The Ivory Tower

Animal

Two weeks passed after we trekked into the forest, and Lucas now knows many more words. His vocabulary increased almost every day, ever since he learned to ask “what is that?” He asked us that question about everything, including our own homework and other things that we had always known, and when we answered, he would concentrate on remembering it. He even said sentences with more than four words, or big enough for us to understand what was said and put the rest together.

The temperature outside was getting colder after another week, and Papa suddenly left home very frequently by sundown, only to come back right by the time we were going to bed. Mama was getting very suspicious, as he always said that he was going out to business meetings with the friends, but it was the friends that we all were afraid of –at least Annie and I were afraid of them. They were my friends’ fathers, whom were very cocky and, most importantly, treated other people with lesser respect than they would for themselves, and even worse to slaves. [My friends told me that they saw him at their common gatherings, something my father had always declined and never allowed me to join. They apparently gave him advice on how to properly “teach” a slave and all that, but I could only hope that Papa wouldn’t change.

It only got worse after that. No longer was he our Papa. We had to call him Father. He started ordering Lucas around more often, sometimes raising his voice in unmistakable yells. He woke him up earlier than usual to do pointless labor, whether it be tilling the field’s soil again or cleaning out the stables after doing it last night. He even took out the normal bed from his little room and replaced it with a minute amount of straw. 

We all tried in vain to stop him from wrecking the classroom. He took out all of Mama’s stuff, books, board and all, and turned it all to rubble with his hammer. He then forbid Mama from caring for Lucas, whether it be washing his clothes or teaching him anything. He said that we HAD to do it to put the “animal” in his proper place. At that point I didn’t understand how Papa could view another human being as an animal, being that he could learn our language just as well as anyone else. But this wasn’t Papa- this was Father, and at that point, I couldn’t tell who was the animal and who was the man…