text: The Black Horse on the Prairie The ripened Pink Ladies could not mask the putrid odor of Herman Hilltop’s decomposing body. A fresh patch of sugar magnolias could not even soften the tear-rousing stench. Had a man passed his foul-smelling corpse, a double-handed nose-pinch would disable him from cutting down the cordage noose--as would the apprehension of fondling a dead black man's flesh. There, drooping from the highest branch, he would stay flaccidly swaying in the wind. It would be just eight days until the maggots had finished boring through his brain and crawling out his eye sockets, but his tattered skeleton would not be found until hell froze over. ⏅ “Momma. Just a few mo’ months and Imma get us outta her’, alright,” Herman, with a hand gripping her sagging shoulder, explained. It had been 11 years since Herman and his mother were sold to the Corucca Plantation in Calvert County, Maryland. Surrounded by acres of tobacco, he fantasized about life out of shackles, earning modest wages, and raising his own family. His fantasy was not too far out of reach. The laxer conditions of the north allowed him to work odd jobs, after his day in the field of course, for a couple bucks. After 11 years of spit-shining shoes on the most dehydrating-days of the summer and constructing oak-wood furniture until his fingers could not bare anymore splinters, Herman had accrued $650, nearly enough to purchase his and his mother’s freedom. Just a few more months, as Herman had so neatly drawn out, and they would be freemen. ⏅ Nobody saw it coming. The winter of 1865, as temperate as it seemed compared to last, carried a devastating wind-chill that took lives mercilessly. Wrapped in wool blanket by open fire, Herman’s mother took her last breath, and her son neiled by, head-in-hand, sniveling over his loved-one’s death and the impetuous fever that foiled their plans for liberation. He found he had haplessly misused the past 11 years. As fate would have it though, in the following month, January, the 13th Amendment was passed through congress, freeing all slaves in the entire U.S. territory. 11 years of arduous toil just to be left with a dead mother and gratis-freedom left him in a deep, dark, and seemingly incurable depression. As all the other slaves on the plantation soulfully celebrated their imminent release, he chose to rest alone; convinced solitude would alleviate his anguish. ⏅ “Don’t trus’ nobody. The white folk. The black folk. Nobody.” Herman remembered the lesson his mother had ingrained in him since childhood and he had earnest intention on following it. ​11 months and 17 days after his late mother's death, Herman departed from the Calvert County post office on horse, clutching his Homestead Act authorized-deed to 80 acres of land in Kansas, en route to the Great American Desert: his new, reclusive life. Herman understood the land out west was nearly infertile, but he had no intention on farming it commercially. The crops he grew on this land would be harvested for subsistence only. $650 allowed him to purchase one horse, two oxen, a wagon, a steel plow, seeds, saplings, and enough raw materials to build a comfortable dwelling: a wood-framed interior encased by a mud-brick exterior, a one-room residence that could keep cool in the steaming days of the summer and toasty in the windswept days of the winter. His dreams, once of raising a good ol’ Christian family, had faded and were cloaked by his narrow-pathed vision of withdrawal and grief. ⏅ ​Good grief. He’d been reaping what he sowed. Eating enough to live but barely living enough not to die. Apart from tending to his crops, he hadn’t been outside his 80 acres in weeks. When he first arrived at his land, a quick horse-ridden survey would keep him inside his boundaries. No residents but ex-Confederate soldiers and Irish-bloods for 30 miles in every direction. His mother taught him how to read them when he looked, and, promptly, he had been left alone. With the majority of his 80 acres being untouched, passerbyers could assume the land was vacant--no knocks on his door, no hospitable salutations, nothing. Sadly, the empty land was not the reason for his lack of companionship. The knowledge of his black skin passed through the grapevine, keeping neighbors away. A barrack of buffalo soldiers, stationed just a 45 minute gallop away, never payed a visit to the sole black man. With their rise in status, from slavery to calvary, and their new pompous attitude, they had no interest in accompanying the ostensibly declasse black, from slavery to solitary poverty. ⏅ Two years and he’d been alone in his grief for too long. Never had he been invited to cut up the rug at the biannual Grange dance. Never had he been invited to tie one on after the Priest’s sermon on Sunday night. Never had he even been invited into the threshold of the local church. Two years was too long to not hear another soul’s voice. Two years was all it took. ⏅ ​The Pink Lady tree reminded him of the one that grew on the Corucca plantation. Even more than its aesthetic, climbing to its tippy top brought him back to his childhood. His childhood, although full of slaving and drudgery, had one key component: company. Although he was nearly worked to death, he had never felt as weak as he felt right now; in his terminal moment he had nobody. His mother, never even breathing a breath of air as a free woman, comfortably died in her loving son’s arms. Now, he would see his own death, cradled by the arms of the Pink Lady tree. ​As the black silhouette tangled by the cordage noose, Herman Hilltop’s horse nayed. Now that his master had gone under, he was a free horse and could travel about as he liked. Where shall I go, thought the horse. What shall I see? Who shall I meet? The horse, in all of its glory, galloped into the prairie, the Great American Desert. In two years or less, the vivacious nag would have all of its questions answered: Nowhere, nothing, and noone.