Any Known Blood

by Lawrence Hill

  Mr. Brown spoke out. “He may die, sir. That may be true. But is he afraid of that? I am not afraid of death. We all die, Mr. Wilson. The question, sir, is how we die. Dining in great comfort, or fighting to save our fellow man? He is right, Cane. You could die on this mission. But what a glorious death it would be. Your death would help change the course of history.

  I stood up. “No death is glorious. Death is death. Follow this devil, and blood will run. Innocents will die. Is that glorious, Langston? With respect, Mr. Brown, you are a lunatic. Get out now, please.”

  Brown nodded. “Only a very few have the will to pursue this matter to the limit. I bear you no ill will. You have done good work helping the fugitive Negroes, sir. And you, Cane? Are you with me?”

  “I’ll think about it,” Cane said.

  “You have little time for reflection. I have some equipment being repaired, and a new horse to purchase, but I will leave town when my work is done. God bless both of you.”

  Brown and Cane disappeared into the darkness. There were no stars, that night, and no moon either. Clouds hung low in the sky. It thundered past midnight, but it did not rain.

  I flipped ahead to the next diary entry about Langston Cane or John Brown.

  August 11, 1859

  Langston Cane is in serious trouble. I overestimated him. The Negro Church—a modest little affair that takes itself quite seriously—has called him up on bigamy charges. Langston has fled town. He left an envelope on my doorstep, with coins in it, and his name scrawled on a piece of paper. “For the selfless assistance, thanking you heartily.” The writing astonished me. Over and over I read, “selfless assistance, thanking you heartily.” A turn of phrase requiring no slight degree of writing sophistication. At any rate, Cane has fled town. I hope that he has not, in his desperation, taken up with John Brown.

  I was convinced that my great-great-grandfather had pulled out of Oakville with John Brown. But I still had no idea what had happened to him at Harpers Ferry, or if he had even gotten that far. It was time to return to Baltimore.

  Chapter 19

  I WASN’T EXPECTING MILL to meet me at the Baltimore–Washington Airport. But meet me she did.

  “I’ve got more boxes for you to look at,” she said.

  I explained that I needed to rest. I said I had been exhausted by a kidnapping, a sort of prodigal non-return, the discovery of an exam-cheating father, an accused great-great-grandfather, and all sorts of other things.

  “What sorts of things?” Mill said.

  “Various ones. I’m too tired to get into it right now.”

  “No, you ain’t. Why aren’t you looking me in the eye, boy?”

  I feigned ignorance.

  “You’re looking at me funny. Have you been talking to your father?”

  I asked if she had any food at her home. Perhaps I would stop by her place and have a bite, if she wished, before going to my flat to sleep.

  “I haven’t been to university, but I know what a subject is. A subject is what I’m trying to talk about, and you’re trying to change it on me. Look me in the eye, boy.”

  Mill had a large, dark face, with shades of gray under her eyes. Stars radiated out from the corners of her eyes. Bags, too. It was an old, dark, leathery face, with the lines of age gouged diagonally down her cheeks, and across her forehead, and at the corners of her mouth. She wore no lipstick. Her lips were cracked. She licked them.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it the minute you looked at me, fox-like. He told you about me, didn’t he? Didn’t he? Don’t lie to me.”

  I told her about finding the letter, and about talking with my father. We arrived at her house. Her stare relaxed. “Come on, git out of the car. I ain’t bringing you no meal in here.”

  We went inside. It was immaculate. She said Yoyo had cleaned up her house the day before. Mill had ordered Kentucky Fried Chicken. She said she was too tired to bake. The chicken was waiting for us, on the table, in the bucket.

  “Look at me, son.”

  I looked at her again. I wondered if the whole family research project was a bad idea. I had forced my way into Mill’s life and learned the one thing that she wanted to keep secret.

  “Tell me what I used to be,” she said.

  “A prostitute.” I avoided her eyes.

  She was smiling. She blinked, and held something back. But she was smiling. “I don’t mind you knowing, Langston. That was fifty years ago. You weren’t even born. I’m not responsible for things I did half a century ago. So stop looking at me like that. It was more than half a lifetime ago.”

  I asked why she and my father had gone so long without talking.

