A Free State Read online

  Tull settled himself again in his seat, but the encounter had put him in a foul humor. No one in the country would talk that way. They would know they were inviting trouble. In the city everything was a show. No consequences. He wondered what the people around him would have thought if they visited a real plantation, with real slave quarters, real dirt and blood. He would have liked to tie a few of them up and make them watch a slave pissing himself with fear while Master raped his wife in front of him. Let’s see if they would dance a jig to that. Let them smell the slop buckets outside the quarters and watch the little ones running around with no pants on, shameless. Or take the Quakers, who thought all you had to do was wave your hand and say “You’re free!” to turn one of these bucks into somebody who deserved to be free. All these faces turned toward the painted scenery on the stage. That’s all they wanted to see. He got angrier as he sat there, with the crowd clapping and hollering around him.

  The first half ended. Some of the audience lunged toward the lobby in search of pie or drink; the remainder stood at their seats, stretched, shouted to acquaintances across the hall. Tull had had enough. This show in this city where black criminals ran free, and these fools clapping along as if everything were fine. He would never track a runaway to a city again. He promised himself that.

  He stood to leave and had started toward the aisle when his attention was caught by the sounds of a disturbance behind the stage curtain.

  We got through the first half without discrediting ourselves and quit the stage for intermission. Our second half would be essentially the same as a typical weeknight program, although I shuffled some songs and switched a few for others so as not to repeat the previous night’s list exactly. I was restless, and I paced backstage while the others sat and talked and refreshed their blacking in the dressing room.

  One circuit took me behind our backdrop, toward stage right, where our unused stage scenery was stacked, and I noticed that the rear door, to the alley, was open. I had not opened it myself, and I went to investigate. I was about to shut and lock the door when I heard my name, hissed out from behind Birch’s log cabin. I peered into the shadow. There, crouched behind the porch of the miniature Uncle Tom set, was Henry.

  We regarded one another across a burning river.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “They found where I live,” he said. “I can’t go back. I need the banjo.”

  “We’re at intermission.”

  “I’ll leave,” he said. “But I need the banjo.”

  “It’s in the dressing room,” I said. “What is this business with Rose? Did you go to her house?”

  He did not respond.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I said. He shook his head, and looked at me as if to ask, What do you want me to say?

  I heard footsteps approaching. I turned and saw Mulligan, with an expression of shock on his blackened face.

  “What’s happened?” he said. “Why are you back here? Henry! Are you all right?”

  “Hello, John,” Henry said.

  To me, Mulligan said, “What is going on?”

  I was about to answer when I saw Eagan heading our way, yelling the words, “Black bastard!” Everything was suddenly going too quickly.

  “Hold him off, John,” I said.

  Henry vaulted over a corner of the cabin porch, making for the stage, where the curtain was still down; Eagan dodged Mulligan and ran after Henry, getting a hand on his shirt at mid-stage. Henry wheeled around and struck Eagan in the face, and they crashed to the floor together, knocking over two chairs. Mulligan and I were on them almost immediately. Eagan yelled, “Nigger, I’ll teach you a lesson!” We pulled him off Henry, who got to his feet and started for the dressing room again, but he tripped over a chair, and Eagan was out of our grasp and on him again. I noticed a rip under the arm of his jacket.

  Powell and Burke and Gilman had appeared and were all in it now, but they were only adding to the confusion. I was trying to move the melee off stage. Ten paces from the dressing room, with Eagan subdued by the others, Henry got to his feet. God only knew what the audience was hearing, but this was a very bad situation. They had muscled Eagan to the other side of the stage and, with Mulligan’s help, into the wings and out of our sight, and I had almost reached the dressing room door with Henry when a voice, at our heels, said, “Stop right there.”

  It was a beautiful scene, almost too perfect. He had known, intuitively, as soon as he heard the word ring out from behind the curtain, and now here it was. Climbed onto the stage, and had to knock someone out of the way to get behind the curtain. As if foretold, natural as a rainbow. There is an order of things, and it favored him. He gestured with the pistol.

