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"Ooh, baby, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river Hold my hand... Ooh, baby, it's a long way down, a long way down... If you get sleep or if you get none, The cock's gonna call in the morning, babyCheck the cupboard for your daddy's gun Red sun rises like an early warning. The Lord's gonna come for your first born son His hair's on fire and his heart is burning So go to the river where the water runs Wash him deep where the tides are turning..." His Mama had called him Handful and she'd said it was because he'd been born with her heart in his hands. Her little Handful. Born with The Master's milky skin and big robin-egg blue eyes, the only thing she ever gave him were those curls, all the colors of brown and reddish-copper that shone in the sunlight. Yes, he was a beautiful child, and he was all hers. She could see herself in the contours of his white man's face, the roundness of his lips, the button-nose dotted with freckles, even the way he smiled and spoke. He was her baby, her boy, the commander of the fields. But were it not for the tight corkscrew curls on his head, he would be a white child. Even lighter than some of The Master's true babies, his girls. The Mistress ain't never gave him no boy, not like Belle did on the first try. Which was why the young Master had such a soft spot for Handful, even calling him Phillip after himself. And why the Mistress spat on the very ground her sweet boy walked on. She despised Handful's every breath, and her girls did too. Proof of their father's infidelity. Proof that Belle could satisfy and provide better than the Mistress ever could. Handful paid the price for it. Little One was out in the fields before his fifth summer, picking razor-blade cotton with those nimble little fingers. The other children got soft jobs like working in the kitchen with Cook and Patsy or as house servants. Not her Handful. He was out there, crawling on his hands and knees through cockleburs and getting sliced up from all angles, pulling a sack behind him that weighed near twice his body weight. That white skin from his Daddy did him no good out there, as he was left sobbing himself to sleep near every night with a sunburn so bad that it bled and left even more scars, usually on his back and hardened upper arms, the parts most exposed to the elements. His face and neck were mercifully saved by his picker's hat. His tiny legs were near always swollen from Pack Saddle bug stings, the pain bad enough to make a grown man cry. But from the age of seven onward, her boy was still bringing in twice as much cotton as the full grown pickers around him. "You see," Belle once heard the Mistress say to her husband. "That boy may look like you and I, but he's hers. Born to the fields, that one is. Slave's in his blood, running through the white man's veins you gave him." It made her hold Handful close to her bosom that night, crying into her baby's beautiful curls. "Why is you crying, Mama?" She had pressed a solemn kiss to his brow. "Handful, you is the Master's son, you is just as worthy as Miss Sarah and Miss Mabel. You understand me? You is going to be free one day, you is going to be free on the Master's dime 'cause he needs a boy, and lord knows the Mistress ain't ever gonna give him no baby boy." "I'll take you with me, Mama. I promise." He'd whispered into the night sky and the packed close bodies around them. Hot, sweaty, stifling, but they had never known another life. "Okay, Baby." She got sold away from her Handful, just as naked as the day she was born, belly swollen with another one of the Master's babies, just like the coal-black five-year-old boy still in her arms, and inspected like a piece of meat in the chopping-house... just before her ten-year-old son was torn away from her grip. Oh how Handful had screamed. It was the most unholy sound that she'd ever heard. Her older baby boy had never screamed like that before. He'd screamed and screamed and screamed in a pitch foreign to her, kicking frantically against the hands that held him back. But it was of no use. Handful was not being sold away to the next Master like his own mother and slave-born siblings, instead... he was to be sent away to live with the Master's own white high-society parents in New York City, after the slaver's untimely death of the cholera. Belle couldn't have known who or what her boy would become, as she rode away from him in a horse drawn wagon, his sobs echoing like the Master's grunts in her head. For a moment, Handful was just like his Daddy. "Mama! Mama! Don't leave me! Mama!" Or that the Master had freed their Handful in his will and then stipulated that his only passing son was to be raised as a proper gentlemen. Handful would be given all that was due to him as a Carlyle son, and the heir to his father's fortune. And his mixed-race parentage would never ever be spoken of again. Her Handful, her baby-child born a slave, with his cotton-picking scars, the nasty scours from lashes that the overseer's whip had carved into his supple skin, the deep notches around his neck from the choking mask that had been screwed into his face to silence his screams and subsequent hysteria just after he was torn away from the only person who'd ever loved him. That baby boy she'd raised and coveted, who had suffered for his parentage all his life, was going to grow up as a posh white socialite. It seemed impossible, even sickening in a way, but... Phillip Carlyle Jr. attended the finest boarding school his grandparents' money could buy, he even studied Literature at Oxford. He put Handful and all those memories far behind him. The threadbare clothes he had been wearing the day he was sent away, the Master's (he would never ever call him Father) pocket-watch, a tiny faded portrait of his mother, that had also belonged to his Master, the worn Bible he'd once used to teach himself to read and write under the cover of night, the scrap of blue cloth the same shade of his eyes that had once been a nursing blanket, all of that went into a chest he locked and hid under his bed, and yet toted with