This story is the first in an anthology I am currently writing that focuses on my own identity and heritage as a person who is both Black and white, and things in between, through the stories I’ve been told of my family and other Black and biracial people throughout my life.

“You’re askin’ for too much blood again.”

The words rang out in the tiny plantation shack as Arlo turned, feeling the hard leathery scar tissue that ran up the side of his back and over his right shoulder like a lightning bolt twist while his body moved to face his wife. 

“You’re askin’ for too much blood.”

Lafayette, their son, grew up in the tiny shack on the edge of the Campbell family’s estate. Arlo remembers Eliza leaving in the afternoons after giving the boy some greens and cornbread — or whatever she could whip up into some sort of suitable dinner at that moment —  and coming back tired, sore and visibly aged as if she had been in the cut for 30 years in three hours. But she always came back with something more for Lafayette she’d snuck from a dinner plate she had to wash. 

She got to love the boy. He had to be the one to make him ready to survive in a world that wanted him and everyone who looks like him dead. Or so it seemed.

He remembers Eliza’s father, Martin, once telling him out in the fields how Martin had thought that the hard times were over when he was able to walk off the plantation without hounds nipping at his heels. He thought he and his children were born into a time when Black people were finally free from their shackles. 

This idealistic optimism of new-born freedom blinded them to that slow, subtle noose that the real powers that be were wrapping around all of their necks, collectively as a people, their hands ready to clinch it tight like a rattlesnake finally launching at its prey and string them up just like the other strange fruit on the trees in Mississippi. 

Just like Martin eventually was. 

Sharecropping, they called it. Sure, you start out with nothin’, but it’s only cause you ain’t got nothin’. Stick around and work the land long enough, and soon, you’ll be on your way with palms full of greenbacks. 

But it never quite worked out that way. 

Just when things were gettin’ good, the landowner would ask for more, after all it’s “his land” that produced such fine crops, right? Isn’t it only fair that he should get something from it? 

And that little drop turned into a gash – down the long way of the arm, not a wrist side-cut – that bled each day while Arlo, Eliza and Lafayette worked together out in “their” fields.

Until one day, that man in the pristine, alabaster suit and fine bowler hat came asking for a little more, just a little more after all the “little mores” he’d tacked on to the seemingly ever-amended contract like a railroad spike on the Union Pacific that you can see doesn’t finish the track. 

“I can’t give you no more,” Arlo said, breaking down. “We were supposed to be gone from here 10 years ago. Five years ago would have been fine …”

“You’re asking for too much blood,” Alro choked out. “ And I ain’t got it.”

In a flash, that ivory figure had closed the distance, and Arlo found himself on the ground. While none of them like remembering the details, it ended in the owner creating the lightning bolt on Arlo’s back. After that happened, Eliza bent down by Arlo, whispered something and grabbed the money he had been clutching in his hands. Then, she handed the owner a wad of cash with dried blood mixed in with the green like a half-rotten watermelon. 

“Hmm, seems like Arlo had plenty of blood,” is all the owner said behind a cruel grin as it landed in his hand.

Then, he turned and strolled carelessly back to the main house.

Arlo never walked quite upright again after that, and he also never spoke again while he was out of the house, but to say, “Yes, sir” or “No, sir”. 

He felt the noose. 

It was too late, but he felt every single little fraying hair-like fiber along its length as they dug in. They rubbed against each section of skin and every sensitive follicle on his neck. 

But he also knew that the second he goes to take it off, that’s when DROP … he’d be dangling like a rag doll kicking his legs in the wind while smiling faces beamed from behind a truck with a a camera to take little postcard pictures, and a banjo to celebrate the killin’. 

It reminded him of a story that his mother Bessie told him once, to try to explain what it was like to be a slave on the plantation — back when he still dreamed that he was anything different now. 

“Well, my brother Curtis,” Bessie said, with that meticulous semi-raspy voice that comes with age, “he got out one time. Heard a few tales. Other people jumping from places in the area. Thought he could figure it out that way. One day, I worked in the main house. Was so damn tired, I stayed that night.

“He snuck in the window. Woke me up to say goodbye. I wish I hadn’t been half asleep. Maybe I could have talked him back into his right mind — he had never even been off the plantation. But I guess there was something in his voice, that kind of desire for a freedom you’ve never known.”

She paused for a moment as her light-skinned hand wiped away a few tears from her hazel eyes as she swallowed down her own guilt. 

“Well, it wasn’t until the next morning that they figured out he was gone, and they set out after him. By night, they caught up to him near a swamp. There he was, on one side our slave master and his posse. On the other, a swamp full of starving, hissing gators. … The gators ate well that night.”

“Slavery or swamp,” Arlo thought to himself now, thinking about what he would have to do.

He had always wanted to tell his son that a man – no matter his color, name or anything — could BE somebody if he just lived an honest life and worked hard and treated people right. 

Arlo didn’t want to tell him he needed him to work harder in the field because his old body was failing — and they still needed to pay for the land.

His son deserved to dream of open fields, and empty cages. He didn’t deserve chains, and living an internal life that dare not ever cross over to the outside world. There, even a little shade of it could have you found like all the numberless, bloated “criminals” that have washed up along the Mississippi. 

But it’s not their time. 

He didn’t know when it would ever come. 

He just had to keep his boy alive long enough so that maybe he could see it. 

“Slavery or swamp.”

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