"What you grinnin' about, boy?" he asked me.
"Am I grinnin', Mud Albert, suh?"
"You sure is, niggah," he said. "You an' this red-eyed joker heah."
I thought that Tall John might try to correct Albert's use of the word nigger but all my friend did was smile.
"I's sorry," I said.
"Don't be sorry for laughin', boy. There sure is little enough of it in a nigger's lifetime."
I bowed my head because a tear came to my eye. For the first time I truly knew the sadness of Mud Albert's life. Slaving from the time he could walk until the day we wrap him in burlap and slap the dust from our hands.
I loved Mud Albert and I regretted his unfair lot.
"I got word from the house that Mastuh Tobias wanna see this new boy right away," Albert said. "You ready to go up there, Laughin' John?"
"Yessuh," John shouted.
"Go on then. Forty-seven'll show you the way. He'll wait for you too so that you don't get lost comin' back."
As we ran between the bright green leaves I asked John, "Why'd you give Eighty-four a name and you still call me Forty-seven?"
Up until then we'd been making our way quickstep through the bushes. But then John stopped and looked at me. His big eyes were filled with sorrow so deep that I felt my heart wrench.
"What?" I asked when he didn't speak.
"Your name is set," he said. "Wrought in metal and sent °n a great ship on the long journey across the sky. One day you may decide on another name. But for the rest of time my people and even the Upper Level will know you by the number given you at the Corinthian Plantation."
"What you talkin' 'bout?" I asked. His words were so wild that they felt like mosquitoes buzzing around my ears. "You, Forty-seven. You," John said. "Didn't I tell you that I've been searching for you all this time?"
"But how you gonna know to look for me?" I asked. "How you even know I was here?"
"I have always known that you would be here one day, Forty-seven. Long before men made iron tools, when terror birds and mastodons roamed the land we knew that you were coming. I waited and wandered and searched until I came upon the Corinthian. I searched for centuries but never once did I give up hope. I never doubted the promise."
"What promise?"
"You, Forty-seven. You are the promise. Your blood is capable of great power, your heart is free from hatred, and your mind dares to consider new ways."
We stared into each other's eyes and a profound feeling passed between us. There was a promise and an obligation that we both recognized. Then we grinned and ran off toward Tobias's home.
10.
"You wait out on the back porch until the Master is through with Number Twelve," Fred Chocolate, Master Tobias's haughty manservant, said to me.
Fred was a tall man, thin and blacker than nighttime. He had great white eyes and a perpetual disdainful sneer on his lips. He wore a black suit with big lapels and a white shirt with a string tie. His shoes looked like black glass they were so shiny and his white gloves made his hands look like cabbage butterflies in a black forest.
Before meeting Tall John I believed that Fred Chocolate was the most elegant colored man in the entire world the luckiest too.
Fred Chocolate was named by Tobias's wife when she was just a child. She called him Fred Chocolate after a character in a child's book and the name stuck to him. He was such a favorite of the Master that Tobias allowed the butler to have a shack to live in and a wife, Mabel Chocolate, to live in it with him. Mabel Chocolate was also one of Miss Eloise's maids.
Fred spoke for the Master when he was away and even gave orders to the white workers, all except Mr. Stewart. So when Fred told me to go to the back porch I ran around the house to the little platform built behind the slave's entrance.
I sat down on the stoop there and watched the little black ants make their way, in long lines, from the house to their nest under the honeysuckle bushes. Those ants had been making that journey as long as I could remember. Many a day I had sat on those steps watching them, vassals to a fat queen that lived under the ground. I thought that the slaves were like those ants: Flore and Albert and Pritchard and all the slaves on our plantation and all the slaves on all the plantations in all of Georgia. I looked around to see if there was an ant sitting on a pebble looking at everybody else like I was doing. But I never saw a lazy ant. Even they were better than I that's what I thought back then.
"Hi, babychile," a voice said.
Big Mama Flore had come up behind me and was looking down on my head.
I frowned and grabbed a stick to hit those ants with. But when I was about to strike them I looked down and thought about how I would feel if some hard-hearted person was to strike me and my friends for no reason. So instead I threw the stick into the bushes and turned toward Flore. "Why'd you shet that do' on me, Big Mama?" I cried. She knelt down next to me and wrapped me in her arms. I had been waiting for that loving embrace for many a day. When she hugged me I started to cry and she did too. She
kissed my cheek and our tears rolled together. She pulled the burrs out of my hair.
She didn't answer my question but it wasn't necessary. In my heart I knew why she turned me away. I had to be a field slave if that was what Tobias wanted. I had to do what the Master decreed.
Neither master nor nigger be, the words came to me as they would time and again over the many years of my long life. John had given me a gift that was also a danger if I ever said it out loud.
"How's it goin' out there with Mud Albert and Champ?" Flore asked me.
It was just a simple question. One word would have sufficed for the answer. But it opened the floodgates of my pain and labor. I told Flore about Pritchard branding me and about Champ's beating of him. I told her about the cotton and Eighty-four's pinches and the chiggers and biting gnats, I talked about Tall John but I didn't tell her about the wonderful things he could do. I didn't tell because I was worried that if Master knew about John's powers he might take him away and I'd never see him again. "Lemme see yo hands," Flore said at one point. I held up my palms.
"They all healed," she said. "Mud Albert said that you had real bad cuts. How'd they get bettah?"
I hunched my shoulders. I really didn't know what John had done.
"I guess I jes heal quick," I said.
We talked for a long time and at the end Flore wrapped, four molasses cookies in a napkin that she pinned to the inside of my work shirt. Not long after that Fred Chocolate showed up with Tall John in tow.
"Go back to work," the haughty manservant said. Flore kissed my cheek. Then she looked at my new friend and said, "So you the new boy?" "Yes ma'am," John said brightly. "My baby here likes you," she added. "He is a fine person, Number Forty-seven is," John answered. "The finest the human race has to offer."
"Watch your mouth," Fred Chocolate said as he slapped the top of John's head.
But my friend didn't cower or wince. He kept Flore's eye and she looked at him in wonder and maybe even with a little fear.
"It was nice to meet you, young man," she said then. "I'm afraid you'll be seein' more of him than you want to," Fred said. "Mastuh seems to think that this copper-colored piece'a trash can help Miss Eloise." "He has the touch?" Flore asked. "Mastuh think so." "Do you?" Flore asked John.
"My people know a great deal about herbs and healing," he said. "We've been curing disease for longer than even we can remember."
"That's the lies he tole Mastuh," Chocolate said. "Now we have to smell his field stink all over our house."