I Was a Slave

I was a slave and I lived with a few dozen other slaves in a dirt-floored shack. All the other slaves were black, but oddly enough I was my usual SPF 45 white, with long dirty blonde hair that kept getting in my face. There were more slaves owned by the same entity we were, but they were all field hands. We were the house slaves, so our duties dealt mostly with cleaning, cooking and general toadying.

The house we served - that our shack was built a respectful yet handy distance from - greatly resembled the University of Oregon's Knight Library. It was a tall and somber eidolon of stone. The shack I lived in was made out of old boards with mismatched paint, as though they'd been something else before. The roof was corrugated metal, beginning to rust, and there were a few windows that also looked scavenged.

Being a slave wasn't so bad. I mean, we lived in a dump, we were yelled at a lot, and we were occasionally beaten, but it could have been a lot worse. The people working in the field got a lot more abuse. I felt like they were relatives, and I felt guilty that I was getting better treatment.

I was very young, judging by the height from which I viewed everything. I must have been seven or eight. I helped in the kitchen, wearing a thick, spotlessly white apron. I spent most of my time picking, washing and peeling assorted vegetables from the garden. The kitchen had running water and electric light. Sometimes I would have to cut vegetables, but I didn't like that. I had to stand on my toes a little to reach the counter, and the knife was so big and sharp that I kept imagining cutting my own fingers off.

The house had a lot of rooms on a lot of floors. The ceilings were impossibly high, especially to a child, and heavy drapes were everywhere. There wasn't much light besides that which filtered in on the sides of the curtains. Occasionally, a curtain would be open, but then the light was swallowed up by the dark colors all around it. The floors were dark wood, shining with polish.

I was given a plate of sandwiches to deliver to a party in the gentlemen's den, several floors up and away, and I wasn't sure how to get there. The cook was a black woman in a thin yellow dress and a red bandanna who felt like she was my mother, and she gave me directions several times. Finally, she decided to come with me.

We took a very roundabout way to get to the den, going down a set of stairs into a cobwebby stone passage that must have run under the whole house. We came to a humid room carved out of the dirt and full of dusty, unlabeled wine bottles and faceted jam jars, all with their contents the same deep burgundy color. There was a door in the wall that opened into a part of the backyard next to a tree and a barn. The ground was hardening mud with straw thrown on top of it.

It was a sunny autumn day, turning into evening. My mother led me towards the barn, explaining that we had to go down into a different basement to eventually get up to that level of the house.

The tree we passed had a strange, orange-red bark that seemed to be moving. I stopped to look at it and fell behind. The tree's trunk was covered with several layers of living, crawling ladybugs making quiet piping noises. I knew I was going to be missed soon, but I couldn't stop looking at the ladybugs.

Then I heard a scream from the barn, so I ran over. It was a tall red barn with white trim, looking wholly ordinary. I went in through the open door and saw an empty floor, with stairs going up. Some of the field slaves were running in as well, but I started up the stairs first.

At the top was a large loft, almost a second story. The air was thick with smoke, so sweet smelling as to be cloying, and large, meaty crane flies were diving and wheeling through the clouds, occasionally flying into things with a faintly audible thud.

The smoke cleared or my eyes adjusted, and I saw my mother standing to one side, petrified with fear. On the other side of the loft stood the old master and a handful of his friends, holding candles in a ring around a large statue. The statue was red-brown, taller than a man and looked vaguely like Baphomet, but was oddly lumpy and vague.

A cylindrical area around the statue was free of smoke and crane flies, but the white men were in the smoke with us. The master was saying something, but I couldn't hear what it was - it sounded like buzzing. The other men looked like they were in pain, and things were moving in their bodies, under their skin. It looked like their bones were breaking and rotating.

A few of the field slaves had tools with them and started to move towards the white men and the statue, but they didn't know what they should do. Then the statue started to crack and shudder.

The old white men were twisting, unable to keep their balance. They dropped their candles and seemed to shrink within their skins, as though their skin was staying the same size but the body within was getting smaller. They became puddles of floppy skin in clothing, only the skull and head perched on top looking normal.

Our master kept chanting, and the statue was cracking. I was walking closer almost against my will, and I could see the statue better. It was made of many little globs, as though someone had mixed up a thick batch of terra cotta slip and slowly glopped it on without attempting to shape it in any other way.

Pieces of dry clay were being flung from it as whatever was inside heaved around. Big chunks of the statue would move out of alignment for a moment, showing something shiny and oily black moving inside.

I was looking into my master's eyes and still walking closer, unable to stop myself. His eyes were bubble gum pink and bulging, with tiny constricted pupils. As he kept talking - buzzing - the sweat beaded off his red face and veins bulged in his temples.

Then one of the field slaves hit him over the head with the blunt edge of a scythe, and he crumpled to the ground, instantly peaceful. At the same moment, someone else stabbed a crack in the living statue with a pitchfork. There was a crackling, popping noise like boiling fat over a wood fire. I found myself able to turn again, and I looked over at the statue.

