The Running of Leroy

"The Running of Leroy"

by

Timothy Stillman

("Trust no one. Believe only half of what you see. For no one is as they appear. And nothing is what it seems to be.")

movie tag line for

"Breakheart Pass"

He ran.

He was as black as the sticky heat soaked Louisiana night, through which he sped. The black ebony to envelop his own. The black to soak into him and make him part of the reeds and cattails and the dense humid clouds of brackish water he ran beside. Pick up one bare foot. Put down the other. Repeat the process. Keep on the move and keep looking over the shoulder that is bare as the chest is bare. The only covering, torn cotton trousers with a frayed rope to hold them up.

He ran through the swamps. The air water enervated him. The chiggers dug into him. The hot wool night buffeted his panicked, thrumming body as he plastered himself into it. Flies and gnats flew round him and into his eyes. He had to push the insects out of his face by the bushel load. There was mud he pulled himself through. There were all the times of falling down. Face down into the mud, and the snakes sizzling past making ghost currents. The night open and alive, restrictive and imprisoning, the crocs eyes his imagination had waiting for him. The jaws to snap and reel him in, to cut him apart, to halve him and make of him a late night supper.

He had not eaten in he didn't know how long. He drank from whatever foul water he could find. He had not slept at all except sleeping when running. This device of running was like a machine that pushed him forward. Time became a taffy pull. Days hours and weeks were not in chronological order. Time seemed immense and he tore through it. Time was sour molasses and he struggled through it an inch at a time as an hour became a diamond backed rattler that he handled at church to prove he was pure and reverent and clean and a good yassah black boy. The night was a pen and it was writing him a new world, if it was not writing him out altogether.

Run into the night. Away from the white massah. Way down into bayou country where the wild frogs croak and send out desperate pleas for all black boys who run from white massahs everywhere. Who run from seasons in themselves. And all the seasons are hell fire. The Bible he had learned to read. That, and the old stories passed from generation to generation, he had learned from his mama.

But now he ran. As he put his ebony finger tips together on the pink palms of his hands. And he became the beast he had always been told by whitey that he was. And he was sweat and smell and fear and all the night train locomotives going away in his chest. His pounding heart, like a cotton mill was inside him. Taking apart the fabric of him. Instituting him in what he had done. What he had been forced to do and could never forget. Looming inside him spider trails, breaking off thread, freeing him, binding him, lost in the art of movement. Lost in the art of running for his life. Running toward his, yes, sweet Lord, his destiny.

The night snaky around him. The night signal sounds of running to nowhere just as fast as the black boy, didn't have a name, or a face, or an identity, forgot his name most of the time cause it wasn't important. And now there was just this--that he run as fast as he could, but the night always ran faster.

. He was a machine and machines do what they are told. Otherwise they are disassembled and junked for sale, and another bought in blood put in the previous machine's place. Caught in his skin and holding his hands free to his sides. Arms out like pistons. Carry me down the railroad track. Make 1838 more than what it was. Call to future or to past. Get me out of the smell of cotton and the white massah with his leers and his orders and his un-brooked nonsense that I have to say yessah to and nossah boss when I can speak as well as the lot of you. Ma in the night time shack, teaching him by candle light, holding the Bible to his hurting weary smoke filled eyes.

"Remember this. Remember the words, remember the stories, they teach you about human nature, never forget that, we's all the same, you and me and Lena and Sweet Henry, and all of us, we deserve to be on this earth, happy and free, maybe we deserve it more," her kind broken music box voice said, as her heart coughed out blood from her mouth. "Stay away," she said, as she lay dying beside him on the dirt floor in that little shack, "stay away from white massahs, don't let them get you, don't let them beat you down, don't BE them."

Candles in his memory. Candle stub gutting late in his mother's life, early in her dying, as he held her wracking coughing out life body to his strong heavy body. As she coughed blood onto his bare chest--he had never worn a shirt, never in coldest winters, which could get cold on occasion even here. Feel her dying. Feel her body surging against him and he calling "ma, ma, ma" like a bleating cow under the bone sun and the stifling heat and the shimmery echoes of memories going round and round in him now, striving to the next hill and the one after that. Those circles, white Man fingers studying him, trying to read him like Braille, indenting him, mooning over him like the moon come down to laugh at the likes of him, like the white hot candles that the white massah set around him in the great room at night, when everyone else was asleep, asleep.

