I Was Born a Slave

I Was Born a Slave

I was born in the heat of a field, not in a house, not in a bed, not even in the shade. The women worked with me still inside my mother, and when I came there was no rest for her hands. She bit her lip, finished tying the bundle of cane, and only then knelt to wrap me in a strip of cloth torn from the hem of her dress. Her sweat was the first thing I smelled. Her heartbeat was the first thing I heard.

They say a name is the start of a life, but mine was never my own. It was given by the man who owned the land, and by his reckoning, owned me. He never said it with warmth. It came out of his mouth like a command, short and sharp, the way you’d call a dog. He never once looked at me long enough to see the shape of my face. In his eyes I was a number, a body, a pair of hands that would grow strong enough to work.

By seven I carried water from the well. The bucket was taller than me, and every step slopped it down my legs until the dust turned to mud around my ankles. The older ones taught me to move quick, keep my head down, make my shadow small. By ten, my back knew the whip. It wasn’t rage that made him strike, only habit—as if pain was the first language he’d learned, the only one he knew how to speak.

The fields weren’t just earth and crop. They were a living thing—wide and hot, breathing dust and swallowing hours. The sun pressed against my skin until it burned. Sweat ran down my spine and into raw places. Blisters opened on my hands, and when they bled, the blood darkened the wood of the hoe. We worked until the shadows stretched long, even the air too tired to move.

I watched the older ones bend lower every year. Their spines curled like roots of old trees. Some went blind from the glare, some limped from wounds that never healed. There was no doctor for us, only cloth to bind, water to wash. Some sang to keep their spirits alive. The songs rose low and slow, like smoke from a fire that’d never go out. I couldn’t join them. My voice stayed locked behind my teeth, as if it knew freedom would never hear it.

At night the cabins were crowded with bodies. The air was thick with sweat and woodsmoke. We lay side by side, feet to head, breathing each other’s breath. Sometimes the women told stories in whispers. They spoke of rivers, of towns where no one could be bought or sold, of men and women who’d crossed into that world. I clung to those stories like a handhold in deep water, but every morning the rooster called and the truth came back to me.

There were nights when the moon found me awake. I’d lie with my hands clenched around nothing, fingers curling as if they could hold a dream. In my mind I walked away. I crossed the place where the fence ended, where his land gave up its claim, and I kept walking. The dirt gave way to grass, grass to a road, road to a river wide enough to carry me far. But every dawn the sun rose and I was still here.

I was born a slave. I may die a slave. But there’s a place in me he will never own. It lives in my thoughts, in the way I remember my mother’s face in the dark, in the way I see my hands as mine even when they’re working for him. It’s the secret that keeps me standing, the quiet strength that lets me meet his eyes and not bow my head. One day, maybe not for me, but for someone who’ll come after me, the gate will open. And when it does, they will walk away for all of us.