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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 be came 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 under brush. 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 direc tion. 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 strain ing 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 fear ful 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 de mon 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