that we would never get home, that God had truly indeed blighted us. A torrent of ugly came over me. I spent many nights in the very state that you saw me this morning. Perhaps you know about this, a pain that reaches out and falls over your heart like night.
“I found my only balm was in the work, Tasked though I was. My mind disappeared into my hands and I was soothed by the fields. The whites thought it was my great morality. They thought me gracious under the lash. But I hated them all, Hiram, for as sure as they had ripped me from the cradle, they had right well murdered my brother.
“In this state I met Lydia. Perhaps, having been born into Alabama, she knew more about the weight, and was better fitted to carry the great burden of a bonded life. I would rage and she would laugh, and soon enough I found myself laughing along. And then I would be angry that she had diminished me to laughter. And I would laugh at the whole heap of the thing again. We were to be married, and I felt myself come back to the world. I was tied to something, you see.
“A few days before we were married, I came to see Lydia and found her back-sore. She was well-liked and highly valued by all the Quality, and had never been condemned to a seven and nine. She told me it was the boss’s headman. He had been hot after her. She would not submit. And so he whipped her, claiming it done on account of her sassing him.
“When I heard that, my blood got up. I stood to leave without saying a word. She asked what I planned to do. I said, ‘Kill him.’
“ ‘Don’t you dare,’ Lydia said.
“ ‘Why not?’ I asked.
“ ‘Because they will shoot you and you knows it,’ she said.
“ ‘I’ll see that as it comes,’ I said. ‘But on my manhood, I gotta make this right.’
“ ‘Damn your manhood and every inch of you to hell if you touch one hair on that white man’s head.’
“ ‘But you are mine, Lydia,’ I said. ‘And it’s my duty to make you protected.’
“ ‘And you gonna protect me from under the ox, too?’ she asked. ‘I picked you for a reason. You done told me your story, and I know that you have some notion of a place beyond this. Otha, it’s got to be about more than this. It’s got to be about more than anger, more than manhood. We got plans, me and you. And this is not our end. This is not how you and me die.’
“Those words have never left me, you understand that, Hiram. I dream about ’em—This is not our end, she say. This is not how you and me die. She had taken the whip. But I was the one who was claiming to be wounded. I was supposed to love her. But all I was truly loving was my own regard.
“I know you can picture what horror we saw through our union, what horror, at this very moment, my Lydia, my children, must still see. But what I want you to see is what I am trying to now save, what sent Bland down under, and that is all that my Lydia and me built together—the jests that belong to only us, our children who are an honor upon us, a feeling so deep that it calls across this whole continent. Lydia saved my life, Hiram, and I will give anything to save hers.
“Micajah Bland knew all of this. And they killed him for it. I grieve more than you know.”
Now he rose and held open the slit of the tent.
“My Lydia will be free,” he said. “This is not how we die. My Lydia will be free.”
22
THAT NEXT MORNING, IT came the hour to decamp, and having gathered my affairs in my carpet-bag, I wandered through the field and watched as this wondrous city of new ideas, of visions and liberated futures, of men and women, which sprung up in the fields, fell back into nothing. I took a walk in the woods, so as to enjoy the country air one last time before my descent into the smoke and filth of the city. When I returned, Raymond, Otha, and Harriet were all finishing their preparations. I saw Kessiah nearby tightening the strap on a traveling piece. When she saw me, she put her hand to her mouth,