47

15.

"I've come to see Tobias," John said.

"Tell this soft-headed fool to run from here," Fred said to me.

I grabbed John's arm but his feet were planted like tree roots. There was no moving him.

"Bring Tobias Turner to me," John said in a stern tone.

Fred fell back a step and then a voice came from somewhere in the house.

"Who is that you're talkin' to, Fred Chocolate?" It was Master Tobias.

My guts turned to water and my knees were no sturdier than blades of grass. Tobias came to the door, pushing the butler aside.

"What's this?" he cried. "The runaways. Call Mr. Stewart, Fred. I will have these boys whipped in front of all the slaves out here. Whipped until their backs is bloody and their heads hang down dead."

"No!" Big Mama Flore cried.

I saw her run into the big sitting room behind our enraged Master.

"They just boys, Master Tobias," Fred said.

And even though I was afraid for my life I was amazed that the snooty house Negro would have stood up for two pieces of field trash like us.

"Mr. Stewart!" Tobias cried.

"You can kill us, Tobias Turner," John said in a voice that could not be ignored. "But will you allow us save your daughter's life before you do?"

The russet-hued lad held up his napkin-sack of medicine.

"What are you sayin', Number Twelve?" the Master asked.

"You sent us to find medicine," my friend said proudly. "We've done that. We had to go far away and we got stuck in the rain. I couldn't let the herbs we carried get wet and so we had to hide until the rain stopped."

"The rain quit late last night, nigger!" Mr. Stewart said from behind us.

He had just gained the porch in answer to Tobias's call. I could feel the stamping of his hard boots on the wood beneath our feet. Every time his shod feet hit the planks I imagined him trampling on my bones.

"We fell asleep," John said to Tobias. "We were tired from searching for the medicines your girl needed."

"You can break her fever?" Tobias asked. His voice was lower now. I could hear the sorrow and exhaustion in his words.

"Yes, sir," John said, as serious as a hangman.

"Then come on upstairs before it's too late," Tobias said.

"Number Forty-seven has to come with me," John told Tobias, and I really wished he hadn't. All I wanted to do was to get back out in the cotton fields; back to where I was just a slave and nobody white talked to me or worried about my whereabouts.

"I can't let two filthy niggers in my little girl's room."

"You'd rather let her die?" John asked.

He was no longer acting like a downtrodden slave. Tall

John was talking to Tobias in just the same way he spoke to me. As a matter of fact I believed that everything John was doing and saying was for my benefit. He wasn't worried about the Master or the plantation boss or stuffy Fred Chocolate. He was showing me something. And maybe I would have understood his lesson if I wasn't scared down to the wood beneath my bare feet.

Tobias was shivering with rage at the impudent slave and also in fear for his daughter's life. If John would have listened to me I could have told him that the slave master held a grudge longer than he'd remember any good deed. I could have told John that talking like a white man to a white man was the quickest way for a slave to meet the Lord.

"Come on!" Tobias shouted.

He ran back into the mansion and John followed. I fell back, hoping that I could get away, back to the cotton fields, but Mr. Stewart pushed against my shoulder and I was thrown into the doorway of the big house.

We ran along through the sitting room, with its posh couches and chairs. My dirty bare feet scuttled over the soft carpeting. And even though I was soothed by the feel of the fabric beneath my feet I thought that it was not nearly so elegant as the bed of leaves beneath that great tree where I slept the night before.

We ran up the stairs: Mr. Stewart, Master Tobias, Tall John, Flore, Fred Chocolate, and I. There we came to a big double door that was open. The walls of that room were

lined with large windows and everything was covered with yellow lace. The curtains were lace and also the canopy over the bed, even the walls were painted like the creamy material.

Under the canopy, in the center of the room, in the oversized bed, lay the girl-child Eloise. She looked frail and pale with her eyes closed and sounds of distress coming from her lips.

"The fever is taking her brain," John said in an offhanded manner. "She will not live out the morning unless she is treated."

Next to the bed was Eloise's light-skinned maid, Nola. Nola was hardly older than I. She had freckles and greenish eyes and crinkly reddish-brown hair. It was general knowledge among the slaves that Nola was Tobias's daughter by a slave named Patrice who had died some years before.

