train of black thought

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Train of black thought

The savannah heat made sweat beads drip down my ebony skin as the Georgia sun set into the lush swamp of the untamed landscape. The word untamed was a strange irony in a place as unlawful as this, where a human was not a human whether it was from being an immigrant, or American. How do you define American in a place where sweat never gave you pay, yet only to benefit another human. That human was one of pure evil in his ignorance to denote another with the same privileges as you once had. Where may you ask. The humble savannahs of the African plains that contained the wildlife of many species as diverse as the last. The beginning of man as the African kings sat on the thrones of humanity...the majestic animals could only bow their heads in obedience to the wayward movements of mankind. The idea of man put fear into the eyes of these untamed beasts, which goes back to my last question...are we oxen, or are we man. We think like these pale humans, where we can read, love, think, etc...Does the donkey look upon the same stars and wonder? Yes, wonder about their beauty, and our existence. Does the primitive thinking of the donkey pray every day to the magnificent God that we have adopted from these Pale humans. The word of the book shows us the way every day as the pathway to righteousness. No, we are trained to be like a donkey...we work, we can't read, we reproduce our loving children for something as simple as a calf for the next generation of workers. But the power of the soul of a man cannot be constrained to primitive thinking. We want more from the life we were given in our bondage of traveling months on a ship that threw 2 million of our brothers and sisters overboard only to sink in the deep abyss of the other unknown. No mourning, no burial for the human being too sick to make the trip. We were once kings and queens that are tied up into chains, where we live for months into our own feces and urine. Even the family dog can get more mourning and dignity than a Nigger. The presence of our blackness has forced our new masters into calling us names that we do not understand. Our language is one of the oldest speech that was ever dictated by any creature once called a man. It is now cast away like a swear word a child says in front of his parents...and how does a parent stop a child from saying a simple swear word against God? They beat him once to educate them on the severity of the situation, and that is just one simple word like bitch, shit, fuck etc... But what of an entire language, and culture that instills a foreign presence of rebellion? You beat them for each and every word that they don't understand why to stop. A simple way of instilling the White American way in their minds after years of thinking, and acting a way many were taught by their elders. But is it the white American way? No it is simply erasing what makes them human to what makes them an oxen, or property. They even say that savannah heat in the untamed Georgia sun is much like Africa in terms of weather conditions...how is that? The heat we endure in Africa is one of hard work towards our own living, and not of one that benefits an outsider. The heat we endure feels very much different in that regard. We are even stripped of our names to upset defiance toward our Masters...given names that are beyond our own recognition. What we don't understand, we don't understand what to do about it. These changes all make us forget who we were every day. The redundancy of the hard, grueling work in the hot sun reminds us of how really far Africa is away from us. This is a literal and non literal sense that haunts us every day to where we no longer believe that we are going home, and that makes us slowly forget who we once were. The remembrance of the Motherland fades away into stories, and then forgotten lure that are broken in a language that must be transmitted into another language. This is not hard for our masters, because they are educated in the form of keeping written documents of our past that are simply passed down to generation to generation. The African background must be kept alive orally to one member and then the next even with the confusion of language barriers. This does not sound that this would work, and that is the way the Masters intended. Imagine trying to keep this alive for hundreds of years to the simple mumblings of broken stories. On day on the hot ground of a cotton field, you finally say...why does this matter to me when I am trying to survive in the dangerous South? How does this help me? The truth is that it is not designed to help you with work, yet help you with hope. Hope keeps a man's dignity alive, but waiting for the results can be maddening. So you no longer want to become a man, and you accept your fate. That outcome has destroyed all your future generations to believe in freedom, which is detrimental in your psychological freedom you must obtain. That is the fears that haunt the very foundations of the Negro man. Doesn't the Negro deserve so much more in his struggles of being a person to the point that he should not be confined into the darkness. The inside of a brain lights up with much activity according to the finding of medical examiners of the 1800s, but the brain is confined in darkness. This blackness is not what it prevents the Negro man from doing yet hides the fact that black men can do so much with their minds, dare I say, next to his paler brethren. The Dare is an avenue that leads to anger, rage, and hate that puts the writer of this story in harm's way even in 1859 New York city. Blackness itself is the purge of the future known, where the simple appearance of something that is not fully understood can terrify the most confused people. We are like the brain in a sense that it lives its life in total darkness, but does remarkable things in a state that cannot be explained. Why do we move, get angry, eat, love, care, lust, pray, believe, hope.....with no sense of what we are doing? That is the plight of the Negro, because he lives his entire life in darkness with no knowledge of his intelligence and state of being. His darkness is what all humans have which is skin color, yet every human has a brain. The racists have determined that the unknown leads to an easier form of life that can be tamed and stripped of what is known to the black man. The latter is disregarded to simple savage witchcraft that is actually quite rich with culture that dates back to the first exploration of man. He chronicles the birth of Rome, the Persians, the Greeks, the Asians, and much more. The black man was the pinnacle of cultural influence to the rest of the ancient world as things like rice became a staple diet of man. As I write this........

"Nancy ! Nancy! There you are...you're going to catch a cold dear. Are you almost finished with your book? The snow is about to fall...I can feel it. It chills me to the bone. I don't know how you can stand it?"

I look up and see my good friend Clara with her pearly white grin with those black gums. She has a young face with grown out hair that sways slightly with the cold wind of the North. I sometimes think that Negro hair would simply break off one day...but not today as I sit up from my writing position on the grass with greenish grass stains all over my dress. I could not care about these things due to the fact that a white person seeing me into this expensive dress was a queer sight to behold in that right. I dusted off myself and picked up my book in which I was writing in. The cold mornings of New York was a far cry to the story I was trying to write due to the fact it seemed to make me warmer just thinking about Georgia right now. Clara ran to me in her plain patterned frock with a smile that could also distract me from the cold of this New York morning. We were on a hill with a few autumn trees that released its leaves as if they were on cue. It was not a bad thing to see these brightly colored trees over its former redundant green color and if the leaves covered the ground in a multi-colored rainbow then who was I to complain. The patterns of red, yellow, and orange fell from what seemed like the sky, as if a rainbow was raining itself from the heavens. It was beautiful here, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Clara spoke loudly as if she had not known better, but it was just me and my friend just embracing in each for no reason except being happy to the world. We really knew the reality of our happiness as we stared into our young ebony faces that was etched with African features. We were free! We had the freedom to obtain a job and earn our own pay if we pleased but we dare not discuss it in the open. Our loud meeting was an encounter meant only for the squirrels that played along the trees...this may not be the south but we knew our place in this world for our luxury living could always be withdrawn...like all our money. We knew to let white people walk before us at all times for fear of their wrath. It was unknown the wrath of a northerner due to their simple staring at a bunch of Niggers in fancy clothes walking among them...They also stuck up their noses but they simply walked off in looking at that darkness...without its wonders of the unknown. This was better than the lash of a whip that ripped through back sides...Like I wrote, a dog got better treatment most of the time down there. Clara and I walked to the bar that housed our rooms at the top floor in the edge of town. The roads were paved with uneven rocks, wooden and stone buildings, and an unbearable smell of the foul stench of feces yet New York was one of the most modern cities in the world. The free opened countryside of the south had a strange appeal even if I was just a girl. People were not cramped up walking the streets like a can of fish. Everywhere you went in this damn place was people walking up in down in their finest suits, and most elegant dresses, where everyone except Negroes had the right of way. It was a modern feel to it even though it lacked much...freedom. It was a form of slavery that I endeared with every race of people living in this dreadfully enclosed environment but when you must move aside with white people coming at you at all angles, it can be quite annoying. Clara and I had to go through this ordeal constantly as people walked towards you with an expectancy that you will comply. I never heard of a lynching of a Negro up here, yet the south put a fear in you that made you actually frighten of all white people. There was an uncomfortable feeling in even the white people being kind to you due to your fear that they could change their emotions and lash out on you. You put your head down and never looked them into the eyes, where you thought of them as uncontrollable emotional creatures that if you did not do everything right....well...you never knew. Perfection in our motions, mannerisms, and attitude was a constant feeling of fear if we did not perform them right. Maybe Clara and I were going slightly overboard, yet we had lived on a plantation for a fraction of our lives and that short time instilled a fear that we didn't know the unknown of white people. The sight of a little girl just playing in the woods with our friends and seeing a grown man strung up on a tree like the tree itself had grown a vine and grabbed an innocent man, which pulled him up like it was going to consume him within his branches. It reminded me of the sundews that grew aplenty in the south, where they consumed insects by pulling them into their sticky dew. The bumblebee was strung up on that plant only to suffer a fate of decaying as food for the plant. People often did not pull down lynched Negros as they decayed on that tree branch...a grown man in his tattered clothes just strung up as if the tree would feed off of him. The smell would persist if we stayed there and the buzzing of flies would be a disgusting procedure of nature as the maggots were inserted in his body. My, don't the flies love the trees of Georgia? The body stops looking nature as pieces of once a human being began to rot intensely. The smell sometimes reminds you that you are coming that way even if the mind miraculously forgets such a traumatic event. The smell always reminded you of Georgia more than anything else. Sigh, that was the way in Georgia. Sometimes the poor soul remains on the tree till his body rots to the point of his body falling off with his rotting head still attached to the rope. Remember the family dog I talked about earlier? Did that tree feed off of it? I was not sure but the power of white control gluttonized on this amazing feast as if they were the trees of Georgia themselves. Like white men they were around for hundreds of years. That sight was enough to show me white people were unpredictable enough to stay away from them all together. Sure there were abolitionist, but the look in the eye of one of them gave you a uncomfortable feeling that you just could not shake off. I sighed at that. I was sure that they meant well. But you could not shake the feeling that they were white and you were not. That was the feeling that permeated in your brain no matter how kind the individual was. My trust was something hard to earn in these turbulent times, and being white had put you in sort of a disadvantage except of course to Sara Lawson.

