ancestry—my dancing mother, the monument of the progenitor—as some farewell to this world.
I stood and walked out of my quarters. I had a notion to head out to the fallows, to the monument, hoping to find something there that might resolve my memory with Hawkins’s story. I turned down the narrow passage along which I lived, passed Thena’s quarters, and then into the tunnel that led outside. The sunlight beaming in blinded me. I stood there, looking out, my left hand formed over my brow like the brim of a hat. A team of tasking men walked past, with cross-back bags and spades, and among them I saw Pete, the gardener who was, like Thena, one of the old ones who had through his own ingenuity escaped Natchez.
“Hey, Hi, how are you?” Pete said as he passed me.
“Fine, fine,” I said.
“Good to hear,” he said. “Take it easy, son, you hear? And make sure…”
He was still speaking but the distance and my own thoughts overtook his words and I just stood there watching as he and his men disappeared into that blinding light, and at that moment I was, for reasons I do not know, struck by a great panic. It was something about Pete—something about how he disappeared like that into the sunlight, as I had felt myself to be disappearing only days before, but disappearing into a blindness. I rushed back to my quarters with this panicked feeling in me and lay down across my bed.
Again, by instinct, I reached in my pocket for the coin that was not there. I lay there for the rest of the day. I thought back to Hawkins’s story, of finding me on the shore. I was certain I had been in the high grass, I remembered it clearly, remembered seeing the great stone monument before falling under, and my memory never failed.
As I lay there I heard the sounds of the house, this place of secret slavery, rising with the hours into the afternoon, and then falling away, indicating evening had come. When all was silent, I walked back out of the tunnel, past the lantern-light, into the night. The moon looked out from behind a spray of thin black clouds, so that it seemed a bright puddle against the sky pinpricked by the stars.
At the edge of the bowling green, I watched as someone crossed the low grass, and as the distance closed, I saw that it was Sophia. She was wrapped from her head down in a long shawl.
“Little late for you to be out,” she said. “Especially given your condition.”
“Been in that bed all day,” I said. “I need air.”
Sophia pulled the shawl tighter as a wind pushed gently out from the bank of trees to the west. She was looking down the road as though something else had taken over her.
“I should let you be,” I said. “Think I’m gonna take a walk.”
“Huh?” she said, now glancing back at me. “Nah, I’m sorry I have this habit about me, I’m sure you seen it. Sometimes a thought carry me away and I forget where I am. Come in handy sometimes, I tell you that.”
“What was the thought?” I asked.
She looked back at me and shook her head and laughed to herself.
“You say you walking?” she asked.
“I did.”
“How bout I walk with you.”
“Suit me just fine.”
I said it as though it were nothing, but had she seen me at that moment, she would have known it was much more. We walked silently down the winding path, past the stables, toward the Street, the same path I had run up all those years ago in search of my mother. And then the path opened and I saw the long row of gabled cabins that had once been my home.
“You used to live down here, huh?” she said.
“In that cabin right there,” I said, pointing. “And then later when I took up with Thena, farther down.”
“You miss it?” she asked.
“Sometimes, I guess,” I said. “But if I’m honest, I wanted to come up. I had dreams back then. Big dumb dreams. Dead and gone.”
“And what do you dream of now?” she asked.
“After what I just came up from?” I said. “Breathing. I just dream of breathing.”
Looking down toward the cabins, we watched as two figures, barely shadows, emerged, stopping just outside. One shadow pulled the other close, and stayed that way for a minute or two, until they released each other, slowly, and one shadow went back