Homegoing
Soon the man fell asleep. H listened to him snore, watched the rise and fall of his chest. The day the war ended, H had left his old master’s plantation and began to walk from Georgia to Alabama. He’d wanted new sights and sounds to go with his newfound freedom. He was so happy to be free. Everyone he knew was just happy to be free. But it didn’t last long.
H spent the next four days in the county jail. On the second day, the guards took his cellmate away. He didn’t know where. When they finally came for H, the guards wouldn’t tell him what the charge was, only that he had to pay the ten-dollar fine by the end of the night.
“I only got five dollars saved,” H said. It had taken him nearly ten years of sharecropping to put away that much.
“Maybe your family can help,” the chief deputy said, but he was already walking away, on to the next person.
“Ain’t got no family,” H said to no one. He had made the walk from Georgia to Alabama by himself. He was used to being alone, but Alabama had turned H’s loneliness into something like a physical presence. He could hold it when he went to bed at night. It was in the handle of his hoe, in the puffs of cotton that floated away.
He was eighteen when he met his woman, Ethe. By then he’d gotten so big that no one ever crossed him. He could walk into a room and watch it clear as men and women made way for him. But Ethe always stood her ground. She was the most solid woman he’d ever met, and his relationship with her was the longest he’d had a relationship with anyone at all. He would have asked her for her help now, but she hadn’t talked to him since the day he called her by another woman’s name. He had been wrong to cheat on her, wronger still to lie. He couldn’t call Ethe now, not with this shame hanging over him. He’d heard of black women coming to the jailhouse to look for their sons or husbands and being taken into a back room by the policemen, told that there were other ways to pay a fine. No, H thought, Ethe would be better off without him.
By sunrise the next morning, on a sweltering July day in 1880, H was chained to ten other men and sold by the state of Alabama to work the coal mines just outside of Birmingham.
—
“Next,” the pit boss shouted, and the chief deputy shoved H in front of him. H had been watching them check each of the ten men who’d been chained to him on the train ride there. H wasn’t even sure he could call some of them men. He saw a boy no older than twelve, shivering in the corner of the train. When they’d pushed that boy in front of the pit boss, he’d peed himself, tears running down his face all the while, until he looked like he himself would melt down into the puddle of wet at his feet. The boy was so young, he’d probably never seen a whip like the one the pit boss had laid out on his desk, only heard about them in the nightmarish stories his parents told.
“He’s a big one, ain’t he?” the chief deputy said, squeezing H’s shoulders so that the pit boss could see how firm they were. H was the tallest, strongest man in the room. He’d spent the whole train ride trying to figure out a way to break his chains.
The pit boss whistled. He got out of his chair and circled H. He grabbed H’s arm, and H lunged at him before his shackles stopped him. He hadn’t been able to break the chains, but he knew if his hands could only reach, it wouldn’t take him but a second to snap the pit boss’s neck.
“Hoo, hoo!” the pit boss said. “Looks like we’ll have to teach this one some manners. How much you want for him?”
“Twenty dollars a month,” the deputy said.
“Now, you know we don’t pay more than eighteen, even for a first-class man.”
“You said yourself he’s a big one. This one will last you awhile, I bet. Won’t die in the mines like the others.”
“Y’all can’t do this!” H shouted. “I’m free!” he said. “I’m a free man!”
“Naw,” the pit boss said. He looked at H carefully and pulled out a knife from the inside of his coat. He began to sharpen the knife against an ironstone he kept on his desk. “No such thing as a free nigger.” He walked slowly up to H, held the sharpened knife against his neck so that H could feel the cold, ridged edge of it, begging to break skin.
The pit boss turned to the chief deputy. “We’ll give you nineteen for this one,” he said. Then he ran the tip of the knife slowly across H’s neck. A thin line of blood appeared, neat and straight, as if to underline the pit boss’s words. “He may be big, but he’ll bleed just like the rest of them.”
—
It had never occurred to H, during those many years that he worked on plantations, that there was anything more than dirt and water, bugs and roots, under the earth. Now he saw that there was an entire city underground. Larger, more sprawling, than any county that H had ever lived or worked in, and this city was occupied almost entirely by black men and boys. This city had shafts for streets, and rooms for houses. And in every room, everywhere, there was coal.
The first thousand pounds of coal were the hardest to shovel. H spent hours, whole days, on his knees. By the end of the first month, the shovel felt like an extension of his arm, and indeed, his back had begun to ripple around the shoulder blades, growing, it seemed, to accommodate the new weight.
With his shovel arm, H and the other men were lowered some 650 feet down the shaft, into the mine. Once in the underground city, they traveled three, five, seven miles to the coal face where they were to work that day. H was large but nimble. He could lie on his flank and shinny himself into nooks and crannies. He could crawl on his hands and knees through tunnels of exploded rock until he got to the right room.