And he had done things. Had done things that intrigued him. And did the bidding of the whip of the Man, the boss, who stood over him. Even now, seeing again, that pale ghost white Man with that black hearted grin in those jagged white teeth and that long singular eyebrow over those mean little eyes in that scrunched up reddened face with the smile as crooked as a cross the Christ of lies died on, sorry mama, but it's how I feel. Ain't no Christ here. Ain't no salvation except what I make of it. Sorry, mama, and sorry massah boss man, sorry mister charley. And the black boy up to the boss Man's mansion every midnight, like clockwork. Coming up to service. Coming up to serve with the all of him. Holding some of himself back. Pretending to at least.

The Boss Man, in that great room of such luxury and refinement, grabbing at him, tugging at him, kneading him, putting his white grubby hands down to that flat washboard stomach, marveling at the strong muscles, at his panther graceful shiny night body. The white Man pulling down the boy's pants. Gleeful. Excited as a kid at Christmas was Mr. Boss Man. Seeing that kinky pubic hair. Way up close. On his knees, black boy, so white Man could see it extra good. Sides, whites don't kneel to you bucks. Nosiree.

Seeing the black excited in spite of itself cock rise steadily. Seeing the heavy balls rubbing against the thighs as the black boy put his hands over himself. Don't make me again, boss Man--words never uttered. Sweating it out. Tinder box. White hot heat hell box. With God getting ready to do him. Hands over himself. Tentatively. Which the massah pushed away, worshipping that body close, taking in every single detail.. Hard eyes. Cold snake stare. Other worlds gleaming in the red lights of the red blood curtains and the red blood rugs, like the whole room was bleeding for this interloper, and the bright highly polished wooden floor of the great room, where the shadows lay as though they were hot humid oblique rugs over everything. Stroking and kissing from that stupid little pale lipped face. Held against. Turned around. We play slave at auction today, big boss man sah? Fingerprints all over his once proud body. Where the scars of work all day from sunrise to sundown lay. Tired in the very hollows of his body. Tired. But ready for sex. Ready for it even with Boss Man. Cause it was SOMETHING. It was human contact. of a sort. With the little Man worm pressed against his big boy cock. SOMETHING.

All curly sex. All kinky nappy headed sex, made to say words he hated, made to say them to the Boss Man with the spittle at the sides of his white cracked at the lips mouth, Boss Man stroking his own little dick that was the biggest thing about him. As the whitey pleasured himself all over the black boy's body, and massah said "put your hands here, and feel me and tell me they's big, tell me them's the biggest balls you ever seen on one of ya betters, mister nigra sir." And he had to, cause he was a boy, a child, an infant almost-- tall and full of night and mysteries and all the arcane symbols white men thought all black boys were in full knowledge of, bleeding headless chickens, and pentagrams under the light of the full moon.

And filled with grief and filled with nothing in this world but this massah who came to take his ship's prow every night as the black boy was hustled by devils in lurking, into the main house with its chambers and its porticos and its paths of corridors that went to other stately rooms where the gentle folk eat with silver forks and spoons and knives, all that rich food, and the table is cherry wood and covered with silk white cloth. Massah never let him see any of it. Delighted himself in torturing his slave with the descriptions though.

Other rooms, where the gentle folk have their baths, and take their days out of the heat of the noon sun. And the black boy on the rugs so hot so tickly on his buttocks. And white massah standing above him, little balls on such a big Man, little cock on the cock of the walk. But the black servant, the black cotton picker, had to marvel at them. Had to open up his huge corridor of a mouth with the red burning felt inside it and say "yes sah yes sah, you got the biggest nuts I done ever see. May I kiss 'em for you, please, sah?" And yes, the white strutter would say, yes, you may.

And in the reeling lights of red candles and the lights of oil lamps showing back slick sick flashes of red thick curtains and the red flooring bouncing back the curtains' color in the lamp and candlelight, it was to be all the nightmares ever to dream possible. It was like the worst thing imaginable, and yet the black boy was intrigued. And it was better than what he was told wenches could be. And it was the massah pulling off his elegant shirt as the black boy watched from the floor, and telling his boy that he, white Man standing above, always standing above, had had his share and he assured his property of that.

