Boyd was the best teacher I ever had. He was the maker of slaves, and he made me one, and he was good at it the way a master joiner is good, who knows where green wood will split before the blade goes in. He took a dozen of us new to the place, raw men out of a dozen ruins, and before he built anything he took things off me.
The pride I had in a body I had made to be looked at. The care I took of it, which I thought was care. My own say-so about when a thing had gone far enough. He had the whole of that off me in a season, patient and exact and without any hatred in it, as a man takes a board down to what will hold, and only then did he build, and what he built was the part of me that wanted to obey before I had thought whether I would. I did not know him for a craftsman then. I thought him only the cane. I know him for one now, and am grateful.
The breaking was no more the Master’s doing than the cane had been. He never came down for it, having no stomach for the watching, I have chosen to think, and I keep him clear of it still, for a man must put his master somewhere the cruelty cannot reach, or he has nothing left to love.
He left it to Boyd, who had the stable and the breaking of us. The pony-work was to come after, in its season, the gaits and the harness and the great wheel, the schooling of the animal the place meant to put to use. This came before all that and went under it: the breaking of the man to a slave. The wheel, when I came to it, would ask only that a body go on. This asked that a body answer.
The schooling-yard was a square of stones behind the stables, walled high, bare but for the rack where the canes and the whip hung, and a trough at the wall. They brought us out to it before light, day after day, a dozen of us naked in the grey cold with our breath going up in smoke, and stood us in a line and left us to wait, for a slave waits.
Not anyhow. We were set standing, feet together, hands behind, eyes down, and a man who came out of it was marked by whoever was passing. It is no hard thing to hold for a minute. Nobody held it for a minute. What a body wants in cold is to move, to get the arms across itself, to shift off the one foot onto the other, and the posture forbade every one of those, so the waiting was the refusing of the answer to it. My feet went past aching into something duller, and the small of my back took a burn that came of doing nothing at all.
The cold had the rest of us too. Cock and balls draw up small in it, and twelve of us stood in that line with nothing to show, the sac hauled tight against the body and the rest gone to a stub of itself, which is a thing the free world lets a man keep to himself and that yard did not. Boyd would come down the line and look and say nothing of it. I learned to be ashamed, standing there, and what I was ashamed of was not being seen. It was showing small.
The waiting was itself the lesson, and I was a long while seeing it. A slave’s time is not his own. Boyd was never late. He arrived at the hour he had set, and the hour before it was his as much as the hour after, and it cost him nothing to take.
Boyd came when there was light enough to see us by, and went down the line unhurried, the cane already in his hand, and looked each of us over as a man looks over a string of green beasts he has been handed to bring on, and said nothing a while, and the saying-nothing was the first of it.
Then he taught us the answering. Down. Up. Stand. Present. Heel. One word to a breath, a single beat to do it in, and for the beat you took too long the cane across the backs of the legs.
The first mornings I was slow and it found me, a bright line across the thighs, again and again until the backs of my legs were a ladder of welts. There were not days enough between the mornings for any of it to heal, so I carried the whole season on me at once, the new stripe laid over the half-healed one laid over the scar, thigh and seat a map a man could have read the time by.
I stopped thinking of them as hurts. They were the ledger. Boyd wrote on me what I had cost him, and I wore the writing, and learned to be quicker so there should be less of it to wear.
And he taught us the collar.
Not to wear it. We wore it already. What a hand on it meant. He would come down the line and take a man by the collar, two fingers under the leather at the side of the throat, and say nothing, and wait. What was wanted was that the man stop. Not go down, not present. Stop, and hold still, and attend, and wait to be told.
He took it as a man takes a horse by the cheekpiece to steady its head, with no thought of the horse in it anywhere, and went on talking to the handler over the top of me while he did.
It was the only time that man ever touched me except to correct me.
By the end of that season a hand at my throat had me still before I knew a hand had come, and I had begun to want it. Two fingers under the leather, and one man’s attention on the fact of me for as long as he chose to keep it there.
That was the wage. Nobody ever called it one, and I worked for it the rest of my life.
The cold was more a part of the business than I understood. A man is slower cold, and marks worse cold, the skin taking the cane harder and keeping it longer, and I came to believe Boyd had us out before the sun for those reasons and not only because the day’s work waited. The shivering stopped being shivering after the first fortnight and became a current that ran under everything, a low shaking in the belly and the jaw that did not leave when the sun came. It came up in me later on warm mornings, at the sound of the yard gate, before ever he was through it. I put that down to the cold as well, having nothing else to put it down to.
Our knees went before anything else. Grown men going down on wet stone on the word, forty times in a morning, and by the third week every knee in that yard was split and scabbed and split again. The going-down had a sound to it, all of us at once, that I can hear yet.
One more thing about that season does me no credit, and I have never talked myself out of it. I had been strong all my life, and it was Boyd who found out for me that I had never known the first thing about my own body.
