Harrison looked up. “If you ask me, blackfolks should name everything in this world. Don't know why whitefolks use the kinda names they do. Look at poor ol’ Noah,” Harrison continued. “He goes and spends all them forty days and forty nights on water, and have you heard of whitefolks naming one little river after him?”
I shook my head.
“There now, that don't make no sense, if you ask me …”
As Harrison kept talking, I thought about the River Jordan winding through our green cornfield, carrying Noah and his family in a big ark. Only, in my picture it was me and Harrison and Lilly in that big ark …
River of Death
That night, just after the sun set, me and Harrison started looking for the River Jordan. We pushed our way through the crooked rows of corn, and when we got to the edge of the field, we sat down in the weeds, waiting for more darkness to come. Above our heads, the sky was the color of huckleberries—blue, almost black.
“What's the River Jordan gonna look like?” I asked Harrison. He was sitting in the field dirt next to me, with his arms resting across his knees. Eyes closed.
“Don't know,” he said slowly. “See it when I git there, I reckon.”
“How you gonna know it if you never seen it before?”
Harrison waved his arm at the field around us. “You and me, we just look for a big, wide river with a mess of lights on the other side. That's how we know.”
“Say there's lots of rivers like that,” I said, picking at the corn kernels stuck in my back teeth. “How you gonna know for sure which one is which one?”
Harrison stood up and swung the tow sack over his shoulder, not saying a word.
“Say we find the Miss'ippi instead?” I kept on. “If we ain't seen it before, how we gonna know for sure?”
“STOP PICKIN YOUR TEETH,” Harrison hissed, pointing his finger at me. “And stop being smart with me. I don't wanta hear no more of yo’ talkin, Samuel. I does the bossing and you does the following ‘round here.” He stomped past me, crushing stalks of corn and weeds under his feet. “You just hush up,” he said, turning to look back at me. “HUSH UP and don't talk to me no more about the Miss'ippi River, you hear?”
I didn't dare to breathe another word. I just followed Harrison as quiet as I could, trying not to get his dander up. We walked out of the cornfield and into a small woods. And truth is, we found a river almost right away, so Harrison must have known what he was looking for after all.
There was a line of trees just past the cornfield where we had hidden ourselves, and beyond the trees the land started to roll downward. As me and Harrison slowly picked our way down the steep hillside, I could hear the soft sound of water flowing somewhere in the darkness.
But the hill we were walking down ended at nothing more than a creek. There were no lights showing at all on the other side. It was just brush and thick trees. Rocks and fallen branches poked up, here and there, in the shallow water. Was this the River Jordan we were looking for?
“You just ease yo'self down to the water first, Samuel.” Harrison pointed at the edge of the riverbank. “Then you help me down there so I can git a good look.”
But as my feet slid down the small riverbank, I got a lungful of something awful bad coming up from that water. Smelled like rotten fish or dead animal to me. Standing beside the river, I pressed my arm across my whole face, breathing through my shirt cloth. Harrison's feet landed with a soft sound next to me.
“You smell that?” I said, shifting from one foot to the other. “We ain't gonna stay here, right?”
Harrison didn't answer, just steadied himself on my shoulder.
“Don't that water smell awful bad? Don't it smell like something's dead round here? You think something's dead, huh?” I whispered loudly, trying to see up and down the river.
“Hush.” Harrison gave me a smack on the arm. “I can't even hear my ownself think.”
I shut my mouth then and tried not to think about what might be dead in the river: A shot deer? An old horse? A dead person? A whole mess of dead people? My throat felt tight all of a sudden like I was going to be sick.
“Let's move somewhere else, Harrison,” I said, tugging on his arm. “Don't like it here atall.”
“I'm thinking ‘bout what to do. Stop pestering me.” Harrison reached down to pick up one of the river stones. “You figure this is the wrong river?” he said, turning the river stone over and over in his palm as if it might tell him where we were supposed to be.
“Can't we just find another river?” I asked.