Nola was crying over her white half-sister's agony. It was plain to see that she loved Eloise as much as I did.

Many slaves loved their masters. Looking back on it now it seems odd loving someone that keeps you in chains and runs roughshod over your life. But back then the only rule we knew was the white Masters' rule, and so if the Master were ever kind many of us felt grateful because we didn't know any better. And if somebody like Eloise, who never said a harsh word, was somewhere for us to catch a glimpse of now and again, we felt a swelling in our hearts, hoping that such a kind soul would somehow ease our sufferings. That's because the human heart is always filled with hope and the need to love.

So Nola loved Eloise. She would have happily died in her stead.

"Shall I save your daughter, Tobias?" John asked arrogantly.

"Out of the way, Nola," the defeated slave master said.

"No!" Nola shouted.

Mama Flore took the unwilling girl by the shoulders and pulled her away from the dying white girl's bed.

"Come, Forty-seven," John said as he moved toward the girl's side.

Grabbing me by the arm, Tobias said, "Wait a minute. You ain't said what you need this nigger for. He's been on my plantation since he was baby. He don't have no healin' in 'im."

"Where I am from," John replied, rather impatiently, "we cannot heal without teaching. Forty-seven is my student. If I didn't have him I could not save your daughter."

Tobias released me and John unfolded his napkin on the bed.

Even now, over a hundred and seventy years later, in the twenty-first century, I remember the feelings I had in that white girl's bedroom. I was afraid for Eloise because she looked so drawn and deathlike. I was afraid for myself because John had made me part of his haughty procedure. And even while all that fear was in me I was aware that the

Master had lost all of his high-minded ways. He was giving in to a mere slave because that slave might be able to do what they could not. This was possibly the most important lesson John ever taught me; that our so-called masters were not all-powerful, that they were also weak and vulnerable at times. But at the moment I was too frightened to understand the significance of that knowledge.

Upon his open napkin there were various leaves, mushrooms, and twigs. There were also two smaller versions of the soft-glass tubes that he had used to heal my hands and brand. These tubes were so small that they might have been seeds.

John put his hand on Eloise's brow. Nola screamed at him to stop touching her mistress. Flore then dragged the child from the room. John was busy crumbling up the vegetation and mixing it with oil from the capsules he'd gotten from the yellow bag. Then he rubbed the paste up under her upper lip.

"What are you doin' there, Twelve?" Tobias said in a threatening tone.

"Saving your girl if you let me be," he replied.

John crushed another tube and then ran his fingers under the unconscious girl's tongue.

This intimacy was too much for the white man. He grabbed Tall John by the shoulder and threw him nearly across the room. The youth hit the floor with a loud grunt and reached back to rub his head.

I didn't know what to do. John was my friend. I wanted to protect him, but I couldn't stand up to that white man. He could have killed me with just one blow.

Tobias advanced on the prostrate boy. There was death in every gesture of the white man's body.

"Master!" Flore shouted. "Her eyes."

Tobias turned to see his girl looking at him. She held his gaze for a moment and then looked away as if something else had captured her attention. I looked in the direction of her gaze but all I saw was a bare wall.

Tears sprang to my eyes. Eloise was alive and so John and I would be spared. We saved the Master's daughter. He might even grant our freedom. Defeat and death turned around in a flash, like lightning.

"Thank you, Lord," Flore cried.

"She's cured," Tobias said.

"Not yet," John announced. "You threw me off before I could finish the treatment."

"What else do you have to do?" Tobias asked warily.

"I can only show you," said the slave in the voice of a free man.

I could see the two feelings in the slave master's face. He had never had a Negro speak to him thus. For such a slight he was duty-bound to punish the offender. But on the other hand he loved his daughter more than anything-I could see all that in Tobias's visage as plainly as I could see the fingers on my own hand.

Finally Tobias said, "Go on then."

"Come, Forty-seven," he said to me. "This is the hardest part."

Together we went back to the girl's side.

John leaned close to me and whispered, "You have to show her the way back."

Before I could ask him what he meant he took a step back and held out one hand to me while placing the other on the girl's brow.

