Broken Warrior

Emancipation

Elizabeth

The thing about freedom, is that once you are given it people automatically think it means that you're exactly capable of everything else anything else another free person is. It doesn't matter what you went through when you weren't free or how you are treated now that you are. Just, here you go. Freedom. As if freedom solves all issues.

I was born fifteen years after the declaration of emancipation and thirteen years after the Civil war that my fathers and uncles fought in to maintain that freedom was over. I was born free in ways that my parents were not, though I wasn't born equal.

Human rights were deplorable back then to begin with and I remember my friends and family coming back from trying to find jobs up north talking about the deplorable conditions everyone was put in. People starved and froze to death in the streets. Children who were in orphanages were sent to mines and factories to work and fed starvation diets. If they ran away they would freeze, starve or fall victim to gangs. People flocked to this country for the promise of freedom and hope and most of them died miserable, painful deaths.

But as the daughter of former slaves, I was raised to be grateful for what little we had. We didn't get schools right away and we were all shoved into ghettos and not allowed even the basic human rights, but we were free. We were free to starve and be hated and given a second rate everything while being told to 'remember our place'.

Top off all that with the fact that I was a woman, and freedom wasn't so free. I wanted it, I felt in my soul that I deserved it. And I suppose that if I had not died, I would have not lived to really see it.

My father's and brothers were given the right to vote shortly before I was born, though I won't go into the taxes and discrimination with polling that existed well into the latter part of the twentieth century. I would have been an old woman if I had been human in 1920, when women were given the right to vote. And I probably would have been dead by the time the nineteenth amendment was ratified by all american states.

By then, however, I was already entrenched in the new life I had found when my life was saved, even as I was dying from the mistake of seeking too much freedom in too dangerous a life. I was twenty four and I wasn't ready to die.

I had wasted my life, embracing the sexual objectification of the jezebel black woman as the only power I had. I sought freedom and found pain and near slavery in the sex trade that left me at the whims of whatever pimp gangster was in charge of my stretch of street at any given moment.

Carbry Alesky saved me and treated me, not as a woman, not as a black, but as a vampire. Younger than him, and in need of tutelage, but with more consideration and equality than I had ever faced. And the only thing of value I had to give to him was my heart and soul and devotion. I fell in love with him and it took me a very long time to come to terms with the fact that he did not love me back.

It took a very long time to accept that being friends with him could be its own kind of love. I had given him every part of me and he had respectfully, carefully, given most of it back. But he didn't abandon me when it was clear that it wasn't my body that he wanted. He believed himself a monster, and I know that he has done some horrible things in his past, but the Carbry Alesky I know is nothing like the monsters I struggled against in my human life.

I see that pain in his soul as surely as I saw it in my father and uncles when they returned from war. The need, the desire for some redemption and salvation.

In the hundred and seventeen years that I have known him, he has helped countless people, saved untold lives and done everything in his power to atone. And as a vampire, how many lives do we live? Our human lives? Plus all the changes we go through, throughout the decades and centuries? If we can not improve ourselves, if we can not change our pasts, why continue living? I can't believe that the past is the only indication of a person's goodness.