Homegoing(59)

He thought about going back home, but realized that he didn’t know where home was. There was nothing left for him on the old plantations he’d worked, and he had no family to speak of. The first night of his second freedom, he walked as far as he could, walked until there was no mine in sight, no smell of coal clinging to his nostrils. He entered the first bar he saw that contained black people, and with the little money he had, he ordered a drink.

He had showered that morning, tried to rub the clench marks of the shackles from his ankles, the soot from underneath his nails. He had stared at himself in the mirror until he was confident that no one could tell he had ever been in a mine.

Sipping his drink, H noticed a woman. All he could think was that her skin was the color of cotton stems. And he missed that blackness, having only known the true blackness of coal for nearly ten years.



“Excuse me, miss. Could you tell me where I am?” he asked. He hadn’t spoken to a woman since the day he called Ethe by another woman’s name.

“You ain’t looked at the sign ’fore you came in?” she asked, smiling.

“I reckon I ain’t,” he said.

“You in Pete’s bar, Mr….”

“H is my name.”

“Mr. H is my name.”

They talked for an hour. He found out her name was Dinah and she lived in Mobile but was visiting a cousin there in Birmingham, a very Christian woman who would not care to see her kin drinking. H had just about gotten it into his head to ask her to marry him when another man stepped in to join them.

“You look mighty strong,” the man said.

H nodded. “I s’pose I am.”

“How you got to be so strong?” the man asked, and H shrugged. “Go on,” the man said. “Roll up yo sleeve. Show us some muscle.”

H started laughing, but then he looked at Dinah, and her eyes were twinkling in that way that said maybe she wouldn’t mind seeing. And so he rolled up his sleeve.

At first, both people were nodding appreciatively, but then the man came closer. “What’s that?” he said, tugging where the sleeve met H’s back until he’d made a rent in the fabric, and the whole cheap thing tore loose.

“Dear Lord!” Dinah said, covering her mouth.

H craned his neck trying to look at his own back, but then he remembered and knew he didn’t need to. It had been nearly twenty-five years since the end of slavery, and free men were not supposed to have fresh scars on their backs, the evidence of a whip.

“I knew it!” the man said. “I knew he was one of them cons from over at the mines. Ain’t nothin’ else he could be! Dinah, don’t you waste any more time talking to this nigger.”

She didn’t. She walked away with the man to stand on the other side of the bar. H rolled his sleeve back down and knew that he couldn’t go back to the free world, marked as he was.



He moved to Pratt City, the town that was made up of ex-cons, white and black alike. Convict miners who were now free miners. His first night there, he asked around for a few minutes until he found Joecy, along with his wife and children, who had moved out to Pratt City to be with him.

“Ain’t you got no one?” Joecy’s wife said, frying up some salt pork for H, working hard to make up for the fact that he had not eaten a good meal for ten years, maybe more.

“Had a woman named Ethe, long time ago, but I reckon she ain’t gon’ wanna hear from me now.”

The wife gave him a piteous look, and H figured she was thinking she knew the whole story of Ethe, having married a man herself before the white man came and labeled him con.

“Lil Joe!” the wife called, over and over, until a child appeared. “This our son, Lil Joe,” she said. “He know how to write.”

H looked him over. He couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. He was knobby-kneed and clear-eyed. He looked just like his father, but he was different too. Maybe he wouldn’t end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he’d be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.

“He gon’ write yo woman,” the wife said.

“Naw,” H said, thinking about how Ethe had fled the room the last time they were together, fled like a spirit was chasing her. “Ain’t no need.”

The wife clucked her tongue twice, three times. “I ain’t gon’ hear none of that,” she said. “Somebody gotta know you free now. Somebody in this world need to know at least that.”

“With all due respect, ma’am. I got myself, and that’s all I ever needed.”

Joecy’s wife looked at him long and hard, and H could see all the pity and anger in that look, but he didn’t care. He didn’t back down, and so, finally, she had to.

The next morning, H walked with Joecy over to the mine to ask for work as a free laborer.

The boss man was called Mr. John. He asked H to take off his shirt. He inspected the muscles on his back and on his arms, and whistled.



“Any man what can spend ten years working at Rock Slope and live to tell about it’s worth a-watching. Made some deal with the devil, have you?” Mr. John asked, looking at H with his piercing blue eyes.

“Just a hard worker, sir,” Joecy said. “Hard and smart, too.”

“You vouch for him, Joecy?” Mr. John asked.