The moment I took John's hand I was no longer in Eloise's room. Instead I found myself in a field of yellow flowers. I was naked standing next to the girl. She was naked too.

It was broad daylight above us but at the horizon (which seemed to be very far away) night had already fallen. Just at the place where the land touches the sky there hung a beautiful crescent moon. Eloise was staring at that moon. I realized that she had been gazing in that direction even in her bed. Her face was turned fully toward the eerie lunar glow.

She took a step toward the horizon.

I took a closer look at the moon, and in the dark harbor of its arc I saw the grinning skull of Death. I knew then that Eloise had been so close to dying that she had almost completed her journey when Tall John gave her the medicine.

I realized that it was my job to keep her from going toward the darkness under that moon.

But there was a serious problem. I was a black slave while she was the white-skinned daughter of the Master. I wasn't supposed to touch her even with clothes on. I wasn't even supposed to speak in her presence. I was afraid that if she became aware of me she'd scream and her father would slaughter me for molesting his child.

She took another step.

"What should I do, John?" I called out, half hoping that Eloise would hear.

But John didn't answer and Eloise moved another step toward the darkness.

The horizon seemed much closer now. Eloise was no more than a dozen paces from her death.

"Miss Eloise," I said softly.

She made no sign that she heard.

She took another step.

"Miss Eloise," I said boldly.

But still she didn't hear.

"Miss Eloise!"

She took two steps, moving faster now.

She was beginning to run toward the night.

I knew then that there was nothing else I could do. I ran after her and grabbed her by her pale shoulders. She struggled against me but I used all of the strength in my young limbs to drag her back toward the sunlit field of yellow flowers.

"Let me aloose," she cried.

But I didn't stop until we were in the light again, until there was no darkness or crescent moon anywhere to be seen.

Still she gazed toward the place where the skull-face of

Death had loomed, but I stood in front of her, blocking her line of vision.

She noticed me and then looked down at the flowers around her feet.

When her gaze came back to me she asked, "You're one of pap's niggers ain't you, boy?" she asked me. "The one that was spyin' on me from the barn."

She didn't seem concerned about our lack of clothes. Actually she didn't even seem to notice.

"Neither master nor nigger be," I said fearfully. I had to say it but I felt that even though the sky was clear I'd be struck down by a bolt from the white man's God.

"Where are we?" Eloise asked.

"You sick, miss," I said. "Me'n my friend Number Twelve is tryin' to make you bettah. You was walkin' in a deathly direction but I grabbed you an' dragged you back."

"Are you usin' slave magic?" she asked.

"I reckon we is," I said. "It sho seem like it."

"I hear Nola cryin'," Eloise said, cocking her ear.

I could hear it too. The soft sobs were coming from nowhere it seemed.

"Back in yo bedroom ma'am," I said. "She's back there worried that you about to expire."

"But I won't die?"

"I don't think so. Not today anyway."

"So you saved my life," she said, staring into my eyes.

"I s'pose so. You were strayin' toward Death an' we brung you back home."

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Forty-seven."

"Thank you, Forty-seven. Thank you for savin' my life."

I appreciated her gratitude but there was something else that was even more important to me. I really had saved her life. I had used my mind and my courage to brave Death and Master Tobias to do what I thought was right. These actions made me a man, and a real man, I knew, could never be a slave.

From that moment on I never thought of myself as a slave again.

Suddenly I was back in Eloise's bedroom. She was awake and staring into my eyes. She smiled and I knew that she was going to live.

"Is she gonna live, Number Twelve?" Tobias asked in a loud voice.

"Yes, sir, I believe she is."

"All right then. Mr. Stewart?"

"Yes, boss?"

"Take these two filthy niggers and throw them in the Tomb."

I felt rough hands grab me by the shoulders. Two white men ran in and knocked John to the floor.

John had a look of terror and shock on his face.

"What are you doing, Tobias Turner?" he asked with a crack in his voice.

"What I should'a done the minute you stood up an

called me by my name," Tobias said. "This is no house of abolitionists. You will pay for your crimes."

"But I saved your daughter," John said. I could hear the pain and confusion in his words.

"God saved my child," Tobias said. "And now I shall do his will by punishing you."

One of the white men hit John in the face and he fell unconscious.

