Boyd was a black man, and I must set down what the collar made of that, for it is a part of what was made of me. In the cold country I was raised in I had carried the idle reflexes of a free white man and had never thought them through, and here a black man held the cane and I knelt quick to it, and the old reflex reached for what it had always been let make of such a thing and found the collar had got there first.
He was over me, as every free soul on that land was over me, and I under him, and at the first I felt only that the order I had never questioned had been knocked flat and I left lying under the boot of a man my old self would have walked past in the road without a thought. I had earned the under. I did not yet know the collar would not be content to knock the old order flat, that it meant to turn it clean over, and teach me to find the new way of it right.
The cane and the cold and the word had been at what was inside me. What came after was for the body, and it came easier. Take a man’s own say-so off him first, and his pride in himself, and his name for what he is, and there is nothing left in him to hold down when you come for the rest. He does not have to be held. He holds himself, in the posture you taught him, and waits to be told.
He set us with his boot, as you set stock that has no words to be told with. The toe of it under my chin to lift my head where he wanted it. The flat of it on the back of my neck, bearing down when I held a posture badly, until my face went to the stones and stayed there, the grit in my cheek and the cold of the dirt at my mouth.
And once, the boot still on my neck, he said, “Clean it.” I did not take his meaning, and the boot pressed, and I took it. I put my tongue to the leather. The dust of the yard, the polish beneath it, the road, a grain of grit between my teeth. He did not lift it when I had done the once. He let me go on, and I went on, over the toe and along the welt of it and into the seam where the sole met the upper, and it took a while, and the yard waited on me, eleven men down on their knees in the cold with their eyes on the stones and nothing to do but hear it.
My face burned. It burned because he had said the word and I had done the thing, there being no part of me left that could decline him, and the shame of it was in how little of me there was, by then, between his word and my tongue.
I have wondered since why it was the boot, when he could have had anything of me that morning and taken it as easily. The lesson was the gap. A slave with any distance left in him between the word and the doing is a slave who will one day stand thinking while something is wanted of him. Boyd closed the distance while the closing was cheap, on a piece of leather, in a stone yard, where it cost me nothing but pride and cost nobody else a thing. I would rather have learned it on the leather.
I found out that same week what the closed distance was for.
He called one of us out. Not a stable hand, not one of the men the place had had for years. One of the twelve, the young one kneeling next but one to me, off a boat as I was and no longer in it than I was.
He said the word, and the man went down in front of him on the stones, and Boyd opened his clothes.
And there it was, the whole of what Boyd was. Black and thick and longer than I had any wish to have measured.
“Open.” The man had no idea what was wanted of him and opened anyway, because by then there was not one of us who could do otherwise. “Take it.”
He took it badly. He gagged on it and came off it, and Boyd neither stopped nor struck him, only laid a hand on the back of his head and said, “Through the nose,” in the voice he named a slow half-beat in, and put it back.
And went on talking over the top of him. What he wanted done with the second team, where the fault in the near trace was. He did not look down once. The hand stayed where he had put it and went on making its small corrections while he talked. The only alteration in any of it was that the words came slower toward the end, and then he was quiet a little while, and then he finished about the trace.
The man wiped his mouth on his forearm and came back down the row and knelt beside me, and nothing was said to him, and the morning went on.
Eleven of us with our eyes where they were kept and one of our own doing that in the middle of us, and not a head turned in that yard.
I have told it that way for years. It is not true. I looked.
I had three weeks of those stones in me and every hour of it had gone into keeping my eyes down, and I spent every hour of it for the length of two breaths, and nobody caught me at it, and I have never once been able to say I did not know what I was doing.
And what I looked at was not the man on his knees.
It was the place in Boyd where the words came slower.
And the first thing in me was not horror. It was that it had not been me. It came up quick and warm before I could get in front of it, and I knew the feeling, having met it that same season every time the cane found another man’s legs and not mine. It had found the channel already cut for it and run straight down. I had worked out an arithmetic for the cane by then. Kneeling there I understood it was the same arithmetic, and that it was going to be running on this too for the rest of my life.
