It is confusing. Because she is just a thing he owns. She knows this. She has always known this. But do you speak to the things you own about your son? Do you meet with them on the common ground of loss?
You do not. So maybe she is—maybe
he
knows she is—something more. She wants to ask him about it, but she doesn’t know the words to do so. And even if she did, it would be useless. He would just stare at her and shake his head if she were lucky. Slap her so hard her ears would sing if she were not.
They walk for two hours through cane fields, Marse Jim dragging the rifle by the barrel. Abruptly he stops, one hand on his chest as if he is taking a pledge. She pauses, not quite abreast of him. Stands there and waits.
“Gon’ stop here for the night,” he says, without turning around.
She looks. “Here” is a cabin, on the edge of a row separating two cane fields. The door is open and it looks abandoned, perhaps by some slave who has run to seize his freedom. Tilda is confused. “Here?” she says. The sun is still high. Usually, they never stop until it sits low on the horizon and their shadows stretch long behind them.
He thunders at her. “Yes, damn you. Can’t you hear?” Then he winces as if thundering has caused him pain. She can hear him breathing, the air creaking in and out of him in labored sighs. He nods toward the cabin, speaks in a tired voice. “Go look inside,” he says.
She does. No one is inside except a mouse that bolts between her feet and off the step in a flying leap the moment she pokes her head in the door. She sees a cot with a thin, raggedy mattress, corn shucks peeking through the holes. There are shelves, but they are empty. A hook where no shirt or dress hangs. A table with nothing on it. All of it coated with the dust. The room is filled with absence.
“Nobody here,” she calls, “for a long time.”
He nods grimly, walks toward her. Halfway across, he seems to stagger a bit. “Marse?” she says. He glares at her and she swallows her question. He brushes past her and into the muggy darkness of the room.
He lowers himself carefully onto the cot and the corn shucks make a dry, crisping sound beneath his weight. She settles onto the floor. Through the open door, she can see the sun standing high above the cane. They had another two or three hours of light at the very least. But here they are, already bedding down for the night inside a cabin some slave once called home. And apparently, they will not eat tonight, either. Indeed, food seems to be the furthest thing from his mind as he reclines with a weighty grunt, the rifle on the bed between him and the wall, one forearm thrown over his face. He closes his eyes.
She stares, boldly. Something is wrong with him, she decides. But she doesn’t know what.
Suddenly his eyes are on her and he has grabbed her forearm in a grip that radiates pain down to her fingertips. She didn’t even see him move. “Don’t get no ideas,” he growls. “You try to get away, I’ll kill you.” He doesn’t say it in the overheated way one speaks a threat. He says it in the way one explains a certainty, a simple mathematical calculation. Two plus two is four; try to get away, I’ll kill you.
She starts, because it’s as if he has read her thoughts, read her recognition of his vulnerability, and leapt ahead of her to the obvious conclusion. And she cannot shake her head vigorously enough. “No, Marse Jim. Wouldn’t do that, Marse Jim. Ain’t got to worry none, Marse Jim.”
He looks at her for a long moment before he releases his grip. She flexes fingers she cannot feel. He leans back and closes his eyes. After a few moments,
he is snoring loudly, breath leaving him in a whistle. She sits awake for long hours, stomach gnawing hungrily at itself, watching through the door as darkness rises from the rim of the world to catch the falling sun.
In the morning, he is worse. His mouth droops open as if he lacks the strength to keep it closed, and perspiration stands in little bubbles on his brow. He sits up on the edge of the bed, weaving as if the floor were dancing beneath him. She pulls herself into a sitting position, back aching from a night on the hard wood.
Marse Jim glares at her as if trying to remember who she is. Abruptly, he rises to his feet. It is an effort, she can see that. And once there he holds his head for a long moment, occasionally wincing and cursing with the pain. After a few moments of this, he walks out on wobbly legs. A minute later, she can hear his piss hitting the ground behind the shed. Then he appears in the doorway, motions with his head. And they are off walking again.
It is difficult for her to keep behind him. His determined gait has become a leaden shuffle, inching him doggedly across the Arkansas countryside, and she keeps catching up, despite her best efforts to trail. For two hours they walk like this, their progress painful and slow. Then, just as the cane fields deliver them to the edge of a tiny settlement, his strength fails him altogether and he slips down to the ground.
“Marse Jim!” she cries.
There is no answer from the disheveled heap lying in the center of the road. She edges toward him, feeling panic rising in her chest. “Marse Jim?” Still only silence. She is standing over him now. His cheek, what she can see of it through the coarse black bristles of his beard, is flushed and damp. His eyes are closed. Tilda reaches a hesitant hand out and shakes his shoulder, gently at first, then vigorously. He does not respond. She doesn’t know what to do. The panic in her chest has risen so high she can feel herself about to drown.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he dead?”
The woman who asks is white, standing at the front gate of a neat clapboard house, drying her hands on an apron.
Tilda hunches her shoulders. “I don’t know, Miss. We walkin’ along and he just fell over. Been sick for two days now.”
The woman comes over to take a look. “He’s poorly, all right,” she says. “Let’s get him in the parlor.”
They each take an arm. It is not easy. They are only women and Marse Jim is a great vast bulk of a man. But eventually, they wrestle him out of the street and up onto the porch and, finally, onto a high-backed couch in a genteel parlor with paintings on the wall and a piano in the corner by the window. Soon, he is resting as comfortably as they can manage and the two of them stand near the couch, facing one another.
The woman says her name is Mrs. Lindley. She asks how it is that they have come to be in the lane before her house. Automatically, Tilda tells the story of how she and Marse Jim are on their way home from the war, Tilda having gone with him to make sure he was cared for in camp. “Where are you from?” asks the woman.