Once he reached the room, H shoveled some fourteen thousand pounds of coal, all while stooped down low, on his knees, stomach, sides. And when he and the other prisoners left the mines, they would always be coated in a layer of black dust, their arms burning, just burning. Sometimes H thought that burning pain would set the coal on fire, and they would all die there, from the pain of it. But, he knew, it wasn’t just pain that could kill a man in the mine. More than once, a prison warden had whipped a miner for not reaching the ten-ton quota. H had seen a third-class man shovel 11,829 pounds of coal, weighed at the end of the workday by the pit boss. And when the pit boss had seen the missing 171 pounds, he’d made the man put his hands up against the cave wall, and then he’d whipped him until he died, and the white wardens did not move him that night or the rest of the next day, leaving the dust to blanket his body, a warning to the other convicts. Other times, mine stopes had collapsed, burying the prisoners alive. Too many times, dust explosions would wipe out men and children by the hundreds. One day, H would be working beside a man he had been chained to the night before; the next day, that man would have died of God only knew what.
H used to fantasize about moving to Birmingham. He’d been a sharecropper since the war ended, and he’d heard that Birmingham was the place a black man could make a life for himself. He’d wanted to move there and finally start living. But what kind of life was this? At least when he was a slave, his master had needed to keep him alive if he wanted to get his money’s worth. Now, if H died, they would just lease the next man. A mule was worth more than he was.
H could hardly remember being free, and he could not tell if what he missed was the freedom itself or the capacity for memory. Sometimes when he made it back to the bunk he shared with fifty-something men, all shackled together on long wooden beds so that they couldn’t move while they slept unless they moved together, he would try to remember remembering. He would force himself to think of all the things his mind could still call up: Ethe mostly. Her thick body, the look in her eyes when he’d called her by another name, how scared he was to lose her, how sorry. Sometimes as he slept the chains would rub against his ankles in such a way that he would remember the feeling of Ethe’s hands there, which always surprised him, since metal was nothing like skin.
The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again. Timothy, a man on H’s chain link, had been arrested outside the house he had built after
the war. A dog had been howling in a nearby field the whole night long, and Timothy had stepped out to tell the dog to hush up. The next morning the police had arrested him for causing a disturbance. There was also Solomon, a convict who had been arrested for stealing a nickel. His sentence was twenty years.
Occasionally one of the wardens would bring in a white third-class man. The new prisoner would be chained to a black man, and for the first few minutes all that white prisoner would do was complain. He’d say that he was better than the niggers. He’d beg his white brothers, the wardens, to have mercy on him, spare him from the shame of it all. He’d curse and cry and carry on. And then they would have to go down into the mine, and that white convict would soon learn that if he wanted to live, he would have to put his faith in a black man.
H had once been partnered with a white third-class man named Thomas whose arms had started shaking so badly, he couldn’t lift the shovel. It was Thomas’s first week, but he’d already heard that if you didn’t make your quota, you and your buddy would be whipped, sometimes to death. H had watched Thomas’s trembling arms lift the few pounds of coal before giving way, and then Thomas had collapsed to the ground crying, stammering that he didn’t want to die down there with nothing but niggers to bear witness.
Wordlessly, H had taken up Thomas’s shovel. With his own shovel in one hand and Thomas’s shovel in another, H had filled both men’s quotas, the pit boss watching all the while.
“Ain’t no man ever shoveled double-handed before,” the boss had said after it was over, respect lacing his voice, and H had simply nodded. The pit boss had then kicked Thomas on the ground where he still sat, sniveling. “That nigger just saved your life,” he said. Thomas looked up at H, but H said nothing.
That night, in a bunk with two men chained on either side of him, a bunk two feet above him, H realized that he couldn’t move his arms.
“What’s wrong?” Joecy asked, noticing H’s awkward stillness.
“Can’t feel my arms,” H whispered, scared.
Joecy nodded.
“I don’t want to die, Joecy. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” H could not stop himself from repeating the words, and soon he realized that he was crying too, and he couldn’t stop that either. The coal dust under his eyes started to run down his face, and silently H continued on. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
“Hush, now,” Joecy said, hugging H to his body as best he could with the chains clanking and clacking as he moved. “Ain’t nobody dying tonight. Not tonight.” The two men looked around them to see if others had woken up from the noise. Everyone had heard about how H had saved the white third-class man, but they all knew, too, that this didn’t mean the pit boss would show mercy. The next day, H would have to do his share all over again.
The next day H was assigned the morning shift, partnered again with Thomas. He and the other morning shift men woke up while the moon was still bright in the sky, sliced thin and arched upward as though it were the crooked, white-toothed smile of the dark-skinned night. They went over to the mess hall to get a cup of coffee and a slab of meat. They got a sack lunch to take with them, and then they were lowered some two hundred feet down below the Earth’s surface until they hit the belly of the mine. From there, H and Thomas continued two miles in and further down, stopping finally in the room of the mine where they were to work that day. Usually, there were only two men to a room, but this one was particularly difficult, and the pit boss had paired H and Thomas with Joecy and his third-class man, a convict called Bull who had gotten his name not because of his frame, stocky and squat and commanding, but because Klansmen had burned his face one night—branded him, they said—so that everyone would know he was no good.
H had gone through all the motions of that morning, his arms achingly anchored to his sides as he refused the coffee and meat, couldn’t pick up the lunch sack to hold it, shinnied onto the elevator shaft. He had made it through the morning without drawing attention, trying to save up his energy for when he would have to start working.