"Check his pockets to see what else he stole from me," Tobias told them.

The only thing they found was the cigar-shaped sleep inducing device. Tobias took that and put it in his pocket. Then the white men dragged John from the room.

I was deeply shocked by this brutality. After all, I had just come from a bright field of beauty and saving the Master's child. But those men didn't care how I felt. The men who held me battered me around the shoulders and head and dragged me from the room.

Flore yelled out, "babychile!" and I called out for her, but to no avail.

The Tomb was a tiny shack that had once been an outhouse. It sat in the middle of the yard and Mr. Stewart used it to punish slaves without permanently damaging them. It was no bigger than a deep coffin on the inside with just enough room for a male slave or two smaller boy slaves, as we found out.

Mr. Stewart chained us hand and foot and tied us together. Then he locked the door behind us. It was dark in there and filled with biting maggots and ticks. As the sun bore down on the yard the heat rose in there until it was hotter than I had ever known.

"Are you all right, Forty-seven?"

"No," I answered petulantly. "Here I am in the jail when I should be free all'acause you had to go talkin' to that white man like he was a babychile."

"But we saved his daughter," John said in the darkness, where I was sure we'd die.

"But you a niggah, man," I cried. "An' ain't no niggah gonna ever speak to a white man wit'out givin' him his proper due."

"Neither master nor nigger be," he said in the darkness.

I wanted to strangle those words out of his throat but I knew that he was just ignorant of our ways. It had been less than a day since we had shared the dream of his land with his tiny, rainbow-colored people. But a lot had happened since then. Part of me thought that his land of Elle on the ocean named Universe was just a dream. But I knew in my heart that it wasn't, that Tall John was really from beyond Africa and had to be forgiven for not knowing that he was inferior to the slave master's power.

"Listen, Forty-seven," John said. "That's the reason I need you. I've lived among your people for many years but I've never understood their brutality. I was always on the outside passing through."

"But you been a slave," I argued.

"I always had the power to shrug off my chains and escape. I never really paid all that much attention to the people I met along the way because I was looking for you. I suppose that I always looked down on everyone I met and therefore never realized how they felt. Not until now when all of my power has been drained off to save the girl Eloise."

"That's why you need me?" I asked. "To understand how slaves feel?"

"No. Wall is coming."

"That's Mr. Pike?"

"Yes. He is a great power among his people. Much greater than I. You know how to survive against forces much greater than you. You are the teacher and I am the dunce. Without you there can be no future for anyone."

And even there, in my greatest danger, I felt the urgency in John's words.

"Deep under the ground in your world there is a kind of metal," John continued. "It looks like green powder but when it is spun at a great speed it starts spinning on its own and goes even faster. It picks up speed more and more until finally it goes so fast that it tears apart the glue that holds the universe in place."

"And Andrew Pike want that green powder?"

"Yes. He wants to make it spin and blow up everything."

"Why would somebody wanna do sumpin' like that?"

"Because," John said, "in another place beyond the world where we see and breathe there is a river of consciousness "

"That's what you said before. But what do the countesses river got to do with green powder?"

"Not countess but consciousness psi what thoughts and dreams are made of," John explained. "You and I and all of my people and all of yours "

"You mean Champ and Mama Flore too?" I asked.

"And Tobias and Eloise," John added.

I didn't say anything but I was surprised that John saw Tobias and me as belonging to the same people as if we

were the same race. This set off a way of thinking that was more alien to me than anything I had experienced up until that point.

"So all of us are here but at the same time our idees an' our dreams is swimmin' in this river?" I asked.

"Exactly. It is in a place beyond space and time. It is another place that cannot be touched or seen or heard."

"Except if'n you spin that green powder," I added.

"No, but that's what Wall believes," John said in the dark.

"An' this Wall is also Andrew Pike?" I asked.

"Yes. His people, after they split off from our race, developed a taste for the small trace of spirit that makes its way into our bodies. They suck out the energy and souls of sentient beings for their sustenance. But they're greedy; they yearn to obtain the Upper Level where they can feast on the God-Mind."

"So all this man Pike, who really is Wall, gotta do is dig down an' git that green powder an' then everything gets blowed up?" I asked, trying to string together all he'd said.

