Free Free Men by Katy Simpson Smith

rotten wheel this all was, and if my needs were precious, so too were theirs. I said I’d come back for her some day and she smiled and said not to bother, that she’d probably have a new man by then, and she tucked her head into my chest and kissed my chin under the last longleaf pines not cut for timber, just a stand of them and our love underneath, and I knew it was love after all.
    Winna had these eyes that looked like someone dropped honey in molasses—they had shots of golden all in them. Primus had the same eyes, striped eyes, and I didn’t know where they got them, except that maybe they were just shards of white folks creeping in, but those eye sparks always made me think that they knew something I didn’t, that they’d come to a purpose that I hadn’t. And for all Winna and Primus weren’t anything alike—one just a woman after all and the other the best man I knew—they sure did know what they were after, and knowing was most of the way to having.
    Though my eyes were as muddy as the rest of me, still I was moving myself, picking my body up out of the days of kneeling and cutting and stirring and not feeling much one way or the other, and taking it to an elsewhere that was unknown. I was making a choice, and if I never saw Winna or Primus’s ghost in my dreams again, I’d find them in the place where people go who move their life with their own hands.
    I DIDN’T WAIT for Mingo. The night after I talked with my wife and held her head under my head, Master sent me to the Indians with only one stone jug and a sheaf of letters that he called important. I stuffed my sack with boiled eggs and lace cookies I’d snatched from the kitchen and a stolen knife, andI rode that horse slow up the trail that led from Master’s sugar fields through the cotton of his neighbors who weren’t so foolish and money-hungry as to plant cane on these sandy flats, and our steps fell into the dust prints of all the other steps I’d taken this way, and to the horned owls watching, it looked like this journey was no different from the others, that my horse and I would come back in a few days the same as ever. But I went slower. Maybe so as to look less like a runaway, but maybe so now I could watch everything that went past.
    I didn’t have much of a plan, for I thought that my mission being as righteous as it was, fate or something similar would point me where I needed to go, would guide me past the traps and men waiting with nets, right up the shoulder of a child to safety. In my mother’s telling, Antelope made it to heaven every time.
    I figured I had a week before they came after me. The slower I rode along this road, the more I thought to myself how I looked like a justified man, a man with rights of riding, and beyond the fact that this perhaps drew no suspicion, it made me feel like I had chosen justly. I was a just man riding a right path, and the burning of my blood kept me from falling weary. When the dawn reared up, I was halfway through the now-Spanish lands, trailing the Escambia and unperturbed. Once a burned-looking man passed on horseback and we nodded and I kept on walking that horse slow and I was beginning to be almost certain that I was the owner of this road, that river.
    I never noticed how many kinds of trees there were along that path—not just the trembly palmettos, but taller palms, and low, bendy oaks, and trees with smooth bark and toothy leaves. I still didn’t know most of their names, after living among them for howmany years. They could’ve been my children, clearly different one from the other but only if you looked close, and still in all their beauty they didn’t mean anything to me, didn’t do anything but shade me on the path, and me not even grateful for the shade. I would make a point to write her and say I was sorry, once I made it someplace where they could teach me to write.
    When the sun was straight up, I fell back from the trail into a patch of scrub to eat the hoecakes Winna