The puny Man who owned this whole shebang, owned it outright in the crazy quilt world of plantation logic carried over from the old country and how its kings were selected and thus groomed. And this illogic was here to the nth degree. Here in the house of columns white and gleaming, and ceilings huge and high and shadowed. As well as in the demonic smile of the massah who ran this plantation with an iron hand, not afraid to whip, to insult, to humiliate, who was pulling down his pants unbuttoned, slowly like a whore in what passed for heat, exposing his bird like laughable thighs. And the black boy wanted the power. Wanted the great gulf to close and wanted himself to be on the other side of it for once in his goddam miserable creaky headed life. I'm sorry mama, but I do, and that's all she wrote.

But he was nothing but a dick, a cock, so his dick which was indeed a good size strove upward still and all no matter how he didn't want it to, not as the sharp command of the massah with the runny red crazy thick hair. Not like the black's kinky head hair and pubic hair seemed bathed in sweat and in desire and musk and the smell of poverty and lostness and grue and blood battlements from within.

. And he knew it was wrong and he knew he was making his mama up in heaven cry, but what am I do to mama?, say no?, and be killed?, it would be worth it to die, but I'm scared, a total D coward is what I am. For it was the way of things here. The way of the gracious genteel living he and his fellow slaves had provided. The way they kept the machinery behind the walls of the mansion and the plantation humming and working and in order and in tidy rows as tidy as the rows of cotton planted and picked, so carefully in broken back agonies. And the slave quarters lined up beside each other like tears cried and saved and put in straight line order, because it was all they had. So was the coming in the night time hours to the massah's house.

And being with mister charley with his penis that stuck out like a weenie on a stick and those balls that massah made him suck and made him say "oh I can only put one o them at a time in my mouth I do declare"--all the language, all the stupidity that he had to level himself down to to make this fool and all the other whitey fools like him think he was just a shuffling boy buck ("my, your balls are shinin' tonight, black boy, shinin' and there I see some pre cum at your dick head, kinda rosy little dick head too, let me unzip your foreskin boy, scrunch it down like a tobacco pouch, and ohh lordy what we got here that's already wet with your lovin' for me, yessah") and nothing more to take out of him than the seeds of his dick as the seeds of his manhood were squandered and bled out of him all the other ways, by the foremen with their whips and their vinegar to place in the cuts, out in the massively large cotton fields, and whatever else that was still his that all the other white Christian god fearin' folk at this place took from him.

All savage and hot and his arms to his sides as he ran now, as he remembered then. "See them, but don't be them," his momma would say, and he would answer now if he could, I been them, I been them all the time, but now I'm running from it, I'm running to your sweet scrawny arms and I want you to hold me, mamma, I want you to hold me and kiss my forehead and tell me everythin's gonna be fine. God, mamma, come home. Please."

As he remembered the massah's seemingly bloodless body lying on him, like a thin weak thin sack of wheat with boll weevils in it.. As he remembered the white Man's liquor smelly mouth against his own and how it kissed him and pressed against his teeth, and he turned his face away and that got the white massah's blood boiling even more.

"Don't you ever turn from me, boy. Y'heah?"

All the pistons of the black boy's body the Man felt in such unadmitted lust. All the secret places front and back and the Man's fingers caressed the uncut dick of his lay, his serf, his bitch, and the fingers ran up the black creased totem pole, played with it, those crinkly white fingers like it was the Man's own personal toy. They lingered on the edges of the foreskin, straining to bursting around the hard penis. The foreskin that was like a shawl at the end of itself, straining to keep together the secret within. Straining to strip itself down from the secret at the same time.

And the hot wool scratchy rug digging into the black boy's buttocks, making his spine sweat all the more, and the white massah, grinning like a fool, faking screwing him between his legs and the Man making him feel those white chubby buttocks and fondle them and rub his fingers against the crack and the cleft of them. All in time. All in function. Massed and naked and shamed and excited and forlorn and wanting to cry but holding the water back. Done to, he thought again and again, god almighty am I ever sick of getting done to. And no one to tell. The Man always won.

