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the air, that choked it with musk and weeds. It didn’t escape me that I was a black man on a horse. Would Primus be proud of me, or would he know something I didn’t, about how the horse knew not to take me anywhere free, or about how I myself wasn’t yet brave enough to run? I whistled so the owls wouldn’t dive for me in the dark. Master had given me a note for a tavern that stood partway along the route, but I didn’t trust this, so I took my horse two inches off the trail and burrowed behind a palmetto stand so that anyone who tried to get me would first send up a holy clatter. It was cold, and I was frightened of all the things I didn’t know, and I thought of how my brother, long dead, would be halfway to freedom by now, how any red-blooded dark-skinned man would be leaping through swamp and bramble, scotch-hopping over alligator heads to get away from the scent of slavery. The bottom of a bog would be better land to stand on than this path that unrolled like a limb from a sugar plantation. But there I was, arm’s-length from the trading road, nervous to stray farther. I couldn’t sleep that night, not knowing what my body should be doing.
    But the morning brought other things to fuss over and fear, like the Indians that were waiting at the end of the path to take my master’s rum and hand me money, and I didn’t have high hopes for how that transaction would go. Master, who I now sometimes called Josiah in my head to bring him down to the size of other men, had told me not to mind about the language, that they would know what I was there for and as long as I didn’t make a fool of myself I’d get out scratch-free. Don’t move quickly, he’d said, and don’t smile overmuch, for those teeth ofyours are liable to fright them. I did in general smile more than I should, for it was easier than sorrow, of which there was enough to drown us if we opened our mouths to it. So all I knew was to stand still and frown and if they raised their bows at me I’d drop to the ground and cover my head so the arrows at that angle would have a difficult time finding purchase. This last I had thought about plenty.
    As it turned out, the Indians were not wild animals, and they didn’t have fangs or bared bottoms, and I saw no children boiled for supper. The men were mostly the same height as me and some smiled and some didn’t, and one even shook my hand like an Englishman. I stayed with them for two days and though I only heard my language spoken a few times, we understood each other—they pointed where the river was for washing and showed me how to eat the acorn bread and in the evenings I played a game with the young ones where I threw a spear at a rolling stone, and every time it went sailing far past, they all laughed so hard that I thought I’d won. I even got to sample Josiah’s liquor, which no white man would’ve ever let me do, so by the time I saddled up for home I had come to think of these men—not red at all but copper and brown, like the rest of us—as something more akin to me. They had slaves, but who didn’t have slaves?
    Those trips became dreams, where I like a witnessing bird could fly over strangeness, but it wasn’t home, and it wasn’t real. I was still mostly a boy, my heart still empty from my mother, and I thought finding family again was anyone’s only intent. As far as I knew, life was just a rotten thing, and finding another person to take care of you—to cook your grits and comb out your hair and patch up the knees of your pants and maybe, ifthere was time, to sneak you a soft kiss—this was the only thing that made it bearable, for white and black men both. What was liberty without that? As I’ve said, I was very young and hadn’t thought much through.
    HER NAME WAS Beck, and she was more a woman than a girl, for she was older than me and had already had a husband, wed and buried. I would be gone to the Indians for a week once a month or so, and when I was home, in the time