  “Nigger,” Tull said, “you can bleed red just like a white man. Keep going.” To the other he said, “I got him now.” He followed the boy into the room, with the minstrel behind. Gesturing with the pistol toward a dressing-table chair, he kicked the door closed and said, “Sit down.” The boy did. The green eyes, the light skin. The true fear in the eyes. Tull felt fountains of grace leaping around him, bright rubies and emeralds of truth. Even here, in this jungle, justice would find him. A white flame of purity shone upon him.

  “Your daddy said dead or alive, Joseph,” he said. “I don’t care much one way or the other, but I think he misses you at dances. I got your banjo, too, that big nigger in the woodshop made.”

  Tull looked at the other man now, the minstrel, and under the blacking Tull recognized the person he had spoken to just the previous morning, in that same theater. He smiled and said, “I’m going to figure you didn’t know, just like you said. I don’t really care. Find some rope and help me get him tied.”

  The dressing room door opened and a large man entered, disarranged and with half the blacking gone from his face, followed quickly by another, shorter and animated. Tull recognized the short man as the fiddler. This one pushed past the larger man and started toward the captive.

  “Ha!” he said. “Caught! I’ll take a shot at him before you go . . .”

  “Shut up,” Tull said. He pointed his pistol at this short one, who halted immediately.

  “What are you going to do with him?” said the first minstrel, the one from the day before.

  “What do you care what I’m going to do with him?” Tull said. “What do you think I’m going to do with him? If you don’t want this place shut down, get some rope and be quiet.”

  This first one hesitated, but the short fiddler said, “I’ll help. I’ll be glad to,” and walked to an area behind a divan. Tull kept his eye on the man, who pushed away some pieces of stage detritus, props, a sign, a pair of Indian clubs. He hefted a coil of line and brought it to the stranger.

  “You hold him,” Tull said. To the large man he said, “You give me a hand tying.”

  “I will not,” the big man said.

  Tull focused on the big man, his energy darkening, then brightening in recognition. “Hey,” he said. “You play a good banjo. Just stand over there by the door and be quiet while we get this done.” To the boy, then, he said, “Remember, Joseph, your daddy said dead or alive. I’m happy either way.” He removed his hat and set it on a chair.

  The fiddler held the boy’s legs as Tull tied them, quickly, his pistol within reach next to him on the floor. The others knew enough to stay put, at least, Tull thought. “I’m glad you all know the law,” he said. “You almost had me, Joseph. I was getting ready to head out of town and tell your daddy you had slipped away. You’re not as smart as they said.”

  When he was finished with the legs, Tull pushed the boy out of the chair and tripped him so that he was face-down on the floor, and the short minstrel knelt on the boy’s shoulders. Tull looked around and said, “Get me some more rope.”

  “I can’t breathe,” the boy said. The fiddler had his wrists pinned behind his back.

  “Ease up on him a little,” Tull said.

  The fiddler made some slight adjustment and said, to the boy,
“They ought to hang you up and skin you. There, Douglass. What did I tell you? What did I say?”

  “I don’t want you talking,” Tull said. “Where’s the rope?” He bent over to perform some adjustments on the knots around the boy’s legs.

  “I’ll get it,” somebody said.

  Eagan held Henry face-down in an arm lock, Mulligan stood by the door, and I stood to get another coil of rope. What else was there to do? And this, I thought, is how one forfeits one’s soul. I could not bear to look at Henry. I would think that the image of such a scene would make God ashamed of his own creation, but I have become convinced, through many an ensuing year, that God has no shame.

