“There’s a station right here in Charleston.”
“That ain’t true.”
“Lemme tell you something, Lucius-”
A hard knock came from the front door.
“Nelly, you gotta go now.”
“I’ll slip down the hall. You get the door and I’ll come back.”
The knocker pounded again, this time more urgently. Lucius sensed impatience on the other side. He raised his eyebrows. “Go, Nelly,” he said. “You know where the sugar’s at. Get some and get outta here.”
The knocker banged against the door again, even harder than before. Lucius started for it. He placed his hand on the knob and looked over his shoulder to where Nelly had been standing. At last she was gone. Sometimes the only way to make her leave was to send her on her way. Lucius turned the knob and opened the door.
A man stood on the porch, his hand raised as if he were about to knock again. It was getting dark outside, but Lucius recognized the caller immediately. This was Tucker Hughes, a familiar face in recent weeks. He stepped inside without an invitation, brushing against the slave’s shoulder. Lucius wondered why he had even bothered to knock. Before he could ask for Hughes’s hat, it was shoved at him. “Is he upstairs?” inquired Hughes.
After a lifetime in servitude, Lucius had become accustomed, even numb, to the dozens of little indignities he suffered each day. But for some reason the behavior of Hughes gnawed at him. Over the last year or two, Bennett had taken a fatherly interest in Hughes and treated him almost as a surrogate son. Hughes was a frequent caller when Bennett stayed in Charleston. He had come by every few days since the middle of January.
Hughes raised his eyebrows. “Is he upstairs?” he asked again, this time enunciating the words as if he were speaking to a half-wit.
The nasty tone snapped Lucius out of his thoughts. “Yessir, Mr. Hughes, and I can take you-”
Before Lucius could get the words out of his mouth, Hughes turned toward the steps and started up. Lucius tossed the hat on a chair and sprang after him.
This treatment perturbed the slave. It was not merely the rudeness. He was used to rudeness from white folks. It was the total disregard for the role Bennett had assigned Lucius to play in this house. Lucius should lead Hughes upstairs and announce his presence. If Hughes just barged in, Bennett would think Lucius was not doing his job. The slave would look bad and Hughes would have gained nothing. It was supremely inconsiderate.
Lucius wanted Bennett to think well of him. He had lived with Bennett almost his entire life. They were born the same summer at the Bennett plantation. Lucius’s mother had looked after both of them during their early years, and they played together in the rough egalitarianism of childhood. But it could not last forever-not when one of them was white and the other black. Bennett’s father, Richard, separated the boys around Langston’s seventh birthday. Lucius became a full-time slave hand. Bennett’s father introduced his son to the life of a plantation owner. In the mornings, a tutor taught him grammar, history, and arithmetic. In the afternoons, the overseers showed him how to manage a team of slaves in the field. In the evenings, Lucius would lose sleep when he heard the groans of fellow slaves who had been whipped that day by Langston. The boys rarely spoke to each other then, and they certainly never traded words about the past. Sometimes their eyes would meet and exchange a knowing look, but in a moment it vanished. They had their separate roles.
One day, when Lucius was about fifteen, he walked by an open window at the Bennett manor and heard the familiar voice of Langston arguing with his father. Eavesdropping was a skill that slaves honed to perfection, and Lucius decided to listen.
“I won’t do it, Father! I cannot!”
“Langston, he is a slave and you are his master. There can be no favorites on a plantation. You must set aside whatever childish feelings you once had for him from what your responsibilities are today.”
“You are asking me to punish Lucius for no reason-for a reason I am to invent! This test you have devised for me is not fair to him!”
The boy was shouting, but his father replied with cool insistence.
“Langston, you are becoming a man, and you must bury those sentiments. They do not befit a member of our class.”
“No, Father, I cannot do it-and I will not do it!”
Lucius heard footsteps stomping across the floor followed by the slam of a door. He decided he had better get on his way when he heard the elder Bennett mutter something to himself. The words were hard to make out, but Lucius thought he could hear them well enough: “If that’s how you’re going to be, Langston, then there’s only one way to deal with the problem.”
A week later, Lucius was sold to another plantation ten miles away. The night he arrived, an overseer led him into the fields, where two other overseers waited in the darkness. They beat him senseless. “Just breakin’ you in, boy,” said one of them. Lucius crawled back to the slave shanties when it was done. The overseers knocked him around the next night too, and the one after that. The beatings grew more sporadic over time, but they never stopped-and they rarely occurred for a reason.
The abuse went on for years. Lucius grew into manhood, but he wondered how long he could hold up. During the day, he was forced to work harder than ever before. He had managed to escape whippings at the Bennett farm. At his new home, with its owner in Charleston most of the time, the overseers had the run of the place. They were cruel men. Lucius felt the lash constantly. He believed the overseers had it in for him. He believed he was a marked man. There were other slaves who were more resistant to authority, and some who did not work very hard. Lucius thought he was the only one to be singled out for torture.
Not once was he given a pass to visit his mother, who still lived on the Bennett farm. Slaves who had close kin nearby routinely earned this privilege. Lucius thought about running away, but he was kept in such a state of exhaustion and pain that he did not consider himself capable. He figured he would be caught and beaten worse than ever before. Was it really worth going on this way?
Lucius decided it was not. He resolved to end it all. One day, he positioned himself alone in the fields, away from where the other slaves were working. It was sure to attract the attention of an overseer. By the middle of the morning, it had. One of them started walking in his direction. Lucius thrust his hand into an overgrown patch of weeds, and his fingers grasped the handle of a butcher knife he had stashed there. As the man approached, Lucius thought to himself, This is going to be easy.
The overseer stopped about twenty feet away from where Lucius crouched. Instead of hurling insults at the slave and demanding that he move into the other field, he just stood there for a moment. He was not even holding his whip. This confused Lucius.
“If you think I wanna beat the life out of you, boy,” sneered the overseer, “you’d be right.”
Lucius tightened his grip on the knife. Just take a few steps this way, he thought. The overseer needed to come a little closer before Lucius could pounce.
“But I’m not gonna,” said the overseer. “It’s your lucky day, boy. Follow me.”
He turned around and started walking to the manor. His back was to Lucius. He seemed completely unaware that the slave presented any kind of threat. Perhaps this was the time to strike. But now Lucius was curious. He looked down at the knife. It will cut just as well tomorrow, he thought. He hid it and followed the man whose life he had spared.
A few minutes later, he stood in front of the manor. The overseer told him that he had been sold.
“You’re going back to Bennett’s,” said the overseer. “I think you’re worthless, but they must want you bad. I hear you fetched a high price. They must wanna rough you up too-when you came over here a few years back, old Mr. Bennett insisted that we beat you as much as we pleased and then some.”