Well who was Sara Lawson? But one of the kindest souls that came into my existence as slave, Negro, and woman. She was a shining light in that darkness of the unknown by releasing brilliance of actual sight to the plight of not a slave but a human being seen by her. She was my former master and a kind friend to my mother for our entire lives that showed us that some white people could see thru the dark despite her being a slave owner. She was not bestowed to slavery by choice but by the union of her young self to an older gentlemen. It was quite common in this time, for young impressionable girls to bestowed to older richer gentlemen for marriage. It was a loveless practice that often allowed the parents of the child to benefit in this matrimony. The choice of the child was not in question but only seen as a way to advance the life of the child to a higher stature. This practice was most similar to slavery and my mother told me that Sara once told her that she partially understood being grabbed from your home and put in a house in the arms and servitude of a white man. My mother told me that at their youths, Sara was a wild one that preferred riding bareback on a horse that made her fly in the wind. The truth was that Sara hated her man, by the name Percy Williams, to the highest extent. She often seemed misplaced in that plantation, where she also preferred writing and reading as well instead of raising children to a man whose idea of companionship was the cruelty he inflicted on the many slaves of his plantation. She said that he rather liked the idea of being able to control something as useful as the Nigger. He said that it made him feel rather like a king in his own home and these simpletons as his subjects. The idea of controlling something that could control itself at possibly the same level felt quite good in his own words. He would sit on the porch of his plantation with all his hands and slaves, and enjoy a cool lemonade as the proceedings of the day would toll on from sunrise to sunset. Every whipping, sweat, hunger, and pain was absorbed by this white haired man with a solid chin as he took it all in on his rocking chair. That was his simple fulfillment, which put a feeling nausea in the gut of Sara every time she placed her eyes upon him. He was said to wear his dress clothes for church on Sundays and then relax with his simple pants, and church shirt on the rest of the week to watch his so called subjects work in front of the castle he proclaimed as the Williams plantation. All it needed was a moat to satisfy him in the idea that he looked upon himself as Royalty in that heated cotton hell. Sara often looked at him with most disgust when he decided on drinking his famous cane sugar lemonade. The slaves would often look up in fear, because they could dare not lookup with hatred on their faces, or faced being whipped. As the hot sweat rolled down the Negros brow and the blistered hands from picking off cotton...their fingers bled. Percy would like to drink his lemonade and the most distinctive feature of this act was his huge Adam apple that vibrated like a caterpillar moving down a tree. He would kick up his boots on a chair and play with a whip in the air as if he was playfully whipping a child. This thought of sharing a bed with a man so repulsive in physical features and in his soul made Sara feel that all was lost. She looked at her life, and realized that the freedoms of what she had as a little girl was now confided to life on this horrid place. This union was as by all means a life sentence that still was not as bad as the slaves had it. She always had heart for Negroes simply by the fact she did not see the difference of a black man and a white man; it was just two humans with different paths by which one was more fortunate than the other by simple difference in appearance. It was similar to someone dirty and smelly wearing rags and someone clean wearing a freshly washed suit. Only one is going to get ahead cause the other is not allowed to dress differently. She didn't plan to be on a plantation and she certainly didn't plan on being with Percy Williams. She simply saw that she was given a bad hand due to the greed and misguidance of her guardians. She often found herself bored and lacked a conversational, spiritual, loving, or committed relationship with Mr. Williams. There was not much that you could do about your situation, so she looked for anything to pass the time. She remembered when she had flowing blonde hair that blew in the wind as she rode the family horse at her milk farm. She did her chores as expected and played with her friends like any teenager would. How is a 16 year old suppose to adjust to this type of life, because her parents decided on her life...like a slave grabbed from Africa. She learned of Africa from my mother and saw the simple but exquisite life they lead and she could see the similarities to her life but not as severe. She wondered if Percy looked upon her as one of his subjects, or most certainly a conquest because of her beauty. She liked to read but Percy could care less about her habits either inhibiting, or condoning them. He simply expected a breakfast, lunch and dinner and the occasional companion to social outings. This found Sara talking to my mother one day as her absence would go unnoticed. She spoke words of encouragement to my mother, an African slave that came by way of boat rather than being bred like a dog. She instantly became a friend though trust was still an issue as I explained earlier...you never trusted them completely no matter what. The backdrop of rural Georgia put a perfect setting on a blossoming friendship on two souls that truly understood what love was about...because they saw each other's soul rather than their complexion. This is the story of my mother, my friend, and I by a letter hand written by Sara Lawson herself.

I entered my home which was a small apartment in this gigantic bustling city that housed multitudes of people constantly walking the streets. I looked out my glassless window that overlooked the modern cities that housed these people. It was a beautiful sight watching people step on the rocky terrain built for the luxury of walking until your feet didn't hurt. You saw women with children that held tightly on their mother's arms as they seemed to be dragged away and consumed into the crowd. Yes, the crowd took people and literary fed on them until they were no longer an individual but a face that disappeared to the very edges of the window. The tall dirty buildings were a far cry from the openness of the south which contained very few cities. You could see people clean their cloths in their cramped apartments with their flocks fluttering in the wind of this dirty city. How high the New Yorkers must think of themselves? Probably as high as their buildings which also must inflate their egos. I felt that they never probably experienced what life was in the south due to a type of lie where you could easily touch another person from the ever so slightest of movements. No, the south was an open wonderland that never hardly became cold, but was rather instilled with wide open spaces that contained a multitude of life. Every Acre of land could be the home of more life through plants and animals then all the people residing in New York. Life other than people grew stagnant in this new society of the modern world. The only life you could rely on was the multitude of flies that swarmed constantly to trails of untidiness that when you grew a ton of humans in one narrow place. I sighed at that for the mysteries of the south was long and forgotten in my mind due to the fact that I learned to let that past me. I was but a child when I left that place which was sacrilege to the spiritual evolution of the Negro man. The very notion of the south's immense beauty and freedom was not a viewpoint shared by the blacks who worked from sunup to sunset in the blistering heat. As a child I felt that it aroused a sense of obligation towards my people that any paradise that enslaved its people was one of perdition and a hell that was similar to worshipping the Devil to think otherwise. The heat of the south and its many plantations that existed seemed to back up that inquiry, which was that it was hell itself for being a slave. Nobody could not understand that feeling that their own body was not their own but a Faustian deal to be property of the damned. I dare not communicate my feeling to any white man, who took the good Lord in ways that were beyond even sacrificial idol worship. They took the good lord as a way of life and never really investigated their actions to be against Jesus Christ in any way. As a child, I took up the good book as a plaything that never really meant anything to me since I could not read at the time. Imagine to a slave what these black scribbling on a white paper meant to any Negro. Sara, as I spoke earlier, would be allowed to read the good book to us from time to time as really a way of erasing any trance of our African roots. The idea of God was something as real to us as the fluffy cotton we picked as the poetry of the words instilled a feeling contentment. This contentment put our lives to have purpose in some ways due to an afterlife that necessarily didn't mean to not include a Negro. Our white eyes over our black faces looked in awe of such a powerful God that might even have given the white man his power. But that was not so, because the moral of this lesson was that we were to treat our brothers and sisters as we would like to be treated ourselves. That summed up the bible in that simple sentence because everyone wants to be treated with kindness by another human being, and showed love that was expressed in pure bliss and joy. Alas, we were looked upon as sub-human and this didn't apply to us in the eyes of the white man. But were we really? We were suppressed to the point that you could not tell an oxen from a Negro. But that suppression was really a veil over our eyes that the Negro could see. He was blinded by the fact that he could be educated to read and learn, like our brethren in Europe. Over that vast sea most of the slavery and oppression was eradicated to accept the Negro for what he is...a citizen. I met some of these fellows, who are comfortable wearing fancy clothes over tattered rags. They have a confidence that I have never seen, nor feel that I will never obtain with an educated dialect that seems odd coming from a Negro. I am not racist instead I rejoice at this obvious progress in our fight for freedom. We have even written books that explain our plight, and even more explain how we can mimic the white man. Can oxen write a poem? I write because Sara taught me secretly to read at my mother Pattie's request in that tiny shack of a living space. The punishment was death to many Negroes that forbad this law, but the desire to become more than what you are goes even beyond fear. That was the nature of a soldier, and Africa had produced some of the finest warriors. This battle would be fought by defiance to even being a slave...through education and escape.

I walk through my apartment and its many wooden corridors that lead into many people's room, and I go into my own room and say a prayer for my freedom. It is not much Lord, but thank you. I am free to leave when I like, despite the simple appearance of this room. All it contains is a bed, table, and a cabinet...yes an ever so comfortable bed where my body sinks in the soft feathery mattress, a table where every meal is a banquet, and finally a cabinet that contains photographs of my perdition at the hands of Percy. Pictures of slaves, and my mother that open up a wound that bleeds profusely due to me being reminded of my former life. Sleeping with all five of my brothers and sisters on a wooden, spiny bed of pines...The wounds inflicted on my mother's arms and much more shown in this black and white picture by lash of the whip. How dare they! My mother was not educated, nor pretty but she did have a soul of true, loving mother, who loved in ways that anyone could not understand. I remember her holding me in the night after a hard, and often painful days of work...she would say that those stars, and moon shown over the almost mythical plain of a magical land called Africa. Speaking of this would often put tears into her eyes, but she would quickly wipe them away. She loved her children by secretly allowing them to be educated and hopefully explain to her why the stars, and moon shone brightly over two continents. She always wanted to know as she exhibited curiosity to the mysteries of the world around her, and she knew that that type of life was going to be closed to her...but not me. She had a plan for me just like God had a plan for Moses to cross that desert, and those ideals were intertwined as one and the same. Her tears were like a bee sting when they fell on my cheek, and I wanted more for myself at first just to make her happy. She cried every night thinking that this was going to be the rest of her life. It is said that children are the best way towards immortality, and their accomplishments are the parent’s way of doing things beyond their own desires. A slave's hopes are minuscule compared to that of anyone else for they endure the hardest type of living imaginable and their desirable wants would make a white person laugh. Do my desires make you want to jest? Are they below being rich, or successful...no all you want is to be free. But what is free to me? It is the ability to be your own woman, or man so that you can dream like all the children over the world. Dream about red, ripen apples, or soft, succulent strawberries on a summer eve that is just for you. As you bite into them, you want more...maybe apple cobbler, strawberry jam, or to someday own an orchid of your own. Only you can believe in these things and my mother with her nappy hair, long sunken breasts, deep African features, and tattered nurse rags also believed past morality...through me. I too, wished for a better life as Sara read that book of God to me, where his children would be blessed by the lord. A fair blonde white lady seemed very misplaced, with her bonnet dress of exotic patterns and beautiful educated dialect, in a dirty shack talking to a bunch of equally filthy Niggers. But that was why I loved Sara with all my heart even though I didn't trust her completely. It was a nature of mine even after arriving in New York to not trust white people. But they were the only way to freedom much like hellhound guarding the gates of Hades; they were the gatekeepers. I wanted to live beyond this tiny shack and beyond the fields of perdition that had enslaved millions. I wanted to be the one that climbed the pinnacle of this mountain and would dedicate to my Mother, who was just a slave to all but much, much more to me. Couldn't a Negro love? If they can show emotion towards one another such as anger and happiness? These feeling of how black people were ostracized towards being in league of the farm animals made me very angry. A black woman was at the bottom of the chain due to the fact of being both a woman and a Negro. Both these evils were shown to me at a young age due to the fact that black men disregarded a woman's worth to much of a supporter, and as property that birthed the children. The white man was quite worse due to the fact that he would systematically make advances toward many of our sisters during the height of slavery. I was now free and strawberry jam tasted so good so I was going up the ladder ever so slightly.

I really loved Sara despite my distrust of white people and as an abolishment practitioners, she was so kind in so many ways. I owe her so much thru out my life, where she educated me, gave me my freedom, and ultimately became my reason for living. I walk to the lamp in hopes my shadow against the wall does beat me to it. It was a game I played with something much darker than me. As I lit the lamp I opened my beloved cabinet to look at the meager possessions that a black girl in New York had owned. It was filled with neatly folded clothes, a bible, and one whitish envelope. The white envelope was slightly dirty but held immense value to me, more than a bank note. I loved the fact that the letter was nearly untouched from the time, I would look at it. The letter represented to me something valued for sentimental reasons much like a grandfather's old musket, or even as a medal from fighting bravely in a war. It opened a flood of memories towards the greatest day of my life, where I had obtained my freedom as a young girl. It was something of a bond between my mother and this obviously spontaneous white woman who could care less about what the people of Georgia thought about her...MY GOD... she would come out and read to slaves that are sweaty, filthy, and quite repugnantly, by whites, a bunch of Niggers. The soul of a black person seemed too valued as the soul of the trees that they hung by if they escaped. She was something special that girl was. Even when she bid me farewell, she hugged and kissed me on my forehead which was basically sacrilege to be intimate with a Nigger. She smiled and waved like a madwoman as a white horse man rolled out of that plantation. My mother was just crying in the corner as she could not even stand up with herself. She laid on the ground as if she was blessing the ground for letting me ride away on it. As the plantation became smaller in distance; I could see Sara pick up my mother and both of them waved. All that hardship I was about to endure was slowly disappearing over dirt road as the sun set slowly over that hill.

The letter contents were simply a printed free slave certificate, and a letter that showed the very kindness from a woman who hardly knew me. To her, maybe, she was freeing her best friend that could not be removed from the chains of slavery. Instead she was freeing her essence, or what made her immortal...me. I look at the water dish on the ground showing my reflection, and I see that I resemble a skinny more pretty version of my mother. Our features are one and the same and my looks show it. Has my mother's soul been freed, while she anguishes in pain on that plantation of Percy Williams. I never knew my father who gave me the difference of my looks to my mom. She was breed to produce workers at the many plantations of the south, where at auction we would be bought or sold. She told me that she was forced into sexual practices that put certain males to be forced to breed with her. She took it as embarrassing but to me it was a dignity that was long destroyed. But she hoped through all the turmoil that she would be free, and as she whispered those words to me...now...I am free mama I am free. A tear from my own eyes splashed into the water dish as ripples distorted my once attractive face. The thought of me being man handled by a random man without love, or working without wages for myself; It made me close my eyes and thank the ever so powerful Lord that I am out of bondage.