"No," John said. "First he must acquire a machine. When Wall got here he sent off a message telling his people to send this machine from a colony they have in this galaxy. When it arrives it will be able to mine and then spin the green powder. Wall and the Calash believe that this will open the universe to their perverse appetites."

"How long before it gets here?"

"One hundred and eighty-seven years."

"We all be dead by then," I said, thinking that John and I would probably be dead before the next day dawned.

"Maybe so," John said, "and maybe not. But regardless there is another quicker way that he might attain the green powder."

"What's that?" I asked.

Listening to his story I forgot my situation. I was more worried about that green powder than I was about the bugs biting me and the heat sweating me to death.

"I came here in an extremely powerful craft called the Sun Ship," he said. "The engine of that ship can be altered to help Wall excavate the green powder. Wall must not have it."

"And you took this ship on the Universe Ocean to come here?"

"Yes."

I didn't even understand most of the words he said. But I could feel the urgency in his tone. I could feel his fear. And even though I was in dire trouble myself I worried about my friend and my world.

We stayed in that hotbox all day. After a few hours I began to swoon in and out of consciousness.

"I think I'd like to go up north now," I said to John once when I had awakened.

"I can't take us for a while," he said. "My power was greatly weakened by the healing of Eloise. I won't be able to flee or even unlock these chains for a day or two."

What could I say? He'd only saved Eloise because I had asked him to. It was my fault just as much as his that we were in the Tomb.

While we wasted away in the hot stench of our prison I worked my wrists around in the manacles. My sweat made the skin so slick that I was finally able to slip free.

"John."

No answer.

"John."

A slight moan sounded from where my friend lay in the pitch black of our prison closet.

"John, I got my hands free," I said. "Maybe you could too. Maybe we could get outta here an' run."

"Too… weak…," he whispered. "Too… hot…"

"But you gotta try," I pleaded. "If we don' get free an' run mastuh gonna kill us."

"No master…," he choked, and could not finish the admonition.

I reached out and touched his shoulder. I could tell that he was slumped backward, hanging down in his chains. This was the first time I had been with Tall John that he was helpless. I realized then that he was a person just like I was, that he could suffer and need help too.

This was yet another major moment in my young life. There I was in chains and still I was worried for my friend. I was trying to get free so that I could steal us both away from Tobias.

That's what running away for a slave was theft. Because taking myself from the plantation meant that I was taking the master's property me away from him.

Somewhere in my mind I realized that it was absurd to think that a person could steal himself. But I also knew that if I told a white man these thoughts I would be put instantly to death, so I couldn't share my rebellious ideas with other slaves.

Deep in my mind an even more radical thought had begun to form. I realized that I was free even though I was clamped in chains and locked away. I was free because I had made the decision to run away if I could. Most of the slaves on the Corinthian Plantation would never actually try to run away. They knew that they'd probably get caught and whipped or worse. And I could see that the real chains that the slave wore were the color of his skin and the defeat in his mind. Neither master nor nigger be, Tall John had said from the first moments we met. There in the worst aspect of my slavery I came to fully understand those words' meaning.

I felt the thrill of freedom in my heart. "John," I said. "John, I understand. I know what you been sayin'. I ain't got no mastuh 'cause I ain't no slave."

He sighed in the darkness but made no words that I could understand. John's weakness set off a great trepidation in my heart. I believed that only he could understand the freedom that I had just come to realize. Without him I would be as lost as he was on the ocean called Universe.

"John, how can I help you?"

"Touch…"

"What?"

"Touch my head… with your hands," he said.

I reached out and felt around until I could feel the pulse in his temples. One beat, two beats, three beats, four… and then there came a bright yellow light that filled our foul cell. I could see John sagging down in his chains with his eyes closed and his breath coming fast and short like the panting of a winded dog.

Then I was gone from the tomb and free from my bonds. John and I were sitting side by side in crudely built rocking chairs out in front of a small, ramshackle cabin that stood on a rise looking down over a pine forest. There were larks singing and fat clouds floating in the blue sky overhead. John was there next to me.

At first I thought that I had swooned and fallen into a dream.

