Free, at last

wikipedia

The earliest sound that Django remembered from his childhood was the sharp and sudden foooootisssh, the sound made by a whip lashing on his and his mother’s back and obviously the ever present clink clink of the chains that they were both fettered to. Django and his mother were slaves on a plantation in Texas in the 1850s, and these were sounds that were common to their kind in those days.

Django had all but resigned to his fate of spending a lifetime in servitude and was one of the most obedient slaves on the plantation. But the last three days had changed all that. Three days ago, his old mother was tied to a post and brutally whipped to death by the supervisor for having tried to prevent him from raping one of the young slave girls who worked there. This incident awakened something in Django and things just couldn’t remain the same again.

As a precaution his supervisor had chained him to the wall of the deepest dungeon in the big house and tonight Django only had the drip drip sound of the water seeping down there for company. What the supervisor who was new, didn’t know was that this was Django’s favorite hangout as a kid and he and his friends had managed to saw away 3/4^th of the hook holding the chains to the wall as kids as part of one of their crazy games.

Given that this was the deepest part of the house, nobody heard him break the rest of the hook and unchain himself. The next order of business for him was to locate the gunpowder kegs kept outside in the barn and strategically spread it all around the big wooden house of his masters. He chose the darkest part of the night to do this so that no one would notice him do this. He then set fire to the edge of the line that he had created using the gunpowder and quickly started running in the opposite direction of the fire. After a while the only sounds that he could hear was the crackling of the wooden walls of the big house. He had also ensured that nobody could escape from the inside by bolting all the doors from the outside.

Django ran across the plantation to the railway tracks at the far end. By the time he paused for a while and caught his breath, he heard the rumbling chug chug of the steam engine coming his way. He allowed the first few cabins of the train to pass him by before he ran and hopped on to a wagon which was loaded with logs. Exhausted with the night’s adventure, he lay down and started sleeping.

The next morning he was woken up by a sound he had never heard in his life. He was woken up by the gentle chirp chirp of a small blueberry which had flown and sat upon one of the logs on the wagon when the train had come to stop in a nice shady wooded area of the Texas landscape. He was free, free at last.

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This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by Blogadda. The prompt was that the post had to include at least 5 sounds and that is the reason the related words have been specifically underlined in the post.

This post has been loosely inspired by the plot of the movie Django Unchained.

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This post has been selected as one of Blogadda’s WoW picks on 15-Oct-2013.