I walk around the room with this letter, and actually think about hugging it. The thought is a simple one that deals with overabundant joy, and memories of an oppressed path. As I hug the letter I think about the only thing that my mind can traverse about...Mama. Oh Mama, if you can only see me now. You will have grandchildren that most probably....be free. I was not seeing any boy right now but the thought of marriage and a union brought a smile to my face. I giggled at the thought in an innocent type of way and I stared at the water dish...I saw my beautiful smile and felt alone when it reminded me of my mother. She would watch me go down the aisle at my wedding; if a former slave could have one. I never seen a wedding where blacks were allowed to get married and feel what it is like to be at an event that symbolized our union. Hell, slaves were brought together from the widest parts of the United States and even West Africa in order to have intercourse to only reproduce. There was love in those situations much like an arranged marriage, and sometimes in the heat of the south, you found someone who really cared. Love was like bats in a cave where you were blinded and moving in all directions in the dark. But through all that haste and chaos, you found someone you were compatible with, who you could settle down with. That was love in the slavery, when you body was not the right of someone else and you were always working nearly to death. I opened the letter that was addressed to me all those years ago, which I had treasured all my life from Sara Lawson. It read

Dear Nancy

When you have reached the northern territories, open this letter and please don't forget me. We are kindred spirits you and I because of a bond that I made with your mother all those years ago. What does this bond and your freedom have in common? One the first days of living with Percy, I felt abandonment and shame to be married to such a man, who could inflict such cruelty to his fellow man. Most of the women here are upstart, and egotistical for they only desire a man's wealth such as their status may increase. I found myself hating my own race for their extravagant parties with fancy dresses in that plantation that was paid for on the backs of black slaves. The reprehensible way they looked down on your people brings out an anger in me that cannot be contained. From my window, I watch these people work with little brakes and little food...they are whipped like they are horses and mules. The agitation in my soul asks the good lord to be merciful to his children whether they are black or white. I look at these crimes every day, and sometimes I think how a human can endure this treatment and not wish vengeance against God. Still they have begun to worship our lord and savior, and have taken a more ardent approach to looking at this new Lord. They pray when they should sleep for work the next day. This belief system that is more soulful and joyful than the mundane service at the large white churches. Every day I went closer and closer at night to hear this prayer...they sang to the lord? I was perplexed by this and found myself listening to this makeshift service. Every night I went to this prayer group and listened to the Africanized hymnal. One day I saw your mother walking in the woods one of the nights I was listening to church music. She was walking quickly towards a muddy, high creek we called moon creek. I hurried after her with the anguish of running in my pretty frock, and a feeling in my gut told me that she might run away. At first I thought that was a good thing, and leave this hell of a place. I noticed that she was sitting at the edge of the creek weeping to the moon that opened up the sky between the branches of the tree. The tears flowed down her cheeks ever so abundantly that I almost believed that she could make her own puddle. The first thought that came to me was how her tears streamed down like any white person unlike the mules we were lead to believe. I crept up to her and asked...What is wrong my dear? She responded in sudden shock like she did something deceitful to a white person, and stood up quickly. I stood up slowly from my crouched position. She pleaded with me that she was not trying to escape as I did my best to calm her down. I said that my name was Sara and I wished to help her with her problems. She looked confused and paused for a moment. After about a minute, she said her name is Pattie. I pushed out my hand in a gesture of friendship that was unbecoming of a wife of a plantation owner. She looked even more confused and even shocked at the gesture until she slowly moved her hand to grab mine. I asked in the most earnest of voices what the problem was. She replied that it was beyond her control, and only wished for solitude. I noticed that she had a stick in her hand that had a reddish tint on the tip. I wondered what was happening here and I realized that she was trying to make herself impotent. I only imagine the anguish that she had felt from using a plain pointed twig and pushing this sharp instrument of permanent abortion into her womb. She must be in so much pain and suffering from trying to self-mutilate herself with something as dirty as a simple pointed twig. I started crying to myself...at the time I didn't know why. I cried and used my sleeve to wipe away my tears. I cried to God almighty to have mercy on this woman. I cried to her saying why? She looked at me with much sorrow as well...saying please don't cry miss. The tears began streaming down her black cheeks again. It was a sight, Nancy. A slave hugging a white woman while both were crying in the middle of the night in a forest. I kept saying I am sorry and she begged me to stop crying. As our tears receded, we looked at each other and began smiling at how goofy we looked. Our anguish changed in a nice little chuckle then a full out bellowing laugh. We didn't care what other people thought even though it was sort of dangerous. Anyway I found out that it was her turn for breeding and she didn't want to be put another slave in this cruel world. The thought of raising a child to only do someone else's bidding for the rest of their lives was one of pure cruelty and resentment on that young life. I began to see that this child was not just a slave but an extension on the life of Pattie herself. Even though I couldn't grant her freedom, as I now only wished beyond anything else, I would treat her child to whatever she needed to leave this perdition. That was when we made the bond, Nancy. At that exact moment in the glow of the white moonlight, we made an undying bond between two human beings. No not just human beings….but sisters. I could feel that this woman had much sorrow in her life as her blood, from a woman’s most precious object, flowed down her knees and onto the dirty ground. But I would make sure that she would not make our accidental meeting be in vain. As the good lord is our witness, I would bestow upon her the very thing that makes us live till the end of time, and give us the immortality of Gods of the past….her child. I knew that her child would see the light of freedom on the frost of the northern plains. Yes it would be cold, but it would make blacks envious to the cruel heat of the Savannah. Oh if only I could free them all…but it is better to do something than nothing. This was the very thing I promised, and I vowed on my life as a Christian that this woman would see freedom thru younger eyes that are innocent to the full cruelty of man’s wrath in one of his worst, and abhorrent times. Take care Nancy and please never forget me because your memory keeps me content with this evil that I am partial responsible for. I did something, and please forgive me if I could not do more.

Your Loving Friend

Sara Emily Lawson

I look out this window with those eyes of freedom, and feel blessed every day. I thank Sara for her benevolence towards my family in their time of need. This place belongs to me and I have a wage to live on. I choose my hours as I feel fit, when I am constructed a work week. I sometimes break down to the horror I would have endured if I had stayed in that horrid life. A sadness passes over me as I just realize that my beloved mother has to go on her knees on that jagged ground to pick that cotton so little but for all that time. She still has to do tedious work that requires a callous hand, and some tolerance for excessive heat. She was still there, and I think about my freedom? She is sitting on her hands and knees for hours that would probably drive people to insanity! I calm down and realize how resilient my people were, and how they needed the grace of God to be free. There was talk of imposing freedom on my people as the Northern government fights with their voices in the courts. But it is all talk and my distrust for white people only increases my beliefs. These white men could talk a good conversation but what of action? Are they willing to emancipate my people? I simply look at the world as it is, and that you should not expect a different day much like the work that you are going do as a Slave for each minute, each hour, each day, each week, each month, and each year until your dead. I think about this with anger as the cool breeze of the northern drafts hit my face in the window. I then think why didn’t the temperature be like the north as something that cools these hard workers instead of the Georgia sun? The only expectation was that the devil himself forged the living conditions to be more similar to hell. Even though I saw it like that it was a beautiful hell that had every imaginable form of life similar to what the bible talks about Eden. So why does it feel like hell but look like Eden? Probably because the serpent had tempted the countryside with the fruit of hung blooded Niggers.

The days went past and the nights went as the first snowfall fell on the black man’s hallowed ground…freedom. The snow was as white as the cotton that I had picked. I sometimes thought that the good lord brought cotton down from the sky in order to please the whites of the north. All the cotton you want, that you could step in it and even swim in it. Then the Good Lord gives and he takes away in the hotter seasons, which sting the Negros on those fields with the rays of the sun. The Good Lord makes the south the only place that contains white puffs of hatred, and subjugation.

As the snow falls I just walk through the streets of New York with my job at the post office arranging mail. I am looked upon as a simple worker that comes in and does her job. I walk through the streets with Clara as we laugh and talk making sure our jubilee is not too noticeable. We wear coats over our nicely stringed dresses and hold our hands in our pockets as the only white which is seen on us is our smiling teeth. I stop smiling one day when I realize that our coats are made of cotton from the south. I notice a loose string of cotton that is stranded out by a factory up her in the North. I stop smiling for a moment which confuses Clara for my mother could have picked this very cotton from that plantation out of the numerous ones prevalent in the south. I thought that this strand of cotton came from the tips of my Mothers fingers before it was wound into a string that made this coat. I bought it with the meager savings I had while my mother toils on and on. Ever finger pinching together to pull a piece of cotton from the prickly plant. The pain of cutting one’s finger from the elusive cotton without touching its pricks. Every drop of sweat from the oppressive heat, and every drop of blood from the random whip that tears through skin. I feel sick to my stomach on how a simple coat can cause so much pain and suffering, but show a type of benevolence in its attempt to bring warmth in such a harsh, winter wonderland. It shows that evil can be a system of our simple pleasures that becomes a rather important necessity, which we fully ignore the severity of the torture it does to our fellow man.

I walk down the beaten path towards my job as I redundantly do. I talk to Clara for moment as if to ease my convicted self from the horrors that I left my mother with. She was released from her bondage at a Tennessee plantation quite younger than I. The fear of white people even up north was still engraved into her heart so the engraver of this fear could have been a whip that lashed savagely on her back. I have never seen Clara's backside with her dark ebony skin, or marks of the leather whip. She was an enigma to me that seemed to just befriend me due to our complexion, but never talked much about her mysterious past. I open the conversation with simple statement...

"Clara we have known each other for such a long time, where we talk about the colored leaves, the white snow that falls on our tongues, and fresh rip apples in which we bite in that are of a crunchy texture but yield a clear, ever so sweet juice that drains down our chins. We talk of the nature of how beautiful it is up here, and the amazing wonders of flowing river with pieces of ice that break into numerous white pieces. How they seem to flow along the icy cold river to no end. Their clear texture is but a illusion to its melting soft form that makes so many shapes. The naked trees that we will soon have look like they have arms that grab the sky in the frozen wonderland. The soft powdery snow falls from the sky that can be molded into any form by hands that are stung by its frost. The icy stings feel so good as you throw the snow at ourselves till it breaks up into its powdery form once again from its hard rigid spherical form. The walking in the virgin snow yields tracks that seem like a slap to God's face, where he has made mounds of white snow that sparkles into the moonlight. I try so hard to stay on the path but walking in the snow yields its own rewards, where you are sinking knee deep in the bitter snow and pulling your foot up to resume your pace. The actual hindering of your movement brings a joy much like swimming in a lake during the summer. The choice between the two contrasts make you think that choice is but an emotion that you feel inside for that particular point in time. Do you feel, or do you watch the mesmerizing snow? But this pales in comparison to the warmth of the southern sun in my opinion that gently watches over the savannah that teems with life far more than the lifeless cold that either kills, or sends animals away. Ah the life of the south...I remember so well as a child...you're from Tennessee, so in a sense, you got the best of both worlds. Please Clara, tell me of your viewpoint in the south, and how it contrasts from the frozen landscape we will soon endure."

I look at Clara's face which shows an emotionless stare that is frightening in its transformation from joy and laughter. Her voice grows lower, and less enthusiastic...

"I don't remember my time in Tennessee...I was young when my mother escaped with me from a plantation. I really don't know anything"

"Surely you must remember something like the bees, or crickets dancing around the blades of grass. I feel that you are fearful from your emotions."

"I am not fearful of anything I just don't remember...God"

"I mean no harm if you should use the Lord's name in vain. If I have brought up some terrible memory that has haunted your soul...I am truly sorry and I hope that you accept my apologies"

Her voice started to lighten up as if she was sorry about me apologizing

"No Nancy...I am complicated... for my story has yet to be written as you write in your notebook about our history. I look at that life in the plantation with disgust and I am ever so glad to escape that horrible fate. I don't understand why you seem to linger at that time in your history. You were but a little girl, when you left so why not let go?"