  “Because he married a white woman, son. I had nothing against your mother. I’ve never even met her. But she’s white. Aberdeen Williams took to a white woman, and the next thing I knew, we lost him and we had to leave Oakville. When we left, I felt as if I was leaving my real father. I loved that man, Langston, I loved him like you couldn’t understand. And the way I saw it, I lost him because of a white woman.

  “I got into some trouble when I developed into a woman. I saw white pimps running colored prostitutes as if they were cattle. And I saw black men taking off with white women. I could not forgive my brother for leaving me all alone and going on up to Canada and living there with a white woman. It upset the marrow of my bones, Langston. I could not go to his wedding. I could not meet that white woman. I hated her. And I hated him. Because I hated myself. But that’s all over now. Your father did what he had to. Even Aberdeen did what he had to. He shouldn’t have been messing around with that little old white girl in 1930, but I don’t hold that against him now. Aberdeen took what he could from life, and Evelyn Morris was all there was. There weren’t a lot of choices for black men back then. There were even fewer choices for black women. Back then, there were only a few hundred colored folks in Oakville. That didn’t leave you a whole mess of playing room, when you got down to looking for someone to make babies with.

  I told Mill that she should visit my parents, and Aberdeen, too.

  “That’s what I wanted to do, you cussed fool.” She hit me with her hat. “You-all took off on that airplane. You could have taken me with you. Not on an airplane, mind you. I don’t go up in those things.”

  “You don’t?”

  “The only time you’ll catch me up in the air is when I’m flying to meet my maker. You’re going to have to drive me to Canada, Langston. On the ground. Fifty miles an hour is as fast as my old body will travel.”

  I bit into the chicken. I asked if it came from the bucket she had ordered for me two weeks earlier. She swatted me again with her hat.

  “Finish up this family business and take me to Canada,” Mill said.

  “I’ve got a few things to do still.”

  “Get at ‘em, son. I got some boxes I never told you about.”

  I said I had to be going home to bed. She drove me. I got out at the door. She put her hand on my arm.

  “Son, when I was an itty-bitty girl in Oakville, I used to think Aberdeen Williams was old. I thought Mommy and Daddy were old. Yet here I am, twice as old as they were then. I’m at the end of my life, Langston, and I want to go home. I want to go back to Oakville. If you don’t take me there soon, I’m gonna drum on your head with a frying pan.”

  As far as Yoyo was concerned, cleaning houses was hard work. Lugging meat and charcoal and Cameroonian hot sauce and a barbecue stand around the streets of Charles Village was hard work. Jumping out of a jailhouse window and escaping through the streets of Baltimore was hard work.

  But writing was a piece of cake. All you had to do was let your mind float and follow it with your fingers. You could get published in the Toronto Times, even if you were an illegal refugee in the United States. You could find the woman you had once hoped to marry, track her down at the Toronto Times, and start writing love letters to her while she helped you get published. Writing was a good business in America. It could change your life.


  Yoyo had his fourth article published in the Toronto Times. A note came from Hélène Savoie, who passed on a request from a senior editor—could Yoyo write a regular humor column for the Times?

  Humor? How odd. Yoyo didn’t write humor. This Canadian editor had to be a little strange. But who cared? He published Yoyo’s stuff. He paid him three hundred dollars an article. It was the easiest money Yoyo had ever made. Three hundred dollars for sitting down for two hours to write one article was an awful lot better than seventy-five dollars for five hours of housecleaning. Yoyo’s most recent article had been entitled “Columbus Discovered What?” It started like this:

  Most Americans think an Italian by the name of Christopher Columbus discovered America.

  If Christopher Columbus was the first to see America, the Amerindian peoples must all have been blind.

  But this article isn’t about the Amerindians. Of interest to this author, since Americans seem so bent on naming the one who discovered America, is to examine who else might lay claim to the discovery.

  Three cheers for the Norsemen. These Scandinavian sailors landed on the east coast of North America more than six hundred years before Columbus. But they weren’t the first.

  It’s time to raise the flag in honor of the Africans. Have planeloads of tourists not witnessed the Negroid features of the stone heads — over two thousand years old — uncovered in Mexico in 1939 by the renowned geologist Matthew Stirling?