And the boy's black tits were hard as little berries. As the white massah kissed them and bit them and then raised his head to the black boy and asked "Who created you, boy?" To which was the ritual reply, "you did, suh." And that black head was filled with sweat, felt like a dolly's broken smashed head, as the white massah took the heavy hemp rope that had been to the side of them. Tied the black boy's hands together. And then his ankles. All of which he had to mock offer to the Man, say, "please, sah, tie me up now. Tie me good." Chaffed wrists. Hurt heart. And the little boned Man straddled the black boy's chest, and he pushed his stupid silly chicken dick into the black boy's mouth. And the boy would have to suck it in fast and then do it hard and long, then having to drain it, to make the Man nut pop. And then he had to pretend, as the Man closed his eyes and oohed and scrunched up his eyes and got the most silly assed expression on his face, as the Man was rubbing his hand all over the black dick and pulling and squeezing it till it hurt like he was gonna pull it off.

The black boy would have to pretend there was this great gushing in his mouth, rivers of Jordan coming rushing in, which was conquering and making a sea of the fields at night under the liquidy Louisiana moon that was, itself as well, supposed to fill to overflowing. The torrents that were supposed to be a river of propriety in the mouth of a thing that was worthless, a mere ornament to what the riches were he was allowed to lie among each night. The silver belt buckle, belt still in the Man's pants of cream color, over to the side on the floor, in a heap, here in the massah's gleaming light in the nighttime play toy room. Like the eye of a snake, that buckle in its glinting glory, keeping watch. A Serpent eye that would never allow him to leave.

With that body on him. That squirming turning body like a cat greedy for milk and succor and suckling and night time swampy madness underneath him as he jabbed his penis into the black boy's mouth and the boy could feel the little cum leaking out and he had to do it right, had to swallow real and great big so the big Man would see that he was bigger by far than his nigger buck. So he could see that what he owned on his own body was even better even more gigantic than what he owned on the body of the boy who sucked him and who ate that seed that was tasting like dry cotton or starch. Hanging in his mouth like little cotton fluff, gagging the boy, pretending so, and its birth mother getting smaller and smaller. The Man circled that black dick stuck high up in the air, as the boy lay there in his nakedness and in his rope bindings. Which he could break any time he wanted. Like a thing of power and girth and strength and ready to destroy all civilization with the right growl, the right carnage, if only--the delight of playing with the uncivilized beast. The delight of flicking the lion's tail and seeing how long it would be before the lion turned.

But he had to be docile at the same time he had to be strong. It had to be all these opposite things at the same time for it to work for massah at all. Rub fire, camp fire, get that blaze a goin' boy, I'm hongry tonight. Steel dick meeting flaccid massah mouth. Meeting slurping tongue of the Man who would gut the first person who said he was a fancy boy, who would kill the black boy if he ever said such a thing, whose cock the Man had jammed in his mouth, the cannon of strength and dread that mouth drew into itself like Nirvana, that mouth with those little bitty corn husk teeth, while that white snub nose touched the kinky black pubic hair as the Man rode him, as the Man put his face down deep on the staff of Jacob, made of hard unyielding ground that was steel blue almost and filled with popping veins and bold flanges and moldings and sculpted just so and perfectly, as he sucked the essence out of the black boy. He said, sometimes, to his slave, "I'm gonna suck you white someday, boy: ya know that? I'm gonna suck ya so white that ya own mammy ain't gonna know ya--" and then the pause, then the loony eyes in those crinkly red pupils as the man says, he says, "oh she done died, didn't she?, seems she left a fine black buck for me to suckle and to give me suckle as well--glad she didn't slip her sucker--wouldn't have knowed a queer boy like you then....right, you pisser? You wanna be a white god fearer like me, boy? You want that more than anythin in the whole world?"

And the black boy had to take it. Had to nod, had to say "yassah." Had to hold the implosions inside him like backward fired gunpowder and he had to smile real stupidly at the naked Man who was always clothed regardless of that, and he had to nod his head, had to say you shore right bout that. And then if he was real lucky, if he was real fortunate he would be allowed to come in the Man's mouth and not have him pull away at the boiling point and have his all his own jism running down his legs and his crotch and onto the floor between his pulled apart like a turkey wishboned legs, and have to clean it up, have to clean it up in ways he never wanted to remember, to think about--and running now. Though the Massah had never been able to hold all the juice he shot out even when the man tried, the stuff always bubbled and frothed out. "Eat it, you bastard." And Leroy did. From the Massah's lips as well. Nibbling at them.