"I can't let go as long as people are in bondage and suffering...you left the plantation through the underground railroad with your mother. I didn't...I just left her there as she tried in vain to find ways to release me from that horror. I guess the burden of my people lies within my heart cause without my mother...I never really left"

"Didn't some white woman who was her friend help release you? I am sure that your mother is good hands and made her life comfortable...maybe into a house Nigger, or even have servants of her own like some masters give their favorite Negros"

Suddenly an anger balled up into me wanted so desperately to come out. I wanted to cry myself with tears, but I wanted to yell at Clara to some extent. The very notion of just forgetting and accepting our fates in life, however so unfair and brutal, was like blasphemy to devoted priest.

"Look Clara, our fates are one of fortune and really luck. Our luck was created by people who cared about us as individuals...you can't just accept that your success was done on your own. I feel that as black Americans we owe our duty to be as benevolent as the people, who gave us freedom. Don't you understand all that they risked for you in order for you to be free. They thought selflessly for they only thought about you and you alone. In slavery, and in their willingness to die for their cause that seems to have eluded your soul. And my mother's freedom is a priority for she gave all her soul for me to live like a human, while she stayed into hell. A mother's love is like no other much like the bear will give her life against any creature walking the earth to protect her cubs. That includes a man with a gun, whose danger she is well aware of. I lived my life without a mother so I learned to fend for myself and all I could dream of was how I could repay her. Then I realize that Black mothers all over the world live like this without my opportunity, so if I could help one family...I have done something in repaying my mother for her sacrifice."

Clara looks hurt by my statement and decides to apologize with a voice that had no clue what she had done to me

"I never meant any harm Nancy...I just am saying that it is safer not to talk of those things. I have been to rallies for freedom up here in the north, and I do believe that change is coming...as gradual as it can happen. I just think that trying to go farther than backing up the north is...dangerous. I know that we have to come to our own decisions and what not...but I think that dreaming up freedom for everyone is going to the extreme. I mean you just told me how you dream every day about your mother's freedom. So tell me...how are YOU going to accomplish that beyond words? If you go beyond words and you perform action while you damage yourself...then you have put your mother's sacrifice in vain and proved yourself a fool. Then it is you that don't appreciate the struggle. You must show restraint in some forms. A dog can always be free from his master...it is a choice that this animal always had from the moment he was put into the masters house. He runs away from playing with the master's children and then what? He moves through the forest trying to understand to himself...that he never learned to survive. Is it wrong that he ran away and choose freedom...No...But he never gave it a real thought into trying to PLAN the situation. Your freedom and mine came from years of planning the situation. You better understand that your thousands of miles from your mother, or you're going to starve like that old Dog"

I look at her for the first in disgust in which I had never known her to be this gullible to white privilege, or that she was so timid about issues concerning her own people. I guess that I had never talked much about it, and realized that most of our conversations were in the fullest extent, oblivious to slavery. We talked much about poetry, the landscape of the forest of Albany, food, books etc but nothing about what defined us as unique human beings. The thing that makes us who we are whether it be shameful, or not. All these dresses that we wear are just an outer shell of who we really are...as if we are trying to hide from someone who sees us in plain sight. No dress can hide any of that and when we wear these dresses, we better know damn sure where we come from. Our history can be damaging to what people see, but it is our pursuit of a better life that puts that damage to rest. We can't forget, or we can never change in the right way. It was like how you make a clay pot; the most important part is how you spin the clay and form it correctly. Any uneven shape makes the oven process all for vain. Our past has made us learn to form the clay with our bare hands to the point of perfect pots, without history we trying to learn all over again. It is up to the potter to form the clay into what we need for that moment. Maybe we prefer a painted, valuable, ceremonial vase, or simply a water dish for the kitchen. It is about what we need, and freedom is what needs to be crafted right now! Every culture uses clay pots so they have a better understanding of the need of culture though their oppression is much less. This fuels us to be a softer clay that can be much more easily molded. I feel that we should let our hands gently and firmly mold the clay into the type of pot that we desire, and rely on the Good Lord to do the rest. I tell my analogy to Clara about the clay in a calm voice

"Really Nancy, you're ready to mock your so called privileged form of life? From what I hear it seems that you think that we should walk around in tattered rags and call these white northerners Master!"

She breathes in slowly and talks in a calmer, firmer voice

"I am sorry for being that rude to you. You're my only friend in this entire world from Africa, Asia to the United States. It's not that I am trying to talk sense into you rather I agree with you. But this is not our fight in the manner that you seem to be implying. We are two negro girls lost in a very divided country that is quite large and populated. We are like the only Negros that live in this part of the country...don't you think I understand why these people look at me in that fashion. Well I do! But I just move on with my life. It is my life and only mine... I got to be educated in a world, where a horse knows more math than a Negro. We beat a system that was designed for us to be slaves for the rest of our lives. We fell through the cracks of that bottle known as oppression and we should never look back. I am serious that it could lead you to perdition in ways that you could never understand. You never felt a whip but I did!"

Clara then pulls her dress back down revealing a long slender scar upon back. It was surprising darker than Clara which was normal for a scar to be like that while healing. The scar was however bloated where it looked like it was trying to push out of her skin. The scar had curls of tissue trying to grow back in weaker cell-like form which I saw that she took a massive whipping. I could see that the whip had nearly deformed her by ripping into her skin to the point of not just cutting her but pulling off the skin and extra flesh. This had probably pulled apart her back skin about an inch, where there was no way that she hadn't bled profusely. I saw how much pain that she must have been in both physically and mentally. That type of pain could not be erased from memory for it was as much forged into the skin as the soul. The suffering that ensued in her put a fear that mentally forced her to try to forget as much as possible. But the white hot pain rattled the senses that a little girl should not experience and seeing grown men see it that made her think very little of herself. The sound of cracking lightning must put a sensation of fear that she would experience as a grown woman till she died as an old one. The sound, feeling, look of a whip, being used by a man with the cruelest of intentions and doesn't even know it must make her react in ways that rat would react to a cat. I felt a feeling of shame that even my people really endured fall over me. I had forced these feelings and memories out of a cage that was just getting secure. I had hurt my only friend in the entire world through my selfishness in wanting to try to understand her. I now understood her but at the expense of her inner misery. I could actually see the pain on her back and I wanted to caress it with whatever could heal the inner workings of her pain. My God, what have I done. She was just a young girl trying to suppress the pain. I could see the desperation in her voice that was actually trying to plead with me...as if I could stop the pain by just silencing my inquiry. A tear fell down my face as I looked into her brown eyes with that pent up emotion in both of us. I was sorry and she was angry. I looked at those soft brown eyes that felt a lash at the tender age of eight. Another tear came down my eye as I looked at her eyes gazing into mine. The way she looked at me was something that permeated right through me into the inner workings of my soul. That look...so much pain that hurt that was transformed from intense physical pain into a horrible memory that seen every time her eyes dared to look sideways in the mirror. That memory was one of horrid results that could be felt as well as her hand moves down her back to wash the filth of that day...only to realize that rough skin that lumps out is an deformity that will never heal, or go away...like the memory itself.

She looks at me with frustration, and a little anger but as her lip quivers yet releasing her vulnerability as not just a black girl but as a women.

"See what you did, Nancy! curse you and your crusade for your own destruction. You now have involved me in a way that I can't understand. I know your right about the things that you write but you damn well should keep it to yourself. "

Clara began shaking her head and looking confused

"I don't understand why I sympathize with you. I know we are black, and should stay united. I understand that and I always understood that, but why don't I understand it now? Why don't I start a rally, or speak my mind like you. I don't understand because..."

I speak quietly under the emotional stress of Clara's reasoning

"Because you are afraid ...it's as simple as that"

Clara looks up fast with the same bewildered eyes that looked angrily at me. They were not angry, yet sadden and afraid

"You don't want your world to come crashing down on you. You care because you lived through it...working from sunrise to sunset like most slaves. Your emotions are betraying you to question your existence. And no you don't have to come down my path. You are an accomplished black women and your now dead mother is probable laughing with jubilation in heaven. Your descendants will be free just like you, and you see your position in all this. My big mouth that wants to emancipate our brothers and sisters comes from someone who hasn't felt the lash of whip and started out with a strong education. I realized that I have not experienced the true horror of it all. Your fear might actually be a type of whispering wisdom in your ear. So maybe my tough exterior that looks like madness to you is actually a general that has not surveyed the battlefield to understand if he risks this attack...will he lose everything. The truth is that it is okay to be afraid, and I don't look at it in any way. In fact I should admire that you kept your dignity in all this TRUE madness going on in this country. You lived it, which kind of makes you a veteran of a war that seems to be the talk among the whites."

I outstretch my hand in a no hard feelings gesture. It is a pathetic attempt of ignoring all the talk that had went on. It had some insulting thoughts to probably both parties but never really escalated to speech coming out our mouths. I really had no one in my life to share our interests where my trust of white people were limited. Clara was probably too fearful to trust a white person so our bond rests on a matter of mistrust and fear of other potential friends.

Clara looked like a mess of emotions that had rapidly changed throughout her face, and it resulted into an unreadable face that looked me deep in the eyes with both resentment and agreement. She grabbed my hand and shook it with surprisingly a strong grip that was a tense sign that she had forgiven me. All my life, I never more wished that I could take back my words and even my dangerous thoughts. Our friendship was all that mattered to me, nothing else.

Clara walks away from me towards our job at a faster pace, and for the first time as a snowflake falls from the gray, steel sky... I felt alone. I cursed myself for even mentioning an experience that only the cursed would understand. I know that now.

I walked toward my destination with much sorrow as I enter this redundant job at the post office, where I am required to sort through mail to determine its destination. I only hope that the letter's destination does not provide the sorrow that has entered my heart toward my end. I was just a young woman, and really did not know the truth about sorrow, and melancholy. That came with experience, and seeing the world for what it really was...which was that it was time period of disappoints, and regrets. It was funny that I was thinking this, because I saw my white boss walk up to me in this cramped room in the back.

My boss was a short, fat white man, who looked at business as a everyday thing. He saw that if he hired black people in his post office then he could exhort them for a smaller pay. He was not racist, yet his way of thinking was an unique one that seemed to be similar to slavery. He paid very little but the ease of physical work and the fact that you were your own person sure defeated the concept of slavery in the south. He often looked at himself as a business man and counting the money was his measure of success. True, being black was something that was not completely accepted in the North, but that was simply rectified by putting the black workers out of sight from the eyes of his white customers. In his business savvy mind, he could now deal with southern supporters and still make a profit in a business even though it belonged to the federal government. There was a chance that having black workers could show sympathy toward the Northern supporters since we were technically up north, but that yielded a different plan. The death of northern soldiers, if a war did start, would spark a outrage that could benefit his business by showing that the post office would not let the north die in vain. This often put a smile on the face of my boss, Henry Wrickle, but little did he know that this educated woman could read his greedy mind. To him, marketing was deception, and revealing his African employees was his way of making more letters go back and forth especially during a war, or battle. Did my boss care about people, I completely doubt it and further say that he would now prefer that a war was going to happen. A long and bloody one would much more preferred so that the fear of loss would increase the postman's extension... As long as he could count the money.

Anyway I was sorting through the mail in the back when my fat boss came through the door and tapped my back with a loud grunt. I turned around as he looked me into the eye and I right back at him. I could feel that he looked at me like a simple creature that could not understand love, or have emotions that could relate to his white, pasty skin. As long as I work with no objections, which I probably could not get a job with my status among white people anyway. Yes sir, this was a job that employs black people by the fair kindness of Henry Wrickle's heart and he could determine the wages that a white person would laugh at. The irony was that all the sarcasm in my mind could not free me from the hold of Mr. Wrickle's grip due to the fact that there was no jobs for black people anywhere else.

