the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake.
Georgie’s wife, Amber, greeted me at the door, smiling. “I thought you might be making your way past here today,” she said. “And timed right, just before supper. You hungry, Hiram?” I smiled and greeted Amber and then stepped into the one-room hut, and that is what it was, barely better than what I enjoyed down in the Warrens. The smell of ash-cake and pork wafted over me and I realized I was indeed hungry. Georgie was there, seated on the bed, next to his just-born son, who lay there pawing at the air.
“Why, look at you,” he said. “Rosie’s boy gettin’ big.”
Rosie’s boy, that is what they called me down in the Street, though I had not heard a greeting such as this in some time, because there were so few left who still remembered me as such. I embraced Georgie and asked how he was and he smiled and said, “Well, I got me a woman, and now I got me a little boy,” and he walked over and rubbed the baby’s belly. “So I reckon I’m doing just fine.”
“Why don’t you take Hiram out back,” Amber said.
We stepped outside into a small area where Georgie kept his garden and chicken coop and seated ourselves on two upturned logs. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small wooden horse that I had carved for Georgie’s son and handed it to Georgie.
“For your boy,” I said.
Georgie took the horse, nodded a thank-you, and put it in his pocket.
A few minutes later Amber came out with two plates and the cakes and fried pork on each of them and handed one to me and then one to Georgie, and I sat there eating wordlessly. Amber went back in and then returned with her cooing boy cradled in her arms. It was now late in the afternoon.
“Ain’t had nothing today, huh?” asked Georgie, smiling large, his reddish-brown hair seeming to flame against the dying light of that late autumn afternoon.
“Naw, guess I haven’t,” I said. “Somehow it just slipped me.”
“Something else on your mind, mayhaps?”
I looked up at Georgie and started to speak. But then, fearing what I knew I wanted to say, I stopped. I set the plate down next to the log. Amber had gone back inside. I waited for a moment and heard muffled laughter and the baby squealing, and I reasoned that Amber was now out front enjoying the company of some other visitors.
“Georgie, how’d you feel when you walked off Master Howell’s place for the first time?”
He swallowed half a mouthful and took a moment before answering. “Like a man,” he said, and then chewed and swallowed the rest. “Which is not to say I wasn’t one before, but I had never truly felt it. My whole life depended on me not feeling it, you know?”
“I do know,” I said.
“I don’t need to tell you this, or maybe I do, because they have always favored you in a particular way, but I’ll say it anyhow and you may make what you feel of it. I now rise when I want and I sleep when it is my will. My name is Parks because I said so. I pulled the name from nothing—conjured it as a gift to my son. It got no meaning except this—I chose it. Its meaning is in the doing. Do you get me, Hiram?”
I nodded and let him continue on.
“I don’t know if I ever told you, Hiram, but we was all crazy in love with your Rosie.”
I laughed.
“She was a beautiful girl, and there were so many beautiful girls down there in the Street. Wasn’t just Rose, you know, was her sister—your aunt Emma too. Such beautiful girls.” Emma another name like my mother’s, lost in the smoke; I knew she was my aunt, that she’d once worked in the kitchen, that she was a beautiful dancer, but she had otherwise disappeared into the flat words of others and the fog of my mind. But Georgie had it all. The past unfolded itself in front of him like a map, and I saw his eyes glow as he recounted his travels through every mountain pass and gully and gulch.