Hauling since I was eleven, the boats and then the docks, and a gym three nights a week through the winters when the boats sat, because I liked what it gave me to look at. I was heavy through the chest and the arms and knew to the kilo what I could put over my head, and took that for knowing my body. It was a picture of it. I had built it to be looked at, and never asked what it was for. Nobody had ever wanted anything of it but me.
Boyd wanted something of it, and it was not the lift. He never once asked what I could put over my head. He wanted the holding and the going on. A posture kept past where the shaking starts and kept a long while after that. A load taken into the third hour and the fourth at the same pace, the arms gone, the legs gone, the thing still moving. Inside a fortnight he had shown me that the chest and the arms I was proud of were furniture, and the back and the legs and the wind were the animal, and the animal had been carrying the furniture about for years without once being asked to work.
Then he took the limit off me, and that is the part that stayed. A free man carries his own limit about with him and consults it, and when it says enough he stops and calls the stopping good sense. I had one. I had an idleness in me from boyhood, a quiet agreement with myself about when I had had enough, and nothing at home had ever had cause to call it.
Boyd called it, and then he took it. After that the question of how much was in me was not a question I was in. He said when I was finished. My part was to go until he said it, and a body carries less when it is not carrying the deciding as well.
The whip was for that, and it was not the cane. The cane came for a half-beat and was done with. The whip came when I stopped, and went on coming until I was moving again, so that the only way out from under it was the very thing I had just told myself I could not do. “Lazy animal,” he would say, no heat in it and no insult meant, only a fault named. He said it to me a great many times that season. I had stopped before I was finished. A lazy animal does that.
The first morning of it I was into the fourth hour with a full water-cask up on my shoulder, the yard’s length and back and the yard’s length again, and I set it down. I had come to the end of myself and I had been let to say so all my life.
He did not say anything. The whip came across the backs of my thighs and went on coming, at about the pace a man swings an axe, and I got the cask up off the stones, down on the split knees to take the weight of it and up again, and went on with it.
I went another hour and a half.
There had been an hour and a half in me that I did not know about and would have sworn on my mother was not there. It had been in me the whole time. I had spent twenty-five years consulting a thing that lied to me, and a man I had known three weeks had the truth out of it in a morning with a strip of leather.
I went back to the box that night with the backs of my legs open and lay on my face and could not leave off turning it over.
I did not take it well, and that belongs here, because the rest of this reads as though I came to it easy. For weeks I thought him a liar, and under that, unjust. I had had the use of that body since before I could remember and thought I knew what was in it, and here was a man calling me idle with my legs gone under me. It took the best part of that season. What turned me was not the whip but finding, over and over, that he was right, that there was always more in me than the old agreement with myself had allowed, and that the only man alive who knew the true size of me was the one holding the lash.
He was making the body worth more and the work lighter both, for a beast that will not go past its own idea of enough is whipped its whole life, and one that will go past it is hardly whipped at all. It was good for me. I have looked at that sentence and left it standing.
Not good for the man off the boat, who would have had no use for any of it. Good for the slave I was turning into, who had use for every part of it, and who is the one that has written all this down.
That season taught me what was in this body and what it would do when it was made to.
For I grew quicker. By the end of those weeks I was down on the word with the stone biting my knees before the man beside me had begun to move.
There is an arithmetic in a line of twelve that I would rather not have worked out, and I had it inside a month. Boyd caned the slow. If I was not slow, another man was, and there was no morning when nobody was. Every stroke I did not take that season was a stroke somebody took. My getting quicker took nothing at all off the count in that yard. It moved it down the line.
And when the cane fell on him and not on me I felt, low and shaming, glad. Worse than glad. The sound of it going into another man’s legs became a good sound to me, and I would hear it and feel my shoulders come down. I put it from me. It came back the next morning, and the next, and each time it was a little less of a stranger.
I asked Jack a question that same week, in the dark, when I still believed there were two of us in that box and not only the place and its two beasts. He had settled himself against me in the straw, asking nothing, taking up the cold side of the box for himself as he did every night without ever once remarking on it, and I said it low, to the wall, and not to him.
“If I did a thing I was not meant to do, and you knew of it. Would you tell them.”
He did not weigh it. “Aye,” he said, into my shoulder, as gently as he gave the warmth. “We all do our job.”
He said it the way another man says the weather is turning. I heard it that night as an excuse he was making and it was years before I understood he had not been making one. And then, because he felt me go stiff along the whole length of him and did not take himself away: the Master stood over us both, and whatever lay between us was the trust of two beasts each loyal to the one man, and was worth that and not a grain past it. There was no other us. He said all of it with his chest still against my back and his breath still going over my neck, and I have never been able to tell, from that night to this, whether it was the coldest thing ever said to me or the kindest.
Every stroke I earned, I blamed on the half-beat I had cost him. Boyd never came into it. He was no brute, only a busy man with a dozen of us to bring on before the season turned, and my slowness was a thing I did to him, a waste laid on his morning, and the waste was mine to mend.
