A Free State Page 8

  Tull sized her up, figured her to be in her mid-thirties. She was still good-looking, but probably past her usefulness for the old drunk in the mansion. A boy maybe ten years old stood by a small stone fireplace where a fire was going despite the heat. She watched Tull with high alert and fear. She knew, he thought.

  “You know what I’m here for.”

  “Coley go in the other room now.”

  Tull smiled at her, at the comedy of mistaken identity. “I’m not here on a buying trip, ma’am.”

  “Coley, you hear me.”

  The boy stepped backward into an adjacent room.

  Tull saw her take in his hat, his turned eye. No; she knew.

  “I think you got it figured out,” he said.

  She was silent; he could hear the doors being locked inside her. Battening down the hatches. The dread and fear joined now by an attempt to steel herself. Tull knew the routine, the familiar stops along the way.

  “I don’t want any unpleasantness,” he said. “I want to know where your boy ran off to.”

  She sat staring at him.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask you one more time. Where’d your boy run off to? Your boy Joseph.”

  “You not going to find him,” she said.

  “I didn’t ask you,” Tull shouted, his face suddenly mottling red, “if you thought I would find him. I asked you where he ran off to.” Tull saw her breathing a little faster, the face still impassive. He let himself settle for a moment, then he said, “Before I ask you a third time, you think about this. Joseph can come back, alive. He’ll get a whipping, but it’s not going to be too bad because his daddy loves him.” He saw her frown; that was good. “And he’ll be alive, and you will have your boy with you.”

  “He won’t come back.”

  Tull leaned across the table and slapped her hard across the face with the flat of his hand. “You shut your fucking mouth unless you’re going to tell me where he is.” He didn’t like getting angry; it was a loss of control, and the only antidote was to use it to dominate a situation absolutely. He felt himself getting sexually aroused—another way of losing control. It made him angrier, harder.

  He stood up and walked around the table to where she was; with his right forearm he pushed her yarn and tools off the table. She got out of her chair, grabbling at the dowel stick for the yarn, and as he grabbed for her she caught him on the side of the head with it. It had no effect. She screamed, and as Tull jerked her bodice down, ripping the fabric, the boy Coley ran into the room, crying. Tull had his knife drawn and was holding the sharp edge against her nipple and she was weeping.

  “Philadelphia,” the boy yelled, crying and pushing at Tull’s leg. “Joseph said he going to Philadelphia.”

  Tull looked at the boy, across the woman’s body. He was holding her down by the neck, with the nipple still pinched between his thumb and the knife. He looked at the boy directly and calmly in the eye. “Are you telling the truth?”

  “Leave Mama be. Joseph said he gone to Philadelphia and bring us there to be with him.”

  Tull kept his eyes locked into the boy’s until the boy shut his eyes and collapsed in sobs. Leaning down now and looking directly in the woman’s face, he said, “You raised that boy right.” Then he squeezed her nipple, hard, between his thumb and the knife blade and cut off the tip and flicked it away. She called out to her God as Tull wiped the blood off his knife onto her dress and stood up.

  “I think you’re about finished nursing babies anyway,” he said. “If I’m wrong at least you got one tit left.”

  He picked up the banjo from where he had leaned it against the wall and stepped out into the beautiful, hot afternoon.

  6

  Night. Not the barn, not the ravine, not the skiff tied in the rushes. He touched the wall. Somewhere outside, distant, a shrill voice arguing. All dark.

  Henry slid his legs over the edge of the narrow pallet and put his feet against the floor, felt for the matches, lit one, and the small room bloomed dully with murky light and twitching shadows. Slowly, slowly, he rejoined himself, and his pulse settled, slowly. The tiny room in the entrails of Lombard Street, with its built-in drawers and cabinets—done by a riverboat man, so he’d been told.

  He put the match to a candle stub in a low brass saucer, left there by someone, sometime. In the dark, the past stood on equal footing with the present. In the day the sun cast your shadow and you knew where you were. At night it was harder to tell, easier to slide backward.

