A Free State Read online

  When Marcellus told him, in a tone half-amused, as if to say Welcome to the world as it is, Joseph looked at the face, with its lines, its mustache, and felt something fall off a table in his mind, as if a wind had pushed it, and the next thing he realized, Cassius was pulling him off of Marcellus and holding him as Joseph struggled to hit him, or anyone, anything. Marcellus, who had fallen backward, took the opportunity to stand back up and slap Joseph hard, open-hand, across the face. “Your own Daddy doing your girl.” Joseph lunged at him again, and Cassius had to drag Joseph out of the stable and pin him on the ground until he stopped fighting and started weeping.

  Later that afternoon, he returned to the cabin he shared with his mother, with his shirt ripped and his clothes disarranged. His mother asked him what was wrong with him, and she got it out of him without much trouble.

  “I am going to kill him,” he said.

  She got a frightened look on her face and said, “You do that, you kill me.”

  Gradually, the edge of anger wore down enough for Joseph to think clearly, and that was when he began to think about escape. Enoch told him the names of two other slaves on the farm, hire-outs from Belle View, who were connected with people and who could get word to them and help Joseph escape. It took nearly two long months in the autumn. One day, a man he did not recognize approached the cabin. The man pulled something from under his shirt and set it down inside the cabin door and left without a word. Joseph never saw him again. It was a packet containing some papers and an address in Wilmington, Delaware. Across the top of the page with the address were written the words “MEMORISE AND BURN.”

  The night Joseph left The Tides was clear and cold. He had packed two suits of clothes, some linen, a small loaf of bread, some cured salt pork, and three pairs of socks—a luxury. His banjo he carried in a cinch bag made from a grain sack. He carried two other items as well. Out of Master’s lodge room that evening he had taken a pair of new leather boots that he planned to wear; his other shoes were in his carry sack, along with the copy of David Copperfield that he had stolen from Master’s library. In his jacket he had a sharp knife in a goatskin sheath for protection, and in his breeches pocket a small folding pocketknife.

  Joseph was to light out for the river when the moon cleared the eastern tree line and then head north, walking at a steady pace until the moon was halfway across the sky, when he would come to a boathouse. He would need money, about fifteen dollars, a not inconsiderable sum. The boatman would then tell him what his next steps would be.

  At the last moment he had been affected with pangs of loss and misgivings. The cabin he shared with his mother was comfortable and familiar. Above all, his mother’s arms and reassuring voice. As he lay warm in his bed for the last time, waiting, part of him rebelled and wanted only to stay there, warm, and not go out under the cold night sky on a trip with no end. Finally his mother shook him by the shoulder, and Joseph said, quietly, “I’m awake.” He sat up, already fully dressed, and put on the boots.

  “Those belong to him,” she said.

  “No more,” Joseph said, tying them.

  She sat, watching her son prepare to leave. He tried to show no weakness that would make her doubt his readiness, and she made the same effort.

  “You have the money I put up?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Inside here.”

  When he was ready he hefted up his sack, which had a strap she had sewn on, for slinging over his shoulder. It was heavier than he would have liked, but it contained necessities. Before he picked up his banjo, he and his mother looked at one another by the dim light of the one candle.

  “You go,” she said.

  He had planned to be strong, afraid of breaking down and losing his resolve. But at the last moment he put down the bag and came to his mother, who closed her eyes as if she had wanted to avoid a final goodbye. He embraced her; her body was rigid with the attempt to resist the grief this moment brought. After a moment, one arm went up behind his back and she held him to her, strong at first, then more strongly. Then she said only, “Don’t let them catch you. Ever. Go now.”

  He picked up his bag again, and the sack with the banjo, and he made his way to the back door of the cabin, and before he could turn around to look at her again she blew out the candle and the room went dark.

  He walked miles of shore, making his way along the forested banks. There were two long stretches of open land where he was able to make good time, but where he was also exposed in the moonlight. He was too intent to be frightened; all his senses were alert, focused on the single goal of reaching the boathouse. He wore the hunting boots and carried his other shoes in his bag because they were lighter. When the moon was high up overhead, he came to a small creek, and, across it, saw the low house with three rowboats tied up alongside.