The shock came after the relief. That was the order it came in.
And under the shock was the thing I actually carried out of that yard, and it was not the thing anybody there was teaching.
A free man stood in his own yard with his own work in his mouth and his own voice going, and a slave got in under all of it. Not by being clever. Not by being anything at all. By kneeling on a stone and doing badly what he had been told to do. It came out in the voice and nowhere else, and it was a hair’s width, and a hair’s width was more than any of us had ever taken off anybody.
I did not want the thing being done to that man. I have had to separate those two out a great many times since and I do not get them mixed any more. What went through me, kneeling there in the cold with my eyes back on the stones, was that I wanted to be the one who made the voice go slow.
I was twenty-five years old and had spent every one of them on the side that is pleased. It had not occurred to me that the pleasing might be the half with anything in it for the man doing it.
I found that out on a cold morning in my third week, watching somebody else work. I have never given it back.
The free man in me reached for the cheap old remark he had been making about such a thing since he was a boy. The collar got there ahead of him and turned the remark over into a plain question about my own throat.
And Boyd’s own words came back to me out of the line, the ones he had said over my head with a price on them. Good mouth on it, wide, teeth sound, and it will suck when it is told to. I had taken that for a coarseness at the time. It had not been. It had been a description of the work, and I had now watched the work done, and seen what I would be given to do it with.
I lay in the box that night with it. Not with the fear, though there was fear enough and it got up with me every morning after. With how little there had been to take. The words had gone slow and then they had come back and he had finished about the trace, and that was the whole of the ground a slave had got off a free man that morning, and it had cost the slave his knees and his throat and whatever he had been before he knelt.
I remember thinking, with the last of the free man’s contempt still working in me, that there could not be a great deal in a man if that was all of it.
A hair’s width is not nothing when it is the only door there is. I did not know that yet. I spent the next twenty years at the hinge of it.
He gave the word and a man voided where he knelt, on the stones, in front of the rest, a beast not let to choose its hour. I had met that on the road my second day and been unmade by it.
Here it was drilled. He took us to it after the answering, still down on our knees, and gave the word to the row and counted, and what had not come by the end of the count was a fault like any other and was marked like one.
The first morning nothing came. I knelt with my knees on the wet stone and my cock hanging in the cold and heard it start on both sides of me, eleven men going at once on the stones, a sound I had never heard in my life and can hear yet, and nothing in me would move. I bore down on it and the bearing down made it worse. The count ran on without me. I knelt dry in the middle of that yard with the whole row emptying around my knees, and the shame of it was not the shame I had come out that morning braced for. It was the shame of being the one body there that would not work.
He caned me for it. Two across the backs of the thighs, the same two he gave for a slow half-beat, and on down the line. There is no arguing with that, and I did not try. You cannot tell a man you meant to. A fault is a fault whether it was willed or not, and the cane does not enquire, and there is a kind of ease in that once you have given up on being understood.
What I learned in the end was not how to make myself go, which cannot be done that way. It was how to stop holding. Every man alive holds all day long and does not notice he is doing it, and I had been at it twenty-five years, and I had to find the place in myself where the holding was kept and open my hand off it on another man’s word in front of eleven men. It took me most of a month to find. After that it was quick, and then it was quicker than most, and I knew it was quicker than most because Boyd said so to the handler over my head. By the end of that season the body had gone out ahead of me, and there were mornings I heard the word and had already started before I understood I had been told.
We were sluiced at the trough after, one at a time, standing, another man’s hands turning me where he wanted me and the water so cold it stopped the breath in my chest. I held still for it, holding still being a posture, and I had been taught the postures. I was ashamed on those stones every morning of that month. I did it clean, and caught the shameful flicker once more, the small pride that I had not fumbled it.