him whenever he went. He would remember his mother's hands in his long curls as he lathered up the shorn locks with enough hair product to slick it all down and kill any lingering evidence of his mulatto blood. But then evening would come and he would take off the pristine white gloves of high-society and look at the unmistakable scars on his fingers and remember. Cotton always left its indelible mark on those who worked the fields. The starched white collar of the high-class did well to hide his other scars, but he wasn't allowed in direct sunlight anymore, lest his skin darken and reveal the truth. The boy who had taught himself to read by tracing the words of the Bible, would become a world-renowned playwright. The heir to his grandfather's fortune as well as his father's. What did it matter if he woke up screaming with the sound of a cracking whip in his ears, or drowned his sorrows with alcohol simply because it lessened the appearance of his mother's waifish face in his dreams? He did all he was told. On the plantation he'd been trying to hide his whiteness from the Mistress' angry gaze, while in high society he was trying to hide his colored blood from all who scrutinized him. What did it matter in the end? He would never be accepted for both. All he could do was try his best to hide the worst parts of him at a moment's notice. Playing up whichever side would earn him the most favor at any given moment. Handful was always there, no matter how hard Phillip pretended to be a spoiled rich brat of a man, consumed by his own worthlessness and ambition, inside he was still the same slave child who'd picked cotton faster than any grown man. Slinging bushels long before he was tall enough to see over the stalks. He wore a mask of his own making, as the years passed quickly by, like sand in an hourglass or whiskey in a glass tumbler, shiny carved glass just like the one the Mistress had thrown at him once, cutting up his little hip something fierce and swelling the joint to give him a limp for some months on end. And some days he just wanted to run and scream, fleeing from the awful endless dinner parties and suffocating functions. Just like he remembered sobbing brokenly, his back torn open and weeping blood into the dirt below, whipped senseless for being a black mark of infidelity on the family tree. A secret shame. His mother, the way she had cupped his face in her calloused, cotton-picking scarred hands, the way her salty tears had stung his wounded skin. He could scarcely remember her voice, the touch of her lips on his forehead. And he despised himself for it. After forgoing the product in his hair for a few days, by no fault of his own as he'd been abed for a week with a nasty fever, he'd awoken to a mess of tightly coiled reddish-brown curls that made him look like another man. This sad man looked far more like a lost child, with his large soulful eyes and a slave woman's face covered by his sallow white man's skin. The hair product became even more than a necessity after that. Not just because he couldn't stand the sight of the man with his mother's face staring back beneath the veneer, but because he no longer remembered how to tend to those curls. The memories of kitchen fat and grease being worked through his hair by his mother with a thick horse brush or wool carding tool, was too far removed from everything he was now. He cried and cried that night, hands fisted in those wretched curls. His mother's curls. He was surrounded by the living, but not once had he ever felt so alone. -X- It had been just another night, drowning his sorrows in copious amounts alcohol as usual. Contemplating a long walk off a short pier, as he stared at the melting ice in his whiskey glass. It smelt like the Master's hot acrid breath on his neck. When all of a sudden, the most colorful man he'd ever met all but came from the wood-work and asked him to run away and join the circus, to come and see The Other Side, as if Phillip hadn't already seen the worst of it long before this fool man's proposition. "I can't just run away and join the circus." The idea was preposterous. But was it? Really? For the boy who had spent most of his life running away and hiding, what was one more colorful mask to add to the pile, like a cherry on top. "Why not, you seem to have a flair for show-business." Oh, sir. Phillip smiled. You have no idea. "Let's just say I feel a lot more comfortable admiring your show from afar." Meaning he'd never seen it. And probably never would. He really just needed to go see about that pier... But the man, P.T. Barnum as he'd introduced himself, had stopped him by stealthily reaching over to grab some peanuts, tossing them up to catch 'em in his mouth, a real talent. "Ah comfort, the enemy of progress." He'd rolled his eyes as the brightly grinning oaf passed him a shot glass. "Just talking with you now could cost me my inheritance." Phillip grumbled, as if he really gave a shit about all that. But details, details. "Oh no, you'd be risking far more than that, hell you'd be risking just about everything. But... You also just might find yourself a free-man." Phillip froze. His mother's voice crashing like a tidal wave over his ears, ....you is going to be free one day. He didn't wait for the man's offer, he didn't even hear out the rest of the man's little song and dance routine. He just took the shot. It burned on the way down. He looked at Barnum with all the fire of whiskey in his belly, surveying the colorful and bright man who had just unceremoniously sprung into his life like a wildfire. Something that could just as easily raze his life or build him a new one from the ashes. Handful just raised an eyebrow, smile cocked and at the ready. "Where do we start?" -X-
"Ooh, baby, it's a long way down, a long way down...
The wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight Drunk and driven by a devil's hunger Drive your son like a railroad spike Into the water, let it pull him under Don't you lift him, let him drown alive... The good Lord speaks like a rolling thunder, Let that fever make the water rise... And let the river run dry..." -X-