Free Men Read Online Free PDF

right hand slinked up fast from the hold of the left, and Antelope scampered up the side of the baby, tickling her shoulder and onto her head, and when the baby laughed, the rest of us started to breathe again. Sure enough, Panther couldn’t climb up where Antelope was, so he plopped down and waited and waited, and since there was no purpose to coming down, Antelope just kept on climbing, up off our baby sister’s head and right up to heaven, where our mother’s right hand balled up and drifted away, like a star.
    I think this was once a longer story, with more tricks and turns, but it had settled down into the kernel of itself, which was no more than good and bad, and the triumph of the weak. We were the weak, and weakness to us just meant that we couldn’t admit to our muscle. I adored playing Antelope by the creek and would not have wanted to be Panther, who for all his speed and strength and clawed paws never climbed up the baby’s shoulder to heaven.
    WHEN WE WERE a few years older and Primus was already in the fields, stripping the yellow leaves with the others, collecting his hate, we’d play at building houses in the evening—maybe because our own was so crowded and damp—him lying in the scrabble outside our cabin, his arms worn out but not his mind, directing me from the blueprints in his head. I made rooms for him out of bark and corn husks, two and three stories high, far grander even than the big house. I wallpapered them with ourmother’s hair rags, stuffed inside for color. When I was finished, he’d idle his eyes over and tell me what was missing, and then he’d be the one to find the donkey. It was usually a scrap of our dinner, or the dried-out canoe of a pecan hull, and Primus’d set it up alongside the twigged front porch so it was just right for whenever the owner decided to swagger out the door. We never really put a man inside, for we were the men, and it was our house.
    I’d recite little stories about the owner, about how he’d had a long day building houses (my imagination was small) and what kind of dinner he’d eat, with plenty of beef and gravy, and sometimes he’d nap because the houses would be so easy, but he most looked forward to his evening donkey ride, when he’d roam around the land he owned, too big for fences, and if he was feeling handsome would go visit the lady who lived down the road. (“What lady?” Primus asked.) She was very fair, almost white, and had long, long hair that never broke off in the brush or had to be wrapped up in cloth, and her fingernails were little pearls, not a trace of dirt. Our man would lift her up on that donkey and when they went galloping off across the dry plain, no trees in sight, her hair flew out behind her like the donkey had two tails. I could go on and on.
    He kicked the house down and scattered it before we went in for the night so that no one would find it, least of all our mother, who might think that we wanted something better than what we had. Sometimes I’d save the donkeys, would sneak the sponge of lichen that had been our steed into my pocket and then underneath my pillow, where I’d feel it all night between my finger and thumb.
    I told him he should be a builder, for he had fine ideas of spaceand how to use all the corners of a structure handily, and some nights he’d smile at this and agree, and we’d picture how he’d make mansions for white folk from Boston to Charles Town, marking his name above the lintel in half-sized letters that only we could make out. But other nights he’d tell me to hush up.
    “But your name—”
    “My name’s in the back cover of Master’s Bible, same as yours.”
    “Master isn’t giving you a donkey.”
    He’d tap his head. “That’s in here, little brother. That’s all.”
    I thought he was getting used to being who he was, but all the talks we had were just him fighting around his own captivity. The whole time I was making houses for him, he was feeding all the little