us both to shreds.
"What was your master's name, boy?"
"Joe," John said. "Mastuh Joe."
This brought a smile to the Tobias's lips.
"Joe?" he said. "Joseph. Did he have a last name?"
"I jes called him Mastuh Joe, Mastuh. I stayed with him until he died and then I wandered off in the woods lookin' for a farm to work on and a mastuh to keep me. But I been lost all this time until I come upon Mr. Forty-seven here. I was so scared that I wanted to run but he tole me that you was a good mastuh and that I needn't be ascared."
"You know it's my duty to try and find your master and return you to him, don't you, son?" Tobias said.
The only word I had to hear was the last one son. When Master Tobias uttered that word to a colored person it was a sign of affection. That meant that the slave he addressed was now his property.
"Mastuh," John said with deep-felt awe in his voice, "if you could bring me back to my mastuh an' his big house I would kiss your feet an' pledge my life to you."
Tobias swelled up when he heard these words. Every plantation master wanted to be loved by his slaves. He wanted them to look on him like their daddy. John had greased Tobias so well that he assured himself a place on the Corinthian Plantation for the rest of his natural born days.
Whatever effect John had on Tobias it was the opposite for those bloodhounds. They doubled their efforts to get off from the master's leash and then they started braying as if they had caught the scent of a wounded deer. Tobias yanked hard on their collars and yelled at them and made them heel. But still you could see their evil eyes looking hard at the both of us poor souls.
"Forty-seven," the master said when his dogs went mostly quiet.
"Yessuh."
"For the time bein' we gonna give this boy here Nigger Ned's numbah and he's gonna sleep in the men's cabin."
"Yessuh."
"You tell Mud Albert that I will call to see this slave up at the big house latah on and that I don't want him molested by any of the rough element out there undah his charge. And I don't want him branded at least not yet."
"Yessuh," I said for a third time.
But for that solitary response I was speechless. I had never heard orders from the Master like that; for him t
o be concerned about the welfare of a mere slave or for that slave to be presented to him like a guest at his house. It was beyond my experience. Black men and women were slaves and niggers on the level of dogs to somebody like Tobias. He might come out to the kennel to scratch behind their ears or maybe throw them a bone. But to have a slave present himself at the big house to meet with the Master that was like a Negro being able to walk down the main road at midday without some white man grabbing him and beating him and dragging him back home in chains.
Tobias pulled on his dogs' collars and dragged them back down the path toward his house. At every step one of the four hounds would turn and growl at us. You could tell that they could feel our flesh rend under their sharp teeth.
"I thought you said nevah t'say mastuh?" I said when Tobias was gone far enough away.
John smiled easily and I could tell that he was again the same confident young man I had met earlier that day.
"When I talk to somebody like I talked with Tobias," he said, "it's like a joke. To me Tobias Turner is nothing more than one of those dogs are to him just a mad beast at the wrong end of the chain. But when you say master and when you say nigger you are making yourself his dog and his slave."
"I am his slave," I said.
"Not anymore," Tall John said.
It's funny what one word can tell you. When Tobias called John son I knew that he intended to steal him from Pike and keep him as one of his. And when John said the word any I knew that he wasn't one of us, the slaves, but
something different, something that neither I nor anyone I had ever known had met. I knew right then that the runaway Lemuel, now calling himself Tall John, was something like an angel, or a devil. But whichever one he was I knew that I wanted to be his friend.
7.
"He says which?" Mud Albert asked me.
For the third time I explained what Master Tobias had told me concerning Tall John.
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