by Aaron Gwyn
Which it did. The rifle boomed and the men startled and I quickly moved my head to see around the cloud of blue gun smoke. The pig stood rooting. Then it seemed a hard wind had struck it: its legs buckled and it went down on its belly.
No one said a word for several moments. Then the colonel turned to Reynolds.
“It’s best to boil it a minute or two,” he said. “Then add some salt to the water.”
“How’s that?” Reynolds said.
“Your hat,” the colonel told him. “You’ll want to boil it a while to soften the brim, and salt will make it more flavorful.”
Stephens started to chuckle and Reynolds’ face went red.
“Just don’t leave it to cook too long,” said DeWitt. “You’ll never get it choked down.”
* * *
We started back home with our packs full of pig meat. Come eventide, we were close to the settlement, coming down a narrow path Indian-file through the scrub when, up ahead, a clump of lizard’s tail began to quiver and then an elderly black man stood up from the cover it’d been providing, pulling his pantaloons up around his waist and securing them with a length of rope. He took a few steps and disappeared into the palms.
I stopped and stood gawking. Colonel DeWitt turned, and seeing the expression on my face, said, “Pay him no mind. That’s just Old Charlie.”
And so, we continued on our way, branching down another trail until we reached the settlement. DeWitt and Reynolds went to collect their wives to clean the game we’d brought in, but the appearance of Mister Charlie had roused my suspicions and I kept on down the muddy lane past the cabins toward the hamlet’s south end. I realized then that my host had failed to offer us a thorough tour of his colony and soon I discovered the reason.
The last cabin fell away behind me as the ground turned marshy and sloped toward the river. I began to hear voices on the evening breeze. I went through a palmetto thicket, rounded a bend, and there in a little glen were half a dozen tents made of old sailcloth, two flickering campfires, and around these, twenty or so black folks, singing in harmony.
I stood there listening to their song. The tune of it was unfamiliar to me—or the words, at least, but the melody was sad and soothing. It called Mama to mind, how, as a boy, I’d lie in bed, listening as she prayed. She was a gracious country woman, restrained in manner and always mindful of the propriety of things. But when she prayed she held nothing back. Her people were what folks called “Shouting Methodists,” and when she knelt at night to make her appeals to the Lord, a transformation took place: all the daytime propriety sloughed off like old skin and the soul underneath was red hot. It was something to see this woman who never put herself forward, never fussed nor whispered a cross word, bare herself to her Creator. You wouldn’t have known she had such passion squirreled away inside her, such hurt and joy and heartache. She mourned friends who’d passed away, rejoiced over some blessing that had been bestowed on our family, praised God and wept over pains she never mentioned otherwise.
This song I now heard summoned all of that up and a dauncy feeling flooded through me: there is a spirit among black folk hardly to be found among Anglos, a sense of being home, a celebration of the very blood running through the body. It moved something in me.
I blotted my eyes on my shirtsleeve, and having cleared my vision in this way, I was seized by a very different feeling. I saw the threadbare cotton breeches the men wore, the filthy osnaburg shirts—those that had shirts at all. The women were clothed in dresses of plain cloth which had to be about as comfortable to wear as a hair shirt. I realized, of a sudden, that there was nothing cooking over their fires; in fact, I saw no sign of any food at all. I began to notice how thin these people were; many had horrible lesions covering their arms and legs. It struck me at last that these folks were starving.
I turned and went walking back toward the cabins, angry as I’d ever been. I was furious at how these poor people were being treated, and furious that I’d left a slave nation behind me only to find this new land being occupied by slavers as well. DeWitt’s colonists hadn’t planted their first crop of corn, had hardly sewn a seed, and here they were looking to establish plantations for themselves, sleeping behind their fortress walls and keeping their poor negroes out in tents.
What was it Sterling Robertson had called Texas? A lazy man’s paradise? And what could be more heavenly to the slothful than a land where slaves performed your labor?
When I made it back to the cabins, there was fresh venison roasting on spits above the cookfires, gobs of the pig I’d killed skewered on mesquite branches and set to sizzle. The residents were milling about, laughing and carrying on. A celebratory air had broken out.
I saw Stephens standing beside one of the fires talking with several other men; they were passing a bottle back and forth. When he saw me, he held out both arms as though he’d embrace me.
“And here is the man himself!” he exclaimed. “Where did you get off to? Were there other unruly swine requiring your attention?” He looked at one of the men beside him. “You’ve not seen shooting like this, Marcus. The pig dropped like he hit it with a hammer!”
Well, I might have endured such compliments another time, but I was in no mood to discuss hogs or marksmanship. I pointed back toward the river.
“The folks down yonder are in extremis, Mister Stephens.”
His brow furrowed and he took a step to look around me to see the people I referenced.
“Who do you speak of?” he said, and the concern in his face was genuine.
“Those Negro men and women,” I told him. “Down there by the tents.”
