Was that it? Is that where the manhood lay? In the naming done by a whiteman who was supposedto know? Who gave them the privilege not of working but of deciding how to? No. In theirrelationship with Garner was true metal: they were believed and trusted, but most of all they werelistened to.
He thought what they said had merit, and what they felt was serious. Deferring to his slaves'opinions did not deprive him of authority or power. It was schoolteacher who taught themotherwise. A truth that waved like a scarecrow in rye: they were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race. Watchdogswithout teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not betranslated into a language responsible humans spoke.
His strength had lain in knowing that schoolteacher was wrong. Now he wondered. There wasAlfred, Georgia, there was Delaware, there was Sixo and still he wondered. If schoolteacher wasright it explained how he had come to be a rag doll — picked up and put back down anywhere anytime by a girl young enough to be his daughter. Fucking her when he was convinced he didn't wantto. Whenever she turned her behind up, the calves of his youth (was that it?) cracked his resolve.
But it was more than appetite that humiliated him and made him wonder if schoolteacher wasright. It was being moved, placed where she wanted him, and there was nothing he was able to doabout it. For his life he could not walk up the glistening white stairs in the evening; for his life hecould not stay in the kitchen, in the keeping room, in the storeroom at night. And he tried. Held hisbreath the way he had when he ducked into the mud; steeled his heart the way he had when thetrembling began. But it was worse than that, worse than the blood eddy he had controlled with asledge hammer. When he stood up from the supper table at 124 and turned toward the stairs,nausea was first, then repulsion. He, he. He who had eaten raw meat barely dead, who under plumtrees bursting with blossoms had crunched through a dove's breast before its heart stopped beating. Because he was a man and a man could do what he would: be still for six hours in a dry well whilenight dropped; fight raccoon with his hands and win; watch another man, whom he loved betterthan his brothers, roast without a tear just so the roasters would know what a man was like. And itwas he, that man, who had walked from Georgia to Delaware, who could not go or stay put wherehe wanted to in 124 — shame.