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planted by Master’s long-ago kin, so that though I could hear her, can hear her, screaming still, her face was blacked out in shadow, vanished.
    Was that too much for a boy to bear? The next week, the younger ones were split into parcels and sold in town, and when the winter came, they handed me to a young man with black hair standing straight up and a round face red with pimples who said his name was Treehorn and that he had come to take me forhis master a million miles away, and laughed like a wild dog, and I willing went, for I had lost all sense of who I belonged to.
    A MILLION TURNED out to be a little less than a thousand, and we were two weeks on the road to Pensacola, all crammed in a wagon and some trailing behind. Treehorn didn’t talk much, and the other white man said so little I never heard his name, and of the others they gathered like black flowers along the way, most were boat-fresh and spoke a dozen tongues, none of which sounded like words to me. In all this strange noise and silence, and with the vision of my mother like a heavy brick in my mind to be avoided, I started talking more and more until I was damn near narrating that expedition. I named the trees and the birds and the road animals, even when I didn’t know their names, which was mostly. I asked where we were going and what kind of work we’d be doing and for what kind of man we’d be laboring, and when I got no answers, I described the future to myself and anyone who’d listen, and in this way I built a little room in my head where there wasn’t any sorrow. I had never been much of an unhappy child, and now I was teaching myself not to be an unhappy man, a man being what I thought of myself on the road at eleven years old, approaching twelve, the past being what it was. When you lose what you love and still find yourself alive, what else do you do?
    On the trail spiraling down from Virginia to Florida, us hobbled to the wagon and the whites on horses, I saw things I’d never seen before: low mountain passes and flat dry land and earth that looked solid till you put your foot in and water came seeping up or the sand dropped out from under you or you found your leg in a fox den, and anything that didn’t look like the threehundred acres of forest and tobacco fields where I’d spent all my years now took me by surprise. I saw Indians for the first time, and they too struck me strange, for I never knew there were such things as Indian women, but there they were in the uplands, riding horses by themselves with baskets of baskets behind them. Treehorn and the other man bought their liquor from a Catawba near Columbia, and the three of them drank together round a fire while the rest of us were chained to trees outside the circle of light. I had thought Indians were just like us, but they’re not at all. Their place is by the fire, but it’s a fire they have to build themselves, so I don’t know what they are.
    When it rained we got wet, and when the sun baked, our skin started peeling in sheets, and when the horses were tired from pulling the wagon, we walked until our feet had burred soles. When the men with branded cheeks tried to escape before dawn, they were beaten until their backs matched their faces, and when the women dragged slow behind, the chains were tightened round their necks. And still I talked, and still I mumbled out all I saw for people who didn’t care to understand a word I was saying, leaving out the sorrow, leaving in every bright thought I ever had. They could’ve whipped me for never shutting my mouth, and I sometimes looking back on it wonder why they didn’t, and I figure they must could have used the sound.
    We got to the farm in the warmest part of the late afternoon, when all the January sun seemed to have puddled in that one place, and it looked like a dream with trees I’d never seen, some with spiky leaves and some with branches longer than the trunk was tall, and moss hanging over everything so that