“These are parting gifts,” she said. “I cannot take you with me, but don’t worry. I mean for you to be free.” Mrs.
Finson reached for her reticule. “The town clerk wrote it down so there’d be a record. And I have your paper for you.” She got to her feet and pressed the document and ten dollars into his hand. “I wish you good fortune, Cornelius.
I wish you the best of luck.”
As he listened to the wagon pull away he thought he ought to be feeling happy. He was a free man, free to go wherever he wished, do whatever he wanted.
But all he felt was empty. He was a free man, but he had no idea what to do with himself or where to go. He had lost the only people who shared any memory of his mother. He laid his cheek to the table where he’d eaten every meal of his
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life, in the room where Maydee had coddled him and combed his hair, where he’d learned to read and to write his name. And he wept.
The next day, he left for Boston to see for himself if there were African men who owned their own shops and wore waistcoats and carried silver-tipped canes. He walked the city streets until he found the hill where there were more black faces than white, and he stared at the dark women sporting crisp bonnets and leather slippers. They looked right through him, rough country boy that he was, so he made his way to the docks, where there were others just like him working hard. The stevedores took note of his broad shoulders and agreed to try him out on the night watch, when darkness and damp made the job even more dangerous.
Cornelius was sure-footed as well as strong and was rehired night after night, but he found no fellowship there.
He was just one more of too many black men jostling for a scarce job. Competition for women was even fiercer, for there were barely any of their complexion and few respectable ones, especially not in that neighborhood.
With his first wages, Cornelius followed a mustee whore down a dark alley, where fear and need overwhelmed him, and he was unmanned in a matter of moments. The heavy-lidded girl—half-black, half-Indian—would have laughed and walked away with his money, but she heard his ragged breath and, putting her hand to his perfectly smooth face, felt the tears.
“Poor thing,” she said. “Follow me.”
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In her narrow room, she made him slow down enough to follow his own pleasure, and then she taught him how to control himself to increase it. And because Cornelius was so young and clean-smelling, she kissed him on the mouth.
They slept on her cot most of the next day. As evening approached, she told him that he could come back after work, to sleep again.
She took every cent he earned that week, and in
return she shared her supper as well as her bed. She took his hand and showed him the simple secret of delighting a woman, and she gave him a lesson on the proper use of the tongue. But when he returned to her room at the end of the seventh day, there was a skinny white woman in the bed.
“Where’s the other one?” he asked.
The tart’s face was covered with smallpox scars. She looked him up and down and said, “She’s gone, but I’m just as good as her.”
Cornelius left. With nowhere to sleep, he wandered the streets, glassy-eyed, until he found himself outside Tobias Smith’s barbershop window, fascinated by the sight of four well-fed black men, smiling easily.
Smith spied Cornelius through the glass and motioned him to come in.
“Look at that nappy head,” he said to his friends, not unkindly. “You want a trim?”
Cornelius looked at his shoes.
“No money, eh?” Smith said. “We’ll put it on your account. Or you can sweep up to pay it off.”
Just then, his daughter walked in. Twelve years old but tall, her eyes were bright and quick.
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