Now. Leroy. He had a name. Running away had bought it. This was it. He was a definable something. He existed. He felt existence coming into him each running step he made away from the plantation. Running like the devil was behind him. Cause the devil was. Running fast and with the world juggly and spinning and earth coming to meet him time and again, in his pounding eyes. Beating around his ears the cottony sounds of fast and free and no one will catch me and mamma you didn't raise no fool and I ain't a queer like that even though, even though--

"I looked through the window of the great room t'other night, Leroy. Got curious long time back. Where I saw you go at midnight and come back later on, head down, crying, and I just had to know finally what it was. I looked through the window, right in the middle where the curtain was still open some. I looked in there and saw what you two wuz doin' and it flat out broke my heart, Leroy, it did that for sure," said Henry. Sweet Henry. Lena's boy. Lena from the shack next to Leroy's. Henry with who Leroy had gone giggin' with time to time when they could catch a minute or two which was pretty rare. Sweet Henry, of the soft liquid molasses voice which could draw round a person and envelop them and make them feel the wounds of this place had never happened, who Leroy loved like a brother, scarcely older than him, and they took care of each other. And now Leroy knew his secret was up, his shame was complete. They had been lying outside the shacks, in the hot inverted bowl of the sky summer grass looking up at all that blackness that covers the sun at night and gives rest to the weary, some of the weary at least. Those who don't know the high price for the darkness, the high cost of putting the moon up there in the first place.

Sweet Henry with the gentle buck toothed smile and the warm arms that Leroy collapsed into at that moment and cried like a baby, this big strong tough boy, this boy who hated the smell of whitey, that crinoline smell that covered up the shit smell, or tried to, inside the thin massah especially, the powder he dabbed on his white skin to cover up the fact that whitey too has these malodorous parts of his body. And he told Sweet Henry everything, did Leroy, it gushed, vomited, out of him as his come had gushed out of him twice a night sometimes in his sessions with massah, who did not have a name as much as a condition, something that was black bars against which the tiger roared and screamed and pushed and sweated as he fucked the massah, fucked that pimply funny squeezy behind, and slid and slammed into him and put all that pain and all that sadness into the roiling gate of that massah who craned his head back and kissed the air trying for Leroy's face and his wild wide eyes, as he levered his strong thick dick, foreskin unsheathed, straining huge human corn cob into that ass hole, and turned further the taps of massah who groaned and shivered and laughed and shot his little sticky load into the floor as Leroy thrust the night and what was hidden inside the shadows into the moonlight man.

There among the cushy heavy thick covered sofas, and the demitasse tables, and the lamps of beveled glass, with the red ruffled fringe on them, and the echoes of man and boy sex through out the huge room, throughout the room with the antlers of sex that burgeoned out and struck a blow against the Christianity that supposedly held it all together, the right manners in the manor house, the right airs, the knowing of one's place in society, and it was all, Leroy told Sweet Henry, a lie, a lie as big as the South and as big as all the subjugation that went on and was called Biblical because the Bible adjures "slaves, obey your masters." There Leroy being ministered to by this king of pain, this king of delicacy that had a whip at one end and a gun at the other and ties that bind and sun rise every morning, far too early, sun set every day, far too late, only to bring the next day forward that was just like the previous.

And whitey sucked black balls, ("you hung like a horse, m'man, but not bigger than me, right, boy?") those black heavy ponderous balls, those balls that Sweet Henry sucked that night, after he so carefully, so respectfully, without a word, took the pants off Leroy and then off himself, the night of the confession, the night of the baptism into sex that was tender and kind and thoughtful and soft as the moon above them that looked down and half way smiled on how it could be. The coming together of a gentle buck toothed mouth that took each of Leroy's balls in one at a time, and healed the heart of them.