  He had had no particular plan beyond getting to a free state. They wanted him to go to Canada, but Philadelphia suited him. What they called Bottle Alley was an entire city block carved into a warren of rooms along a network of passageways off Lombard; Mr. Still’s man Sam had told him about it after he had spent some weeks with the Passmores, way out on the Germantown Road. Staying at the Passmores’ had been a temporary measure, arranged by the Vigilance Committee, while he got used to being free. They were good people and generous to open their home to him. Yet when he offered to play and sing for them on the second evening, Mistress Passmore put her hand on his arm and said, “Please . . . we can’t have this here.” They said it was a slave instrument, and he had thought, I am nobody’s slave.

  During those first weeks in Philadelphia, he had been taken to abolitionist meetings, usually at churches, where he felt himself on exhibit, like a circus oddity. The earnest white people pressed his hand and wished him Godspeed. He did not want to be ungrateful, but “Godspeed” sounded as if they wanted to get rid of him, fast. One Pastor Radford would introduce one Mr. Linforth, a Friend To The Bondsman, from Buffalo, New York. Mr. Linforth would intone: “Brothers and sisters, how can we, as Christians, as men and women of good conscience, look the other way? Like Pontius Pilate, we find no wrong in the miserable wretches subjected to the daily Crucifixion of whippings, arbitrary separation from loved ones, and worse, much worse, and yet still we remand them to the whims of a murderous mob. Imagine yourself, unable to do the least thing without the imprimatur of a sinful human who crowns himself your Lord and Master. Imagine misery, unalleviated by the slightest glimmer of hope. Beauty, the joys of a family, the very basis of humanity a closed door to you, reduced to the level of animals by the inestimable cruelty of the lash and the branding iron . . .”

  Henry, or Joseph as he had been called, was not whipped. He had not worked in the fields, not slept on a mud floor, had not spent all day picking, lifting, carrying. He had, perhaps, a special perspective. But in his experience, even the lowest field Negroes at The Tides weren’t animals and didn’t think of themselves as animals. In fact they had a kind of contempt for Master James and the others of his class. To the abolitionists, Henry was a representative of a subjugated people, nothing less, and nothing more. It was his role. Certainly the idea that there was any fun to be had in the world seemed to be taken as an affront.

  He reached for the banjo leaning in the corner, lifted it into his lap. Deep midnight, but day would come. Touch of the wood, the taut strings. Softly, he thumbed the lowest string, and it warmed the room. Thumbed the next string, then the two again, a note between, quiet so that only he could hear. Playing, he knew he was there; it put him in time, yet out of time, too, the pattern now buoying him like a tide, like a river, like the river . . .

  Banks of the Rappahannock in the chirping noonday. Bulrushes, frogs. Those are boats that come and go.

  Through the woodshop door the bright sun, and a juneybug crawling through the wood curls. Tiny blocks, sanded for no splinters. The horse was a horse. Enoch made the horse.

  This is the Bible. These are words. God is a Word and He is all around. They lived in a garden and there were snakes down by north pasture. All the animals went on a boat when it rained. There was a frog in the puddle. Found him later dried and dead.

  Plates go here. Napkin there. Knife and fork and spoon. Here is a cup; here is a glass. This is a broom. Sweep like this toward the middle of the floor. Like this.


  The table set for dinner and a cloth that Mother sewed. Gold sun outside and tree shade at dinnertime and then He blocks the door. We about to eat. Joseph go outside go play. Go now. Later Mother did not talk.

  This is how you hang Master’s shirts. This is how he likes his tea. This is how you shine his boots. Always in a row like this. These are Master’s breeches. That is Master’s coal and that is Master’s bucket and that is Master’s fireplace and that is Master’s table and those are Master’s footsteps. Master likes his hoecakes nice and brown and why did Penelope laugh at that. Atticus didn’t laugh. Marcellus brought the coal in.

  In the Mansion House there was a room with books and he said, So many Bibles, and Mother said, No they are different. Each one is different. Every day was the same but every book was different. Every day they had the chores. It was better than the fields; he heard that more than once.