"No," Tall John from beyond Africa said, answering my thought. "You are not dreaming. We are here together in our minds."

"Where are we?" I asked John. "I don't know. Don't you recognize this place?" Suddenly I realized that we were in front of Britisher Bill's place; a cabin that Una Turner's father had given to the slave, Britisher Bill, when he earned his freedom. I used to go there with Big Mama Flore and Mud Albert when I was very small. Master Tobias would send us with a basket of food that the old master had promised to deliver to Britisher Bill every fourth Sunday for the rest of his life.

Flore and Albert would walk hand in hand and every once in a while they'd stop and Flore would kiss Albert's cheek. Once they sat on a log and hugged for such a long time that I got bored and asked them when we were going to leave.

"How did you know about Britisher Bill's cabin?" I asked John.

"I didn't," he said, "the memory is in your mind." Britisher Bill appeared in my mind then. He was older than Mud Albert by far and he spoke in an accent that people said was English. The old master had gone to Jamaica long ago and purchased Bill for his personal manservant. He became so fond of the slave that he brought him back to the Corinthian.

"But," I said, shaking the image of Bill from my mind, "if you too weak t'work your magic then how did we get here?"

"The power is in your mind, Forty-seven. Your mind brought us here. I merely showed you the way."

"So can my mind bring us water an' food?" I asked. " 'Cause you know I sho am hungry an' thirsty too."

John leaned back in his rocker and sighed.

"You could imagine eating chicken," he said, and somewhere I heard the cackle of a hen, "but when we go back to our chains you will be all the more hungry."

"So we ain't got aloose from the Tomb?" I asked. "We just daydreamin'?"

"Don't you like it better here than in that hot cell?" I looked around at the peaceful yard and the forest beyond and thought, Yes, this is better than chains.

"Back there," John said. "I'm almost dead. I wouldn't be able to give you my last words, my council."

"You not gonna die, John," I protested, but in my heart I feared his words were true.

"I should have listened to you, Forty-seven," he said. "I am well over three thousand years old and so I thought a boy of fourteen couldn't tell me anything. I was so sure that I could master Tobias just as he had mastered you. My pride was my downfall and now I have put the entire universe in jeopardy."

"You cain't be worried 'bout no universe when we in trouble right now in the Tomb," I scolded.

"Right again, Forty-seven. I can feel my mind fading. I must tell you what you need to know before I pass on to the Upper Level. Listen closely.

"I had intended to give you guidance and power with which you could fight against Wall and keep him from his mad plan. Now it's too late for that. I will die in Tobias's chains but you may yet survive. If you do I want you to find my yellow bag and study its contents. Certain items therein will speak to you "

"Things gonna talk to me like them oil seeds you use for healin'?"

"You will see something," John said patiently, nodding slightly as if he were tired and soon to fall asleep. "And after a while you will have a nagging feeling at the back of your mind. And soon you will know how to go about using that thing."

I noticed that the sun was setting. This was odd because when we first came to Britisher Bill's cabin, only a few minutes before, it was high noon.

"Time is running out for me," Tall John sighed. "I was arrogant. I didn't listen to our hero."

"You not gonna die, John," I whined. "We gonna both make it through this. You just tired, that's all. You just sleepy. If Tobias meant to kill us he'da send us to Mr. Stewart's killin' shack. All you gotta do is sleep an' build up yo' strength. Tomorrow he'll prob'ly send us back to the slave quarters. You'll see."

I helped John out of the rocking chair and laid him out on the ground.

He smiled at me and said, "So you forgive me for delivering you into Tobias's hands?"

"Ain't nuthin' to forgive," I said. "It was me wanted t'come back. It's my fault we here."

Hearing this John smiled and then fell into a deep sleep. As he closed his eyes the sun set on Britisher Bill's cabin. In the darkness the pine forest and the sky faded, becoming the close walls of our cell. The scent of pine was replaced by the odor of human suffering. As the darkness descended I realized that our cell might be an actual tomb for both of us.

When the night came the heat didn't let up and even the little light that had filtered in with the sun was gone. I came awake, lamenting my sad fate. There I was chained by my ankles with no water or food, dying. And what had I done wrong? I had helped to save the master's daughter. I had come back home even though it meant a life of slavery.

