Saint Exupery clearly wants to, but can’t quite get a grip on the subject of slavery.

Last night, looking for my travel journal in my backpack, instead I found Wind, Sand and Stars. The book fell open to a place I’ve bookmarked before.

Saint Exupery describes his encounters on the Sahara. He discusses men who have been tricked, kidnapped and sold into slavery. Saint Exupery, a truthful writer, is at sea here. He veers from casual condescension to fascination and empathy. He observes such men are not unhappy. Then he describes a man who is clearly unhappy. He observes discarded servants, granted freedom late in years, who lie on the sand and wither away. The beauty and peace of the end of their lives. Or is it the loss of a rich valuable life, death from stark unappreciation.

Saint Exupery was a pilot, and he and a group of friends back home and other pilots pool their resources to purchase the freedom of one man called Bark. All slaves were called Bark. This man had a former life as Mohammed. He had had a wife and children and a home in Marrakech.

The man owns nothing now, has a threadbare cape. The pilots give him a significant sum of money to help ease the transition from slavery to freedom.

The man is overwhelmed. He has dreamed of freedom so long, and when it arrives just as unpredictably as he lost it, he is stunned. “He was free, but too infinitely free; not striding upon the earth but floating above it.”

He does the things a man might do on a day off with money in his pocket, but that does not ground him. Then, a sickly child draws his attention.

He goes to the shops in the market and spends every coin he has been given on toys and gold-threaded slippers which he hands out to a thousand children.

Saint Exupery offers no real guidance here, or none that I can understand, writing abstractly about angels seeking weight on earth. And though he writes of the man telling prositutes “I am Mohammed ben Lhaoussin,” Saint Exupery continues to refer to him as “Bark” throughout.

Slavery. Money. Dignity. I too am lost.

It is Mohammed’s story. What is the worth of a human being? What is the meaning of money that a handful of metal disks can take away or gain the freedom of even one man? What is the value of a sum of hard-earned francs collected for you to establish you in the real world? It is worth a thousand pair of gold-threaded slippers, gone in an hour.