Tilda answers without thinking. “Mississippi,” she says.
The woman’s brow wrinkles. “But you were walking west,” she says. “Mississippi is the other way. East.”
Tilda manages an awkward smile. “Marse must have gotten confused,” she says. She can see by the look in the white woman’s eyes that Mrs. Lindley doesn’t quite believe her. She allows the moment to breathe, then lifts her chin in the direction of the unconscious form on the couch. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”
The woman nods. “We used to treat soldiers here, before the war was lost. I’ve seen this many times. Your master has pneumonia.”
Tilda is perplexed. “Pneumonia? What is that?”
“It’s a sickness in his lungs. He will probably get better, though I’ve seen some die. I’ll have to give him some brandy and quinine. It may be necessary to employ scarified cupping.”
Tilda’s confusion must show on her face. “Bleeding,” the woman says. “To improve the blood flow, let the sickness out of him.”
“You’ve done this?”
“I’ve helped doctors do it,” she says. A moment passes during which the only sound in the parlor is the air laboring in and out of Marse Jim’s lungs. Then Mrs. Lindley says, “Is it true, the two of you are going back to Mississippi?”
She is, Tilda decides, probably in her middle thirties, hair a nondescript color going over to gray, pulled back now into a bun. There is frank intelligence in the eyes that wait on Tilda’s reply. They are blue and clear as water.
“No,” says Tilda. “That’s just what Marse Jim has been telling everybody.”
Mrs. Lindley’s mouth tightens with satisfaction. “That’s what I thought,” she says. “So where are you going, then?”
“I don’t know,” says Tilda. “He has not told me. We left Mississippi after two runaways. We found them, he killed them, and we have been walking ever since.”
“Killed them?” Her hands hang clasped before her.
Tilda nods. “Shot them down,” she says.
“But there are no more runaways. There are no more slaves. Haven’t you heard? You all are free.”
Tilda hopes she is not smiling. “Marse Jim doesn’t see it that way,” she says.
“I see.” A pause, and then: “You know, you speak very well for a nigger.”
“My previous mistress, the woman who owned me before Marse Jim, didn’t believe in the laws against teaching colored to read. She made sure all of us knew how.”
“I’m not surprised. You seem very intelligent. For a nigger, I mean.”
There is no way to answer this. Tilda doesn’t try. After a moment, Mrs. Lindley says, “You know he’s not going to be in any shape to travel for a week, probably two. You could take your leave and have plenty of time to get away from him.”
Tilda is confused. “Ma’am?”
“You could be
free
,” she says. “There is no way he could stop you.”
“I could do that?” She is surprised that the thought hasn’t even occurred to her before this.
“Of course you could,” says the white woman. “Don’t get me wrong, I am no abolitionist. But the war is over and the Yankee government says you’re free. I think that’s a blessing in disguise for us down here. As you are free of us, so we are free of you. Whatever benefit you may have brought in terms of keeping house and working the fields was more than offset by the trouble that came along with you—your thieving, your running away, your laziness, the way you tempted our men into immoral behavior.”
Her eyes seem to have caught fire, though Tilda supposes that might just be a reflection of the noon sun glancing in through the window. “I for one am happy you are free,” she says. “Nothing could please me more than to see the whole African race leave our country. Go live with the Yankees, since they love you so much.”
Tilda is taken aback by the sheer fury of her. “Yes, ma’am,” she manages to say.
Mrs. Lindley seems to catch herself all at once. There is a moment. Then she says, “Do as you please. I’ll go get the brandy.”
As she leaves the room, Tilda’s eyes fall upon a small picture hanging on the wall near where Marse Jim sleeps his noisy sleep. It depicts a man in a Confederate cavalry officer’s uniform who stands, facing the camera. He has a Vandyke beard, his chin is slightly elevated and his hair sweeps back heroically from an ample forehead. One hand rests lightly on the shoulder of a woman seated below him. Mrs. Lindley gives the camera her clear-eyed gaze, and she is almost smiling, as if on the day the portrait was made, she was satisfied with the world and her prospects in it.
That night, Tilda lies on the floor beneath that portrait, unable to sleep. It is not Marse Jim’s raspy breathing that keeps her awake. She is used to that. It is the thing the white woman said: She can be free now if she chooses.
There will be hardship, yes. She has nothing. She doesn’t know where to go. She doesn’t know what she would do. But would the hardship be any worse than what she is enduring now? At least she would not have to walk each day to exhaustion. At least she would not have to live in constant expectation of being cursed and hit. At least she would be the owner of her own self for the first time in her life. At least she would be free.
She sits there.
The moon is full and the light of it bathes the room, cutting oblong shadows onto the wall. She can see Marse Jim’s chest rising and falling unsteadily.
She sits there.
Mrs. Lindley smiles down on her from the portrait on the wall. A clock ticks loudly in the darkness.
She sits there.
She stands up. Her legs shake. She ignores them. Glances over her shoulder at Marse Jim lying there, sweating and unaware. Vulnerable. She could give him what he deserves. It would be easy. But she is no killer. She is…
What?
Maybe that’s the point of being free, she tells herself. A chance to find out.
As if in a dream trance, she moves toward the door. Moves through Wilson’s body lying against the tree in a ghastly caricature of repose. Through Lucretia’s blood-soaked dress and accusing eyes. Through her own fear, so powerful it clenches her heart like a fist even now, forbidding it to beat, sucks the air from her lungs, forbidding them to breathe. Her legs are so unsteady she is afraid she will fall.