Wild, Beautiful, and Free

by Sophfronia Scott

I was old enough to know that being angry wasn’t easy. Dorinda used to say that cursing someone wasn’t a matter of spittin’ out words. You had to stay focused on the curse, nursing the words and the hurt, and after a while you wouldn’t even know that some part of you was still working the curse, because it got so deep inside you. I didn’t like that. If a thing was inside you like that, it had to be eating you up. Just stood to reason. I didn’t care enough about Madame, even in hate, to let her have that much of me.

You have to aim in the right places. Don’t want you killing anyone. Hit a man in the leg if you can.” She fired the pistol and hit the upper thigh of the stuffed man. “That’ll stop him from coming after you. If they figure out what we’re doing and you kill a man, you’ll end up swinging from a tree at the end of a rope.” She checked the gun, wiped it with a cloth, and handed it to me. “Even if they don’t catch you, killing anything hurts your soul. Ain’t none of these white men worth you harming your soul. Remember that. They’ve taken enough of us, and they don’t get any more.

I tried to say that we didn’t treat our slaves badly, but of course that was such a shallow argument. We were holding human beings in bondage. He said to me, ‘When you die, Christian, will that be your argument to God? That you enslaved his creation but treated them well?’

“What is this life for if not to willingly give it up for those we love?

Tears welled up in my throat. He was not going to tell his mother, not directly, that he was dying. He was doing it another way—by telling her that her mothering duties were done. That he knew right from wrong, that he loved her, that she had provided for him and he was grateful. He told her about me and why I was writing the letter for him.

“It’s the cycle of it all,” he said. “Knowing that it’s still going on, even though I’m not there. Some nights when I was in the hospital, my shoulder would hurt so badly, but then I would think about what month it was and what the apple trees were doing and what chores I’d be doing if I was at home. I’d be pruning trees or checking them for bugs eating at the bark.”