Free Them by Nathan McCall

marine and travel the world while getting paid to do decent work. Then life got in the way: His mama got sick; a girl named Joan said she missed her period (it turned out to be a false alarm); one thing or another kept him pinned down and stuck at home.
    Moving to Atlanta had been a major deal, though not nearly enough to satisfy. So he went and got a library card and started reading about the rest of the world, which sometimes seemed about as out of reach as a pearl buried on the ocean floor.
    Now he had a routine down. On most Friday evenings after work he’d buy his lottery tickets, pick up a six-pack and head to the Auburn Avenue Research Library downtown. He went there so much now the librarians knew him by name. They’d see him come in, shambling slow and tired in his ink-stained khakis. They’d watch him browse the shelves, sometimes for hours.
    When he first began going there, one librarian, a high-yellow, cheeky girl named Rachel Worthman, studied him closer than anyone else. She wondered if he was actually reading books or merely gazing at pictures on the pages.
    When she could no longer stand the suspense, Rachel tested Barlowe one day. He had come to the front desk with an armload of books that he planned to skim that week. She scanned the books and lobbed a question, framed as an offhand compliment.
    â€œMy. With all these travel books you’re reading, I’ll bet you know all the continents now.”
    â€œI guess I do,” he said, matter-of-factly. He rattled them off, one by one, in alphabetical order.
    In other brief exchanges, Rachel Worthman discovered he knew a little bit about many things. He could tell you the seasonal rituals of Africa’s Dahomey people, and he knew the main industries in Nigeria and Brazil. He had memorized other trivia, such as the average annual rainfall in Zurich, Milan and Johannesburg.
    Rachel was taken by Barlowe’s raw intelligence. She also thought he was kind of cute with his thick, untamed hair and pearly whites. With no ring on his finger, she wondered if he might not be spoken for.
    Now she looked forward to seeing him come through those tall, ornate doors on Friday evenings. She began wearing her special sweater on Fridays, just for him. It was a pink sweater, made of angora wool, the one her mother gave her for Christmas.
    Rachel wasn’t sure if Barlowe had noticed her in a certain way. She straightened her sweater and flashed an inviting smile whenever he approached the desk. Lately, she had started trailing him into the aisles sometimes, to ask if he needed help finding anything. He would politely say, “No, thank you,” then move on to another row.
    This day, though, Rachel had hung shyly behind the desk, careful not to scare him off. Barlowe browsed the shelves for a full hour, until he found the mortgage guide and other books he was looking for. In the travel section he had searched for a book that told the story of the Gullah people. He had met a wild Geechie girl somewhere once; she was black as coal, and so pretty the sight of her made his armpits moist. She told him her people descended from slaves who had escaped to the islands off the South Carolina coast. She said the Gullah people held an annual festival, in a place called Beaufort.
    Barlowe promised himself that one of these years, when his money was right, he would go to the Gullah festival, and maybe even look up that fine Geechie gal.
    As usual, he took the books up front and plopped them down on the desk. Rachel Worthman smiled and poked out her chest, which was quite qualified to be poked out that way.
    â€œFind everything you were looking for?”
    â€œYeah. I did all right today.”
    He leaned over to slide a book beneath the scanner. He felt Rachel’s eyes bearing down and could hear her breathing hard, like she had a mild case of emphysema.
    Rachel glanced at one of the titles: Bo Rabbit Smart for True: Folktales from the Gullah . Then she