  They had not told him what to do when he reached the house, and there was no light in the window. He sat among the trees and watched and listened; the sound of the trickling creek was time itself running through the night, and finally he decided to cross at a narrow place and knock on the cabin door. He knocked very softly and watched for a light to go on. At length a door opened into a dark interior and a voice said only, “Walk to the second boat and wait.”

  The rowboat wobbled as he stepped in, and he kept his weight low, sat down. After a few minutes the boatman appeared, got in, requested Joseph’s money, and pushed off. After the initial transaction they didn’t speak, and as the overhanging trees gave way to the starry sky and they moved away across the water under the immense vault and he saw the land retreating behind them, falling away, he felt the size of what he was doing, suddenly exposed and vulnerable, for the first time.

  On the far shore they tied up and the man told him where to walk, following the banks of the Choptank, told him about a series of landmarks, and then how to find his way to Delaware. As the boatman made ready to leave, Joseph nearly asked to be carried back across; he allowed himself to imagine going back overland and making it home to the farm before daylight. And as he imagined it, he knew he would not do it, and that he would never go back.

  Four more nights walking until the first hints of coming light in the sky, the first birds darting across a treetop to a barn, and days sleeping in cold barns and in the woods—he had never been so cold—first along the Choptank and through Tidewater Maryland, making his way by the stars, then Delaware, and a bed for a night in Wilmington with people who gave him identification papers and a new name—Henry Sims—and directions to an address in Philadelphia. A morning steamer carried him up the Delaware River, finally docking at the foot of Arch Street in the late afternoon. From the top of a hill the lowering sun blazed into his eyes amid a tangle of noise, shouted orders, cart wheels on cobblestones. He stepped off the packet boat to take his first steps on solid ground as a free man.

  Experience was instantly more dense. Walking up the hill from the river—the shops, the signs for stoves, shoes, rope, eyeglasses . . . Everything was someone’s idea, everything was multiplied. The sky took less of the world, replaced by buildings. There were alleys and walls and places to hide, to appear and disappear. The last of the most recent snow still blurred the streets and superimposed webs of pointless lines, maps of nonexistent terrain, a second skin. In Virginia when snow covered the ground it revealed clear footprints, showed where one had walked. Here your footsteps would be constantly erased, and that was fine with him. There were overlapping rhythms, constantly changing patterns. That much was instantly clear.

  He climbed the hill, found Fifth Street, and turned right on a shadowy sidewalk, following the directions he had committed to memory. Numbers, which he knew, as he knew how to read words, from his mother. The houses needed the numbers. Not The Tides’ smokehouse, dairy, washhouse, wood shop, blacksmith. Instead, the numbers that ordered everything, implied a progress.

  A door the color of dried blood opened onto a short woman with blue-black skin, who gave him an approving once-over.

  “Mister Still go
ne for the day.” She spoke in a West Indian accent that he recognized; three of the house women at The Tides were from there. They had a little society of their own, laughing and chattering like magpies over the laundry, nonstop. “He know you was coming?” Someone said something from a room beyond and she laughed.

  An oil painting, oil lamps, narrow stairway going up on the left, carpeted. A mirror.

  “Wait here,” the woman said. “Where you came from?”

  “Virginia.”

  “I got cousin family there. What you got in that bag?”

  “A banjo,” Henry said.

  “Ooooh. Play me a song. Them Quaker don’t like music, no.”

  A large, very black man appeared in the doorway from the back room, saying, “Please get finished so we can go home.”

  Looking at Henry, the woman said, “You going to have lots of company. Listen to what Sam say—him boss man ’til Mister Still come. You play me a song sometime?”

  When she disappeared, the man named Sam addressed Henry, saying, “You were on the packet boat, from Wilmington?”

  “Yes,” Henry said.

  “Mister Still will receive you tomorrow.” He looked Henry up and down and said he needed warmer clothes.

  “Either that or warmer weather,” Henry said.

