Finding Freedom
Norma Sherman
Russell was born out of necessity, the kind of necessity that pushes the limits of endurance. Running and running, breathing shallow and constant, just enough to keep the muscles loose, loose enough to continue running, alert enough to continue listening for signs and wonders. There is hope for more than the last time. The way forward is the only way out. The mother tree that still stands beside the freedom river will be there. The lantern that burns during the night will be lit. The patchwork quilt will hang on the line outside the safe house. This time you must think deeper than anyone should ever have to or want to, knowing that without wit and God tomorrow would never be a part of your life. Necessity, that’s what made Russell.
What could it have meant to be wanted? There is a longing to be wanted by someone, anyone. There is a fugitive kind of wanting that posts wanted signs on trees and door steps. It will not happen this time.
Russell wanted to be a part of something greater than what he had been given. He had the gift of life but it was lost somewhere between the loss of mother and father. He had nothing. There was little recollection of anything. Laying awake at night wondering if the mother who bore him was alive. Did he have a father and were there brothers and sisters out there somewhere? Russell was traded and sold 4 times before his twentieth year. Somehow he was dutiful to mark his years by the seasons that came and went.
Russell was all of 6 feet tall and lean, keen nostrils with a bristled beard. He was handsome to see, but without history or someone to tell him, it meant little. There was nothing he could attach himself to but the work and the dream.
It was a small dream at first, just a beautiful little package. He carried it around with him as he tamed wild horses and weeded fields. A secret spot, fitting and perfect for raising chickens and children, but not in this place.
In the beginning, Russell had no mind to procreate such things. All of these things were values that connected a man to life and duty, duty and purpose, purpose and future. Russell had none of these and so they were just thoughts, that's all they were. That's all they could be in the beginning.
Russell would climb the ladder that led to his lodging space after supper. Settling in under a few tattered blankets, the thoughts would slowly creep into his mind and quickly vanish. Going into a deeper sleep, they would reappear like hunger and thirst, like wind scarring his face and pushing out tears. Taste and sight, spirit and love, his secret spot, that's all there was.
Russell was transforming. He knew that he was a man and no longer a boy even if every day he was called a boy. He was a man and a place, green and lush, strong and broad shouldered.
It was dangerous to speak any of these thoughts into existence. In his mind there were tiny eruptions that disagreed with the ownership and the dignity of a man's place in the universe. There was a deep seated instinct that tore at him, wrestled with him nightly and sometimes during the day. Some nights his heart would stop in the middle of his reaching for a branch in a tall tree, gasping for air as he tried to swim across a river, holding a woman so tight that she too could not breathe. Russell had lost the ability to have a regular heart beat. He knew that everyone needed a place and a purpose to complete that which was ordained by a God he could not see but knew it was promised from the beginning of time.
Russell began to dream of free towns, wide open spaces where land was red and rich, sturdy and promising. Land that stretched all the way out to where the sun goes down. Down to where trees would rise up early with shadow markings to welcome daylight and flow a path all the way to the other end of the sky. Trees that would wave in echoed increments until the sunlight was no more. The darkness would come but it was a welcomed darkness. It was a free kind of darkness. A second page to the first light. When the trees finished their bowing to the naked sun, it was then time for the glow of the moon to shine or dip through the dense forest and follow the creek all night long. Russell wanted this peaceful secret spot to become his home.
While standing in the middle of plowing an early crop of whatever, right in the middle of his workday the mule swayed back and forth for only a moment and fell to the ground dead.
Russell walked right out of the field he was tending in Nessie, Arkansas. A field operated by a poor white sharecropper who felt a black man was owed no more than the spot in the hayloft and the meager meals handed out from the back door of a house so far removed from ownership that to burn it down would not settle the debt. Being poor and white was a curse, but it was one step up from blackness. Class and servitude sealed the working relationship until the mule died.