  Enoch made a table, made a chair, made the shelves for Master’s books. The table was from a tree. The wood comes from Richmond. This is maple, this is walnut, this is cherry, this is pine. This is hard, this is soft—look how you can do with your fingernail. Hold the rasp this-a-way. You see? Like this. Hold the saw like this. Cut away from your hand. Look how I learned that lesson. He held up his hand where one finger was gone.

  Enoch made a wooden rose. Enoch made a horse and carriage. Enoch made a banza with a gourd and a goat skin. The strings were fishing line. Joseph made a table leg and Enoch said that was good. You getting big enough to handle that saw.

  The book was from a tree. Davey was a boy in a story and he loved his mother, and his father died and another man came to the house. Mistress taught Mama to read and Mama taught Joseph. Mistress hung herself over the barn rafters.

  The world assembled itself slowly. He was twelve. Master James said he was getting tall. Put his hands in his hair and said, “Bushy, bushy,” and laughed and laughed. Not too tall for me to go bushy bushy. “Irish eyes and Mandingo hair.” Funniest damn thing ever. Joseph didn’t see what was so damn funny. He learned to say damn from Cassius at the stable. Master’s breath always smelled of the whiskey he drank. Joseph knew because he had tried it himself one time out of the glass decanter on the silver tray and he got sick and his mother said she would have whipped him but it looked like he didn’t need a whipping, that whiskey had whipped him plenty.

  Enoch was hired out to a man in Baltimore for a year. By then Joseph could do the necessary small repairs in the wood shop. Better than folding Master’s shirts and shining Master’s boots and hauling Master’s damn coal and smelling Master’s breath. He liked being alone in the shop, and now he had other things on his mind. Like watching Aurora switch under her skirt as she carried the milk from the dairy. He felt his blood burning him alive from the inside out. Was careless one day and damn near cut his little finger off, cut it almost to the bone. Mama put something on it made it sting worse than the cut and wrapped it up in gauze. Looked at him while she was wrapping. Something took your mind off what you were doing? Looked like she knew.

  The boats went up and down, and he had a week to watch them while the hand healed. Everything was alive and everything spoke to him, and down by the river sometimes he would take care of himself in the rushes, and afterward he would watch the tow boats and the barges and the steamers and wonder what they saw when they went where they went. Everything bothered him, and his mother watched him and seemed to know something about him that she wouldn’t say.

  He mimicked people to make her laugh, and then to make the others laugh. The laundry women with their West Indian accents—“Dem two head cabbage,” he would say to the men at the stable. “Dem ten pound potato in a five-pound sack,” and they would laugh and let him get up on the horses. Spanish Pete, who got things ready for market, had a music Joseph could copy in his voice, nonsense syllables that Master found especially hilarious—“Cuesta la bombolino de los frijoles!” he would exclaim to howls of laughter. Cassius might say something to one of the other men, and Joseph would repeat it back in Cassius’s voice. “I come up behind her when she washin’ Massa’s dirty drawers and tell her how I likes it,” and the other men would laugh and laugh, and Cassius would, too, unless Joseph did it a couple or three times and then Cassius would say, “What are you? A God damn mockingbird?”

  He rarely saw the fields, or the slaves who worked the fields. A man named Mister Colson rode a horse and had a gun and came through once a day to talk to Master James. One time had one of the field slaves with him, had his shirt torn open on the side soaked with blood. Master hollering at him—“Don’t bring this here! What’s wrong with you?” And Colson yelling back and then Colson left the farm, replaced by Nettles.

  Joseph worked in the wood shop. Cassius said Joseph had an easy life, had nothing to complain about. Master didn’t even come to the cabin anymore. When Joseph would walk down by the river and watch the boats, though, it weighed on his mind. Where did they go? Who was on them? The boats no longer a kind of decoration but part of a mechanism connected to something invisible that he was beginning to realize did not belong to Master James.

  Enoch returned the next spring. He wore a red silk scarf around his neck and had on real trousers. More important, he had a musical instrument with him. Joseph had never bothered about music one way or the other, although he had an ear for spoken language. This was something different, though.

