Horrible Harvest

We walked until we come up on a hunting shed used to clean and skin whitetail. Fore taking a seat on a tree stump, Tate handed me a canteen of water.

“I still don’t know why you’re here – With Mr. Miller – In the Confederacy.”

“I still don’t know why you think I got somewhere better to be.”

I give a chuckle. “Ain’t the North better?”

“It’s better if you’re white. Sure. Better for me? Not even a little bit.”

“You’re crazy. This whole goddamn thing is about you people. Up North you’ld have freedom and whatnot.”

Tate laughed. “You think white folks up North are going to welcome me with open arms, do you? I thought you were smart, boy.”

“Well, damn sure ain’t nothing for you here, ‘cept whip and toil.”

“There are two things I won’t be if I run up North – a slave and a freeman. I will be a dog-poor nigger begging for pennies on the street. I’ll get chased from one town to the next because white folks can’t tolerate my blackness – They can’t abide my roots and the seed I hold that spreads my color. No, sir. Abolitionists are all about freeing slaves from their chains and shunning blacks for their lack of whiteness.”

“But here, you’re – ”

“Here, I am but arm’s length from my master’s throat. Here, I have opportunity to put grip to its tendon, muscle, and bone and squeeze until all breath vacates his lungs and not a molecule of oxygen can seep in. That is where I earn my freedom, Augustus. When the corpse of Cameron Miller lays at my feet.”

I considered Tate’s declaration, and then asked, “Why ain’t you done it? That sumbitch closes his eyes at night, don’t he? Ain’t that your opportunity?”

“Opportunity isn’t the next moment or even the next after that. It is the right moment. I am measured in my movements. I will strike when I arrive at that right moment and not a moment sooner.”

I shook my head.

“I am not moved or surprised by your disapproval.”

“Big talk is what I hear. I believe in my mind something else’s got you collared to Mr. Miller.”

“And what might that be?”

“You’re afraid. Of what’s on the other side of this. Of freedom.”

Tate turned and stared daggers at me. “That is what you think? I fear freedom?”

“It’s plain as day.”

He spoke with corked-up rage. “I do not fear freedom, boy. I know freedom. Even in this state of servitude in which I was born, I have found freedom. Whenever I dissent – Whenever I break an unjust law – Whenever I read a book or write but a single word on a piece of paper – I know freedom in these things and more. It is fleeting. It is as ethereal as a dandelion in its starlight phase. A soft wind blows it apart and leaves nothing but a spent weed dying in the field. I am that spent weed. Me. I am what is left when the riches of a white man grow in proportion to the weight of the yoke in which I am fitted. The heavier my burden, the greater his wealth. I am that dying weed.” He stopped to catch his breath and to find the will to speak without raising his voice. “I do not fear freedom because freedom will give me life. What I fear is that I will be set free in a world moored by hate. Whites – southern, northern, alien – They will hold me squalid and unworthy of decency because I was born a slave, lived as a slave, and freed a slave in of pool white blood. They will not see the life I was born in as unjust. They will see the life I am granted because of this war they think unjust. They will not see the nobility in my suffering as a slave. They will only resent me for the suffering their kin consumed on the battlefield in an effort to end my state of slavery. Until negroes are allowed to fight for their freedom, I will remain here, in Master Miller’s brigade, in wait for the moment where I can squeeze the life out of him and join the Union with firearm in hand. Freedom is mine to earn in Confederate blood, Augustus, and I am filled with dread that I will never be given the opportunity to win it thusly.”

“I am Confederate.”

“I am aware.”

“You’d spill my blood?”

“I would, just as you would spill mine if I wore a Yankee uniform.”

I didn’t answer.

“The difference is I know why I would kill you. I know the cause – for my freedom and the freedom of my people. You – Master Tennyson – Do you know why you would kill me? What is my offense? What is your cause?”

I give his question some thought. “They come here. They didn’t have no right. The blue bellies got this idea that we gotta do things a certain way – ”

He laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“You accuse me of being afraid of freedom, but you can’t even say the word.”

“What the hell you going on about?”

“Freedom. You make the claim you joined the Confederate army because the Union wants to dictate how you should do things. You joined to fight for your freedom.”

“That’s right. Same as you. What of it?”

“No, Augustus. Not the same as me. And if you can’t see that, you’re a dumb-fuck cracker. Worse than the fools in Mr. Miller’s brigade. They’re rakes and pirates being true to themselves. You fight for a lie.”

“You’re twisting everything in on me. I just ain’t got the words you do say it proper.”

“You do. You’ve just played yourself dumb for so long to escape your daddy’s whip that you’ve forgotten everything your momma taught you. Think, boy. Why are you here? In your Confederate grays?”

I earned the rage he’d been fighting. “What else am I to do? Where else am I to go? I ain’t got say in the goings on. Folks who get voted into things says what’s for, and I’m bound by duty or law or whatever to follow.”

He give me a good long stare. Long enough to get under my skin.

“What you giving me that look for?”

“I’m seeing something I’ve never seen before.”

“What?”

“You’re a slave, too. The difference is you don’t know it. You’re jumping high as the plantation class tells you to, but you’ve fooled yourself into thinking you’re the one who set the mark.”

“I ain’t got nothing to do with the goddamn plantation swill.”

“Boy, you’ve been suckling at the teat of master Cameron for years. Before that, your daddy broke back and spirit to please the plantation class. You and your whole ilk are nothing but masterless niggers fighting for the right of the Cameron Miller’s of the South to hold me and my sort in chains.

“What you are either too dumb to realize or too ashamed to acknowledge is that the more slaves Master Miller owns, the more power he holds over you. I am his treasure. I am his wealth. I am his power. Me, the dying weed.

“You are trapped by the system in which he thrives. The sovereignty you are fighting for is also your prison. You are casting yourself into a permanent state of poverty. Slave owners don’t just own coloreds. He owns the worthless junk pile of poor whites that only holds value as cannon fodder in his world. They keep grave diggers fed and pine boxes full. That is your worth entire to the system for which you fight.

“And I think – No, I hope deep down you all know that. Every one of you crackers knows that you are taking up arms in service to your feudal lords. You fight for the struggle you know because you are the ones who fear freedom. My freedom. You’d rather be hopeless cowards scrounging to survive in a system controlled by the master class because it is the suffering you know. You don’t have the courage to not fall prey to their phony call for patriotism – ”

He is interrupted by a slave, not much older than me, stepping out of the tree line and struggling to catch his breath in the shadows.