"Numbah Twelve?" came a voice from outside of our

hotbox.

"Eighty-four?" I answered.

"Is Johnny in there wit'you, Forty-seven?" she asked through the door.

"Yeah but he out. It's 'cause'a no watah I think."

"I brought you an' him some watah an' two apples," she said. "Mud Albert sneaked out an' unchained me an' give me this here from Flore."

And with that the food slot opened. I could feel the cool breeze of night coming in through there. She handed through a small water skin and two apples. Because my hands were free I was able to reach out and take her gifts.

"Tell him that I be prayin' for you. I sure will."

The girl that John called Tweenie closed the food slot and I held the jug to his lips. At the first taste of the water on his tongue he made a sound in his throat and roused. I held the cup to his lips until he drank every drop.

When he realized that he'd finished the water he asked, "Did you drink already?"

"Yeah," I lied. I figured that he needed the water more than I did and, anyway, the fruit that Eighty-four gave us had water in it too.

We each ate an apple. I devoured mine, core and all.

This is another moment that I have to stop and explain the crazy contradiction of the pain of slavery. Those apples certainly weren't the best that I've ever eaten. I have traveled, in my many years, near and far across America and beyond. I have eaten the most delicious fruits that our rich soil has to offer. But that mealy little apple that Eighty-four fed us in our prison was the sweetest, most delicious thing that I've ever tasted. No great meal of succulent pork and sweet potatoes could ever be so satisfying. That's because we were starving. We were near death. And those small spotted fruit contained the taste of salvation.

In the morning the door to our cell was opened and we were dragged out into the light of day. All around the yard stood the field slaves, in chains. The house slaves were also there Fred Chocolate, Big Mama Flore, Nola, and the rest of the servants. Sitting on fences and wagons all around were Mr. Stewart and a dozen or so white riflemen. Dead center of the yard was a huge wagon wheel leaned up against a hay wagon.

When I saw that big wheel my heart went cold.

John and I were thrown to the ground and Master Turner came out wearing a black suit like Andrew Pike had worn the day he interrupted Ned's funeral.

"We are here today," Tobias said, "to punish the disrespect, thievery, and mutiny of these two niggers, Number Twelve and Number Forty-seven. They are bein' punished for talkin' back, for stealin' a handkerchief, and for runnin' away while on business for their master. I have brought out all you other slaves so that you will see and learn, so that you will remember not to forget your place in the scheme of things as God has decreed.

"I have to punish these boys because it's the responsibility of the white man to keep the black from forgettin' his place. But I am not unfeelin'. I could have both of you boys whipped until you were dead. But I know that po' Forty-seven was led astray by this new nigger here. So the punishment for Number Twelve is twenty-four lashes and a visit to Mr. Stewart's shack…"

"No!" Eighty-four shouted. I saw her try to run out into the yard but her chains and the women around her held

her back.

"And as for Forty-seven, he is to receive just twelve

lashes "

Mama Flore ran out into the yard yelling words that made no sense to me. She was tearing at her breast and running right for Tobias. A big white man stood forward and knocked Flore down with the butt of his rifle. The moment he did that Mud Albert ran out. The rifleman swiveled and shot Albert in the chest.

All of this was almost too much for me to take in and so when Champ Noland also broke line and was beaten to the ground by other white men I hardly noticed. All I could see was Mama Flore like a lump on the ground and Mud Albert crawling toward her and bleeding like a well-pump bringing up water.

Albert made it almost to Flore's side but then he stopped moving. I'm sure that was the moment of his death.

"Get on with it!" Tobias Turner shouted then.

John was dragged to the wagon wheel and chained to i hand and foot. Mr. Stewart counted out the lashes as a bi _& white man named Thaddeus Murphy worked his bullwhip in a hideous way.

John didn't cry or shout. He just took the lashes and hung down. When that was over they put me in his place.

I cried and shouted for Mama Flore. I begged and screamed and finally I passed out. Before I lost consciousness I had a vision of myself as a young child sitting on Flore's lap and playing with her ears.

"You got big ears, Mama Flore," I remembered saying.

"You got little bitty ones," she said, "like chocolate sea-shells."

And then I passed out.