فصل 10

Caesar THE excitement over Jockey’s birthday allowed Caesar to visit his only refuge on Randall. The dilapidated schoolhouse by the stables was generally empty. At night lovers sneaked in, but he never went there at night—he required light, and he was not going to risk lighting a candle. He went to the schoolhouse to read the book Fletcher gave him after much protest; he went when feeling low, to weep over his burdens; he went to watch the other slaves move about the plantation. From the window it was as if he were not one of their unlucky tribe but only observing their commerce, as one might watch strangers stroll past one’s front door. In the schoolhouse it was as if he were not there at all.

Enslaved. In fear. Sentenced to death.

If his scheme came to fruition, this would be the last time he celebrated Jockey’s birthday. God willing. Knowing him, the old man was apt to announce another one next month. The quarter was so jubilant over the tiny pleasures they scavenged together on Randall. A made-up birthday, a dance after toiling under the harvest moon. In Virginia the celebrations were spectacular. Caesar and his family rode in the widow’s buggy to the farms of freemen, they visited relatives on estates for the Lord’s holidays and New Year’s Day. The pigs and venison steaks, ginger pies and corn-bread cakes. The games went all day long, until Caesar and his companions fell in panting collapse. The masters in Virginia kept their distance those festival days. How could these Randall slaves truly enjoy themselves with that dumb menace waiting at the sidelines, poised to swoop? They didn’t know their birthdays so had to invent them. Half these folks didn’t know their mothers and fathers.

I was born on August 14th. My mother’s name is Lily Jane. My father is Jerome. I don’t know where they are.

Through the schoolhouse window, framed by two of the older cabins—their whitewash smeared to gray, worn down like those who slept inside them—Cora huddled with her favorite at the starting line. Chester, the boy who prowled the quarter with such enviable cheer. Obviously he’d never been beaten.

The boy turned his head shyly from something Cora said. She smiled—quickly. She smiled at Chester, and Lovey and the women from her cabin, with brevity and efficiency. Like when you see the shadow of a bird on the ground but look up and nothing’s there. She subsisted on rations, in everything. Caesar had never spoken to her but had this figured out about her. It was sensible: She knew the preciousness of what little she called her own. Her joys, her plot, that block of sugar maple she perched on like a vulture.

He was drinking corn whiskey with Martin in the barn loft one night—the boy wouldn’t say where he got the jug—when they started talking about the women of Randall. Who was most likely to mush your face into their titties, who’d scream so loud the whole quarter would know, and who would never tell. Caesar asked about Cora.

“Nigger don’t fool with no Hob woman,” Martin said. “They cut your thing off and make soup with it.” He told him the old story of Cora and her garden and Blake’s doghouse, and Caesar thought, That sounds about right. Then Martin said she liked to sneak out to fornicate with swamp animals, and Caesar realized the cotton picker was dumber than he thought.

None of the Randall men was that bright. The place had undone them. They joked and they picked fast when the bosses’ eyes were on them and they acted big, but at night in the cabin after midnight they wept, they screamed from nightmares and wretched memories. In Caesar’s cabin, in the next cabins over, and in every slave village near and far. When the work was done, and the day’s punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.

Cheers and shouts—another race done. Cora set her hands on her hips, head tilted as if hunting after a tune hidden in the noise. How to capture that profile in wood, preserve her grace and strength—he didn’t trust himself not to botch it. Picking had ruined his hands for delicate woodwork. The slope of a woman’s cheek, lips in the midst of a whisper. His arms trembled at the end of the day, muscles throbbing.

How the old white bitch had lied! He should have been living with his mother and father in their cottage, rounding off barrels for the cooper or apprenticed to another of the town’s craftsmen. His prospects were limited by his race, to be sure, but Caesar had grown up believing he was free to choose his own fate. “You can be whatever you want to be,” his father said.

“Even go to Richmond?” From all reports, Richmond sounded far away and splendid.

“Even Richmond, if you like.”

But the old woman had lied and now his crossroad was reduced to one destination, a slow death in Georgia. For him, for his entire family. His mother was slight and delicate and not made for field labor, she was too kind to endure the plantation’s battery of cruelties. His father would hold out longer, donkey that he was, but not much. The old woman had destroyed his family so thoroughly it couldn’t have been accidental. It wasn’t her niece’s greed—the old woman had played a trick on them the whole time. Tightening the knots every time she held Caesar in her lap and taught him a word.

Caesar pictured his father cutting cane in a Florida hell, burning his flesh as he stooped over the big kettles of molten sugar. The cat-o’-nine-tails biting into his mother’s back when she failed to keep the pace with her sack. Stubborn breaks when it don’t bend, and his family had spent too much time with the kindly white folks in the north. Kindly in that they didn’t see fit to kill you fast. One thing about the south, it was not patient when it came to killing negroes.

In the old crippled men and women of the plantation he saw what lay in store for his mother and father. In time, what would become of him. At night, he was certain they were dead; in the daylight, merely maimed and half dead. Either way he was alone in the world.

Caesar approached her after the races. Of course she waved him away. She didn’t know him. It could’ve been a prank, or a trap laid by the Randalls in a fit of boredom. Running was too big an idea—you had to let it set a while, turn it around in your head. It took Caesar months to permit it into his thoughts, and he needed Fletcher’s encouragement to let it truly live. You need someone else to help you along. Even if she didn’t know she’d say yes, he did. He’d told her he wanted her for good luck—her mother was the only one to ever make it out. Probably a mistake, if not an insult, to someone like her. She wasn’t a rabbit’s foot to carry with you on the voyage but the locomotive itself. He couldn’t do it without her.

The terrible incident at the dance proved it. One of the house slaves told him the brothers were drinking at the big house. Caesar took it as a bad omen. When the boy carried the lantern down to the quarter, his masters following, violence was assured. Chester had never been beaten. Now he had been, and tomorrow he’d get his first hiding. No more children’s games for him, races and hide-and-seek, but the grim trials of slave men. No one else in the village made a move to help the boy—how could they? They’d seen it a hundred times before, as victim or witness, and would see it a hundred times more until they died. But Cora did. She shielded the boy with her own body and took his blows for him. She was a stray through and through, so far off the path it was like she’d already run from the place long ago.

After the beating Caesar visited the schoolhouse at night for the first time. Just to hold the book in his hands. To make sure it was still there, a souvenir from a time when he had all the books he wanted, and all the time to read them.

What became of my companions in the boat, as well as those who escaped on the rock, or were left in the vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all lost. The book will get him killed, Fletcher warned. Caesar hid Travels into Several Remote Nations in the dirt under the schoolhouse, wrapped in two swatches of burlap. Wait a little longer until we can make the preparations for your escape, the shopkeeper said. Then you can have any book you want. But if he didn’t read, he was a slave. Before the book the only thing to read was what came written on a bag of rice. The name of the firm that manufactured their chains, imprinted in the metal like a promise of pain.

Now a page here and there, in the golden afternoon light, sustained him. Guile and pluck, guile and pluck. The white man in the book, Gulliver, roved from peril to peril, each new island a new predicament to solve before he could return home. That was the man’s real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered—he kept forgetting what he had. That was white people all over: Build a schoolhouse and let it rot, make a home then keep straying. If Caesar figured the route home, he’d never travel again. Otherwise he was liable to go from one troublesome island to the next, never recognizing where he was, until the world ran out. Unless she came with him. With Cora, he’d find the way home.