For it was more than friends, it was more than sex, more than love even, it was in its white hot heart, a salvation of sorts. A mending of minds and bodies and they came in tears and in joys and in magnificence. It was an anointing, and how good, how painfully wonderfully good it was for Leroy to come in the mouth of his friend who sucked him down and blessed him like Preacher Man on Sunday go to meetin' never in a million years imagined. Sweet Henry took the massah away, and soon and soon, Leroy talked of running away, the both of them, talked himself into it, and Sweet Henry talked him into it too, told him he had a chance, he might be able to do it, run into a new world, as Leroy begged Sweet Henry to come with him. But Sweet Henry shaking his head--"too tired, too fed up, too scared what's out there, but you go, Leroy, you go and run cross the world, you be somebody, you prove it to the whole goddam whitey world, you get prosperous and fall in love with someone who loves you back, and be fine and you read the books you can find and you chase the wind, Leroy, stead of it's chasin' you all the time. 'Sted of that sour wind named white massah." And Leroy scared and quivering and come with me, we can make it together, please, Sweet Henry, and Sweet Henry giving him that last blow job for good luck and sending Leroy on his terrified way.

"Off to the world," Leroy thought, ran it all through his mind, the litany of words to keep him company, building blocks for tomorrow," out of Louisiana, and off to something better, something mama would be proud of me for, something Sweet Henry would be proud of me for too, and then I'll send for him and we'll get us a house all to ourselves and we'll fish and we'll read books and we'll find us some fancy women or some fancy men, whichever we prefer. We'll walk up the steps of the finest whorehouse in Wherever New Orleans and we'll be prosperous men in our white coats and fancy dan pants and our thick heavy rich black polished to a farethewell boots, and we'll say we want the best you got, as we pull out our wad of money, and we won't take no for an answer. And if anyone's got a mind to clop us on the head and steal our poke, this here is called a knife. It cuts deep. Wanna see?"

Sweet and fine woman flesh and man flesh and all together or in the shadows each for us, separate, and we'll never rue the day I ran away, and the day I got me a job, a real fine job, and I will send for Sweet Henry to leave the sweat and the cracks of the shack and the passing out heat of the noon day picking and harvesting, and the crawling on his belly for some sour dough for lunch and the same for supper if he's lucky and not gettin' one damn dime for any of this and having to kiss the ass of massah--that goddam massah, that fuckin 13 year old MAN who done took over the plantation now his pappy died and his mama is up in her big lace bed on the second floor, her with her vapors and her chocolate candy, in a room massah said was so ornate and fluffy and pink and white and so fancy and soft that it was all like her deep wide feather bed.

The whole room was something you could just sink down into it for all time, said that fuckin 13 year old MAN to a grown man like me, some where over 30, don't know exactly, has to be a BOY though to the MAN, I has to be treated like I'm a little child (gets that boy OFF seeing it like that, it does) and that little dick wipe with his two inch manhood stickin' out I gotta just praise and pretend he comes like a sperm whale, no more of that, I'm a not a fuckin' little gnat like him, goddammit, me and Sweet Henry--no one else would believe a little boy could make a man do all those things. They would say that black bastard done mo-lested this darling butter wouldn't melt WHITE WEALTHY RESPECTED SUNDAY SCHOOL ATTENDING CHILD. Oh god baby did he hurt you bad? Tell me every detail. Don't leave a thing out, the kinfolk and the townsfolk would ask, eyes leaking their electricity out of them, especially at Sunday go to meetin'. They would be on tenterhooks for sure about that. Then there would be a grand lynching and a chicken dinner afterwards and that little Man would be laughing his sorry ass off all the way. Cause that little piece of shit knowed it too. Held it over my head. Laughed about it as he sucked my ass. Laughed his fool head off as he stuck his penis in my mouth and commanded me to suck till I was a white fool doin' it, till he told me to stop.

And the words like pistons in his brain and his body and his heart and the words like the steam engine of a train and like the train wheels clattering down the early dark morning hours of the tracks, that train roaring out like greased lightning, and all the world is night right now with scary hills and thick frightening deep valleys and depressions to go through, the whole world seeming like some gigantic slave auction I'm running from, but running to? where, don't think about that, don't. Cause where we're going, Sweet Henry and me, it won't be a prison no more, and when the sun rises, our black black ebony skin won't shame us and whitey won't have power over us and we will bloody well kill all of them and eat them up for lunch and supper time too,

The words, the hopes, the prayers for deliverance, in Leroy's head, seeing Sweet Henry's eyes as he gets the ticket Leroy will one fine day send a man he could trust, with money, to massah, and buy Sweet Henry away from him, give him money for some real clothes and a ticket for the noon day train, that Sweet Henry can board, as proud and fine and free and anybody-- get off your knees shoe shine boy, get that gooney smile off your face, porters, this is the world and I'm gonna to see my man and the Man can kiss my royal butt and damn well pay ME for the privilege. SWEET HENRY sitting all comfortable and happy and black as night shining to beat the band, while he's smoking a huge cee-gar in the smoking car, the refinements of respectability all round him, the seat soft and secure and holding him on his safe journey to me, in all that steel and silver and black and burning coal and head lights blazing forth.