There was sense in it. A beast in the shafts cannot ask. Once I was on the road in harness with the house behind me and hours of it ahead there would be no hour of my own to choose, and a body not taught to go on the word will go without asking on the day it suits it least, in a lane, in front of the Master and whoever the Master is walking with. Boyd took that day off me before it could come, and took it in a stone yard in front of eleven men at the same work on the same count. I know which of the two shames I would have chosen had the choosing been mine.
The bit he set back into the ones whose answering came too loud, the iron over the tongue and buckled behind, the mouth hauled into its grin, the spit a man cannot stop and cannot wipe. I wore it that morning for a word I had let slip, and wore it the rest of the day, for he did not take it out when the yard-work was done but sent me on to the stable with it in, so that I did the barrow and the water still bitted, and was seen so by men who had been at Beauvert years and did not look twice.
The jaw goes first. By noon there was a shake in it I could not stop and the hinge burned, and the tongue was pressed flat and had swelled up against the iron, and I could not swallow without working at it, so the front of me was wet through and drying and wet again. What I felt under it was ease, and there is no better word for it. A bitted man cannot answer wrong. There was nothing that could be asked of my mouth that day and no fault in it for anyone to find, and I have been as comfortable as that only a few times since, and every one of them was in harness.
And here was the deepest of what he taught me, and the one I have never since got out from under. There came a morning I was made to present and was not clean for it, having missed the sense of an order given the night before.
Present was the word for going down on the elbows with the knees apart and the back hollowed and the face on the stones, and the rest of you up and open to whatever came behind, and the holding was the whole of the command, for a beast that shifts under a hand is a beast that wants two men to steady it instead of none. I could hold it by then. I could hold it through the cold and through the shaking and through a stranger’s hands, and had found a kind of quiet in it, the eyes on the grit an inch from my face and the yard going on somewhere above me and behind.
Boyd came down the line behind us that morning. I heard him stop at the man before me and I heard what that was, and then he was at my back, and there was no word given and none wanted, the posture being all the consent that place ever asked of a body. Something cold and slick went on. His other hand came down flat on the small of my back to steady me, the way you steady stock, not to gentle it but to keep it where you want it, and then he was in.
I had been parted and looked into at the house, and had braced there for the finger and it had not come, and I had let myself take the not-coming for a kind of settlement. It was not one. Nothing had ever been inside me but the pipe and the water. Not a finger, not once, not my own. There is no preparing a man for the first of that and the place did not trouble to. It went past what I had thought was the end of me and kept going, and my whole body came up to meet it and had nowhere to come up to, the elbows down and the knees apart and the face on the stones and every one of those a thing I had spent a month being taught not to break.
Then he found something.
I have no word for it and had none then. He turned his hand a little and pressed, no harder than a man presses a thumb into a joint, and something went off in me from the floor of my belly to the back of my throat and my arms went out from under me. A sound came out that I had not sent. It was not pain. I could not get round it, then or after. There was a place inside me that answered to a hand, and I had carried it about with me my whole life, and gone twenty-five years without once being told it was there, and a man who was not even attending came on it in a cold yard before the sun and did not look down.
He did not look down. I want that set here. All of that was loose in me and he had his head up, giving the handler the count for the mill, and his voice never altered by so much as a word. The cane came across the backs of my legs while his hand was still in me, twice for the elbows and once for the sound I had not sent, and his eyes never left the handler and the count did not break. A fault is a fault whether it was willed or not, and he had said so, and he had made this one himself, and none of that came into it. He was not opening me. There were orders about that. He was putting his hand into a sack to learn what was in the sack.
And he found what he had come to find. I had missed the sense of an order given the night before and had not made myself ready. He named it flat, down the row, so that eleven men heard what I had carried into that yard on me.
I braced for the shame I knew, the free man’s shame at being a thing bent open to a hand. What came instead was a shame I had never felt and have felt every day since. The showing was only my use. I had been shown unready. I had carried him a fault to find. He had moved my shame off the thing done to me and onto the thing done badly, and I never caught him at it.