I didn't care if it was the wrong river or the right river. Only thing I knew for sure is that I didn't want to set one foot in that dark water. Even if it was the River Jordan. Even if Moses himself was waiting on the other side.
“Why?”
“ ‘Cause it don't look like the River Jordan to me. You said there'd be lights on the other side. I don't see no lights.”
“All right,” Harrison said, as if he had made up his mind. “Then I guess we just cross over this little river and keep going north. Maybe we got the wrong river. Maybe another one will come along. Maybe it'll look like they said.”
I stared down at the black water and folded my arms, stubborn as a stump. “I ain't goin in that water. Nohow. Not with the way it smells. Not with something dead floating in it.”
“Don't be a child,” Harrison said sharply. “Lemme grab ahold of your shoulder.” Digging his old fingers into my skin, he said, “You gonna help me git across. That's all there is to it. We gonna cross this river and keep going north.” He began to push me into the dark pools of flowing water as if I was nothing more than his old walking stick. “Go on, now,” he said. “Go on. Start walkin. WALK—”
With Harrison behind me, I couldn't do a thing. My feet slid on the slabs of rock as he pushed me right into the river. “Stop goin so slow,” he hissed, squeezing my shoulder. Staring into water as black as midnight, I tried to slide my feet across the bottom, one foot at a time, because I wasn't about to step on anything dead. But each time I stepped down, the slick, muddy rocks made my heart fall right to my feet.
In the middle of the river, the water swirled past my knees, taking my breath away.
“Lordy Lordy Lordy…,” Harrison whispered, and I felt his fingers tighten on my shoulder. “Keep movin, Samuel,” he said, pushing me.
Seemed like it took half the night to pick my way across, with the darkness and the rocks and Harrison. I never did see what was dead, although the smell was worst where the water was deepest, so the dark river must have been hiding something terrible beneath it.
When we finally reached the other side, I left Harrison to pull his old self up the steep riverbank. Figured if he could push me across the river, he could do that by himself. I sat down on a log at the top of the riverbank and waited for him.
But when Harrison finally got to where I was sitting, all he said was, “We don't die but once,” in a hard voice, and then he kept right on walking. Past me. Not even looking back.
Made me just want to stay there and let him leave. Let him stumble around in the dark by his ownself
We don't die but once. What was that supposed to mean?
And where was he going off to? There was no River Jordan—that's what my mind said. We were just wandering and wandering in a dark, tangled woods, looking for a river we would never find. And, truth is, how could you find something you had never seen?
I remembered when Miz Catherine had lost a pin that belonged to her dead mother. She made us crawl across all of the floors in the house looking for it—even Lilly she ordered onto her hands and knees. And while we crawled, Miz Catherine stood over us and poked us hard with the toe of her shoe.
“I know you go through my fancy things when I'm out,” she said, her mean voice rising higher and higher. “You know what my mother's pin looks like. Don't tell me you haven't seen it.” But we didn't have the smallest idea what we were looking for. Gold, silver, pearl? We never found any pin a
t all, so Miz Catherine took something from each of us—Lilly's good Sunday bonnet, a pair of winter gloves from Harrison, and a set of clay marbles from me—saying if we stole from her, she would steal from us. “But you can't find things you never seen.” That's what Lilly kept trying to tell her.
And I wanted to say the same thing to Harrison, but he wouldn't listen to any sense. Wouldn't stop looking for that old River Jordan. He shuffled up the hillside away from the river, not speaking a word to me. Just kept driving his walking stick hard into the ground, as if he was trying to plant beans in a field.
We crossed over a narrow mud path, through a small field of tobacco, past a barn that looked tumbledown and empty, around a stone wall, and into another thick woods. Still going uphill.
Seemed like the uphill went on forever.
And then it stopped.
“The River Jordan,” Harrison whispered. “There it is, Samuel. Just like they says.”
Below us, the land fell away to a blanket of deeper shadows with pinpricks of light scattered here and there. Looked like nothing but a handful of little fireflies thrown into the darkness.