The statue was pumping out thick black foam from the crevices in its clay, and its moving and heaving came more slowly. The man who'd speared it on the pitchfork was covered in the foam and was whimpering softly. He tried to wipe the black foam off of his face, and did, but the face that showed through was missing its skin. The muscles looked ragged, and his eyes looked like soft boiled eggs, leaking aqueous humor.

Then the statue stopped moving and the noise stopped. Some time in the struggle the smoke had cleared, and there was no sign of the crane flies. The only sounds were the injured man and the piles of flesh and heads around the statue. More and more slaves started arriving, and some of them carried the foam-covered man away. Others carried the master away.

The heads sitting atop the piles of folded skin were trying to talk, but couldn't make noise or couldn't force air through their throats. They were frantically looking around, mouthing words and making little clicking noises as their mouths articulated consonants. I tried to pick one up, but all the skin was too heavy to lift, and I didn't just want to pick up the head part. They felt like crumpled-up blankets on a bed someone just got out of.

Then my mother came over and led me away from the loft.

I found myself in another part of the house, which was now looking a lot more like the Knight Library, books and all. It must have been many years later; I was taller and older, in slacks and a shirt. Also I was black, but that didn't seem surprising. I had long red fingernails, short hair that I'd combed to the side and plastered to my skull with pomade and earrings that dangled and hit the side of my head when I turned my head. I was carrying a portable typewriter in a modified case that didn't close; I could just set it down and type, then pick it up again.

Sitting around the library were many older black people I recognized as having been slaves on the same estate as me. They looked about twenty years older, and were wearing nicer clothing (as was I). We weren't slaves anymore.

I was anxious, on a deadline. There was going to be some kind of hearing very soon and I wanted to get statements from everyone who'd been there that day when the statue came to life. Nobody wanted to talk about it, saying that they'd been trying to put that behind them, but I wanted to get it on record. Because I was younger, I'd been doing research, possibly for a dissertation, on just what exactly had happened. I got a few people to give me a few comments, which I typed on carbon paper and had them sign. Then a large wooden door swung out of a conference room, and everybody started going in.

Inside the room were several rows of tables, some already occupied by people who resembled the white men who'd been chanting. Our old master, now incredibly old, was sitting in a wheelchair beside one of the tables. There were many older black people on the other side of the room, and a few sundry legal or academic-looking arbitrators milling around, readying a beige dictaphone.

The meeting started, and slowly the old black people got up and told what they'd seen in the barn. After the first few had gone, they began to warm up and give more elaborate descriptions of the statue, the smoke and the shrinking men. The white people looked scornful, and the arbitrators looked a little disbelieving.

More and more ex-slaves got up to tell about what they'd seen. I was a little annoyed that they hadn't let me write down their statements for my research, but I reasoned that I could get a copy of the recording.

The white men just looked more and more evil as more witnesses spoke. Some of them looked like they just didn't believe it, while others looked like they knew exactly what had been happening and wished we hadn't stopped it.

Soon, it was my turn to speak. I had a lot of notes, and I started out by talking about what I saw. It had been a long time, however, and I had only been a child, so I downplayed the more fantastic elements of my testimony. I thought I had made them up. I didn't want to make our case look bad.

After I talked about what I'd seen, I started arguing for the chanting slave owners! It seemed to me that if the arbitrators were convinced that they were devil worshippers, we would get some kind of settlement, but I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly trying to convince everybody that they weren't. I felt like I was outside of my body, being manipulated by something else.

I talked about British passion plays and mumming plays, and started to read from some book that had a traditional folk play with people pretending to worship the devil in it.

Then one of the white men, our ex-owner's son, stood up with a gleam in his eye. He looked at me with a smug smile, walked over and closed my book. I couldn't do anything but look down. He said,

"Thank you very much for your learned opinion; I think we'll all agree that this is all just superstition grown out of hand in ignorance. Now, I suggest everybody leave; this building is going to explode."

The room was silent and everyone froze, trying to put that together. Still looking at the floor, I saw it turn from a floral patterned carpet to living, interlocking worms and grubs.

Then time started again, and everyone started running, except for the ex-slave owners, who just stood there laughing. I kept stopping to pick something up; I grabbed my pile of books, my notes, my typewriter and the dictaphone from the arbitrators' desks. Finally, I was at the door to the room, which now led outside.

I ran as fast as I could away from the building, the things I was carrying pounding against me, bruising me. I heard a quiet explosion, more like the woof of a gas burner igniting, and felt a great radiant heat on the back of my neck, but I didn't turn around.

I ran until I stopped. I was all the way across the university campus when I looked back towards where the library was. There was a neat, rectangular pillar of flame shooting hundreds of feet up from where it had been, with black shapes swirling in and out of the column of fire. I could hear sirens faintly in the distance.

I was by an enamel-painted bench, under a tree, so I set down my books and notes and typewriter and dictaphone, then sat down myself. A student that I knew walked by, and I asked her if she'd help me find my car. I noticed that I was myself again; long-haired and white.

As it turned out, my car was parked right by the bench. I just didn't recognize it at first because I hadn't been me then. As I walked over to put my things in the back, my car greeted me in a loud, cheerful voice and said it had been worried about me when it heard the explosion.

I was a little startled.