And having found what was in me, he set about teaching me to work it. It was a drill like the others, given at the end of the answering, in the same voice, on the same mornings. We went down and presented, twelve of us in a row with the cold coming up off the stones into our knees and every part of us open to the yard, and he walked the line and gave the two words. Open. Hold. A beat to each, as with everything, and the cane for a beat missed.
I had not known it was a thing a man could be told to do. I had not known it was a thing a man could do. It is a muscle like any other, which is the whole difference between this drill and the morning one. The morning water could not be willed and had to be waited for. This answered. I could send it and I could take it back, and inside a fortnight I could do it clean on the beat, and there is no getting round what that means, which is that I came to be good at it because I tried.
What it is to do that on a word, with nothing in you and no hand on you, I gave up trying to get anybody to understand long ago. There is cold air where a man has never had air. You are open onto a whole yard and nothing whatever is touching you, and the being open is the entire fact of it, and it goes on for as long as he does not say the other word.
A man goes twenty-five years and never once thinks of that ring of muscle. I could not stop thinking of it. It became the part of me I came awake to first, ahead of my legs and ahead of the welts, and I found myself working it in the box at night for the practice, unwatched and uncounted, with nobody there to be quicker than.
And the shame in it was of a kind I had not met before. The cane you take. The boot you take. This I did. There was no hand making it happen, only the word and then me, and Boyd could not have got me open on any morning of that season if I had not agreed to it, and I agreed to it every morning. And it was easy. I have never talked myself past that. It did not tear and it did not hurt and it did not fight me. It went the way a hinge goes. I had expected a body to object to that and mine did not object at all, and I knelt in the cold with the row doing the same on either side of me and could not find, anywhere in myself, the feeling that I had been wronged. Only that something in me had been found out and put to its use.
A handler went behind us with his hand and checked us at it one after another down the row and called up what he found, and their voices went back and forth above us, as they went about everything. Slack. That one’s slack. That one’ll do.
I burned through that hour every morning for weeks, and not at the hand. I had a posture for the hand by then. It was that the eleven men in the row with me and the two free men behind us were all of them attending to the one part of me that had never in my life been anybody’s business, and that I was working it for them, on the beat, and that I was working it well.
And while we held it he sorted us aloud. He went down the line like a man working through a list he has to have written up by the week’s end. That one to the shafts. That one to the shafts. This one has a face on it, so a bed. Two he could not settle and left over. It was the voice he gave the count for the mill in, and it went along above our heads, and every man on those stones learned that morning what he had been bought to be put to.
He stopped behind me and put his own hand on me and kept it there a moment. “This one has it. Good and tight, and it minds. Bed, and not a cheap one.”
And the handler said the other thing. He was a lesser man than Boyd in every way there was and had none of his flatness, and he looked down the row of us on our elbows with our knees apart and laughed once through his nose.
“Twelve whores at their lessons,” he said. “And this one here’s the pick of the house.”
And I must go back a little, because by then I was hard, and had been before any of it was said.
It had come on at the word. Not the handler’s word. The other one, the plain one, Present, the same beat as every other morning, and my body had started on it the way it had started on the morning count, and for the same reason, which is that they had wanted that of me at a fixed hour every day until the hour began wanting it for them. I went down on my elbows in that state and had been going down in that state for a week and had told myself each time it was the cold, or the night before, or nothing.
So there was no hand on me and nothing being done to me and no word said yet to lay it to. There was the hour, and a body that had learned to keep the appointment without me. It was the same trick they had worked on my bladder and I knew it while I knelt there, and knowing it did not stop one part of it.
And then the sorting went over my head, and then the word. Whore. Said out loud in a cold yard in front of the eleven, not to me but about me, as everything about me was said. And it took me the rest of the way. I stood up hard under myself with my knees apart and the two men behind able to see the whole of it, and I was as certain as I have ever been of anything that every man in that row could see it too, with their faces on the stones and their eyes where they were kept, and no head in that yard turned, and it made no difference at all to what I was certain of.
