Unlike Uncle Brent, Bennet made no judgments. If he 19
felt he was better than me, it was only because he felt bet-20
ter than everyone, and that, in some strange whiskey-21
soaked way, made me an equal in the world — at least in 22
the world as seen through his eyes.
23
“Yeah, all right,” I said. “Let’s do this thing.”
24
Bennet smiled and retrieved the satchel from the floor 25
next to his cell. He took five bound stacks of twenty-26
dollar bills.
27 S
“Twenty-five thousand, as we agreed,” he said.
28 R
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The Man in My Basement
Then he came out with an ugly chunk of black metal 1
that had some mechanical purpose that was not immedi-2
ately obvious.
3
“It’s an original lock used to hold down a line of slaves 4
in the old slaving ships,” Bennet told me. Along with the 5
lock there was a brass key with a cylindrical tip that had 6
teeth and slats made to fit the archaic mechanism. “It’s 7
over a hundred and fifty years old. I got it in Mali.”
8
As far as I knew there was no one in the Blakey family 9
who had ever been a slave. We came over as indentured 10
servants and sailors on Spanish and Portuguese ships. It 11
was even intimated that one distant cousin was himself a 12
slaver, selling black bodies on the wharves of New York 13
City from a ship called the
14
Many of my relatives didn’t like to think that they were 15
a part of the mass of blacks in this country. They would 16
say, secretly, that they were no different from the English 17
or Irish immigrants. But most Negroes, even the old fam-18
ilies that dotted our neighborhood, understood that racism 19
doesn’t ask for a pedigree. I knew that many white people 20
didn’t like me because of my dark skin. I wasn’t stupid. At 21
the same time I didn’t feel the pang or tug of identity 22
when slavery was mentioned.
23
But that lock was a vicious thing. It must have weighed 24
four pounds. The loop of metal used to secure the bolt was 25
half an inch thick. I could imagine that ugly device hold-26
ing down twenty men in the cold fastness of the Atlantic.
S 27
R 28