Anyway, he looked at me with his lazy eyes, and started shaking an envelope with one hand and rudely coughing in the other.

"Well Nancy, it seems that I have a surprise for you. Your hard work for me has shown the Good lord that he rewards all his little children...even you...HeHe"

I just stared at him wondering what the heck he was talking about

"I know that you came from humble beginnings where you believed in your heathen Gods and the Good lord came into your soul and brought you to me. In me offering you a job of your desiring has made me a type of hero that saved you from the ills of slavery"

The man made me hate white people even more than I really could for that moment. He talked of humble beginnings as if slavery was a job and we were considered people. I wanted to scream out at him in the top of my lungs that slavery was a disrespectful display of a human turned farm animal, and that he was not the leader of justice that he made himself out to be. I was a future cash cow and that was all...if the northern whites would break out and free the slaves. As he sputtered out these self praises to himself, I began to wonder if what was the point of all this bravado in his personal viewpoint.

"I can only hope that your offspring thank me for providing you a better way of life. You have lived like Cretins for many years so I hope this gift shows you that you are more than just a slave. It is something that all people like us receive in our lifetime, and I hope you enjoy it...well that is all...proceed by to work...chop chop"

He hands me a simple letter that is rectangle, and pale white. It is directed to be received by me? The blue ink markings over the milky white letter say that this letter belongs to me. So that was all the fuss was about? His gestures toward me was similar to how one approaches a child, and showing the same insult as those slave masters with less brutality. How everything that happens to me that a white person would experience was something in the light of the nativity. I sigh...what are you going to do? The idea of Clara's argument seems to come into full focus, and realizing that a rational head was the best way to survive. I decide that work can be put off for five minutes as I go into a corner in the room that is nearly blacken by darkness. I decide to also borrow a oil lamp from Mr. Wrickle because I think that this letter is by the grace of God...I smile sarcastically. I go to this corner room as the lamp opens up the darkness to reveal a few cobwebs and loose nails. I find a warm comfortable corner, and prepare to sit against a wooden post and read my letter. I gently pull off the triangular cover in order to preserve the letter for it was very rare that I received a letter, and the mystery is also from whom? A bigger mystery is from the recipient of the letter, because who would write to a former slave that has no outside friends and no family. The anticipation was about to explode in my mind as I sat to read a letter like I was about to read a prized novel from a library. I pulled out the letter and unfolded it from its 3 seams. There was something else in the envelope but that was ignored for now. My life was a meaningless form to me that contained no shape, or direction so a letter from God knows meant that it could have meaning to someone else. I pulled out the folded letter and gently placed it against the flame to illuminate the words that suddenly obtained meaning. It was from Sara!! The feeling of confusion and jubilation swept into my heart, where my imagination began to soar. The memories of plantation, and all those who resided there began to show pictures in my mind. They were like paintings of loved ones, or photographs that were kept and treasured to enjoy at one's ledger. The contours of the many slaves, and even white people began to form by the simple stroke of the brush that Sara was writing to me. My insignificance was magnified by 3 fold due to someone caring about me in my current state of loneliness and perhaps being friendless. My eyes gleamed at the letter as I could not wait to read it.

Dear Nancy Brown

I wish I could say that I am writing to you with good tidings but yet that would be a lie. I regret to inform you that your beloved mother has passed away and now rests with the angels of God. She was a beloved person to not just me as my companion to whom I credit endless hours of conversion with a genuine, decent, loving, humble human being but as the rock that kept moral high during these turbulent years. What I mean is that even though her birth daughter has obtained freedom, she was a mother to many slaves various ages to where she cared for them like they were her own. She was a light that made the restrictive, cruel, hateful, place a beautiful warm oasis that took away the hurt. She was our light to guide us towards better times in this horrible place, where humans are forced into the dark to fend for themselves. I never knew what being alone meant until now, and I never knew what death could do someone that believed in that righteousness could overcome. I am now alone to cook, wash, and clean without the sound of the nightingale known as your mother to ease my pain of what I know and what I do. She was my comfort, when I never knew that living with Percy could not get any worse, or horrible. Our son which we had near the time of your exodus is the living stamp image of my father yet has the soul of my wicked husband. I have chastised him many times to not go down that road but with all certainty he believes into the good book and that Negros are cursed to do what he pleases with them. He loves the power that he has over these people and I am ashamed to say that he is of my womb. His childish mischievous pranks are more to the side of Satan to the extreme that he pursues them. His temper is one of hostility that puts fear in your brothers and sisters, as they don't know when his cruelty will all of sudden appear and then vanish. The confusion, and unknown makes people just stay in line all together for what will he do next? Anyway I just wanted you to know that your mother has passed from this earth, and that you should be informed. I would have written to you earlier but Percy forbid it due to his anger in the fact that I bond with these filthy baboons as he put it. He is one of pure evil, yet he allowed that I write to you and even invite you to see your mother's grave. In-closed is an ID, train ticket and freedom papers for you to journey to our Plantation. These are exciting times aren't they...with all this talk. Maybe there will be a time that you will never need a freedom paper to be free. That is when the grace of God would will finally extend his hand over the south and finally bless it for the tranquil, beautiful place that it is, where the people's inner soul will hopefully match.

Your faithful friend

Sara Emily Lawson

I didn't realize that I was crying as I read that letter. She is dead. Her connection to me has been severed and has no chance of reunion, and atonement. Her ghost haunts me as a memory that never fulfilled our connection. But what is a memory when the vessel has moved on? It is the final thing that walks the mansion that is my mind as an entity that shows no pity in cursing me with grief. I can actually see her with a great big smile upon her face as I clean up the shack. I next see her picking cotton in the hot sun with a cloth around her head to soak up the inevitable sweat that drips down her bosom. I remember her face looked troubled and wondered if she thought that she was in pain, or I could later have this pain to the point where she could not bear it. The haunting begins with watching her fall to her knees on the dirty road with tears in her eyes...why didn't she try to save herself?!?!

Why me, lord Jesus...Why me? I wept to myself thinking of the thoughts that didn't relieve my pain only exacerbated it. But aren't these thoughts suppose to relieve me of my pain as loving memories! I then think that how could leaving your mother on a plantation where they are nearly worked to death...be a silencing relief? I just left her there and decided on not writing to Sara, or making any attempt at communication with my own mother. I sniffle up the tears and snot from the crying and try to lift myself up. I bet her memories of me gave her pleasure over the years then decayed into nothing as the memories turned into wonderment of what actually happened to me. She probably didn't know if her baby was dead, or alive yet know that she is not suffering in that plantation ...the unknown must have made her shun me. Maybe she even hated me as a ungrateful brat that didn't deserve to walk the earth. It was all a mystery that needed to be solved and in my right hand lay freedom papers. I just wanted the memories to stop telling me the multiple outcomes to the question that I was asking about how did my mother view me. My part was also important to where I end this dead weight that has plagued my life with guilt for nearly decades. I suddenly think of times that were redundant yet cheerful during my childhood as a young girl in a place that is barren with gratitude, or sincerity for the benevolence of the hard work of black people. Instead we are called niggers that have more in common with a baboon rather a human being. The anger of this is ignored to remember the times with my mother. I remember how she combed my hair with its nappy roots that often left me in pain. The comb dug into my scalp like a pointed tip of an Indian's arrow and found its way of pulling my hair from its roots. Every follicle felt like it was burning with pain, and even though hundreds were pulled from my hair, I swear to God that I felt each and every one. But my tears were one of pain rather than a person's loss, so I wished that I could now feel the pain of each follicle for my mother's ebony, rough, wrinkled hand to touch my head for that one time. The dirty hand was a plenty cleaner than some of the white people's hands I have encountered in terms of the soul. Just a difference in skin and that nappy hair made a person to be in bondage with another. I smile thinking that our suffering with hair should be enough rather than being whipped. I cry tears from the heart that make me feel that I was dirty myself for forgetting my ma. I comb my own hair now and it had not brought up memories for a while. How could I forget? Why would I forget? Maybe the answer to those questions lie in that train ticket and freedom papers.

I walk home in disgust with myself and feel that I could have done more for my mother. I feel that I am trying to overachieve what I can actually do. I think of Clara and wonder if I should talk to her about a decision that was crazy, yet touching to the heart. I know that she will persuade me out of it due to her disposition towards staying out of trouble. These were really turbulent times that needed examples of those that were against the institution of slavery. But I was not really doing my part as I long hoped. I was not starting rallies, or helping the underground railroad but going to the south as a free black woman to see my mammas grave. It sorta trivialized what I was doing as selfish in nature for my own atonement and not helping blacks as a whole. Even a champion race horse must learn how to walk first in its life, and that took the courage to understand that you must go against fear...in this case...fear of falling down. I had not yet learned to walk in peacefully protesting the slavery of my people, so just stand up in trying to get the courage of just entering the south as a free woman. The fear in me began to overtake me in thinking that they will put me back to slavery or worse. Life of a negro was one of misery in the south, and I don't know if I was ready to walk up that long road. What was I going to do with my life just work in the mailroom with Clara till I was old. I had one friend who apparently is just my friend for the fact that we are only two black niggers in this town. We never had that connection with each other now that I think about it. We were sisters in skin only and the fact that we were both educated. The connection that I realized was that we never fought alongside each other on any hardship...the true test of friendship. We were only happy when we were sitting there quoting poetry, or observing the lush northern landscape. We were living in a hardship that affected our own people. We grew up together and just ignored it. Even the little things like standing up to Mr. Wrickle over working pay and hours...Clara never spoke but just continued with her job like nothing was happening. When I was speaking to Mr. Wrickle I turned to look at Clara. Her eyes were not focusing on the conversation, yet her ears were definitely listening to the crap that we took. She was just shuffling the mail faster than ever in a motion that was both mixed with fear and maybe even anger. But maybe she was right because I could have lost my job and who would hire a negro during winter? The facts themselves were very much like a scale of what you can do, what you should do, what you shouldn't do, and what you should not have done because it is too late. I battled with my courage on every single level and asked those questions every day. This was the south and it could be the last place that I live if I am not too careful.

I enter the small apartment that I live with its creaking door and single room. The room looks larger to me in my imaginary comparison of slave quarters that only provide you with a pine cone bed. I know that I have to take these images out of my head of the past and think with a full balancing scale. Fear and courage were very similar but one required more action than the other. I go to my closet and look at my beautiful frocks that I had bought with the money that I had. They were not that expensive but they were beautiful for the fact that they were not rags. The dresses were paired with each other side by side and I realized that to a simple black person...I was living in luxury to that of kings. Our people had not come across the Atlantic to the hope to find a better life yet as a hope for others to find a better life. A feeling of shame comes across me that I scold at in my mind...pride of who you are comes first. It feels like I am fighting a war with my brain over what to do next. I look at one of these dresses with pink dyed cotton and white curving sleeves. The dress has fluffy shoulders and a turtle neck like sleeve for the neck. The dress is made with painstaking threading and a fake jewel in the center of the throat. All made by the backs of slaves and these are my prize possessions. A feeling of weakness reaches my legs and I began to cry tears for what 100s of years my ancestors had to endure. Why the hell am I so afraid to talk to my mother and ask for forgiveness on her tombstone? Why is that so hard? I am afraid but I am afraid that if I stay here that I will be afraid of what I will become. Clara could not understand what I am feeling. If they don't end slavery, we are destined to be servants of perdition. I read the bible and hell has all the makings of slavery if we are not too careful. The idea of being cautious and coward are ripping at me like a bunch of wolves pulling apart a deer. I know that I must go and say my final goodbye one of the few people on this continent to love a slave to the point of sacrificing themselves.