I had been here once before, in the line, the morning he priced my mouth. That time I went hot to the ears and hated it. This time I did not, and I want to be exact, because this is the turn and I have had twenty years to be sure of it. What was in me on those stones was not shame at being called a whore. It was that they had looked me over and put me in a class and named the class out loud, and that I had been found the best of twelve at the thing the class was for, and I wanted them to go on saying it.
And I did not know what I was wanting. I knew the word. Any man off any dock knows the word. What I did not know was the work. I had seen one piece of it, weeks before, done to a man three feet from me, and had watched it with every part of my attention, and I could not have told you what else there was, or what is done to a man in a bed, or how he is even put for it.
So there was no picture in me for the wanting to fasten on. There was only the place they had put me in, said out loud in front of the row, and it fastened on that. It knew nothing whatever about the act and was as strong as it was regardless. I have gone looking since for where in me it took hold and never found the spot. It was not in any part of me that had ever wanted anything before.
I wanted to be the best whore in that yard. There is no other way to put it and I have given up looking for one.
Under that, and I set it down because it is true and not because it does me any credit, I wanted the rest of the teaching. He had shown me one muscle I had never been told I owned. There would be others. I wanted every part of me I did not yet know how to work, and every word for how it was done, and I wanted it from him, and I would have asked for it if a beast had been let to ask for anything.
Nothing came of it. I have never taken the measure of that. They schooled it in me all that season and not one man in that yard opened me, for it was not the yard’s to open and a handler who went past a finger in a beast of that price would have answered for it. So we were drilled at it and checked at it and left shut. I went through that season worked and handled and complimented on a thing nobody was going to use, got ready as a room is got ready, a long while before the guest.
And into the place the old shame had left, he set a pride. There was a morning soon after when I took the cane without a sound and held the posture clean through it, and Boyd passed me by and found nothing to mark, and I rose from it, God help me, feeling more a man than I had felt since the sea. A strange manhood, got on my knees, in the bearing-well of a thing no free man would bear at all.
Even a slave must keep some pride, I tell myself, or he is nothing at all, and then I remember that nothing was the whole of what I was, and that they had taught me to take my pride in the one thing that fed them. They had moved the shame and the pride both into my use, so that I could be stung only by serving badly and warmed only by serving well. A thing you can move by those two will move itself, and want no driving.
I asked Jack about it in the box, on a night I could not get the morning out of my head. He was along my back as he always was, his warmth going into the day’s welts, and I was a long while working up to it, and when it came out it came out badly.
“What is it like,” I said. “To be a whore.”
I had to push the word out of myself to get it into the room. Jack had known me since the lane and had never had me for anything but the big one off the boats, the one who could take a load and go on taking it, and I had let him keep that picture because it was the last of the old thing left anywhere in the world. The word finished it. I heard it go out into the dark and there was no calling it back, and I lay there wanting it back.
He was quiet a moment.
Then he told me. Not what it was like. He never once told me what anything was like, in all the years, and I do not believe the question meant much to him. He told me how it was done. Keep the teeth off, he said, that is the whole of it, and the ones who get hurt are the ones that forget. Breathe through the nose, and breathe when you can and not when you want to. Do not fight the throat, it opens if you leave it alone. And hold still. A man finishes quicker with a still one and is kinder after.
He said it low and unhurried, the way one man on a boat tells another how to take a strain so as not to put his back out. He was not being kind and he was not being cruel. He was handing over what he had.
And I lay in the dark and learned it by heart.
That is the part I have kept. Not the shame of having asked, though there was that, and it sat on me for weeks and he did not bring it up again. It is that I had gone to him with the biggest thing in me, the thing I could not name and could not stop turning over, and he had taken it for a question about the work, and answered the question about the work, and gone to sleep. He was right. It was a question about the work. I was the only one in that box who thought it was anything else.
What I had left in me was not fight but a dragging half-step behind the obedience, a part that did the thing and grudged it, and Boyd’s whole craft that season was the grinding of that half-step down to nothing.
Boyd said the why of it the once, to the row of us down on our knees, in the same voice he gave the commands in.