  Enoch said it was a banjar. A large round hoop with a skin over it, the skin held in place by a metal ring with shiny brass bolts. The neck was a rich cherry red and it tapered up to the head, which scrolled and curled around itself. The polished wood shone. As soon as Enoch played a note, Joseph was free. The sound was freedom. Enoch played two or three simple, rhythmic songs. Where you thought there would be a note, there would be no note. Then when you thought a silence, a note tapped you on the back of the head; when you turned around, it was gone.

  One day, after weeks of begging, Enoch let Joseph hold the banjar. He was instantly flooded with a sense of presence and power. Joseph strummed the strings down.

  “Do one at a time,” Enoch said. “This way.” Showed him how to press down with his fingernail and snap the string, like flicking away a fly from a cake. Press and flick. Joseph did it, and a note bloomed, dark as molasses, with something peppery in its center. Joseph listened to the note slowly fade. He did another. Like breathing. He was lost to the room and the world until Enoch said, “That’s all you do today.”

  Joseph looked up, almost panicked. “Show me.”

  “You come back sometime late and I’ll show you.”

  He quickly learned the few tunes Enoch had to teach him. He would sit and play for as long as Enoch would let him, sometimes snapping down with his fingernail as Enoch had taught him, and sometimes plucking with his thumb and up with his forefinger. The sound of the notes, each one flaring up as he plucked it and then dying down and fading away, to be replaced by another, and another.

  He learned songs from Marcellus, one about Black Mattie that his mother told him not to sing, and from one of the laundry women, about the bullfrog dressed in soldier clothes. He found that by turning around some of the finger patterns in the little tunes he could make new songs.

  Master James had him play for visitors. There were glittering parties where the best silver and crystal were set out (after being meticulously polished by the servants, including his mother). After dinner, Joseph would be called in under the chandeliers to play and sing. The ladies wore cloth gowns, and two of the men had stains on their waistcoats. “What a prize he is!” one of the ladies said. Everyone looked at Joseph while he performed, and he liked it. The others were unseen, removing the plates, setting out dessert, but he was seen.

  His mother’s hair was going gray, and her legs were slightly bowed, and she was not yet thirty. She kept a rag doll on her sagging bed; she had had it since she was a girl. Master had given it to her, before she was old enough for him to use and then discard. Now she slept with the doll. Her treasures were
a Bible that Mistress had given her before the trouble started, and out of which she had learned to read, and a few trinkets, tiny presents from Master—a little tea cup—cracked and then glued together—a hand mirror with a pearly frame. A small ceramic dog. One day, Joseph, fifteen years old, asked her where they came from and she told him they were gifts from Master, with a kind of pride. By that time Joseph had figured out the business Master had had with her. Astonished, furious, he asked how she could keep the trinkets after what he had done. Because they are pretty, she said. They are mine. That damn drunk, he said. She looked as if she were going to slap him, then she turned, shaking her head, put the things in order on the small table by her bed.

  He suffered attacks of melancholy, of suffocating sadness. To combat the feeling, he played the banjo for himself. It consoled him. Why it did, he could not say. Alone, he had a brother in the banjo. For others, he played musical jokes, tricks, sleight of hand. The visitors mistook it for simple happiness.

  Aurora liked to watch him play and that did not hurt, either. Tired of thinking about her by himself in the rushes, one day he got her an hour before dinner and asked her to take a walk with him.

  “Where you want to go?” she said, making it clear with her eyes that she knew.

  Looking once over her shoulder they walked slowly past the number two barn and the smokehouse and then started running when they knew they were out of sight.

  It became a constant torment to him. For three weeks they met, becoming increasingly reckless in their meetings. Until one day she failed to show up for a rendezvous and Joseph went looking for her. He couldn’t find her at the dairy, he couldn’t find her at the Upper Quarters. He went to barn number two and couldn’t find her there either.

  He saw her the next day, walking quickly from the Mansion House toward the Upper Quarters, and he ran to catch up with her. She wouldn’t talk to him or even look at him, and when he grabbed her arm she shook him away almost violently and quickened her step away from him, leaving him standing there like a scarecrow. The talk got around that she was now living in the Mansion House, Master’s newest “keep Miss.”