  What, after all, did I owe Henry? Did I force him at gunpoint to perform with us? Had I lied to him? Misrepresented the offer? Had he saved my life? Rescued me from a mob? I had not tricked him. I owed him nothing. I had built this troupe and thereby earned my freedom in this world of illusion, and I would not give it up. These men depended on the troupe as much as I did. We had bought ourselves time by presenting Henry, had regained our audience. With some diligence and luck we would keep their attention with other attractions. Henry would be taken away, captive, and we would remain free. I thought of how I had seen him perform on the street the first time. I thought of what it might have cost him to get himself free, to Philadelphia, the risks, the privation. Whom had he left behind? Where would he be taken? Was it my concern? My responsibility was to my men . . . I was in a fever. My partner, John, watched me as I stepped behind the divan to get the rope. I looked across the room at him, and our eyes met, and I hesitated for a moment. I saw him nod, very slightly. Eagan was taunting Henry.

  I got hold of the required item and carried it across the room to where the stranger was bent over, tightening the ropes, and I swung that club as hard as I could into the base of the stranger’s skull. I had kicked a rat once and felt the surprising weight of it against my toe, heard it expel something between a grunt and a squeal, and this figure made a similar sound as a mist of blood shot from his nose. Time slowed down, and I watched him fall forward at Henry’s feet, like an orange onto a stack of towels, and roll to one side, unconscious. I watched as if from a tower, as if I were another, witnessing a riot in the square below. Then I went to strike him again, like a watermelon, turn his head to pulp. I would kill him. Mulligan was in front of me, blocking me. I recognized him, at least.

  “Don’t,” he said. “James . . .”

  I knew him; he was there. His hand was on my arm, and his eyes looked into mine as if from a distance.

  “You’ll go to jail for this!” Eagan was saying. “I’ll see to it.”

  Mulligan said, “I will put an end to you if you say another word, Michael.” He bent down and retrieved the pistol. “Sit and be quiet, or you’ll be sorry.”

  The stranger was unconscious; a trickle of blood ran from his left nostril down his cheek and into his long, greasy hair. He was breathing. Henry had rolled onto his side, and Mulligan knelt to untie him. I was looking at Henry struggling to get free even faster. Then he was untied, and standing, and Mulligan was pulling some banknotes from his pocket, but before he could offer them, Henry was gone—out the door, disappeared, just that quickly, not a goodbye, just gone. Gone. I had not been able to utter a word to him.

  Somewhere overhead the stars wheeled in the evening sky, unseen. I was shaking; I was so cold. I could not stop shaking. Mulligan stayed with me and very shortly two men identifying themselves as police officers arrived, no more than two minutes after I had struck the stranger. One of them, with sandy hair and long side whiskers, seemed to recognize the still-unconscious figure.

  “You did this?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded, mulling it. His companion, a half-wit wearing an odd hat, said, “He gave poor Vic the beating. We spent the entire day for two dollars.”

  I was taken into custody, and put in the city jail for a week, until, through the efforts of a businessman I did not even know—a Negro, in the bargain, named Still—I was released, my crime deemed self-defense. Apparently he had had some dealings, himself, with Henry. I never found out what happened to the bounty hunter; all I was told was that he had not died, and had left the city.

  But it was the end of the Virginia Harmonists.

  Eagan, Powell, and Burke formed their own troupe. Mulligan left, for Boston, inviting me to come with him and establish a new troupe there. But I had lost my taste for minstrelsy. Not for the music, but for the overwhelming lie upon which it fed. Some fluid that had surrounded me had evaporated. The magic Henry had summoned had ended in such violence and discord, and I could not help but imagine all the others in similar straits, or worse. Seeing it had closed off an avenue which had been my road in life, and I was at a loss, as if I were suddenly unable to write, or walk.

  I took a job for a while as stage manager at Sanford’s, but the presence of all that enforced gaiety onstage in contrast with the reality behind it, and the sheer tedium involved in my job, chafed intolerably. Things began to seem pointless, as pointless as they had seemed at the farm. I struggled to remain at the theater, but I felt that if I did so I would cede the final measure of any dream I had sustained through the years, destroy my past as well as whatever the future might bring, and at length I quit. And then, for a time, I drifted.

