Red Blood Like Mine

Red Blood Like Mine

I remember a time when the plantation was full of shadows. They were tall, and dark, and thin, and they stood upright instead of lying flat on the ground. From before I woke up in the morning until after I went to sleep at night they would move among the cotton, picking the white buds with their black fingers, murmuring softly in a language I didn’t know. They came and went with the seasons, bought in when they were young and strong, and sold on again before they outlived their usefulness.

I was always proud to tell my friends that I had two shadows: one that followed behind me in the sun outdoors, and one that followed behind me in the dark inside. I had heard his name once; it was long and the only part my baby tongue could pronounce was “Seb”, so Seb he stayed. Seb was too small to reach the cotton buds, so he worked inside the house, fetching and carrying, coming and going, and being beaten when he didn’t work hard enough. Pa made sure I knew that Seb was just like the other slaves;

“It’s a risk, Danny,” he’d say, “having a nigger in the house. It’s a risk because you might start believing he’s like us. But just you remember, son, that little nigger boy’s dumb like an animal. Even if he speaks, he doesn’t understand it. Don’t you ever kid yourself he’s anything more than a dumb slave.”

But Seb was always my special slave, my pet. During the long summer, when Pa was too busy with the cotton to take me to school, I would play with Seb, giving him lumps of sugar and rubbing his smooth skin to see if the black came off. I made him say my name like a parrot, and when he didn’t cooperate I hit him. He never cried, so I assumed slaves didn’t feel pain.

The autumn I turned eleven Pa sent me to school in New Orleans. It was too far to travel every day, so I would have to stay in New Orleans and come home for Christmas. The day I left, Pa was ill, so Seb’s pa drove the wagon instead; Pa let me take Seb along as well so I’d have something to play with along the way. Seb was more fun than any toy, because he laughed when I tickled him and didn’t break when I got angry and hit him. He kept me occupied for the whole journey, while his pa jiggled the reins and clucked at the pony.

It was starting to get cold by the time we reached New Orleans, and when we arrived at the schoolhouse it was almost dark. For the last couple of miles it almost looked as though the wagon had no driver; Seb’s pa’s dark skin faded into the falling dusk, while the bay pony stayed easy to see. I made Seb hide in the dark corners of the wagon, and I tried to find him, a blacker smudge in the black of shadows. By the time we slowed and stopped, I’d learned to find him by the white of his teeth and his eyes.

There was a man waiting for us at the schoolhouse, smartly dressed in a suit and felt hat. He frowned when he saw that I’d been driven in by a nigger, but Seb’s pa kept his head low and his eyes to the ground, and the man nodded approval as Seb’s pa jumped off the wagon and faded into the dark like the shadow he was trained to be.

The man didn’t notice Seb at first; sitting next to me he looked just like my shadow. But when I clambered out of the wagon holding Seb’s hand, the man’s face hardened.

“That a slave, boy?” he asked, in a voice like gravel.

“Yessir,” I answered, “he’s mine, too.” To show this, I took Seb’s arm and shook it, hard. Seb blinked, but he let me shake his arm until something clicked and I let it fall again. The man’s mouth curved slightly and he nodded again. But his eyes turned cold as ice when I gave Seb a hug before he got back into the wagon, and as he watched the two shadows turn around and drive away his face was like flint.

That man was in charge of the boarding house, and he saw to it that I never even had a chance. The first whisper went around the very next morning, all around me, until it seemed like even the wind was murmuring, “Danny’s friends with a nigger boy, Danny’s friends with a nigger boy.” I tried to explain that Seb was my pet, not my friend, but the other boys just laughed, and one of them said, “And did your black momma tell you to say that?” I went up to the bathroom and cried, and by the time my nose had stopped running, I was late for classes.

My teachers caned me for no reason, the man at the boarding house put dirty sheets on my bed, and the head of the school called all the boys together and preached a sermon about the godliness of the white man, and the evil of the black. And throughout it all I bit back my tears and hated myself for missing Seb the black slave more than Pa or my white friends.

“Nigger boy”, the boys called me. “Black dirt, black like your momma.”

“Ma’s white!” I cried, and I lashed out with my fists. The boys had hold of me before I could hit any of them, and they twisted my arms behind my back and smeared black mud onto my face and neck.

“Nigger boy!” they screamed in delight. “Now you’re black like your nigger friend, black like the dirt your momma’s buried in!”

“I’m white,” I sobbed, “I’m white!” And the boys laughed and ran away while I curled up in the black mud and cried.


By the time the winter came I had a stone where my heart used to be. I was taller, and leaner, and I had a long scar on my arm where I’d tried to scrape the dried mud off with a knife. Pa came to get me in the wagon, and he exclaimed at what a man I’d become, while my stomach knotted itself into a ball and refused to loosen. Pa let me drive the wagon over the frosty ground back, and before we were halfway home snow had started to fall. The ground was white by the time we reached the plantation, and the sky was dotted with stars.

I made my own way back to the house while Pa put the wagon away. Suddenly I heard my name called, and a black shadow was running towards me across the white snow. As I watched Seb running barefoot, the knot in my stomach writhed, and all at once hatred flashed through my body like lightning. “Nigger boy,” I hissed, and as Seb neared me my fist shot out and caught him just below the breastbone.

Seb went down silently, his white eyes rolling up behind the black lids. Every code said it should end there, but I didn’t care about rules anymore. Grabbing Seb by the hair, I yanked him upright and hit him again. Again he went down, unconscious almost before the blow fell. Biting my lip so hard that blood dribbled down my chin I kicked him in the ribs with my booted foot, and again in the back, and the groin, so that his prone body shuddered with every blow. Wiping the blood from my chin with my hand, I drew my foot back one last time and brought it crashing into Seb’s temple. I felt the skin split beneath my sole, and blood oozed from the blackening wound onto the snow, staining the whiteness scarlet. The moonlight glistened on the reddening snow, and the wet blood on my hand, and with a shock that set my head spinning I realised they were the same colour. Seb’s blood was red like mine.

Later, as I lay on my bed with my eyes open, seeing my foot crushing Seb’s skull again and again, I heard Pa come in. I steeled myself for a beating, but it didn’t come.

“Danny,” Pa said, “I’m proud of you. You’ve finally learned how to whip a slave.” I stifled a sob. “You darn near killed him – could be dead already. ‘Bout time too; that nigger boy didn’t know his place.” And with that Pa left.

As the night wore on I heard Seb’s ma start wailing, a high, keening howl that set my hair on end. All through the night she cried for Seb, and part of me knew that she was mourning.

At last, as the stars started to fade, my tightly knotted heart started to unwind itself. I saw again the laughing black face, the white teeth flashing against the dark lips, and I reached under my bed and took out a tin. Opening it, I rubbed my hands in what was inside, and worked it into my skin like oil into a saddle. Smiling sadly, I put the tin away and looked into the mirror.

With the boot polish on, my skin was black like Seb’s.