Prentiss feared the walk to the camps would be no different. He made sure they were far beyond Majesty’s Palace before taking to the road, not wanting to see his old master and those who’d elected to stay with him.
Was it really only a week ago? How strange that morning had been. They’d heard rumblings that Union soldiers were drawing near, whispered rumors not unlike so many that had traveled through the cabins for years, ever since the war began. The notion of true emancipation had always seemed so fantastical that, were it to occur, Prentiss had expected the heralds of a bugle, rows of men in lockstep who would descend upon Majesty’s Palace like angels brought down to serve the aims of God himself. In the actual event it was nothing but a few young men in blue uniforms as scraggy as the clothes that Prentiss and Landry had on themselves. They came down the lane and called them from their cabins with Master Morton following in unison, still in his pajamas, exposed in a way Prentiss had never seen him. Morton begged for the soldiers’ understanding, insisting his slaves wished to remain in his keep, all while the young men ignored him and announced that each man, woman, and child in bondage was free to go as they pleased.
Master Morton said they were hopeless creatures, and beseeched the soldiers once more to recognize as much, though it was evident to all that he was the hopeless one, carrying on worse than a child who’d lost his mother. Still, none of them moved at first. It was Prentiss himself who stepped off the cabin stoop and toward one of the soldiers, a baby-faced white man perhaps even younger than he was, who clearly cared as little about this farm as he would about the next one, where Prentiss suspected he would soon repeat the same announcement in the same monotone.
“When might we go?” he asked the man, low enough that Morton wouldn’t hear, for what if there was more to this arrangement than met the eye, and a punishment lay in wait for even deigning to ask?
He’d never heard such precious words as those that came next from the boy:
“Whenever you feel the urge, I suppose.”
Prentiss wheeled around to face Landry without a second thought, for their lives could now begin and it was time to craft them in whatever way they saw fit. The tremble of Landry’s jaw, the nod of his head, told him that his brother was in total agreement.
To enter the forest had been an expedition all its own, and now, as they left it behind, its sounds shrank and folded into silence; the odd carriage began to appear before them, quickly passing at their side. They made their unhurried way, step by step, dirt filling the unpatched pits of their shoes. Each home they came across either less or more impressive than Majesty’s Palace, but all of them remarkable, all of them white.
“You figure you’d take to that one?” Prentiss said, but Landry kept his eyes on the road. The veranda of the home before them was vast enough to host a large party. Small blue bushes were given comfortable space before each column at its front.
“I don’t take to it neither, no more than the rest,” Prentiss said. “What, with all that space? How you s’posed to explain to someone that you got lost in your own house? Answer me that.”
The question had dawned on him before, but as this was the first time he’d seen any homes beyond Majesty’s Palace and its neighbors, he’d not known that whatever plague of excess had befallen his former owner had clearly consumed the town as well.
They carried nothing. They met the eyes of more oxen than men, yet each step felt like it was being watched, as so much of their movement had been in the past. The farther they got, the more real it felt—each step a confirmation of their freedom.
“Look at us,” Prentiss said. “World travelers. Sightseers. Ain’t that something?”
He gave his brother a prod in the ribs, but his sweet talk took him only so far as they came to the sign that bore the name Old Ox. Landry stopped as if he’d run into a wall. Suddenly there was the whir of noise and sights—the moaning cattle hidden in unseen stables, the shrieks of bickering children, a man spitting his muck juice indiscriminately from his porch. Prentiss experienced it all at once, perceiving it as his brother might, and he knew then the struggle that lay ahead of them.
“It’s just a step like any other,” he said.
Landry looked at him, eyes stern, in the manner of a statement.
“Okay,” Prentiss said. “Okay then.”
He wouldn’t force his brother to go into town, any more than he had forced him to enter the forest. So much of their lives had been pressed upon them by other men, it felt only right that each decision be prized—their own to make.