Joecy was the cutter that day. He was five feet four inches tall, a small man, but he understood the ways of the rock like no one H had ever worked with did. Joecy was a first-class man they all respected, working off year seven of his eight-year sentence as fervently as he had year one. He would often say how he was going to get free and start working in the mines for pay, as some of the other black men had done. They couldn’t whip a free miner.
That day, the space between the rock was only about a foot high. H had seen men wiggle into spaces that small and shake and hyperventilate so badly they needed to leave. Once he’d seen a man get to the very middle and then stop, too scared to move forward or backward, too scared to breathe. They’d called Joecy over to try to fish him out, but by the time he got there the man had already died.
Joecy didn’t even blink at the small space. He shinnied his small body under the rock and lay down on his back and started to undercut the bottom of the seam. Once he had finished that, he drove a hole into the rock, listening to it, he liked to say, so that he could find the spot that wouldn’t crumble on top of him and kill him straightaway. Once the hole had been placed, Joecy put in the dynamite, lit it. The coal blew apart, and Thomas and Bull picked up their picks and started breaking the rock into manageable pieces so that they could all start to load the tramcar.
H tried to lift his shovel, but his arms would not budge. He tried again, focusing all his mind’s power and energy on his shoulder, his forearm, his wrist, his fingers. Nothing happened.
At first, Bull and Thomas just stared at him, but before he knew it, Joecy was shoveling his pile for him, and then Bull. And then, finally, after what seemed like hours, Thomas too was pulling weight, until everybody in the room of that mine had shoveled his own pile and H’s too.
“Thank you for your help the other day,” Thomas said once they had finished.
H’s arms were still aching at his sides. They felt like immovable stone, forced to his sides by some gravitational pull. H nodded at Thomas. He used to dream about killing white men the way they killed black men. He used to dream of ropes and whips, trees and mine shafts.
“Hey, how come they call you H?”
“Don’t know,” H said. He used to think of nothing else but escaping the mines. Sometimes he would study the underground city and wonder if there was somewhere, some way, he could break free, come out on another side.
“C’mon. Somebody must have named you.”
“My old master say H is what my mama used to call me. They asked her to name me somethin’ proper before she gave birth, but she refused. She killed herself. Master said they had to slice me out her belly ’fore she died.”
Thomas didn’t say anything then, just nodded his thank-you again. A month later, when Thomas died of tuberculosis, H couldn’t remember his name, only the face he made when H had picked up his shovel for him.
This was how it went in the mines. H didn’t know where Bull was now. So many were transferred at one point or another, contracted by one of the new companies or absorbed by another. It was easy to make friends but impossible to keep them. Last H had heard, Joecy had finished his sentence, and now all the convicts told stories about how their old friend had finally become one of those free miners they had all heard about but never dreamed of actually becoming.
*
H shoveled his last thousand pounds of coal as a convict in 1889. He had been working in Rock Slope for almost all of his incarceration, and his hard work and skill had shaved a year off his sentence. The day the elevator shaft took him up into the light and the prison warden unshackled his feet, H looked straight up at the sun, storing up the rays, just in case some cruel trick sent him back to the city underground. He didn’t stop staring until the sun turned into a dozen yellow spots in his eyes.
He thought about going back home, but realized that he didn’t know where home was. There was nothing left for him on the old p
lantations he’d worked, and he had no family to speak of. The first night of his second freedom, he walked as far as he could, walked until there was no mine in sight, no smell of coal clinging to his nostrils. He entered the first bar he saw that contained black people, and with the little money he had, he ordered a drink.
He had showered that morning, tried to rub the clench marks of the shackles from his ankles, the soot from underneath his nails. He had stared at himself in the mirror until he was confident that no one could tell he had ever been in a mine.
Sipping his drink, H noticed a woman. All he could think was that her skin was the color of cotton stems. And he missed that blackness, having only known the true blackness of coal for nearly ten years.
“Excuse me, miss. Could you tell me where I am?” he asked. He hadn’t spoken to a woman since the day he called Ethe by another woman’s name.
“You ain’t looked at the sign ’fore you came in?” she asked, smiling.
“I reckon I ain’t,” he said.
“You in Pete’s bar, Mr….”
“H is my name.”
“Mr. H is my name.”
They talked for an hour. He found out her name was Dinah and she lived in Mobile but was visiting a cousin there in Birmingham, a very Christian woman who would not care to see her kin drinking. H had just about gotten it into his head to ask her to marry him when another man stepped in to join them.
“You look mighty strong,” the man said.
H nodded. “I s’pose I am.”
“How you got to be so strong?” the man asked, and H shrugged. “Go on,” the man said. “Roll up yo sleeve. Show us some muscle.”
H started laughing, but then he looked at Dinah, and her eyes were twinkling in that way that said maybe she wouldn’t mind seeing. And so he rolled up his sleeve.
At first, both people were nodding appreciatively, but then the man came closer. “What’s that?” he said, tugging where the sleeve met H’s back until he’d made a rent in the fabric, and the whole cheap thing tore loose.