Setting down the tow sack, Harrison raised his hands in the air like he was praying to the night sky. “Hallelujah,” he said in a trembling way that sounded both scared and pleased at the same time. “OF Harrison finally made it to the River Jordan.”
“I don't see no river,” I said, squinting into the darkness.
“Listen,” Harrison whispered.
I slapped at a mosquito and listened to the still, quiet air. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, and a night bird called out nearby, but I couldn't hear water flowing. Not even a drop of water. “Don't hear a thing,” I tried to say.
“A big river ain't like Lilly's kitchen pump,” Harrison hissed. “You ain't gonna hear water pouring out of the ground. Use yo’ ears and listen now.” It was the same soft sound as the wind brushing across a field, he said, or thunder from far-off clouds rumbling through the sky. “Listen for a small sound moving across something big. Hush, now. Just listen,” he told me.
But I still didn't hear any river.
Harrison pointed toward the deeper darkness just below us. “See how the land goes down, Samuel? Goes down to the bottomlands around the River Jordan. And them bottomlands is flat as my hand, flat as the top of a table. They call them the Cornfield Bottoms, ‘cause they's full of corn growing from the blackest, flattest earth you ever come across.”
Harrison was quiet for a long while, just staring toward that river we couldn't see. I thought maybe he had forgotten where he was.
“We gonna keep movin?” I said real low.
Harrison shook his head. “You don't know nothing ‘bout what's waiting for us in them bottomlands, Samuel.” He pointed his walking stick at the darkness. “Them cornfields is full of patrols. Whitefolks down there, they hunt flesh-and-blood people. Got guns and dogs and whatever else they can find to catch blackfolks. Hunting you and me ain't no different than trapping animals to them.”
A chill went through me. I remembered something Young Mas Seth had told me once. I was collecting some eggs from the henhouse, and he had peeked around the door. “My brother knows a fellow who hunts runaway Negroes on the border of Kentucky,” he'd said. “They call him a pat-er-roller. He caught twenty-two Negroes in one week. You ever heard of pat-er-rollers before?”
“No, sir. Now, you go away from me,” I had warned him.
But he waved his wooden popgun at me like he was something big. “They pay a hundred dollars a runaway there. If I hunted Negroes, I bet I'd be as rich as a king. Maybe if you run off someday,” he said, pointing the gun, “I'll hunt for you.”
“Ain't running away,” I told him. “Now, stop telling me stories.”
But he popped a hard cherry pit at my back anyway. “Bang. You're dead.” He laughed and ran off.
Later, when I asked Lilly about patrollers, she turned around real fast and pointed her finger at me. “You just stay away from Seth and do the work you got to do. Stop listenin to all his foolish stories. There's lies growing outta every hair on his head.”
But maybe what Seth had said was true.
Digging through the tow sack, Harrison pulled out Lilly's sharp knife. The one I had taken from the kitchen. “That's why I brung this along,” he said.
My voice stuck in my throat. “Why?”
Harrison waved the knife at me. “ ‘Cause if somethin happens, if they catch us down there, I ain't going back to Mas'er Hackler. I'll slit my own throat ear to ear ‘fore they take me back.” Harrison's eyes had that look in them again, the same wild-eyed look from the woods.
“I been caught once, and they ain't never catchin me again,” he whispered. “OF Harrison, he'll fight ‘til he's dead and gone.”
Cornfield Bottoms
They hunt people who run off from their masters. Human flesh and blood. Hunting you and me ain't no different than trapping animals to them. Til fight ‘til I'm dead and gone …
Harrison's words tumbled through my mind as we crept down the dark hillside toward the Cornfield Bottoms and the scattering of lights that Harrison called the River Jordan. We walked carefully, the way deer slip through the woods, placing each foot softly in front of the other, freezing at the smallest sound—the snap of a twig, a clatter of stones, a dry whisper of leaves.
In the middle of the hillside, I stopped and stared at a shadow in front of us, thinking it was a patroller. He was crouched behind a clump of low bushes with a rifle sitting across his knees and a dog curled at his feet. My heart pounded.
“You see something?” Harrison held tight on my arm, breathing fast.