Well, that chased the concern from his face as quickly as it had appeared.
“Oh,” he said, “their masters find for them.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Reynolds walk up. He stood there with his arms crossed, glaring.
“I don’t think they’re well at all,” I said. “They have nothing whatever over their cookfires and nothing in their mouths but a song. They looked to be starving.”
“Starving?” Reynolds interjected. “If they are starving, why do they sing?”
“Likely to keep their minds off their bellies,” I told him. “Can we not carry some of this meat down to them once it’s cooked? I’d say there’s more than enough to go around.”
Stephens lifted his hands and showed me his palms. “You’d have to take that up with their owners. I myself am poor as Job’s turkey: everything I own I brought to this colony in a sack.”
Then hoping to put the topic to bed he said, “Tell me: what’s the farthest shot you’ve ever made? Or the longest I suppose I mean.”
“I’m not sure I know,” I said, though I knew very well: I’d once shot a deer through the heart from 340 yards. But I wasn’t going to stand and crow about my abilities with families going hungry a half-mile away.
“Well,” he said, “that’s the finest piece of shooting I ever saw. Perhaps you’ll teach Thomas here a thing or two.”
“I do just fine,” Reynolds said. “I’m not seeking instruction from the Colonel’s guest. On marksmanship or slave-feeding either one.”
I knew right then that Reynolds himself owned one or more of the families I’d seen down by the river and that he’d taken great offense at my remarks.
“You need a deal of teaching on both,” Stephens said, trying to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t listen. I went and found Noah and told him everything I’d seen in the sleeping camp, and after he’d heard me out, he agreed that the paradise that had been promised by Robertson was in fact a purgatory. Or, in his words, “A heaven for white men, but a hell for blacks and women.”
It seemed so to me, squatting in the muck alongside that muddy river, the live oaks thick with mosquitos and beards of Spanish moss. And the alligators: all day long they floated downstream with their yellow eyes poking above the water, watchin
g for any unlucky thing that came too close to the river’s edge. Evenings, you’d hear dogs yelping when the gators walked ashore and grabbed the poor mutts in their sleep.
And a few nights after our hunting trip with Colonel DeWitt, I woke to a more skeersome sound.
It was pitch black inside the cabin. I sat up in my blankets with my heart in my throat.
“What was that?” I asked Noah, who was sitting up beside me.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Then here it came again, a caterwauling that climbed my backbone joint by joint.
I crawled over, unbarred the cabin door, and peeked out.
Moonlight poured in, then that horrible clamor that’d woken us. I realized it was the voice of a girl.
Then Noah and I were outdoors, running toward the shrieks with our rifles in hand, sprinting through the shafts of silver light. Shaggy limbs blacked out the stars. I heard a dog begin to bark up ahead, and then several dogs were barking, the ruckus intermingled with the girl’s shrill screams.
Noah and I came out into a moonlit glen where a sward of grass sloped down to the river. Here the dogs had decided to make a stand, their hackles roached up, howling and carrying on. At first, I didn’t see what they were yelping at. Then Noah said, “Good God a’mighty,” and I saw very clear.
It was the largest gator that ever crept the earth, long and fat as a canoe, backing down the slope toward the water. In its hideous jaws was a young slave, couldn’t have been more than twelve.
The creature had caught the poor child by the arm. She’d screamed herself completely mute; her mouth still moved, but there was no longer any sound. About the same moment I saw her, she seemed to spot me and Noah. Her eyes went wet. A dog moved up and snapped at the gator, and the gator scrambled backward several steps. If he hadn’t been so greedy for girl-flesh, he might’ve taken this brave canine and made his escape.
Up to that second, I’d been frozen in horror, but the mutt’s courage stiffened my spine, and I lurched up and clubbed the monster between the eyes with the butt of my rifle. That gator just blinked at me. His eyes shone like a cat’s. I fetched him another blow and his great tail swished through the grass like a scythe through sugarcane.
I’d been too unsettled to trust myself to take a shot, fearing I’d hit the girl instead, but my attack on the creature gave Noah some confidence, and he came up, put the muzzle of his gun to the gator’s side and pulled the trigger.
Well, the beast didn’t like that one bit. He released his hold on the child and went sliding back like a snake. You couldn’t tell what was gator and what was grass. In hardly a second, he’d vanished in the water without so much as a plop.
The girl lay there a moment. I feared she might be mortally wounded, but all of a sudden, she sprang to her feet and climbed me as if I were a tree, finding herself a perch atop my shoulders.
We started toward the sleeping camp where the girl had been abducted. Miraculously, she was not even bleeding. The gator must not have wanted to abuse his meal before he had her in the river. As for her part, the child didn’t say a word. It might have been shock that sealed her lips, or perhaps her voice hadn’t recovered from the screaming. Perhaps she’d been brought up to this foul place from Santo Domingo and spoke no English at all.
