1856

The year 1856 is a fixed point of rupture in Paul D's life, the moment when the last of the Sweet Home men is reduced to a trembling body in a buried box. Before that year, he had known the relative stability of Garner's farm; after it, he carried a rusted tobacco tin in his chest where a red heart used to be. The eighty-three days of shaking—his hands so unsteady he could not smoke or scratch—became the physical imprint of a psychic break that would not fully surface until he stepped into the red light of 124 nearly two decades later.

The Trembling and the Box

Paul D's trembling began not in 1856 but was fixed by the time he understood it was there. It started inside as a flutter in the chest and shoulder blades, then spread to his legs and the base of his spine. By the time he was shoved into the wooden box fitted into a five-foot-deep trench in Alfred, Georgia, his blood, frozen for twenty years, had thawed into pieces that swirled and eddied. The box had three walls of scrap lumber and red dirt, a door of bars that lifted on hinges like a cage, and two feet of earth over his head. Forty-five other men shared the same grave-like quarters. Paul D's hands quit taking instruction; they would not hold his penis to urinate or a spoon to scoop lima beans. The miracle of their obedience came only with the hammer at dawn, when the chain-up began and a sledge hammer was placed in his palms.

The Chain and the Song

Each morning the forty-six men woke to rifle shot, unlocked one by one, and stood in a line in the trench. They threaded a chain through the loop on each leg iron, then knelt in the mist, waiting for the whim of a guard. The lead man, called Hi Man, gave the signal—"Hiiii!" at dawn, "Hoooo!" at evening—that let them rise and dance two-step to the music of hand-forged iron. Paul D believed Hi Man alone knew what was enough, what was too much, when things were over. With a sledge hammer in his hands and Hi Man's lead, the men got through. They sang, garbling the words so they could not be understood, tricking the syllables into other meanings. They sang of women they knew, children they had been, animals they had tamed, bosses and masters, mules and dogs, graveyards and sisters long gone. They beat the women for having known them and no more; they killed a boss so often they had to bring him back to life to pulp him again. They sang love songs to Mr. Death and smashed his head. The successful ones—those who had been there long enough to maim, mutilate, maybe even bury Life itself—kept watch over the others, their eyes saying "Help me, 's bad" or "Steady now."

The Rain and the Escape

After eighty-six days, Life was dead. Paul D beat her butt all day every day until there was not a whimper in her. Then it rained. For eight days without wind, the rain came, and by the ninth even the salamanders were gone. The men were locked down in the boxes. The water rose in the trench, and mud oozed under and through the bars. Paul D thought he was screaming; his mouth was open and there was a loud throat-splitting sound, but it may have been somebody else. Then the chain was yanked—once, hard enough to cross his legs and throw him into the mud. He yanked the length of chain at his left so the next man would know. The ditch was caving in. Mud was up to his thighs. Then another yank came from the left, less forceful because of the mud it passed through. One by one, from Hi Man back down the line, they dove through the mud under the bars, blind, groping. Some wrapped their heads in shirts, others just plunged. The chain that held them would save all or none, and Hi Man was the Delivery. They talked through that chain like Sam Morse, and Great God, they all came up—like the unshriven dead, zombies on the loose, holding the chains in their hands.

Aftermath and the Journey North

The prisoners from Alfred, Georgia, found a camp of sick Cherokee who called them Buffalo men. The Cherokee gave them small axes to tap away their chains and a pot of mush cooling in the rain. Paul D was the last Buffalo man left, without a plan. A Cherokee smiled and pointed: "That way. Follow the tree flowers. Only the tree flowers. As they go, you go. You will be where you want to be when they are gone." So Paul D raced from dogwood to blossoming peach, then cherry, magnolia, chinaberry, pecan, walnut, and prickly pear, until he reached a field of apple trees whose flowers were just becoming tiny knots of fruit. From February to July he was on the lookout for blossoms, a dark ragged figure guided by the blossoming plums. The apple field turned out to be Delaware, where a weaver lady took him in. It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper—one by one—into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest. By the time he got to 124, nothing in this world could pry it open.