The Last Slave (2021) - Marilyn Nelson

 

Samuel Freeman, emancipated

Nov. 8, 1820

You never could tell: people disappeared

suddenly in the old days, left rumors

and big black gaping holes in family trees.

Like the ones our Ancestors must have left

when Fate ripped them out of the world they knew.

You might have been sold. Or you’d run away

from despair and gotten lost in the unknown.

Was there a difference? Might as well be dead.

What happened to the loved ones left behind

holding dripping handfuls of might-have-been

was, simply, Fate. They just went on living:

they just survived. Or didn’t. Such is Fate.

Bought as a child by Captain Joseph Noyes,

I served him with respect until he died

and I realized that my Fate had changed.

For three generations my family

had lived with the Noyeses as one household

divided by an inherited curse

that made some Noyeses, and some property.

This was the only family I knew.

My wife was born and raised in a Noyes home.

Dr. Noyes delivered our two babies.

When I decided to claim my freedom,

five Noyeses testified on my behalf.

I was the last slave. Because freedom means

you have to earn wages, and make them stretch

from payday to payday, for rent, food, clothes,

the doctor when (not if) someone gets sick ... 

It doesn’t change the way the brutes see you,

but it does change the way you see yourself.

And that makes all the difference. I’d been free

six years when I was viciously attacked,

for acting proud while black. If I’d fought back,

I’d probably be dead now. William Noyes

hired a lawyer, who sent the brute to jail.

Because our families’ Fates are intertwined.

I’m sixty-five now. Who could have foreseen

that I’d be sitting out here on my porch

while red-throat whistlers and black-capped dicky-dees

celebrate, and the cherry petals snow.

No more than thirty years ago, who could

have foreseen this as my possible Fate:

a free, white-bearded black man with his wife

sunning together beside their front door,

looking down their forsythia-lined path;

their son out back hammering a horseshoe

in the blacksmith shop; their daughter humming

tunelessly in the kitchen; their grandsons

swearing they’ll finish chores before dinner;

their quiet granddaughter dreaming futures.

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