And I never found the hatred in me a man is owed who canes him morning on morning, not for Boyd, not for the overseers, not for the court at Valcourt that read me my sentence for a folly. To hate them I should have had to be a man wronged, and a wronged man has no peace. I had chosen on the block to be guilty instead, which is the cheaper peace, and the only one there was.
He talked while he worked us, low and flat, not to wound but only naming what he saw, which was the worse for it. “Down. A beast does not weigh it first.” Then, three men along, “Present. You are not being asked. You are being shown how.” He named us what we were without heat and without malice, the plain fact of it, and the naming went deeper than the cane.
He stopped at me the once, the big one, the prize of the new string, and looked me over. “This one’s a handsome beast. Handsome pulls no better than plain, and kneels no quicker on its own. We’ll get the rest out of him.” And under the words the want leapt up in me to prove him wrong by proving him right, to go down faster than any of them and show the handsome beast could mind, and the place had its hook in me before I had seen the hand that set it.
It was there, on those stones, with his word on me and the wanting already up before the shame could catch it, that I understood what the courtroom and the block had only written down. I was a beast now. Stock. A body that heard a word and answered it. Not a man being punished, who serves his term and goes home, but an animal being schooled, that has no term and no home and no after. I had stood for it on the block and not felt it. I felt it that morning in the yard, in the body.
He priced me aloud once, in front of the row, and it was worse than any name he could have put on me. He said it to the handler, over my head, the way they said all of it.
“The big buck. Back and legs are worth having, the rest is weight we feed. Heavy sac on it, and that is worth something the face never will be. Good mouth on it, wide, teeth sound, and it will suck when it is told to. Hole’s not been opened. On a beast this size that is where the money sits, so nobody opens it till the house says. For the shafts a face counts for nothing. For a bed it is the whole of the price, and this one will see a bed before it sees the wheel, or I am no judge. It’ll price better once it has been used a few times and stops shying.”
The row heard every word. Buck is what the trade calls a male beast it may breed off or may work out, and the word does not trouble itself over which. What I had built in my own free time, the chest and the arms I had made to be looked at, was weight we feed. My mouth had a price put on it in front of eleven men before anybody had yet put anything in it. And the last part of me that no one had touched was named out loud as the best of me and put under the house’s keeping in the same breath, before I had understood that it was a thing which could be kept.
And I heard, in the same flat voice as the rest of the inventory, which of the two uses the house would put me to first. It was not the one I had spent the season being schooled for. I had been breaking my knees on those stones for the shafts, and the man breaking them had already set me down for a bed.
And he did not say he. He said it, and said it again, and did not notice he had done it, because there was nothing there to notice.
And my body answered the words. That is the part I have never found anywhere to put. It was cold enough that morning that there was nothing on any of us to see, and what he had said was about a mouth and a hole and what the two of them would fetch, and it came up in me all the same.
It started while he was still speaking and it was not quick and there was nothing I could do at any point in it. I felt it go from the belly down and then the ache of the blood arriving in a part of me that had been drawn up small in the cold for an hour, which hurts, which nobody tells you, and then I was standing in a line of twelve with my hands behind me and my feet together and the whole of it out in front of me in the grey with the steam coming off the trough.
Nothing had touched me. There was no hand on me, there had been no hand on me all morning, and there was not one man in that yard I would have wanted to touch me. Words, said over my head, about a mouth and a hole and what the two of them would fetch.
The man on my left saw and put his eyes back on the stones. The man on my right had been in the yard three weeks longer than I had and did not move at all, which was worse.
The handler saw. Boyd saw. He did not laugh and he did not remark on it. He looked at it as he had looked at the back and the legs, and made no note, and went on down the line, and I understood that it had gone into the reckoning with the rest of me.
I held the posture through the whole of it, because a man who breaks a posture over a thing like that is telling the yard it matters to him.
I went hot to the ears. It was not the shame of being called a thing. It was the shame of hearing it said correctly and having nothing to set against it. He was right about the back and the legs. He was right about the rest of me.
I have had twenty years to settle what that meant and I settled it early, because a man cannot stand in a yard with that on him and no answer for it. I settled that they had been right about me on the block. That the thing they bought was the thing I was, and the wanting had not been put into me by anybody but only found, the way the back and the legs were found. It is the easiest of everything I have ever told myself. I have never been certain it is the truest. I have never once let go of it either.
He did not curse us and he did not invent, and a man who will tell you exactly what you are is doing you a kindness that nobody in my free life ever troubled to do. His words came over into me that season and I never felt them cross. Stock. The big one. This one. The buck. By the end I would hear a word said about me over my head and be agreeing with it before I had decided to, and after that there was no need for anyone to tell me. I had it by heart, and have it yet.
He was right about the mouth, as I found out that same season.
