nothing no longer, and then I’d get my man, Fred, that was my husband’s name, I’d get him so as to have another hand to work. And then we’d, all together, get the young’uns.”
“And what happened?”
“Old master died. Place was carved up and one of them low whites—man you just seen—took over. Then I ain’t like my work so much. He took all the money for himself, said he had no notion for any agreement with my old master, nor any banking. So I got crafty. Started working slow and sloppy. But he caught on.”
Mary Bronson paused here. She drew herself in, composed herself to continue.
“That’s when the beating start. He set a figure for every week. Said if I ain’t make that figure he’d take it out on my hide. He threatened to sell my husband, my sons—all my boys. I worked hard as I could, Mr. Otha. He sold them anyway. He spared me my youngest”—she nodded to the little boy, still on the floor playing with the wooden animals—“but that wasn’t no sympathy or concern. It was weight. He held that boy over me, so I always had something else to lose.”
“Why’d he bring you to the city?” Otha asked.
“He got family up here,” she said. “He was bragging to them about my work. Had me working for his sister. In his sister kitchen.”
“Up here?”
“Yes, he did. But I done showed him, have I not?”
“Surely, you have.”
“Chain is a powerful thing, Mr. Otha, a powerful, powerful thing. I was thinking bout all the times I come north and ain’t run. And I was thinking about the grip they got on me. And I knew that boy would be off to the fields in a year or so, and I knew that then they’d have him too.”
She sobbed softly into her hands. Otha went over and sat next to Mary Bronson. Then he drew her close, held her, gently patting her back. As he held her, Mary Bronson wailed and I heard in the wailing a song for her husband, her boys, and all her lost.
I had never seen an agent do what Otha was now doing—comforting her, treating her with the dignity of a free woman, not an escaped slave. He rocked her in his arms until she was settled and then he stood and said, “We shall have a place for you and your boy in the next few days. Raymond gone to get all that started. You and your son welcome to stay here until it’s all arranged.”
Mary Bronson nodded.
“It’s a good city, ma’am,” said Otha. “And we are strong here. But I understand if you don’t want to stay. Either way, we gon help how we can. As you will soon see, finding freedom is only the first part. Living free is a whole other.”
There was a moment of silence. I had stopped writing, thinking the interview terminated. Mary Bronson had stopped crying now. She wiped her face with Otha’s handkerchief. And then she looked up and said, “Ain’t no living free, less I’m living with my boys.”
She had composed herself now. I could see that her pain and fear were shifting into something else. “I don’t wanna hear about your church. Don’t wanna hear bout your city. My boys—they the only city I need. Now you done found a way to get me and Octavius out, and by God, I am thankful for it. I was raised correct—I am thankful. But my other boys, all my lost boys, that is my highest concern.”
“Mrs. Bronson,” said Otha. “We just ain’t set up like that. That just ain’t in our power.”
“Then you ain’t got the power of freedom,” she said. “If you can’t keep them from parting a mother from her son, a husband from his natural wife, then you got nothing. That boy over there is my everything. I run for him, so he might know some other world. Left on my own, I would have died as I was born—a slave. That boy freed me, you see. And I owe him so much. Mostly I owe him his pappy and his brothers. If you can’t stop them from breaking us up, as they do, if you can’t put us back together, then your freedom is thin and your church and your city hold nothing for me.”
* * *
—
That following Monday I began my employment in a woodworking shop, just off the Schuylkill docks, at the corner of Twenty-third and Locust. The