As both of us have run away for good from, and laughing our butts off at the little whiny white boy back there who was meaner than all the snakes in the world, the little boy his mother patted on the head in the evening when she got out of her bed, her vapors trailing her, and sat, so high and mighty, in her ruffled gown and house coat, with her sweet innocent straight from heaven above child beside her on the verandah swing, as he nestled into her, while she stroked his so angelic, so placid, so delicate head, while the big buck nigger field hands and their women and children had to come by in ritual and say good night to the ma'am and to the massah, and the massah, the little pisser, smiling so sweetly at his brainless woman bearer, and so devilishly at Leroy and the others standing in line before them, as they bowed their inferior heads to their gods in the firmament, bidding pleasant dreams. Leroy knowing in a few hours the sex games will start again. But no more.

Away from that. Away from it all.

And he ran. And the marshes and the dark places ran with him. They became him. Were him. Felt him from the outside and the inside. And he held the words, the building blocks of the future miracle, in his mind and whispered them with hard run lungs, as it all went along, the world around him rocking and veering off, the mud slapping his feet, tripping him, and him getting back up again, mosquitoes bringing blood from all parts of his body, his having to stop a moment here and there to pull a leech off his water filmed starved thirsty frame, and all the world wrapped around him, and was filled with dark spots before his eyes. All crumpled, the world, seeming sad for him and being sick for him as well, since he did not have the time to do it himself.

Leroy refused--simply refused!--to let himself hear what he knew and had known for some time he was hearing, till they were close enough to him, so he couldn't pretend it any longer, and he shouted the words of freedom out of his croaky dry seared throat, like gospel songs sung to a black god above who would surely get around to protecting his children some time, but it did no good. And Leroy stopping by increments. Fast then less so. A bit more running. A bit slower afterwards. Run a bit, tired, need to stop, need to let destiny catch up with me. It was always behind me. Never in front of me. Walk a bit, then a small sprint. Then--nothing. The sounds behind him dug into him. Pushed him down. Made him give up the ghost. Falling flat. The mud surging up against him. Take me hide me sink me in you. But the mud did not hear. Lungs bursting. Heart imploding. Muscles dancing snake dances in him. As he tried to hold onto tomorrow that had to be in him. That HAD to be. But it was too late. It had always been too late.

And the hounds' barks and the cuss word shouts of the men were closer and closer to him and they were louder than the little words of Leroy who had no name, who had no future, and no past, who better get used to some more pain to come, the whipping post for sure, and the little boy to put the bite and fear of god into him. The black man naked to the world, all the plantation slaves and the white people gathered around as the boy slashed him on the back and the butt with the whip. And Leroy praying not to cry. To be a real man about it. He would hold out. He had to.

Had they killed Sweet Henry? The stark realization came. It wasn't bad enough. That had to have happened too. Massah and his suck ups knew how close Leroy and Sweet Henry were. Knew Sweet Henry would know where Leroy done gone to. That was why Sweet Henry stayed. So they would question him, hurt him, slam him around, whip him, make him talk. But he wouldn't. He was buying Leroy time. With his life, he was buying his friend all the time he could. And thinking that, Leroy crumpled into himself. Decayed inward. He had not considered it before. It came like a great foul cloud sinking into him. He knew then that Sweet Henry was dead. Because of Leroy. Sweet Henry had given up his life for his friend to escape. What happens to those who stay behind so their friends can run away. The cost of staying behind. The cost!! Leroy howled. And the dogs and men found him easily.

And, if he was lucky, if he was very very fortunate indeed, he could go back to kissing god fearin' sweet angel massah on the pimply rump again. After his whipped wounds started scabbing over. The ones that were capable of scabbing over at least.

Then the men were on him.

the end