FREEMAN WALKER

UNBRIDLED BOOKS

Chapter One

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 eve, 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...