of torment. I was young and strong and should have fetched a price within days. But the days went on, and people went on, and I remained.
Finally, just as the first hints of spring made themselves known, a buyer appeared. Ryland brought me out in chains. I was blindfolded and gagged. I heard one of my jailers say, “Well now, fella, you have paid quite the price, I know, but I reckon that you have got the upside of this entire bargain. This boy is young, healthy. Should be worth ten hands out in the field.”
There was a silence for a moment, then another of my jailers spoke: “We held him far longer than any man should. We had most of Louisiana looking after this boy. Hell, Carolina too.” I felt rough hands on me. Someone was inspecting me, I had adjusted to it by then, and that alone is the worst of it—that a man could feel his violation as natural. But it was different now because I was blindfolded and could neither see the prospective buyer nor anticipate where he might place his hands.
“And you have been well paid for your time, and any troubles,” the buyer said. “But not for your manners nor conversation. Leave me with what is justly mine and I shall leave you to your work.”
“Just making talk,” he said. “Just making it all cordial.”
“But no one asked you,” said the man.
All conversation ended there. I was hoisted, like the thing I was, into the back of the carriage. I saw nothing through my blinds. But I felt the carriage moving at a rapid clip, and for hours there were no words or whispers from the driver, just the random sounds of the woods and the road rumbling beneath us, until we reached a portion of the path where the carriage slowed. And I could feel us going up and over several hills. And then we came to a stop. I was hoisted out. Hands worked at my bindings. My arms were freed. My eyes unmasked.
I was on the ground. I looked up and saw it was night. And then I saw my capturer. I had imagined him a giant. But now I saw him to be average-sized and unremarkable—an ordinary man. The dark was too thick to make out any features, and at all events, there was no time to make a survey. I tried to stand but my legs went wobbly and I fell. Then I stood again, but this time my capturer gave a gentle shove and I fell back, but instead of hitting the ground where I might have expected my feet to have been, I fell farther. And looking up again, I saw that I was in a pit. Then I heard the door to the pit into which I had fallen close over me.
Again I rose, my feet unsure, the ground wobbling under me, barely upright before my head touched against a hard earthen roof. I reached out and found walls of roots and wood, which kept the earth around me at bay. I took the measure of my dungeon. It was about my height, perhaps double in length and width. The darkness was total, beyond blindfolds, night, and perhaps blindness itself. A kind of death. I thought of Marvell’s Book of Wonders, the entry for oceans, how their mass could swallow whole continents, which themselves could swallow some innumerable quantity of me. I saw myself as a child, on the library floor, marshaling all my powers to count the breadth of the ocean, until my head throbbed at the limits of perception. And I felt, at that moment, down in that darkness, in that seeming death, that I was lost in an ocean, a body sinking in the great surf.
I had heard stories of white men who bought coloreds simply to enact their wildest pleasures—white men who kept them locked away for the sheer thrill of being able to; white men who bought coloreds for the ecstasy of murder; white men who bought coloreds to cut on them for experiments and demon science. And I felt then that I had now fallen to such a white man, that I was now subject to the perfect vengeance of Virginia, Elm County, my father, and Little May.
11
TIME LOST ALL MEANING. Minutes could not be discerned from hours, and with neither sun nor moon, day and night became fictions. At first I took note of the odor of