The Prophets(46)

They were not oxen, but they moved and the people watched.

Isaiah would remember to tell Samuel later that he never understood the fascination with blue. Sure, it spotted the land in remarkable ways, broke up monotony, and offered a reprieve from the blinding shock of cotton, but it wasn’t special. It was a distraction like everything else and he was tired of not paying attention. Still, looking upon it in the distance, peeking out of the fog, it seemed as though maybe pieces of sky had broken and fallen to the ground and perhaps it was right to give that a name. He closed his eyes and made the mistake of getting lost.

It was the first time that Isaiah thought about who came before him. Who was Paul’s first victim? Was it a girl? A girl was an investment for toubab men because they could be raped into multiplying, but the rewards of such could take decades to bear fruit. A boy, then, with big arms, wide shoulders, a black and heaving chest, and iron legs, who could drag a hoe through land, digging the lines of demarcation needed to plant whatever seed the land would take. Did Paul’s father give the boy to him as a gift? First a toy and then a tool? Or was he Paul’s first purchase, selected from the auction block after being picked over, prodded, inspected, and finally approved for a life of drudgery? It matters to know who was first because it should be noted who didn’t prevent a second. Not that he could be blamed. That was too large for any one person to manage on his own. And death was only heroic after it was done.

But fuck the first. Samuel wondered if any of them would be the last—or, at least, the one who would leave blight in his wake so that no toubab would ever think to take up the dreadful enterprise again. A well-placed ax or stolen guns, the only difference between them being volume. One had only to decide which they preferred: submersion or thunderclap. Right now, Samuel felt like making noise. He wanted to feel the warm metal in his hands, to raise it to one eye and close the other, to wrap his finger around the trigger and pull, to watch his target riddled and bleeding. Let someone else’s blood and body nurture the soil for once. How many people had he already seen destroyed? And no one with the decency to cover a child’s eyes.

As they were both inside of themselves encountering forlorn moments of disgrace, Isaiah and Samuel rounded a bend, which made the wagon clearer in the periphery. The people still stood in it, straight and tall, like pillars of salt that Isaiah didn’t want to look back on for fear of becoming one, too. Samuel, as always, merely kept his eyes forward because there was no reason to look back—or above. There was nobody up there who could help. The past had no use other than to dredge up pain and mystery and, thus, to confound. And there were already too many things in the present that made no damn sense. So the future was the only possible place where he might find resolution.

Isaiah, on the other hand, wondered the shape of the plantation. Was it square or rectangular? He could count the steps, but he wasn’t supposed to know how to count that high. It wouldn’t be a circle because toubab seemed to despise those, relentlessly worshiped right angles as though they provided order in and of themselves. It could be a triangle, but that too was unlikely because the angles could never be right. He realized then how much of this he wasn’t supposed to know: shapes, angles, and the differences between them. Mathematics was forbidden because, he convinced himself, there was an equation that would reveal things that neither the Pauls nor the Amoses in the world wanted the Isaiahs to know. They spoke of trees, fruits, and snakes, but that was only a diversion meant to dissuade you from measuring the distance between here and life. But Isaiah went along. Feigning ignorance hurt as much as the lash. It was the pretending that all he was good at was toil, and not the chains, that threatened to break him. The jangling of the metal loops that connected his and Samuel’s hands and their feet like the letter I; a spike holding each shackle in place, making the walk more difficult because the legs had to be spread to avoid piercing one’s own ankle with the other.

The toubab somehow imagined nudity to be degrading, so the walkers were always stripped down before they were forced to drag. Attached like a hind end of a horse so that degradation became the defining characteristic. But to be in one’s natural state, save the mosquitoes, wasn’t the kind of humiliation toubab imagined it should be. The skin caught every breeze along with every light. Privates were free. And the fog kissed you, left a moisture for your skin to drink, every bit as holy as any baptism, perhaps purer because it was voluntary and never purported to be salvation.

Walking on nettles was meaningless as feet had become immune because of the calluses. Isaiah, unlike Samuel, had learned to find any tiny pleasure wherever it could be found. So when James purposely steered them over a bush whose thorns were obvious, it had disparate effects. Isaiah smiled when he shouldn’t have; Samuel refused to wince when he had to.

What pleasure? Samuel, in so many ways, was suspicious of it because he knew how easily it could be taken away. So if he refused to adore it, he wouldn’t miss it when it was snatched from him.

Hold on.

No.

That was a lie.

There was one pleasure that he enjoyed beyond his ability to control, and were it to be removed from his grasp, he would become as empty as his pried-open hands, scraped out down to the shell of himself, a walking nothing, which wouldn’t only be regretful for him. The pitchfork they used to gut him would inevitably leave impressions. Those marks would have to show something. And what was shown inevitably becomes what was done. Samuel wouldn’t look up. Not now. Not never. He would look dead ahead. He could already see the blood coming. And from there, he could see the bend of the world, not that it mattered. All he could do was see it, never was he going to ride it. It might ride him, though: strap its ends onto him and kick and kick before it placed him over the stretch of its arc and rolled over him.