Finding myself was a task that put me into a dangerous place in my mind but the idea of returning to the south was one of either stupidity or courage. What was I going to do for the rest of my life? Was I going to wonder that I am truly a black woman? What was it that I truly wanted that haunted me to travel down this path? Was it that when I look through the mirror I didn't want to see Clara. Was it that I wanted to do more for my people in way that made a difference? Clara was only exhibiting fear which was the cornerstone for the emotion known as common sense, but I felt that I had another calling. Our path's were going to be different because we are different people from the experiences that we had went through. This made me think of this as a cautionary tale that Clara was screaming in the back of head right now that I have felt the whip and you haven't! It was like I was prepared to feel the lashing of that leather just to free the guilt from my heart. Maybe I was crazy because I never felt the full brunt of being a slave due to Sara's safety. Clara was staring at me in the back of my head in the corners of my mind. Why would anyone go to the south when they are of the skin of color...free or not? I look down on the floor for I cannot look at the reflection of the glass of the window. Why don't I just write a letter? Yes why not? It was the safe plan that did not put injury to myself or even Sara. I close my eyes for it is 12:00 Oclock midnight and the only source of light was the flame of a candle dancing against that dreaded window that showed my reflection and a glowing ball which represented the flame.

I dream of myself sitting on a blanket in the middle of a hill of green grass that was greener than it ever was. I was sitting kneeing down in my blue dress as I was preparing for the eventual meal that was probably in the basket on the center of the blue blanket. The birds were flying overhead on this warm sunny day as they chirped in a pleasant manner. I was breathing in the warm air that filled my lungs, and gave me much pleasure when I exhaled. I was thinking to myself that life was good and this feast was going to be much more pleasurable than breathing in fresh, untainted air which was a contrast to the smelly stench of many different people being in one place. This put a thought in my head that I was not in the north. The feeling shocked a fear in me that took away the comfortable bliss that I was once feeling a few moments ago. The air's fresh feeling had a stagnant odor to it much like a eating something beautiful that made you sick. That feeling created a nausea that put curls in my mind, lungs and stomach. I looked around rapidly in all directions to see if I was safe, and only saw the trees that contained a gray birds that turned their heads in all directions. I exhaled with less fear for I was only seeing hills and hills of green pasterns. I suddenly didn't want my food. The feeling was too great of nausea that consumption would prove a pain that would hurt every part of my chest. I looked around only to see something crawl on my hand. It was black from a distance but it was a tiny ant that was crawling on my finger. It tickled my hand a little as it move intrepidly up my arm. I smiled at that as it moved to where ever I was looking as if it knew that I would not hurt it. How a simple creature could look right at me and move where my eyes were was astounding. The creature could easily be put under my heel but the thought was the wonderment that this insect contained a type of intelligence that made me look at it as almost the same level as a tame dog rather as an ant. The ant seemed to be try to communicate with me by shaking his antenna in strange patterns that signaled fear. I could not understand this hard to believe language coming from a everyday ant. I could only smile and put it away on the ground so it could go back to its anthill. No it returned back to me by climbing on my knee...it was very strange. I was tempted to get up so I could gently separate myself from this insect but I didn't feel to do that either. I was somehow trapped by some super ant that keep playing with me. I groaned a little and looked at the tree with the corner of my eye and noticed there were five gray birds just sitting on the branches chirping instead of one. The sound that they were making were pleasant but they were not singing in unison. They looked like cardinals only gray and I wondered what species of birds those were because I had never seen them. They moved like cardinals and had a pointed tip head like a cardinal but they were gray. This puzzled me and I quickly ignored it for they were strange birds that seemed to be multiplying in all directions for the tree on the other side of me was filled with twelve birds chirping. I was noticing these birds till the ant bit me with its mandibles and I screamed in pain as the ant crawled into the grass. The pain was intense and maybe poisonous for the pain had only increased by a tenfold every second. My first thought was why did my friend bite me like that. Then I decided to leave for this trip to the hills had gotten too strange for my tastes. Intelligent, poisonous ants and gray cardinals sitting on trees made me very uncomfortable and I decided to take my basket of food. The basket fell on the ground revealing that the contents were just thousands of ants similar to the one in the grass. They were crawling everywhere in droves and running in every direction. The ants were so numerous that they looked like black globs tearing itself apart into tiny ants going in all directions. My first reaction was not one of fear but of wonderment...if these ants were just as intelligent. Before I could react, the birds came alive from their stagnant positions and flew by the thousands themselves towards my blanket and began swallowing each ant as if it was a seed. The birds flew into their own glob of feathers and flapping over the black glob as more and more came out of the woods, the creek, the sky and even a cave. They swallowed till they were fattened to the point that they could not fly on their own. All this was happening on the blanket that once served me to instead be a feasting table for these gluttons. The birds themselves pecked and pecked on that some blanket as if they were some insane chicken pecking on feed that contained the cure for not becoming dinner. The insanity of it all was atrocious to the point that they could not fly anymore. The shock of that made me feel nausea to think that could eat that much where I could not move. The gluttons fed on the ants like they were the last supper and the sky that was once over shadowed by scores of grey birds was now blue once again but at what cost? The ground was littered with these obese birds that could not take up to fly anymore. They flapped their wings rapidly but with no hope of flying till these poor intelligent ant could be digested. The ground was now the surface overshadowed by these birds...but something strange happened and they began to vomit the ants up in order to fly again. It was a series of rapid vomiting that gave off a rancid odor of death, which was strange smell coming from something so small. They all vomited in succession releasing a type of black pudding on the ground, where it was obviously ants mixed with the strong smelling digestive acids in the birds stomach. The black pudding smeared the ground until it turned the beautiful green grass, and warm smelling flowers covered in this black syrup that seemed to have the stench of death of something larger. It was like a deer died and the carcass was decaying for days. The pudding dripped off the grass, and dripped off of the trees so much viscosity it seemed to just hang there like harden sugar. The stench was so putrid that I had to run away from the south, and go elsewhere for the countryside was littered in half-digested ants. The poor ants never had a chance and they seemed to mimic the intelligence of something quite smart. The birds on the other hand were flying away due to the release in weight and flew away towards the sun. I narrowed my eyes and looked at these pointed head cardinal like birds and I swear as they flew towards blue sky into the sun...they look white as snow.

I awoke from my dream sweating profusely and realized that it was all a dream yet it felt it was more of a something that was warning me. Mamma used to warn me about confronting dreams and said it was how the Good Lord communicated to those who possessed a strong bond with the Lord. Mamma would say “Da lord is lookin out for you child. Never resist the dream but never take it in too much” I knew that those ants were black people and they needed refuge in my basket that contained my sustenance. But what does food have to do with it? I began thinking of the dinners we had with turnip greens, and pig foot. I had never eaten those things anymore yet they would be called food for the soul. That's what Mamma would call them cooked up foods...The gumchin, as my mom would call it would be the source of strength to persevere and be able to work those long, irregular hours in the heat of Georgia. I smiled to myself and realized that the food would be called food for the soul. The dinners where we prayed we called that mess of food....soul food. I knew that the white disregarded food would be used to strengthen the Negro beyond his natural strength, but I never understood why it was called soul food. Maybe it was because we came to together for the lord, and it gave us the strength to work...maybe as a way to thank him. Maybe it was how the soul was regarded...strengthen through bonding. I see that maybe through my subjugation as a slave, I thought in the back of my brain that the soul was food as the basket was a source of food. Maybe the dream could simply interpreted as a way to help my people, yet I could not understand how food was involved

I had to go to the south because it is something that I know that is scary, but it is something that I must do. I think to myself...I must do...? I realize that it might be deeper than that...more of what people interpret as their destiny. Destiny to me was something that was a word way bigger than a poor, free black woman in New York. The word awed me because I never had a purpose that was a path towards something so scary...hell I never had a purpose period except working at the mail room with no end in sight...not even a man to love me. Heck love might be the compass towards the path that I am going. The only person to sacrifice themselves for me is sitting patiently into a cemetery as a beacon of love that compels me. The haunting of the dreams and the hurtful memories can only be relieved by atonement. She is waiting for me after death when I disregarded her in her suffering through life. Destiny was a word way too small for me because my mind was made up and no one can't convince me not to go...not Clara, not no one!

Two days later

The train was crowded with people of all nature that used the rail line as a vessel into traveling to various parts of country like we were all free and life was an easy going thing for everybody that had the distinction of being human. For humans who have pretty much enslaved everything to his will the rail line carried the valuable blood of human kind and his goods. The reason that this amuses me is that life truly is that simple for people living in this moment. It was a difficult to eat and even more difficult to get a ticket to travel even though life is getting more convenient every day. I look at myself in the reflection in the mirror and how my clothes look on me and how that contrasts how I feel. I am a black woman that is dressed up aboard a train that is surrounded by white people all bunched up together to the point that I can feel their breathe on my shoulder. I can feel the heat of close quarters human contact like if I was hugging my own child myself. But these were not my children as I pondered how each white man, woman, and child must be staring at my backside and wondering about how each of them where insulting the very nature of sitting on a train with a negro. Yet this was the north, so I could forgive them and the help that Negroes would need in the future would prove that notion was a necessity. The danger was far from the danger level compared to when the tracks of this very train would pass the dixie line that would lead to a world that truly was compared to the black man's Hell. The hate of a man's freedom would not be nothing compared to that of the heated south where my brother is expected to be in bondage, or suffer the consequences of the opinionated white man who is the law of the land. I sit thinking of my decision and the true consequences of trying to live with it. The seat has never felt so uncomfortable and inside of the boxcar, and so hot compared to the outside of freezing cold of the north. I decide to look around at my surroundings very similar to trying to scratch an itch that ever so stabs your skin. I look very quickly in order to process the view before being noticed as someone staring.

The wooden seats are finely handcrafted with comfortable interior as if you were the president of the United States, which gave you a feeling of this is where it is at. I see a family of white people laughing at a book that they were jointly reading. They were wearing finely tailored clothes with the wife and daughters wearing purple and green dresses. Every ripple was finely woven as you could believe that this was a family with class. For a moment as a sense of relief went over my mind as I felt they were not noticing me. That was the feeling that resonated in my mind, which I will repeat again...they were not noticing me. The feeling of some type of freedom made me slightly more brave as I moved my eyes to the other side, slightly longer this time. I saw a young man sit on the chair smoking a pipe with his belly rolled out in comfort. He was wearing a vest with a timepiece in his pocket and smoking rather vigorously. He was a fatter man but he was in a stage of comfort so great that he barely noticed me. I then felt an even greater freedom for a moment and decided on looking behind me even longer. I noticed a slimmer man who had a young face with blonde hair and a nicely trimmed suit. He had a mustache that looked outta place for someone more young. I looked back one last time to see the rest of the train with a feeling of confidence that made me think that there was hope for the world if nobody showed hate for a Negro wearing a fancy white dress in a sea of white people...almost like everyone was wearing white which matched their skin and I was black which exposed my black skin to this flooding white wave... I looked back one last time and saw a older white man with wrinkles and such wearing a blue suit. I was not really focused on him till I saw his eyes with Irises filled with Hazel. He was staring right back at me with his rounded hat and bifocals. I know that I should have looked away but I could not help his staring at me with those fiery eyes. Was that hate, or anger? Was it curiosity toward a black woman that he had never seen? The questions filled my head to ignore the reaction to look away at this man just staring at me at the back of the car. I noticed more about him, and his striped blue suit and what looked like a pistol. That was strange for a such a old man to wear a gun unless he was a man of the law. That could explain his inquisitive nature until the still scene of the man showed movement. It was not his hands, or legs yet his lips moving to the stillness of this scene. He spoke with anger and fury that was uncharacteristic with his posture and I already knew what he had said which quickly made me face the front of the car. I would never forget what his white lips had said, which was "Turn around you filthy Nigger!" The freedom that I had once experienced was completely suppressed by the savagery of this gentleman obviously returning to the south, which was the south's birthright. The hate had hit me like standing in front of a cannon which you first had to be whole before being blown to bits. I realized that I had to endure this or perish in the being subjugated as one with too much pride. This was to be my undoing if I did not accept that I was a black woman in a racist world. I breathed in and thought about what Clara had said and then thought about what I had said. I suddenly realized on how high the stakes would be. This was to be no game with that man staring at the back of my head for maybe hours with his pistol on his side. I sighed and breathed in deeply one last time

The conductor signaled that the train was moving towards Tennessee for a certain duration. The once still boxcars began vibrating with life as steam fogged up that black reflection of me in the window. I could hear the gears and wheels begin to grind on the metal track. I dared not look back at the man, or anything white for these next hours. I was tense like the trunk of a great oak tree and it felt like I was being restrained from life itself. For the next hours every movement would be calculated to see its consequence. I dared not read even though I had brought a book with me. I looked at its cover which showed a image of a young girl falling in love, sense and sensibility and realized that no one ever wanted to see a black girl with nappy roots read about love. Love was something not thought that a Negro obtained...similar to oxen having sex only in order to reproduce where the stronger bull was lusted only by favorable physical traits rather than by his nurturing, loving, kindness, generosity, affection, and child rearing to name a few. I just sat there in my rigid position as the snow fell off the train as the passenger carrying behemoth moved at an accelerating speed along the snowy tracks of New York. As I looked out the foggy window, all I could see was the white of the snow.

