THE NIGHT SKY MADE ME THINK. THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO BUT DREAM AND WONDER. MY MIND WAS FREE TO GO ANYWHERE AND SOON THE IDEAS CAME FLOODING IN. WHY AM I A SLAVE? WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE SLAVES AND OTHERS MASTERS? WHO MADE ALL THIS? WHO AM I?
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SUMMARY: THE STORY SO FAR…
Josiah, a young slave 12 years of age, lives in a cabin in the slave quarters of a Virginia tobacco plantation with Auntie Bee, Mose, the plantation handyman, two young children, Randall and Emily. He notices Mose leaving the cabin in the middle of the night and follows him to his secret workshop in the woods where Mose is building some sort of strange contraption. Mose tells him it is a machine that will fly him to freedom. Now that he knows Mose’s secret, he stays to help build the flier. After mishaps, false starts and setbacks—the flier tumbles down the mountain and is seriously damaged—they are attacked by snakes—mountain lions lurk all around them—they realize someone has been spying on them and they think their escape plan has been discovered. Finally, their time has come. Now they are in the air, riding on the wings of the wind.
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It was gradually darkening. The sun was sinking so slowly we hardly noticed its movement. In the east, on the other side of the sky, far from the brilliant sunset, already the sky was black. With night closing in, heaven was changing before our eyes.
Soon we were riding in the dark. I was comfortable lying on my back to study the sky. The heavens were alive, pulsing with light. Stars by the thousands dotted the vast space above us, flickering white against a
background so devoid of light you cannot conceive of darkness so complete.
I wondered if anyone has ever tried counting the stars. If they did, they might never reach the end of them. It must be an unfathomable number, more than anyone can possibly imagine.
I found some familiar stars. There was the Big Dipper. With my finger I drew an imaginary line across the sky, starting from the two stars at the end of the handle and kept going until I reached the last star in the tail of the Little Dipper. I knew the North Star. It was one thing I was always sure of.
Every slave knew the North Star led to freedom and Canada. It was a great comfort to see the North Star up there and still leading the way for all time.
This was our first night of flying. This is the great gift of freedom. For the first time in my life I had the opportunity to do nothing but look up at the stars. It was glorious beyond anything I have ever seen.
Stars have been coming out for millions of years. When I was down on the farm, I could have looked up on any night to see the same stars in the same sky. There was nothing to stop me—except I never thought to do it. I
was always too busy, too caught up, thinking too much about what I had to do. And always I was too darn tired.
Never before had the night sky seemed so vast, so majestic, so mysterious as it appeared from the flier. You can’t help but see it. There’s nothing much to do around here but look up.
That’s the first thing I have to say about freedom. It’s like you just woke up from a bad dream and now can see the world as it really is. For the first time I knew what Auntie Bee meant by those Bible verses she read: God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Staring at the limitless expanse above me, I imagined myself actually flying out there among the stars and looking back toward the earth. I could definitely see myself there. Somehow, I felt I belonged.
The night sky made me think about things. There was nothing to do but dream and wonder. My mind was free to go anywhere and soon the ideas came flooding in. I could not stop thinking and questioning. Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves and others masters? Who made all this? Who am I? What is this thing called life? What happens when I die? Do I disappear and turn into nothing?
I had lots and lots of questions. Even though I had no answers it was amazing just to think of so many questions.
I thought about God.
As a young boy, I heard white preachers say that God up in the sky made all things. This God made black people to be slaves and white people to be masters. He said that God is good and knows what is best for everybody.
These were perplexing and troublesome questions to me. Even as a child I knew it was not a satisfactory explanation of God. Where was His wisdom? Where was His charity? Where was His love? It collided point blank against all my notions of goodness.
Besides, I could not tell how anybody could know that God made black people to be slaves. There were puzzling exceptions to this theory of slavery—the fact that all black people were not slaves and all white people were not masters.
To this day, even as a grown man, I have known many white folks whose hearts are full of goodness, kindness, charity and love and plenty of black folks who are the same. But there are many people, black and white,
who show not even a shred of God’s goodness. There are plenty of mean and nasty people in the world, black and white and they treat everyone badly and it doesn’t matter whether you are black or white.
One thing is certainly true. There is no love and not one shred of anything good in this whole slavery business. I have known about the unnatural and unholy character of slavery since I was old enough to think. I do not need to read a book about it. I do not need a law or any authority figure to tell me what I know to be true. Slavery is a crime. Slavery is a sin. Slavery is evil.
I think slavery is the next thing to hell.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, June 20th 2010 at 9:52PM
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