Babel

At dawn, the trees of Empty were as ferocious as they were during the shade of night. Looming and towering, stationed at the borders, beckoning high above the fog, but only in the interest of luring close enough to kill. Kill whom? It depends. But lately one kind in particular. These trees are no home, not to the sparrow or the blue jay, nor to the ant or caterpillar. These trees, some upright, some gnarled, some felled, all sentinels, tasked with one bit of labor: to witness. And maybe they do, but what use is a witness who would never offer up testimony?

But, oh yes. The testimony is there, to be pried from them only. The streaks on their bodies, the gashes revealing the white meat beneath, the cracked branches snapped holding the weight. There are reasons for every split, but they never tell, not even when asked. You must know, therefore, how to prod, where to seek. Peering into the cuts that lead to the roots: roots that lead to soil: soil that doesn’t lie, but curls beneath the toes of those whose blood nourishes it, who in other lands was skin-family, just like the cosmos above. One day someone will tell the story, but never today.

These trees, they guarded the edges. The most crucifying places were at the edges, there where the plantation met the land that had no owners (so said the people who were killed for challenging the idea that the dirt could have an owner). These were the roads, hot from the Mississippi sun, but not dry because the air was too thick, where even horses walked more freely than the people, insects hovering in the sovereignty they took wholly for granted, and the outer woods, the rivers rushing forward to who knows where, the arc of skies, low but forever out of reach. All these things never to be touched by any of them without great cost: a loss of limbs or a separation of spirit from body, the latter being the most preferable, but cowards would never understand that because liberty is more bitter than sweet.

And what of the homeless birds? They fly over in judgment. Almost all of them: the sparrow and the blue jay, and also the dove and the robin, but the raven is nowhere to be found. And the crashing of their voices would singe if the ones at whom they were cackling weren’t already burned by summer. So for the incinerated, the robin in particular was only music.

And there was, too, another rhythm beneath, a quiet pulse, one that had started even before the march out to the ends of Empty. Isaiah and Samuel thought they were the only ones who could hear it. Blithely, it whistled not so much in the wind as in the swaying of hands and hips, like in the midday praise in the clearing where they weren’t welcome unless . . . But the sound traveled and reached some ears whether they wanted to hear or not. It wasn’t, in fact, the people singing as they had first thought. It was someone else, or more than someone, judging from the harmonies. It sounded like something old and comforting, which made Samuel feel silly and Isaiah act it.

Ruth had to say but one word, and James, who had to act even if he didn’t believe, rounded up his barely-men to shake Isaiah and Samuel out of slumber—even before The Two of Them had a chance to rise and shine into each other’s faces, sweep up the hay they had fashioned into a bed, and greet morning with the same trepidation they would for the rest of their lives. How quickly and forcefully they snatched Samuel and Isaiah up and ordered them to stand. And the gleeful yet rough-hewn manner with which they fastened the shackles to their wrists and ankles. And then the spikes.

By the time they had been pushed out of the barn, the animals more surprised than they were, horses flexing their front legs and pigs’ squeals drawn out, Isaiah and Samuel had seen what the fog couldn’t hide. They expected the crowd that had already gathered, golden in the torchlight of the dawn. Some were tired. Some were smiling. The latter stunned Isaiah, but not Samuel. These were people after all. There was, therefore, some kind of happiness to be found in someone else being humiliated for once. Failure of memory prevented the empathy that should have been natural. Samuel knew, though, that it was selective memory, the kind that was cultivated here among the forget-me-nots.

The morning mist would soon give way. It would no longer crown their heads and obstruct beauty from view. Soon, it would descend and bless their knees and then their ankles before disappearing into the ground itself, revealing, then, how even a horrible place like this could be winsome. Ask the dragonflies.

How many people had already died on this land and who were they? First the Yazoo, who fought valiantly, surely, but who could never have been prepared for guns, or disease molded into the shape of one. Surely, the Choctaw were next.

And then the kidnapped people, the ones who dropped dead from toil, yes, but especially the ones who refused to mule, whose very skin was defiance. They were the ones who looked on from the darkness and occasionally whispered to their children, How could you? Samuel thought they meant: How could you let them? Isaiah thought, How could you stay? Answers weren’t forthcoming and righteousness filled the voids.