I kept my eyes down, and looked away from the people who must be obviously staring at me. The mere vicious actions of a seemly old man showed me that I was going to the gateways of hell for something that I felt was once noble, even brave. But there is a thin line between foolish actions and bravery that is truly defined by the actions cause rather than results. I had much to fear from the viewpoint of white people in a place where dark skinned machines served the purpose of white men. Heck the train was I riding on had many different people but had much similarity to slave. It was a powerful machine that did the loading work of men, and did not possess a soul that gave the men a second thought. Like the black man's muscle, it was simply a working of gears that rolled along the track as a slave carries bundles of cotton to his Master. The train does not think for its brain is steam driven and simple, which is the viewpoint of a slave to his Master. The difference between a train, and a Negro is that a Negro dreams of freedom from his oppression and wishes the freedoms, or fundamental rights that his Master has. Yet which object obtains more respect? The train is thanked for his contributions to connected the country together as a whole due to its work. Far and wide there is admiration for a train where children play with toy models and its CULTURE is revered from its limited history. The steam driven brain of the train does not show gratitude because it is not human. Is the black man thanked for reconstructing his country on his sweaty back? Is his culture revered, or is it vanished from our similar minds, where we think, dream, hope, aspire, and love. No it is not and it looks like it will never be. I must be careful in these turbulent times of black people trying to show that they are more than a machine, or animal. The man behind me could be dangerous but we were in New York approaching the heart of the south...And a saying that I heard from a great man yielded "You ain't seen nothing yet"

The hours went by as I stood rigid in that seat dared not to look back even after the train dropped off the old man behind me. He ignored me as he walked up to his stop, but my eyes could not release their glance from the back of his head as he walked. His white hair, showing a long age of hatred and not forgiveness, fluttered in the wind of the open door that released me from his overshadowing presence. It was like his gun was in the back of my head, and the cold steel was constantly daring me to turn around so he could blow my head off. Yet he was walking away in silence from the standoff that I was imagining in my head. My heart gave way as if a huge weight was lifted that made me realize my foolishness for was sitting a seat 3 rows away yet I thought he was right behind me. Then I thought about intrepid motives of my decision, and realized that this was just an omen to what I was most probably going to experience. Was my racing heart beating the way it is, out of anticipation of the worst? I pondered these things slowly in my head as the steam fogged up my window. I was prepared to look at where we were and it seemed like Virginia. The cold had settled into this luscious area where the beginning of the south began to take shape, but still obtained the cold chill that scarred the North. I looked out my window to see a snowy wonderland which took my mind off of my tormentor for just a moment. It was not as frozen as New York yet obtained that icy feel which your breath danced with the stagnant air. A thought occurred to me that this was the beginning of my road to south for this area still obtained slaves. The thought of slaves trying to pick cotton in this slightly less frozen oasis was one that made me cringe worthy. Obviously, you could not pick cotton here so I assumed that the slaves were pressed other duties when the time became cold and frigid. What could you do here in the cold? The first cringe worthy concept was that they were in loose rags as a snow storm blew into here, and their work was actually a blessing due to the fact that it kept them warm. It deemed the question that which conditions were worse...cold or heat. The unsettling lack of comfort in both conditions had varying degrees of pain that made me believe that white people could not be less evil in their nature. A small relief came in the form of a thought that the cold would numb the flesh tearing whip marks by severing the nerves and snow, like an angel, washing the blood stained back. The thought of people having to endure this brought a small tear to my eye in relation to the man telling me to turn around Nigger. One was not even close to the level of other but both brought the realization that fear was an emotion that can make someone doubt the existence of God because of where you were in this lonely world.

I stared out the window as the train moved over the Virginia countryside, where you could see rows of trees posing naked as the winter wind has stripped them of colorful clothes that made them dance in the Autumn wind.

The snow was on hills that partially covered the landscape as deer chewed on these grassy uneven patches that were getting rarer due to snow beginning to fall. I saw noble buildings of Virginia as I continued with my sightseeing that included unique structures that were reminiscent of both northern city construction with bustling people but with the southern construction of some isolation and one with the wilderness. Maybe that was my opinion due to seeing both urban and rural areas, but yet I have not seen a slave. I felt my eagerness to see at least one of my people was overshadowed by the fact that they would most likely be in bondage. It was the closest I would get to see my people over the country that they built with their bare hands. Those rough, callous hands that did the work which nobody noticed. I wanted to see all my people that were in bondage, which gave me sense of slight exhilarated pride under overwhelming fear, and doubt. The fact that I was free seemed to make my wishes seem evil yet hauntingly fulfilling. I realized that this was the closest that I would be in trying to free them in order to free myself.

The train moved at such a bumpy ride in the beginning due to the starting of the engine that fed on fiery coal after it had stopped at colorful train stations throughout the country. That momentum that moved me was at the same time uncomfortable yet exhilarating. The feeling of this giant behemoth moving along the stone cutaway countryside was one of amazement and awe. The passengers would get off and then get on, simply ignoring me in the process. As I went deeper into the south, the look of passengers that saw a Negro in a fancy dress made them give an uppity, annoyed expression at me. It would be just a harmless glance but I saw much more in that moment in time then just a look. I stood there in my rigid stance and sat there in the train hoping that my dress would somehow be a cloak of invisibility that would allow me to do freely and stand with these people as just anybody else. That was not the case and for many centuries somewhere in this bigoted country I predicted it would never happen in all areas. The tension of the line between black and white caused a ferocity that was going to be at its boiling point for many years. So I just sat there with my black skin and trickled sweat from my nervousness of what would happen next as the heat of the south was just getting warmer.

I stared out the window as if it was a series of pictures of what this country looked like in all its glorious seasons and realized that different people had different problems due to what the area of the country provided them. The was also like watching the seasons change from the winter wonderland of Virginia to the cool breeze of the North Carolina's glassy noels with its ever shining sun glowing down the hilly plains. So it seemed that the colder the place the more tolerant the white people, yet I also realized that a slave is not too good in the cold...for there is nothing to pick, or work that involves the assistance of slave hands. I guess that is supply and demand 101for you. It showed that people could live all over this country, yet when the need for something exists like an oxen to plow the cornfields...you need them where there is corn. A slave is similar to Oxen in that sense that he is just a tool that you need for a task. He does not have a life nor other needs to tend to that have any upmost importance. I know that I was once angry for this treatment but an overwhelming fear came over my heart that made it beat like a Kentucky drum. I was here in this world full of hate and animosity, yet as I get closer to my destination I know that anything could happen and there was no turning back. I then thought of Clara and that awful scar on her back that practically deformed her. I closed my eyes and imagined the force that a man would have to swing to be able to rip open someone's skin with a whip. I imagined that scar before it was even a scar...a chunk of flesh must have been torn off to cause the skin to open like eyelids to a reddish bloody eye. The effect would have been similar to a sword cutting open a man in combat. I thought of the blood that at first must have been flowing through that slit and how the muscles must have been slightly exposed under that blood. It must have looked like a butchered cattle, but with black skin, after the first axe chopping into it. Why would a human being do something like that to another person that took the form of a little girl? I cried a slight tear to that and then I decided to erase its horror by thinking about how that little girl was before the whipping and after being set free in this world. Free to be not reminded of the horrors of living as a slave. I had doubt about my decision to where I could be put back into slavery, and forgo my freedom living in New York. The stakes have never been higher if there were men that existed that could do that to a little, scared, fearful, black girl and not think anything about it. It would not put horrors in their minds, nor pain or regret. They would simply just go back to life and not really care how deep that scar was both physically and probably more painful...emotionally. These feeling will pick into a young child's brain for the rest of their lives and how they grow. The scary part was that was the point in the eyes of the master's like Percy who sit and drink lemonade on the porch overseeing their small kingdom. The scar was fear itself holding the victim at bay towards the path of death, or obedience. The cruelty was very apparent, and often practiced all over the south and in the north as well. There is a third option...escape

I begin to ponder on that bumpy train, how blacks could escape from their bondage when slave hunters existed throughout the south. Yes, the term supply and demand even resulted in a market for men and women that explored the lucrative business of hunting the slaves. The idea of a slave deciding on throwing away his basket of cotton and running through wilderness towards freedom was actually a prevalent action throughout the south. It was an act of defiance that made the owners realize that they could not have a 500 to 600 dollar property decide to be free and have the same rights as him. The idea made sense in the terms of how much a slave profited for his Master but I always felt they wanted power over a human being as well. Even if the slave was worthless, I always felt that the white man would rather have them killed then smell the air of being free. This was something that was equally true as the previous idea by the smell of corpses hanging from Georgia trees from slaves that were repeat offenders. The idea of seeing a grown man on a tree was so common that those who walked to church on a warm sunny afternoon would snare at the men hanging from trees due to the repugnant odor and continue on to church to praise the Lord. The decaying corpse of a human being that was once a child of God (according to the bible often instilled in the slaves) just swings from time to time as the only signs of life. Maybe his head rock to the left as the maggots get him by eating his neck to cause that. Sometimes the wind would give him slight life as well. Move to left, or Move to the right. When the smell gets so intense that it is a bother to the citizens of the proud southern states, you may see men take him down with cloths on their faces to avoid the smell and the buzzing flies. Who knows that they do with him next. His rotting flesh must be buried deep to avoid the smell, and to avoid the hungry crows. But this is all about power over someone and forcing them to submit to the will of the white man. The cruelty of the white man must not be ignored, even a young black girl like me must realize that gun from the old man could have gone off and nobody would have even cared. The thought of Clara seemed to be an image of clarity towards my actions that seem to haunt me as a realization of my actions. I can see her face saying that I am foolish for what I have done, and nobody is going to help you now...not that white woman...nobody.

As I sit on the train alone with a book that I am fearful to read due to the violent nature of the world we live in. Blacks were not allowed to read under any situation in the south. I had past that border many hours ago, which slowly became the point of no return and the fear that resided in me took a turn for the worst. Yes I had to hide that book from the public so that they cannot see that I am an intelligent negro that was perhaps once free from my actions. The realization that negroes are to be dumb creatures permeated in my mind during this unholy journey into hell. I was a life that wished to learn and be more than I am but through the eyes of others that had the same dream, I was an abomination to the world or a spectacle of reticule to people whose only notion of greatness only came from what was civilized in the vast wilderness of the unknown to the world. When you kill an animal the real question of what occurs is that the creature didn't have the intelligence, or soul of a human. These white people force you to be that animal in their merciless eyes and that you must understand that a horrible death is not one that will have the remorse of anyone including your own people due to their submission. I guess that it was simply a way of life that is as apparent as the sun setting in the west and rising in the east. I begin to realize that fear itself was the factor that made me think of all the terrible things that would be done to me, and as I looked out the window I realized that I was behind enemy lines. The thought of burning the book even feverishly occurred in my now fragile mind. I begin to think of the future to where I was going to stay for three days and I would have nothing to read. But was a little boredom worth my life? I was now going insane from the anticipation of a unknown future that was dangerously not read. I guess I was realizing that I was now going to risk my life for something that was a combination of Love and pride. Love for my forgotten mother and pride for myself.