The mule fell, still harnessed, breath gone, it turned itself over to the land it had dutifully worked. When the mule fell, with no hesitation, Russell unwound the bridal straps from his hands and gently laid them also to the ground. He guided the bridle straps as they streamed down either side of the lifeless animal.
Falling on his knees he offered the frail ghost of a once-strong beast back into the earth and he thanked God for the opportunity he had given to both. Both were finally free.
There would be no good reason he could give to explain to a man who fed his mule poor and his slave even poorer still. Russell turned to the North sky and started walking.
Freedom on paper had been declared. He had not heard. A man could maybe find ownership in the middle of the country. A place being settled by black folks who had stories to tell, just like his own story. Russell never stopped until he ended up in the woods of free town, Oklahoma.
It did not take long for folks all over FreeTown to tell stories of how Russell hollowed out a place to begin a life that turned into something bigger than he could ever have imagined.
Russell married a native woman who gave new meaning to signs and wonders. She taught him her language and he no longer wondered about his God and his place in this world. He got all of the things he'd dreamed about. In this place there were chickens and children, 9 in all. He named each one and inscribed their names on a tree with tribal markings his wife revealed to him. They begot Jessie, then Cephas, Bertha was the first girl and so on, Jephthah, and Aaron, Lottie, Veda, Timothy and Justine, all healthy, all belonging to Russell and never to belong to anyone else unless in wanting and free will.
A town can flourish or die depending on the character it takes as it moves forward in time. The care it gives to lives that become a part of that town will matter. The life it passes on matters to those who see it from a distance and wonder about why it came to be and who laid the cornerstone and the pillar marker.
Russell was like that in every way. Russell became a place of its own and folks shortened the name to just Russ. Unity among people who had long memories of suffering prospered together. Barn buildings and church buildings were raised in unison. Stories filtered back to little places like Nessie's and Paowak Arkansas, places in Mississippi too. Free town with its rich earth and unity in spirit was spreading. If there was goodness and mercy for one man there could be hope and promise for six or ten and even twenty, and so they came. Men who had false claims hanging over them, like stealing melons or killing someone over the right to stay or go, came. There was the possibility of land to own and so they came. So many came. It was no longer a secret spot; it was the city of Russ.
What could it have meant to be wanted? There is a longing to be wanted by someone, anyone. There is a fugitive kind of wanting that posts wanted signs on trees and door steps. It will not happen this time.
Russell wanted to be a part of something greater than what he had been given. He had the gift of life but it was lost somewhere between the loss of mother and father. He had nothing. There was little recollection of anything. Laying awake at night wondering if the mother who bore him was alive. Did he have a father and were there brothers and sisters out there somewhere? Russell was traded and sold 4 times before his twentieth year. Somehow he was dutiful to mark his years by the seasons that came and went.
Russell was all of 6 feet tall and lean, keen nostrils with a bristled beard. He was handsome to see, but without history or someone to tell him, it meant little. There was nothing he could attach himself to but the work and the dream.
It was a small dream at first, just a beautiful little package. He carried it around with him as he tamed wild horses and weeded fields. A secret spot, fitting and perfect for raising chickens and children, but not in this place.
In the beginning, Russell had no mind to procreate such things. All of these things were values that connected a man to life and duty, duty and purpose, purpose and future. Russell had none of these and so they were just thoughts, that's all they were. That's all they could be in the beginning.
Russell would climb the ladder that led to his lodging space after supper. Settling in under a few tattered blankets, the thoughts would slowly creep into his mind and quickly vanish. Going into a deeper sleep, they would reappear like hunger and thirst, like wind scarring his face and pushing out tears. Taste and sight, spirit and love, his secret spot, that's all there was.
Russell was transforming. He knew that he was a man and no longer a boy even if every day he was called a boy. He was a man and a place, green and lush, strong and broad shouldered.