“I take no pleasure in this. It is easier carried if the man doing it is a brute. I am not.”
“I am not your master. I am paid to hand you to him fit to use.”
“I do it so you will do what he tells you, the every time and not the most times. A beast that minds most times is no beast a man can use.”
“An unbroken animal is a danger to the man that owns it. I keep you off your master, and he is a better man than you will fall to twice.”
“Thank me for it.”
And he had us thank him, one by one down the row, the cane still hot across us. I said it when it came to me. The saying was the hollowest thing in me that morning.
It is not hollow now.
A slave who minds most times is a slave who must be watched, and a watched slave is one that some man has to stand over with his hand ready. My Master had bought a beast and was owed a beast that would answer. Had I come up to the house half-schooled, the finishing of me must have fallen to him, in his own rooms, with his own hand, and he would have had to learn to do to me the things that were done in that yard. I have tried to picture him at it and cannot, and would not want to. Boyd spent that season being the thing my Master would otherwise have had to become. He did it behind the stables, where none of it ever reached the house, and he did it so thoroughly that it never once had to be asked for again. Whatever gentleness I had of my Master in the years after, and I had a great deal, I had because a man in a stone yard had taken the other work off him first.
Boyd never said one word of that. I have built the whole of it myself, in the years since, and I have never been able to leave it alone.
One thing more belongs to that season, and I have left it to the last.
A man who needed to piss did not always trouble to walk to the trough. It was done to me twice that season. The second time is the one I have kept.
I was carrying water in the yard behind the stable and two handlers came through, talking about a horse that had gone lame in the off fore. One of them stopped. I set the buckets down square, because a slave who slops a bucket has made a fault whatever else is happening to him, and went down on my knees without being told, because by then a free man coming inside arm’s reach put me on the stones the way a hand near the eye shuts it.
He did not tell me to kneel. He did not look at me. He opened his clothes and took himself out and pissed on me where I knelt.
It came hot. That is the part nobody is ready for and the part I have never lost. In a yard cold enough to skin the trough over it was the warmest thing that had touched me in a month. It took me on the chest first and it came hard, harder than water out of a jug, and it drove the cold out of the skin under it, and then he brought it up. Across the collarbone. Up the throat. Over my mouth and my nose and into my eyes and back through my hair. It stings the eyes. It got in behind the lids and I could not put a hand up to it and I did not shut them quick enough, and what I have of that morning I have through the smart of it.
Some went in my mouth. I had it open, or it took me at the corner. Hot and thick and salt and sharp at the back of the tongue, and I swallowed, because a man swallows, and then it was down and there was nothing to be done about it.
It ran off my jaw and down my chest and my belly and into my lap and off my thighs onto the stones, and the steam came up off me and off the ground in the cold. The sound of it altered as he moved it, loud on the chest, flat on the stone, and then quieter as it slackened, and the last of it in spurts across my thigh.
He went on talking to the other man about the off fore the whole time he did it, and shook himself and did himself up and walked on, still talking. I do not believe he stopped speaking once.
I held the posture through all of it, because holding still is a posture and I had been taught the postures. It went cold on me almost at once. The smell came up off my own skin and stayed on me all that day, and every man who came near me knew what had been done, and not one of them remarked on it.
And then I did the thing they had taught me to do. I opened my mouth to thank him.
There was nobody to thank. He was fifteen paces off with his back to me and had not once had his eyes on me, and I knelt in it and understood that I had not been used. A man is used. I had been passed.
That is what it taught, and the cane never taught it. The cane was addressed to me. It came for a fault of mine, and it was reckoned, and it stopped, and a man had to look at me to lay it on. This was not addressed to me at all. No fault, nothing to mend, no being quicker next time. Every last thing Boyd had put into me was built to answer a man who was attending, and there had been no man attending, and I had no posture for that and have never found one since.
And what rose in me, kneeling in another man’s piss, was a want for Boyd. I will set that down plainest of all, and leave it standing as I have left the rest. I wanted the cane. The cane meant somebody had looked at me long enough to find the fault.