As I sat on that train for days now, I had not experienced any form of racism after that old man. I had figured that my dress and apparent freedom was a bulls eye to a marksman. Yet, the white men around me were silent with simply hateful eyes that burnt into my soul but had no physical damage. The rape that occurred to black woman had now entered my mind that caused me to shutter for a moment...it had no law, or consequence that made people worry. It was an everyday occurrence that dealt with a man and his property and nothing was thought about it. The fear of another man just touching my body for his own pleasure brought chills up my spine. The thought made parts of my body that were sensitive to human desiring just curl up in fear. The opposite just occurred my body at the thought of a man violently ripping off my clothes and doing his own will to these tender areas. There was no love, no real lust, or joy in his works...just a free ride that did not allow consequences to rape. What I mean is that what father is going to let someone rape his daughter and get away with it? The reality was that the father was just a tool to breed and he did not have love with his many partners. He was designed to produce the strongest buck in the lot and that was it. If a woman is property and parental love did not exist then any man, not just known rapists, would get his kicks for pleasure and following the crowd. The scary part was that fact as I said before applied to any man who saw us as inferior and that was a lot. The cries of a young girl that is on the ground screaming with her tattered clothes ripped was of no remorse to a man that looks at an accepted practice in this part of the world. The girl could scream to God himself, and to the man who taught God to her would look at it as a dog barking after playing with his master. The human factor was well eliminated and when he is done...he simply does not care. I suddenly look at my fancy dress as something that could attract that form of behavior to where I look somewhat attractive to the white men here. I could hide a book yet I could not hide a dress. I dared not look back at the crowd in fear of seeing someone like that old white man. I cringed in fear to where I shuttered at the thought of why I came here for my mother that I had barely knew. Yes she provided me freedom yet was I throwing it away. I just stood there as rigid as ever as the bumpy train made its many stops and I needed to trade trains. The fear was now overwhelming as I sat in my seat shaking in a sea of possible racist white men with this beautiful dress on and being the only negro on this train and at this train station. The whistle had blown its loud roar and it was now or never. Jesus I must have the courage to move from this seat. The whistle had blown again to indicate that time was now precious, and my fear was going to send me to God knows where. I breathed in very deeply and waited for all the white people to go so I dare not bump into one and feel their hatred. I got up quickly with my bag of clothes and food and quietly walked toward the doorway of the car. I moved quickly yet inconspicuously through the train towards the outside door. I suddenly turned around as the steam lifted my dress from the train as I walked down the steps. The white gust was mistaken for a something else that was white, which might have enjoyed that. I look down as so not to attempt eye contact with anyone. I see everything on the ground that littered the wooden planks of the train stop. I see dirt, cigars, old tickets crumbled up and the circular windings of the wood. I can only imagine what all these white people are doing, which is probably staring at me as the negro with the fancy dress. I feel like running at this point towards my destination which is the other train car that is at the opposite side of the station. I don't look at anything, or anyone on my way to the other train. I am about to run when I realize that I am not slipping. There is no snow but warm heat on my back that seems foreign to me after experiences of the frost bite of winter. The feeling makes me tingle as if snow was melting off my body and the warm rush of summer had taken hold. Yet it is the winter months and the heat of the south was the source of this sorcery. I was here into the heated lands of the south. I had to look up with curiosity and behold the wonder that was the wilderness of the savannah.

My eyes looked up at my ancestor's glorious beginnings with the wilted trees swaying in the wind over this surprising heat that crept up my back. I could not see any other home in my mind as the frosted cold was just a refuge. The bugs were not frozen in the abyss of the cold where they wait for revival from mother earth's changing climates. I saw all that with a simple train ticket. I saw the transformation of all that was once frozen and dead to some life and finally to warm paradise...well for white people. The train station was very modern and painted with such detail surrounded a green wilderness teeming with life and beauty. But it was very ugly here, even though the area would fool many of God's most inquisitive angels. This great country had transformed itself before my eyes in a place that was confused with the bowels of hell. The negro was to suffer under this illusion of a paradise that they could not enjoy, or hold, or touch. The demons that reside in this area(not all for many were for change) use whips and all manner of torturous devices for their vast financial enterprise. I looked over a fence to see a calm, tranquil stream that lay near a brook. The bubbly water seemed to be the only thing cool over the heat that had fooled me through my journey in the changes across America. One side lives in ever changing weather where that brook would be covered in jagged ice and then a running stream the next. The wonderful thing about this magical place was that the stream would flow for all eternity till the end of time. Was slavery of blacks going be similar to that stream? Was the north's change really a change for good. Oh Satan, you make the your deepest domain so appeasing to the eyes of the uninformed...how many negroes drank from that stream to cool off after years of oppressive heat only to feel the whip of cruel work hours with no reward except to live it another day. The days have gone by as the time has made black hair turn white instead of ebony black and still nothing to live for. The eyes of these men and women have only seen slaves work, be raped, leave, be born, and work some more. The expectation is very low for these people and yes I say people who have been denied their status all too long. I watch the blue flowers with black pits sway back and forth like blacks dancing for the freedom they never had. I can imagine with my eyes closed that blacks are dancing to sound of heavenly music as the men let out their hands to allow the bowing ladies a chance to join the dance. I am awaken to the sound of horn of the joining train that is taking me to Atlanta to see Sara and the final resting place of my mother.

I enter the train without harassment once again as the conductor yells for all those to come aboard and I quickly, without making eye contact, go to my seat while trying to stay inconspicuous to the many white passengers around me. It has been a long journey and one that I will never forget especially for a girl who has never gone really much anywhere. The mundane routines of my life were surprisingly forgotten by a person who has kept her life in order without spontaneity. The fascination with the journey to a place that was once an accursed paradise kept me excited and at the same time dreaded fear. But with all vacations, if you may call it that, the mind is preoccupied with escaping from what we call a normal life. It is brief, yet a necessity for the sanity of some. For me it is an element of chance that brought me here so it is an element of chance that I am relieved from my redundancy. I feel that suffering all around me has brought me here and my fears are going to realized as a strength of caution. I feel that my journey is about joining the abolishers and freeing my people that feel the same fears as I do. Their constant suffering is a reminder that my mind wandering by the guidance of my fears is a journey into the unknown...A world where the whites and blacks can live together in peace through difficulty of understanding that each other is human in their own way. Human, something that the north can learn as well for the roots of racism run strong where that foundation of hate is everywhere. I close my eyes and imagine my final destination to the plantation of the Lawsons...

I walk down that dirt road, where I saw the sun set over my end of being a slave only to come back to the bright sun rising towards my former home. A old white woman runs to me as I can see her bright grin from all the way from the porch to the gate. The gate has changed to where the cracked pieces of paint cover all over the fence. It has aged like all things do and I look at this vibrant old white woman running towards with a grin on her face which is beauty in itself. My fragile memory does not recognize her due the wrinkles and white hair that have transformed an once active, lovely woman to someone who is now vulnerable to the powers of father time. Her heart does not age, however, because the beauty and loveliness to be blinded to bigotry are timeless. The smile is only grander as I get a closer view to her. I hug her ever so hard and she kisses me on the cheek as if I am her own child that had just returned from a bloody battle. She looks me into the eyes and begins to cry and put her old wrinkled hand to her face. The tears stream down her crevasses of her wrinkles as she shakes with joy. The eyes show joy but the shaking shows sorrow for we all know why we are here. She points to path down a road and smiles under all that shaking and says

"I will take you to where you want to go Nancy and please understand that I will take you as far as you want"

I am crying and I don't even realize it. As we walk, Sara talks in a joyful tone that reveal the battle over old age and hidden youth.

"For a moment I thought that you were your mother and she had awoken from the dead to say her goodbyes. She never had a chance to say goodbye, death just came and took her like a thief in the night. It would happen to all, I suppose. Goodbye is something that we cherish like a memory like taking a picture that makes us sleep at night. It is our picture and only ours to look upon on the coldest, loneliness of nights. As the rain pours on these dreaded nights and hits the window pane, we reflect the fact we had made peace with a loved one, where their soul and ours is at rest. So girl, cherish those memories like it is your whole life till your memories are one day handed down to another"

I smile at that with much esteem and frown upon the fact that I have no memories with my mother except the freedom that she provided. I am a stranger to these lands due to my long absence, but I have familiar friends in Sara.

We go over a small and into a ditch of mud till we reach our destination.

I see nothing but twigs on muddy dirty ground till I notice that they are sticking into the ground. The twigs are tied into a cross by a vines that have rotten to a dark gray coloring. The twigs are not even parallel to the ground as some slant to the side. I first I think we are still going farther to our destination but I feel shame that we are here. The feeling of going on that journey has lead to us going to a pile of sticks brings an ungrateful doubt to my heart. It is quickly gone when I see Sara knell in the mud to put blue flowers upon the makeshift grave. To think people are buried under this muddy dirt with headstones from pieces of fallen branches of trees. The realization that they didn't have coffin but bodies thrown in dirty, unholy ditch with the rags that they were brought into. Eyes looking at the slaves throwing dirt on their exposed pupils. Dead with no stinging eyes except the eyes of the Lord who must shed tears at this. Not even a box that allows them to rot in piece from the elements...the dirt surrounds them with every type of flesh eating insect, or animal preparing for the feast of slaves. The harden skin of the negro must be a tasty crisp treat as they fertilize the earth with their death and decay. Shame it's on soil that will not be plowed or harvested but neglected as a clump of dirt. I fall to my knees crying a burst of uncontrollable tears as the mud covers my beautiful dress and I scream "You deserve better than this!" I yell it until the birds leave their trees and I notice that the birds are those gray cardinals but they are now white with pointed tip heads.

Well this is your destination nigger? Do you hear me nigger? This your destination!!!

I snap back to reality and realize that I have not reached the Lawson Farm. I was suppose to meet up with Sara at the train station with a Taxi. I fearfully but firmly leave the train and walk slowly out for I have actually reached my destination toward Atlanta, Georgia. I calmly take up my bag and go towards the baggage claim. I look around and see many people walking in all directions. Even though I was insulted by the ticket master, I ignore it for I understand why I am here. Not just for my drug using mother who almost aborted me if it wasn't for that saint known as Sara Lawson. Even gave her a job as a maid during the civil rights era and this was very good for Jobs for Blacks were very hard to come by. My mother helped pay for my education while I worked at a Post office in New York to help pay and support myself during school. Education was the key, but it is the only freedom that matters in this turbulent time. I know that it is the 1960s but has anything really changed. We eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom during segregation with subhuman conditions. Sometimes I think of a time when we fighting for more than just freedom but our dignity. Has anything changed? We are still subhuman creatures that are strung up on a tree for the reason being a black man. We cannot educate ourselves in the manner that we can go to proper schools that whites have freedom to go. The fear of being more than we can be is ingrained in the minds of blacks all over the country. The alteration with the ticket master brought me back to reality but how far from reality are we? I could be raped at any moment without the law being able to help me. My children will not get any opportunities making finding a man pointless. The police of this time assist the pointed headed birds to murder thousands of black men every year...no justice. The blood of 500 years is upon us...we must do better...we can do better. Blood is not always clean for Sara's son is a member of the Klan. I guess he took after his father Percy rather than the angel I know as Sara. I know it sounds crazy but I often view my life as a different time period... a simpler time period before lawmakers justified what they were doing as freedoms for blacks. A time period where they did what did because it just suit them to be evil as possible to get a profit. I feel that we have not left that far away from the times we had lived. The fear in me excites me into being stronger than my friend Clara but I must realize that she was assaulted with a knife by a racist that tried to rape her. She can only do as much...she must strive to succeed. Sometimes I ponder what has really changed into the mindset of black and white. I will not make my mom's death in vain for she broke her back for me and only me. Even when she didn't even want me. It seems that the only way to see the future is to compare to the past because the past is really the present. But I am going to march with Martin Luther King and someday I will not imagine things that hurt and scare me but things that remind me of actual freedom...freedom itself.

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