Samuel raised his head first. He figured that if pain was going to be this day, it might as well be earned. One of the barely-men snatched the chain attached to the shackle around his neck, pulling him backward. But he didn’t fall. The three of them moved directly behind him, attaching his chains, and therefore Isaiah’s chains, to the wagon that James had already climbed into. An old rickety thing—the wagon yes, but James too—in desperate need of repair: wobbly and dented wheels that made the ride bumpy and unsure, but purposely made pulling it more of a chore; a bed so eaten through by who knew what that the ground beneath could be seen through it, making it a dangerous ride for passengers as well. But it had long stopped serving the purpose of lessening burdens.

James raised his right hand and one by one some of the people moved from one misty spot to the other. Isaiah had stopped counting the number of them told to cram themselves onto the flat and focused instead on the distance between him, Samuel, and them. Some of them rushed onto it, but Isaiah couldn’t exactly tell whose speed was cursed by excitement and whose was blessed by fear. As they stood in the vehicle that threatened to collapse under their weight, none of that mattered. What mattered was the elevation. Holding on to knowledge that the toubab didn’t have yet, they could now look down, and that, too, was irresistible. Even that tiny bit of height brought about a new perspective that straightened backs and raised chins, while arms met hips akimbo. Isaiah accepted this foolishness, for he knew the source was false. But it stuck in Samuel’s throat like a bluegill bone and wouldn’t dislodge.

Chained to the wagon like the animals they knew they weren’t, James sitting inside with whip in hand, and a load of people cramped behind him, Samuel and Isaiah were forced to pull. And they would have to drag the wagon around the entire perimeter of Empty. And on a Sunday, too. They wondered if this whole show irritated or pleased Amos. They glanced in the direction of the people still standing among the grass and fog and spotted Amos there, a book held under his arm. They took in small pieces of his face and reassembled it inside their heads. Samuel chose irritated, Isaiah pleased. They would never agree, so they took up another project. They eyed Empty. This was how they got to know it. Every nook. Every crevice. Every blasted blade of grass. While Samuel plotted, Isaiah focused on the details.

“Hee-ya!”

James spoke to them in animal language and to move accordingly would make a lie true. So neither of them budged. The first lash sent a shock through Isaiah and his vision blurred for a moment before returning with even more clarity. That’s when he noticed that they were almost pristine. The lines of Empty. How at each point, they were marked by something glorious: a flower, a rock, a tree. It might have been tolerable if uninhabited, if simply galloped through rather than owned. With no one around to mind someone stopping to speak to the bee that found its way to the heart of nectar and wish it good passage, then look up to the clouds and yell, “Me!” Nothing this calm should have such capacity for terror.

Isaiah looked down as the tears said, I’ma coming. He saw his feet as they dug into the squishy, slippery ground that gave no traction. The second crack struck Samuel and Isaiah trembled for him. With everything dead set on betrayal, the young men’s hearts pounded a rhythm of distrust, Samuel’s more than Isaiah’s. It was the strain that had divided them and made them prickly.

Samuel glanced at Isaiah and resented him. It swirled in his chest for a moment before being pushed back down into his stomach with deep inhalation. It would only take both of them to wait until the chains were loosed to snake them around the necks of the barely-men and strangle them before succumbing to the gun wounds that would inevitably follow. But he knew Isaiah didn’t have that in him to do. Samuel had known Isaiah for all these years and still hadn’t gotten to the heart of what made Isaiah not even want to squeeze a fist tightly. What a danger to be so callow.

Meanwhile, Isaiah avoided Samuel’s glances because they hid nothing and what use was it to explain to him that a last resort should be last, not first? But still, Isaiah’s chest swelled with the strain of understanding that they were bound together by something much stronger than the rusty chains that held them. Tempting, though, was the thought of how much peace, however fleeting, there could be if one boy dared to be remiss in his duty and failed to bring the other boy water.

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.

Here, trudging through this land that surrendered too quickly, Samuel found what most others didn’t know: there is a spark at the end of a lash. A tiny speck of light, absent of any color. It’s hidden behind the momentary sound of leather meeting flesh. If you blink, if you blink at all, it will be missed or discarded as a trick of the eye. But it’s there, certainly. Untainted by the blood that has now darkened the whip’s tongue. Unmoved by the cries of the righteous and the wicked alike. Making no distinction between the two, it floats above, almost to observe, but, like the trees, never to witness, and speeds down, not like lightning, but like thunder, and everything shakes. Everything. The past and the future together. And with the present left in such a state of quivering, the mind has no choice but to travel and join.