“Over there,” I said, nodding.
As the moon came out of the clouds, Harrison shook his head and whispered, “Ain't nothin there. Just a tree.”
But in the darkness, everything looked strange and mean, as if the whole hillside was trying to catch us. I was jumpy as spit on a hot skillet as we crept down through a real thin patch of small trees. The moonlight slipped in and out of pale clouds, playing tricks. Branches stuck out like rifles. Low bushes looked like bloodhounds, ready to spring.
“Don't like this atall.” Harrison's voice shook. “Not atall.”
And then we nearly stepped onto the ashes of a still-smoking fire.
“Git down,” Harrison hissed, and we dove to the ground.
A broken clay pipe and a few chicken bones, not even burned yet, lay scattered in the glowing embers in front of us. A pile of kindling and leaves waited nearby, ready to be stuck in the fire. A man's glove rested on one of the warm stones—
Me and Harrison didn't stay to see another thing.
On our hands and knees, we crawled slowly toward a dark cornfield ahead, not saying a word until the cornstalks swallowed us up. Breathing hard and listening to the sound of our own thumping hearts, me and Harrison lay facedown among the tangled legs of corn.
Who had built the fire? Were they patrollers? Hunters? Were they lying in wait for runaways? Or hiding somewhere in the cornfield?
Motioning for me to follow him, Harrison stood up and began to creep farther away from the fire. Softly, he pushed the scratchy cornstalks aside with his hands, going down row after row, as if he was moving through deep water.
Above the scratching of the corn rows, I heard far-off noises—a gunshot echoing, a woman's voice hollering, a dog barking, a cowbell—but near us everything stayed still and empty, not a living soul around, it seemed like.
The land had become flat as a tabletop, just as Harrison had said, and as we walked and crawled in the darkness, my feet pressed into clods of soft, damp-smelling earth. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ears. But I was listening so hard for the sound of whitefolks or dogs that I didn't notice the river until we were almost on top of it. Even then, I didn't hear the sound of it; the cornstalks just fell away to a rippling field of black and silver in front of us.
“Lord Almighty,” Harrison said softly, sinking down to his knees on the
grassy riverbank. “We have found the River Jordan.”
The river in front of me and Harrison was nothing like the one in Lilly's stories. I stared at the water, not believing my eyes. The river was as deep and black as the night sky, and the pinprick row of lights on the other side looked as far-off as the old moon.
Right then, I knew we had come to the end of our running away from Master Hackler because it was plain to see that no matter how far we walked along the wide River Jordan we would never find a place to cross it.
But Harrison didn't seem to realize that there was nowhere to go. Digging through the tow sack, he pulled out the tin barn lantern.
“Where you going to?” I asked.
“Where you think?” he said, calm as anything. “Into that river.”
My heart pounded as I watched him light his lantern with a sulfur stick and make his way slowly down the riverbank. Then, without turning around or saying a word, he lifted up the lantern and walked straight into the water!
I am ashamed to say I squeezed my eyes shut after that. I believed, sure as anything, he was going to keep on walking until he sank slowly below the dark water—first his legs, next his chest, then his shoulders and his head, and finally the glow of the lantern—swallowed up by the River Jordan.
“Samuel,” Harrison hissed loudly. “SAMUEL!” I opened one eye. Harrison stood waist-deep in the black water. “Don't just stand there like you is turned to stone. What's got ahold of you? Git yo'self out here in this river with me.”
“We can't go across the river like that, Harrison,” I tried to tell him.
“Who says?” Harrison flapped his arms like wings above the water and the lantern bobbed crazily up and down, in the darkness. “You and me is gonna turn into owls and fly away.” Holding the lantern high in one hand, and cupping his other hand around his mouth, Harrison gave a loud hoot that echoed across the water. “Who-who-who-whooo …”
All the skin on my arms rose up with gooseflesh because I knew that Harrison had gone out of his head. He had fallen into a fit at the sight of the wide river we couldn't cross, and in his delirium, he was going to get us caught.
Trouble Don't Last Page 5