  “I will get a coat for you,” Sam said, unsmiling. He turned his head to holler something into the back room, where the voices were chattering, and Henry noticed a long, raised scar on the back of his neck. “Wait here.”

  Sam returned and led Henry to a house three blocks away, and down a couple of cement stairs to a door that opened into a basement passageway lined with exposed rocks. Sam stepped inside a doorway to the left and got a lamp lit; there was a simple bed with a basin and a towel and a water jug, full. Some paintings leaning against the wall with their backs to the room, two steamer trunks, pipes overhead. There was a damp smell, but it was warm.

  “They had eighteen to come through just in the last four days,” Sam said. “You’ll be all right here for a night. You remember the way back to the office.”

  “Two streets down, one to the right.”

  “Number three-six-four,” Sam said. “The bells will tell you what time it is.”

  When Sam had left, Henry sat on the bed. He listened for footfalls, conversation, any hints from the floor above his head, but he heard nothing. On the bedside table, a small box with a brass latch and a carving of a cross on top. He picked it up, set it back down. A brass candle holder shaped like a flower, with a taper burned to within two inches. Picked it up, set it back down, looked around. Right now, he thought, Mama is in the house, mending clothes. Enoch is in the shed, sorting rope or wiping down tools. He pulled off the boots, which had raised several blisters, but he kept every other piece of clothing on, hat included.

  Quietly, he pulled the banjo out of its sack, set it on his lap, and softly sounded the strings, one at a time, adjusted the tuning, sounded them again. He played no pattern; a pattern would come later. He sounded each string softly and let it fade in turn.

  The next morning he awoke, still in his clothes. A thin, horizontal wedge of sunlight struggled into the room through a shallow window at street level, dirty enough to obscure a view of the outside world. Carts passing on the street, people walking, voices. His bag was in the corner, where he had put it, and the banjo.

  A piece of paper had been slid under his door; on it, an arrow, pointing toward the door and the hallway through which he had entered.

  He pulled the bed covers up, straightened them. A mounting feeling of excitement. He was in Philadelphia. Not on the farm, not hiding in a barn. Tentatively, he raised the iron latch and opened the thin wooden door to find a tray on the hallway floor. On it, a plate with a towel covering two corn muffins, and next to it a glass of milk.

  It was time to head to Mr. Still’s office, and the people who would help him. He picked up his duffel and the bag containing his banjo and, with a look around, quit the room and walked up the stairs and out into the morning.

  Henry was reading the spines on a wall of bookshelves in a large room that also contained a broad desk and a table covered with neat stacks of papers, three heavy wooden chairs deployed around it. The door opened and Henry turned, holding a volume in his hand, to see a tall, clean-shaven, elegantly dressed man who regarded him with a kind smile. Henry had assumed that such an important man would be white, and it took him some moments to realize that his benefactor was, in fact, a Negro.

  “Have you found something of interest?” Closed the door behind him. Noting the familiar cover, William Still said, “Dickens was here, some years ago.”

  Astonished, Henry said, “In this room?”

  “In Philadelphia,” the forgiving reply. “Who taught you to read?”

  “My mother.” The books smuggled one by one out of Master’s library, then replaced. Except for one. Sounding out the words by the wavering candlelight.

  “Please . . .” The man gestured to a chair and walked around his desk to seat himself. Henry took the proffered seat, still holding on to the book, a copy of Barnaby Rudge.

  The great man asked Henry a number of questions about where he had come from, if he had been misused, taking notes on his story as Henry spoke. Mr. Still asked Henry about the banjo, then he laid out the various means of getting to Canada.

  Henry had heard about Canada—some of the slaves at The Tides had called it “Canaan,” and the family in Wilmington had assumed that he was bound for Canada. But Henry did not want to go there, and he said this. Canada he pictured as a cold place, with no trees, where people tended a few tomato plants and read the Bible and wrote letters of gratitude. “I want to stay in Philadelphia,” he said.

  William Still drew a measured breath and said, “You must realize that you could be captured at any moment and brought back to Virginia.”

  “I won’t go back,” Henry said.

