Freeman Walker

Freeman Walker is a story told by a mulatto slave, Jimmy Gates, freed by his owner-father when he is 7-years-old, separated from his mother and everything he holds dear. After receiving an unforgettable talk by his father about the rules of life he will no doubt discover on his journeys, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence, he is sent to England to get an education. Jimmy, in the first of the novel's great ironies, has had a blissful, loving childhood and never understood he wasn't free until his new freedom” enslaves him miserably.

But that moment, in the carriage, I saw his face as I had never seen it before, and his sadness scared me. Maybe because of that fear, and maybe because after too much silence I was suffocating for the sound of his voice, and maybe because when he finally did speak he deliberately touched each of his fingers and thumb before each sentence, and maybe because he used the pronoun We, which served to intensify our intimacy as the horses broke into a gallop and the carriage began to sway—maybe for all of those reasons I have never forgotten what he said to me.“We,” he said, and he touched his little finger, “all suffer.”Then he touched his ring finger, bent it back almost ninety degrees before straightening it again, “And we are all going to die. It’s a law of nature. You know these things already.”He swallowed. I swallowed. I watched him touch his middle finger and pause as though he found this one the most difficult to contemplate. He blinked rapidly, nodded beyond me to the passing world out the window, the world we were leaving behind—my mother?“We are not in control,” he said.I could not take my eyes off of him. I tried to swallow again but my throat felt dry and swollen. I was dying to unbutton my collar but dared not.“It will take becoming a man,” he said, “to learn these last two. First—” He touched his pointer. “We do not live for ourselves.” Then he made a fist and shook it slightly as if he were holding something precious that he could feel and did not want to let go.He lifted his thumb and whispered, “But we are free!”

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Excerpted from Freeman Walker: A Novel by David Allan Cates
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