  Not quite a year later, I was walking along Front Street. I had fallen on difficult times, had moved from my apartments off Washington Square into more affordable quarters, and I often spent the afternoons walking aimlessly through the Philadelphia streets, hoping, I suppose, that I might once again stumble upon some unexpected grace, some magic that could assure me that everything I saw was more than a veneer with nothing behind it, that a caring God still existed.

  I had just passed Shippen Street, heading south into a rough quarter, when I saw an unmistakable figure walking half a block away, in front of me. I could not believe my own eyes, and I quickened my pace to catch up, and when I was several paces behind, and sure of who I saw, I called out, “Rose!”

  The figure spun around to face me. I saw that she recognized me quickly enough, although I had certainly put on flesh. She had, as well; clearly, she was with child.

  “Rose!” I said, again.

  “Hello, James,” she said, flatly.

  What a mixture of emotions coursed over me then. Her hair was still short, yet not carefully attended to. She wore a skirt that went only to her calves, and a shapeless blouse. The skin on her face was drawn, and I noticed a reddish, dry patch on her elegant neck. She was still lovely, yet her features wore an expression from which the light had all but disappeared. A crease had formed between her eyebrows.

  “How are you?” I asked, putting out my hand, hoping for a touch of hers on mine.

  “I’m well, James,” she said, with no expression, taking my hand briefly and then letting hers fall back to her side.

  “Do you live here?” I asked. “In this neighborhood, I mean?”

  “I stay nearby,” she said. She looked up and down the block.

  “Please,” I said, “do you have time for a visit? We can go to Tanner’s.”

  “No,” she said, “I should not.” She did not seem absolutely sure of this, and I asked again if we might at least sit and visit outside for a while, and she relented.

  I bought two buns for us at a bakery a block away, and we took them and sat on some piled-up rocks that served as a partial levee between docks on the river’s edge. It was a beautiful early spring afternoon, and we unwrapped the waxed paper around our bread and ate, talking and looking out at the Delaware. I told her of how the year had gone; she had heard about the melee, of course. I told her that I was retired from performing, that it had lost its appeal, and she seemed saddened by this, but not surprised. I did not mention that I had moved down somewhat in the world, although I am sure that was clear enough on the face of things. She asked about Mulligan, and I told her he had gone to Boston. She did not ask about
Henry.

  I had lost track of her after the troupe disbanded, assumed she had gone with Eagan and the others, and I told her this, asked how the fellows were. She told me she had not seen Eagan for the better part of a year.

  “But why?” I said. “I had thought you would follow them to their new theater . . . ?”

  “I did,” she said. “But Michael tired of me.”

  “Tired of you?” I said. “That is impossible!” I believe that I meant this to sound lighthearted, and I saw her attempt to summon a smile in return, but her features expressed only a sadness that nearly broke my heart.

  “He accused me of being unfaithful,” she said. “I don’t know if he even believed that himself. I think he just wanted to be rid of me.”

  “Well . . .” I said, hesitant to ask a further question. “I can’t understand that.”

  “Can’t you?” she said.

  “Are you with another troupe now?”

  She shook her head in the negative. “I do piecework. I make my living as I can. As you can see, I will have a dependent soon.”

  “Is it . . . Eagan’s child?” I blurted out.

  “No, James,” she said. “It is not Eagan’s child.”

  We sat silently for a while longer, as I struggled to think of what to say. At length, Rose said, “I ought to go.”

  “Rose,” I said. We stood up, and I felt something rushing through my hands that I would never again touch, and I felt a kind of panic rise in me, and on impulse I said, “Come to live with me. I’m not in the finest place, but I will take care of you as well as I can. Please—we can still make something of our lives, together.”

  Even as I was saying these words I watched her expression darken into a frown, a wounded look, and she stepped back from me.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “You are still a child.” She drew her arms around herself, looked as if she might say something else, then she turned and walked, quickly, away. And I stood there, dumbly, watching her.