It was dangerous to speak any of these thoughts into existence. In his mind there were tiny eruptions that disagreed with the ownership and the dignity of a man's place in the universe. There was a deep seated instinct that tore at him, wrestled with him nightly and sometimes during the day. Some nights his heart would stop in the middle of his reaching for a branch in a tall tree, gasping for air as he tried to swim across a river, holding a woman so tight that she too could not breathe. Russell had lost the ability to have a regular heart beat. He knew that everyone needed a place and a purpose to complete that which was ordained by a God he could not see but knew it was promised from the beginning of time.
Russell began to dream of free towns, wide open spaces where land was red and rich, sturdy and promising. Land that stretched all the way out to where the sun goes down. Down to where trees would rise up early with shadow markings to welcome daylight and flow a path all the way to the other end of the sky. Trees that would wave in echoed increments until the sunlight was no more. The darkness would come but it was a welcomed darkness. It was a free kind of darkness. A second page to the first light. When the trees finished their bowing to the naked sun, it was then time for the glow of the moon to shine or dip through the dense forest and follow the creek all night long. Russell wanted this peaceful secret spot to become his home.
While standing in the middle of plowing an early crop of whatever, right in the middle of his workday the mule swayed back and forth for only a moment and fell to the ground dead.
Russell walked right out of the field he was tending in Nessie, Arkansas. A field operated by a poor white sharecropper who felt a black man was owed no more than the spot in the hayloft and the meager meals handed out from the back door of a house so far removed from ownership that to burn it down would not settle the debt. Being poor and white was a curse, but it was one step up from blackness. Class and servitude sealed the working relationship until the mule died.
The mule fell, still harnessed, breath gone, it turned itself over to the land it had dutifully worked. When the mule fell, with no hesitation, Russell unwound the bridal straps from his hands and gently laid them also to the ground. He guided the bridle straps as they streamed down either side of the lifeless animal.
Falling on his knees he offered the frail ghost of a once-strong beast back into the earth and he thanked God for the opportunity he had given to both. Both were finally free.
There would be no good reason he could give to explain to a man who fed his mule poor and his slave even poorer still. Russell turned to the North sky and started walking.
Freedom on paper had been declared. He had not heard. A man could maybe find ownership in the middle of the country. A place being settled by black folks who had stories to tell, just like his own story. Russell never stopped until he ended up in the woods of free town, Oklahoma.
It did not take long for folks all over FreeTown to tell stories of how Russell hollowed out a place to begin a life that turned into something bigger than he could ever have imagined.
Russell married a native woman who gave new meaning to signs and wonders. She taught him her language and he no longer wondered about his God and his place in this world. He got all of the things he'd dreamed about. In this place there were chickens and children, 9 in all. He named each one and inscribed their names on a tree with tribal markings his wife revealed to him. They begot Jessie, then Cephas, Bertha was the first girl and so on, Jephthah, and Aaron, Lottie, Veda, Timothy and Justine, all healthy, all belonging to Russell and never to belong to anyone else unless in wanting and free will.
A town can flourish or die depending on the character it takes as it moves forward in time. The care it gives to lives that become a part of that town will matter. The life it passes on matters to those who see it from a distance and wonder about why it came to be and who laid the cornerstone and the pillar marker.
Russell was like that in every way. Russell became a place of its own and folks shortened the name to just Russ. Unity among people who had long memories of suffering prospered together. Barn buildings and church buildings were raised in unison. Stories filtered back to little places like Nessie's and Paowak Arkansas, places in Mississippi too. Free town with its rich earth and unity in spirit was spreading. If there was goodness and mercy for one man there could be hope and promise for six or ten and even twenty, and so they came. Men who had false claims hanging over them, like stealing melons or killing someone over the right to stay or go, came. There was the possibility of land to own and so they came. So many came. It was no longer a secret spot; it was the city of Russ.
Norma Sherman: After working as a civil servant for almost 30 years and raising 3 children, Norma went back to college and received a BA in Creative Writing. Growing up in California’s central valley gave her a love for the land and the people who worked on that land. Her fictional stories reflect those growing up years, listening to old folks tell migration stories, watching her father plow fields and smelling her mom’s hot biscuits on Sunday mornings.
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