We restored her in one of the tents—her howls had failed to rouse her kin, so dead tired they were from the labor their masters put them to—and started back for our lodgings, feeling like knights who’d rescued a damsel from the jaws of a dragon.
But the good feeling of our victory was short-lived. When we arrived at the cabin, we found the menfolk huddled about the doors of their cabins, staring out like frightened children. These settlers who fared forth so valiantly by daytime to snipe deer and turkey were too craven to defend what they liked to call their property.
“What was it?” Stephens asked me, but I was too furious to answer.
Noah said, “Did you not hear that girl hollering?”
“We heard her,” Stephens said.
“Why didn’t you come help?” Noah asked. “It was a gator down there big as a john boat.”
All the men just stared like he was speaking gibberish, and I knew right then I could not live among these cowards—though I had no idea where else to go.
I walked off, squatted beside a sycamore, and had a dark moment to myself, feeling homesick and wishing my life had been altogether different.
It is a judgment on you, I thought. If you weren’t such a miserable sinner, you wouldn’t be hunkered here among slavers in a frontier far from home.
But directly, I grew ashamed for sinking into despair so easily, and began to give myself a talking to. Or I suppose it was me: it almost seemed like my father’s voice, echoing between my ears, saying: You’ve spent these past months trying to get yourself to Texas, and now, finding difficulties, you fall into a brown study and pout like a child. DeWitt’s Colony is only one among many. This new country is large enough to make your own colony if you must.
That had never occurred to me—making myself a colony—and I realized how green I’d been. Had I hoped to step off the boat and find this land ready-made?
That was not the way of a world where anything worth living in must be fought for and fashioned, and I glanced back at Noah, watching as he scolded our hosts, thinking we could still have the Texas we’d left our homes to find. Even if we had to build it for ourselves.
CECELIA
—VIRGINIA, 1827—
Running alone was harder in some ways, but easier in others. You wouldn’t have any ears on your conscience. Nobody’s ears but your own.
It was a matter of preparation. You couldn’t leave a single thing to chance.
She began by working her way through her mistress’s library. No more poetry, those old Greeks and Romans. Now she devoured geography and medicine, all she could find on poultices. On balms and bandages. On salts and salves. She memorized every map she came across: Preston County, Monongalia County, up to the Pennsylvania line. Beyond that was free country, but she couldn’t walk up to the first white man she came across and collapse into his arms. She would have to wise up about the world. She was doing it, book by book.
She grew interested in astronomy, writings on navigation. Some were by trappers, and some by sailors. You could discover north with the Pole Star: the Dipper pointed you to it. As did Cassiopeia, that W in the northern sky. Or Orion over there with his bright shining belt. At night, she stood in front of the house, gazing up into the stars.
Haverford had ordered her to stay clear of Wellman’s field hands, but the hands knew things you couldn’t find in any book. She talked with them whenever she could. She offered them sweetmeats from her mistress’s table.
And there was a girl named Alice she spoke to very freely. Alice was eleven, also the property of Wellman, but she wasn’t a field hand. Alice had been purchased two years before from the slave market in Richmond, but she’d been born in Maryland, and Cecelia was interested in all she had to say of that country to the north. Haverford would come home in the evenings, and Cecelia would be sitting on the lawn, braiding Alice’s hair. Haverford paid it no mind, and so she continued plying Alice for information. She wanted to know about hounds, especially.
“You can trick them,” Alice said.
Cecelia nodded. She conditioned the girl’s hair with bacon grease and butter, braiding it into rows, tucking one strand beneath another, tucking away everything Alice said.
* * *
She was seventeen when she made her next attempt. She had a picksack with a kitchen knife she’d stolen. A five-foot length of rope. A loaf of bread, a little salt. A waterskin made from a cow bladder. She was determined not to fill it until she reached the Cheat River.
It was fall again. Everything was dying. She waited until the house was dark, then went out the same window she’d used two years be
fore, inching it up, propping it open, then dropping to quiet grass below.
She was wearing one of Haverford’s soiled shirts, and she used the road this time. No slave would do that. No one would think a slave so bold. The sky was clear and the stars were shining. Cassiopeia stood on its edge like an E turned around. She was frightened, but she’d learned to govern her fear like you governed a raging toothache. You pushed down the pain and put your thoughts in your stride.
By dawn, she was north of Kingwood, in country she’d never seen before. She shaded up in the woods, ate a breakfast of bread and salt pork, then buried herself in the leaves.
She slept fitfully. In dreams, the hounds were snuffling through the underbrush to catch her scent. She’d hidden her bedding in the attic; she’d tried to dispose of anything that had her smell. But these nightmare hounds knew every trick. They weren’t farm dogs with wet noses and wagging tails. They were enormous beasts the size of horses, fangs like icicles in their massive jaws. And there was Jubal, dragging along behind them with the leashes in his hand, urging them on: come now. Sniff that nigger out. She started awake in the midday heat and sat with her back against a cedar, waiting for dusk.