—You are born in 1830, he began in a low, level baritone. You are the property of one Jonathan King, gentleman planter. Master Jonathan is your sun. Your moon. Your stars. He is your god, just as he is the god of your mother, three older half brothers, and four younger sisters. He is the god that taketh away—when you are six, he sells your father to a man in Tidewater Virginia who needs a good buck for breeding.
—And what is it that god giveth? He gives you the privilege of being the playmate of his oldest son, Jedediah King. And as you grow older he gives you the honor of serving as the young master’s valet, rather than working in the fields. You are quiet and you are obedient, with an unusually strong memory, and the year you turn nineteen you are allowed to walk with your young master the two miles to Blenheim, where Jedediah will begin training for the ministry at Triune College and you will be allowed to sell fruit on the college’s campus. You make a pittance off the fruit. What you cherish about these days are the walks you take with Jedediah through virgin forests and along the edges of tobacco fields—walks in which you remain a few steps behind your master and listen to him practice for his classes by reciting passages from the Gospels, Aquinas’s Summa, Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth. And it is from listening to him that you discover you have a love for what you will later call “melodious meter.”
—You do not know the meanings of the words you hear him recite, but you are resolved to learn them. You search the floors of open-air markets and the shoulders of roads for wordy trash, for ripped pages of spelling books and mud-stained glossaries. With these you cobble together a primer to teach yourself your ABCs. You prize above all anything with verse on it, and one of your dearest possessions will be a bloody page of newspaper used to wrap your master’s mutton. Printed on it is Jaques’s speech in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage.” This will be the first verse you commit to memory.
—You stash these materials beneath your pallet in the slave quarters, and on Sabbath afternoons you use what few hours of free time you have to carry them to a lonesome spot under an ash tree. It is during these fugitive afternoons that you discover your memory is not just strong, it is prodigious, and in only four years’ time you will go from teaching yourself your ABCs to composing original verses of your own. You must memorize whatever you compose, since it will be another decade before you learn how to write.
—At Triune, “pranking” slaves is a favorite pastime of the students. They trick slaves into accepting counterfeit coins in exchange for precious fruit; or they invite a pickaninny to take a bite out of what they insist is a delicacy but turns out to be prettily shaped offal. Most hilarious is to tease the black brain, and one day some friends of Jedediah hand you a love poem they have composed and ask you to judge its quality. You are expected to smile, shuffle, and stammer out your ignorance. But instead you stun them by reading the poem word for word, a spectacle one of the boys will later remark was “akin to watching a mule give a sermon.” It is a violation of North Carolina state law to teach a slave to read, and what you have just done has gotten other slaves whipped, beaten, strung up. But Triune is a place of higher learning! And just as in the name of science you do not kill a dog with two heads—not immediately, at least—so too must a slave’s freakish reading talent be humored.
—Your skull is measured by Triune scientists, your diction examined by a professor of rhetoric. You become known throughout the Piedmont as the Spouting Darkie, and soon the time you once spent selling fruit is occupied by reciting original poetry for undergrads. Students in search of a novelty for their sweethearts ask you to compose a poem. You charge a quarter, sometimes as much as a half dollar, for an original composition your customers transcribe. A few weeks after you turn twenty-five, a local newspaperman offers to publish your poetry. You will later write in an essay that the day you first saw your name in print—Carmichael Stewart King—was when you first felt the name truly belonged to you.
As students packed up, Grayson asked Reshawn to stay behind to discuss their research plan. I went to wait out in the hallway and found Jamie standing there—her independent study was a few rooms down.
—I was in Rebel Yells sophomore year, she said. Amazing, right?
Professor Grayson was amazing, but class wasn’t what I wanted to discuss right now. This was my chance to ask about Thao without Reshawn present.
—What were the names of your friends I met last semester? At the bar?
It took her a moment.
—You mean Thao and Henry?
Breathe. Nod.
—Only Thao’s my friend, she continued. To be honest, I’ve never gotten used to Henry. He can be a little … high strung. More than a little. He had another break in December.
—Doesn’t everybody at King?
Jamie laughed.
—No, like a psychotic break. He had to go to McLean. He’s out now, but Thao’s taking the semester off to care for him in Massachusetts.
—Oh.
Disappointment was inseparable from relief.
The rest of my schedule remained as planned, three joke courses awash with teammates—including Chase. Now, though, Chase and I made sure to choose seats far apart, avoiding eye contact during lectures and keeping our