Isaiah looked at Samuel and the direction of Samuel’s eyes led him to the spark, too. Even with the tears stinging his eyes, he saw it. Most clearly just before the sting that followed. A North Star that led no one nowhere.

Wait.

Wrong.

It led people here. To Empty. Where they, too, would become so. Capable, perhaps newly, perhaps always, of interrupting true affection and replacing it with something less, for reasons that were perfunctory and only sometimes bitter. The bombast, all that frantic posing, was designed as a cover for something even more indecent: nature.

And the spark mocked them. Flaunted how easily it could pierce reality and then retreat as though it had never been there in the first place. Failed to leave behind a path from which it could be followed into that other realm. Though there was no guarantee that anything over there would be better. It could be the same or worse, and that could be what the colorlessness signaled. Besides, a beckoning was rarely a reason to rejoice. Still, the mind, in callous circumstances, insisted upon longing for every meager delight.

Language undone by the threat of violence, they could only signal and suggest, hoping gesture could be translated and Samuel didn’t mistake tucked lips for “fight,” or Isaiah think a balled fist could possibly mean “patience.” But they had known each other long enough not to fall victim to such easy deceptions. They placed desire above the indisputable for the sake of not wanting to think, which is another way of saying surrender. And they couldn’t surrender now, not after all of this, not after they had stunned even themselves at how expert they were in uniting the entire plantation against them, toubab and person alike.

Shit. Look at how even the flowers looked at them: dandelions swaying not in the breeze, because there was no breeze except in the motion of Samuel and Isaiah passing them by. The milkweed turned away, but the obedients seemed curious, dozens of smiles laced on top of one another like treachery. That was what Isaiah smelled as they passed the huddled bushes. Everyone else might have enjoyed the fragrances, but Isaiah knew what it really was. So did Samuel.

Isaiah was tempted then to scream, to allow his legs to buckle instead of needlessly resisting. It had become clear that it was the resisting that was most despised. But acquiescence would mean nothing but more drudgery, and more abuse for error. To give up now would mean that exhausted knees could crash against pillowy weeds and the chest could collapse in on itself before it hit the ground. Lying there, ass out to all eternity, but able to catch his breath and close his eyes, if just briefly, he would raise a weak smile, but still a smile. This was tiny, but still joy. He hated himself for how much he wanted it, but hated even more the circumstances that made him want it.

Samuel wouldn’t dare admit he wanted the same thing so his hate could never be turned inward. If he closed his eyes, it was only to imagine the creative ways in which that hatred could be acted out. So when his hands and teeth clenched, it wasn’t only because of the lash. And just because he was bent didn’t mean he couldn’t see their faces. He signaled as much when he raised his chin and used his lips to point Isaiah’s weary stare in the direction of the crowds of people watching them as they drudged around Empty like two white horses pulling a carriage of royalty. This was not a race, but there they were, huddled together, only some against their will, waiting at the finish line. This was not a race, but it was a race.

Why did they have to stand so close? Because most of them wanted to see. They needed to see so that they could be thankful that it wasn’t them being broken right before their eyes. At the same time, both Samuel and Isaiah noticed the smiles on the faces of some of them. Maybe not smiles, exactly, but if approval could fix the lips to curl a certain way, then this was it. Isaiah noticed something more: a heaviness in their eyelids that spoke nothing of weariness. Their heads were tilted too far back. No. The downcast gazes shouted one word: Yes!

That was the weight that finally made Isaiah collapse at the ankles. He stumbled forward, landing square in a patch of star creeper. Stretched out like one himself, he cried into them, and Maggie was the first among the crowd to make a move: her hands trembled and her eyes were alert, but she knew better than to extend a hand. Samuel just panted, and maybe his eyelids got heavy, too.

Isaiah didn’t have to say he surrendered because lying facedown stretched out like a star-fool already said it plainly. It made Samuel angry enough to pick up his disparate pieces and put them back together in glorious order. One final lash for daring and then Samuel put Isaiah’s arm around his neck and together they walked, with labored and wobbly step, chains just a-jangling, back toward the barn, bowlegged because of the spikes, but not waiting to be unchained just yet. Twin backs juicy with the marks left by whips and disapproving gazes.

By the time they collapsed into each other just past the barn entrance, dust scattering as they fell, to the dreary people watching they looked like two ravens who had the nerve to become one.