  “The only way to make certain of that is to continue on to Canada.” Still paused. “You’re free to do what you want—of course—but this is how things stand. You or any other Negro—whether under title to a slave owner or not—is in danger of being captured and taken south as long as he is in this country. Moreover, it is a crime for citizens not to aid in that capture if asked. This is now the law of the land. This city has many sympathizers with our cause, but you are not safe if someone comes to reclaim you.”

  “You haven’t been captured,” Henry said.

  After a moment’s surprise, Still replied, “I am known, and I would be too easily recognized.”

  Recognized, Henry thought. “What do they do in Canada?”

  “They farm, or they run businesses of their own. They raise families. They do what any other human being is allowed to do, or should be allowed to do by natural right, here in the United States. They lead their lives. Perhaps you imagine being there alone, but there are already thriving communities of our people, who live free of the threat of the lash. Hundreds of them. I imagine your master will come looking for you.”

  “He is not my master.”

  “Yes,” Still said, holding up his hand. “I misspoke.”

  William Still said that if Henry would not go to Canada, he could perhaps be of use in Philadelphia, speaking at meetings. He said he would arrange for Henry to stay with a white family named Passmore, temporarily, and he directed Sam to bring him there. “Hilda will provide you with some fresh clothes.”

  Henry was still holding on to the book and he held it out to Mr. Still.

  “Would you like to borrow it?”

  “I’ll return it,” Henry said.

  “I know you will.”

  In the evenings the Passmores sat by lamplight, quiet, the Bible reading. Their son, seven years old. Robert Allen Passmore. Always addressed as Robert Allen. On the second night, Henry caught his eye. “Here,” Henry said, presenting the two open, upward-facing palms of his hands, the right hand displaying a copper disc. “Here is a penny. I’ll let you keep
it if you can tell me which hand has it after I’ve closed my fists.”

  An eager nod from the boy.

  “Watch closely, now.” The boy’s attention focused on his hands.

  “Now!” and with a rapid snap of the wrists the hands flipped, clenched, palms downward now, awaiting the verdict. The boy tapped the right hand, where he had last seen the coin, the obvious choice. Henry righted his hands upward and opened them to reveal—but how?—the penny on the left palm. The boy in transports of wonder and delight. Henry noticed the glance that went between the boy’s parents; it was not approving.

  During the day, he walked. No one accosted him; no one seemed even to notice him. Everything about the city made him hungry. He would walk all the way into town, fascinated, then come back to the Passmores’, invigorated and tired. Theaters, factories, stores for tools, eyeglasses, wigs, stoves, steam engines, trunks, satchels, carpetbags; liquors, coal, candles, bells, chocolates, feathers, clocks, boots, books, coffee, rope . . . Standing in front of the bakery on Chestnut and Market, sugar on his chin, sun on his face, he savored the pure and undefiled moment.

  Springtime came early that year. Mr. Passmore brought him to a chair maker on Second Street, a friend of the abolitionist cause, who let Henry work for several weeks, cleaning up and doing some finishing work. With the money he made there he moved out of the Passmores’ house—they had offered to keep him on as a servant, but he declined. Sam had told him about Bottle Alley, which was run by a friend of Sam’s named Zena.

  When he arrived in Bottle Alley, Henry felt more comfortable. All the occupants were Negroes, for one thing. There was an open courtyard, hidden from street view, with a dirt floor and a pump for water. There were chickens walking around and always at least a couple of occupants sitting on a bench, making conversation. Jerome was a regular fixture—a dark-skinned man with perpetually red eyes who smelled of whiskey. When Henry said hello to him the first time and asked him how he was, he replied, “Still a nigger,” which was how he replied every time he was asked. Zena did laundry and cooking out there as well, a large-boned, very black woman with a vicious-looking scar down the left cheekbone that continued down her neck to her collarbone. She wore a wooden whistle on a leather cord around her neck. Zena was matter-of-fact about everything, stood for no nonsense from anyone, but she was honest, and Henry liked her. He asked her if it was all right if he played his banjo in the evenings, and she had looked at him as if he were crazy.