  Who do we assume carved those stone heads, dear readers?

  Let’s drop Columbus from the textbooks, and insert the sailors of papyrus boats from the west coast of Africa …

  Yoyo reread the clipping of his article. Hélène had attached a short note that said: “Here’s your latest missive, in published form. They think you’re a riot up here. Keep in touch, H.S.”

  Yoyo told me about it, and said he had started writing back to Hélène. He longed for his old lover, and he told it to her straight. He wanted her in his bed. Actually, he wanted to be in her bed. In Canada.

  “If you are already spoken for,” he wrote, “let me know. I wish not to embarrass you. But if your pulse beats as strongly as mine, let us meet again in Canada. Show me the jewels of the world’s second largest nation. Show me Banff National Park, where there is a lake, I have read, the color of emerald. Take me to the Niagara Falls, source of unrelenting hydroelectric power and magnet to the deranged, who seal themselves inside barrels and plunge from absurd heights. Take me, dear Hélène, to Oakville — historic refuge for the fugitive slaves of America.”

  Yoyo was waiting at the door when Mill dropped me off at my flat.

  “You went away, my friend, without consulting me,” he said. I told him I’d been through a kidnapping and that I needed sleep. “Fine, get your sleep, my friend. I must leave to clean a house. But don’t travel north again without advising me. I would like to join you.”

  “Let’s talk about it after I wake up.” I tried to close the door, but Yoyo slipped inside. “I want to see my friend, Hélène Savoie, in Canada. I want to marry her. I mustn’t say that to her, of course. I have already learned the hard way that speaking too directly about such things can capsize a love affair.”

  “Speaking of Hélène, she mailed me something to pass along to you,” I said. I dug through my bags. My need to sleep seemed to be fading. Yoyo’s energy was stirring me. I found Hélène’s envelope and handed it over, along with Mahatma Grafton’s business card. Yoyo tore open the envelope.

  “She says, ‘If you can come up for a few days, I’d love to see you. Don’t be offended by the cash. It’s to help you get up here.’ Take me to Canada, Langston. Take me with you.”

  I don’t know how long it took me to become aware of the knocking. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. On the front door. I rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans, and walked out of my bedroom.

  I saw Annette through the window, and had the same thought I’d had when we’d met weeks earlier: she was too good-looking and too young for me. Her face was thin, and angular. Her color was like the smooth side of an acorn. I saw the darker freckles on her cheekbones. Her lips parted into a smile as I opened the door. Yellow dress, with red poppies, hemmed at mid-thigh. Sandals.

  “Mill told me you were back,” she said. Her voice ran like water, with a hint of laughter in it. Her tongue brushed over those teeth, spaced slightly, and lovely in their imperfection. I couldn’t imagine a man not wanting to hold her. I took in a breath.

  “You look terrific,” I said.

  “You were sleeping, weren’t you?” I opened the door wider. Wide enough for her to squeeze through, but not without touching me. “Entry will cost you.”

  She planted a quick one on my lips. “A woman is watching from across the street.”

  I waved to Elvina Peck, and realized that my rent was overdue. It was August 4. And I’d been away for two weeks.

  “Elvina, how you doing?” I called across the street.

  “Just fine.”

  “I’ll get you that rent money today.”

  “Fine. Take good care of your visitor.”

  I waved and closed the door.

  “You don’t have any food in here,” Annette said.

  “I was away.”

  “And you didn’t warn me that you were leaving.” “I wasn’t sure you were interested.”

  “Wasn’t our last time together an expression of interest?”

  “Do you mind if I kiss you before answering that question?”

  “Kiss me all you like. I like it when you touch me. But remember to tell me the next time. I might like to know if you’re going someplace.”

  I woke up to the smell of potatoes and onions frying.

  “I bought you some food,” Annette said. There was a baguette on the counter. And a bottle of red wine. I checked the fridge. She’d bought oranges and a cantaloupe. Milk. Juice. Cheese. “I got ground coffee, too,” she said. “Want to make some? I’d love a good coffee.”

  “Sure. Just a minute.” I dressed and crossed the street — it was early evening, now — and knocked on Elvina’s door and borrowed her coffee-maker.

  “You don’t keep much around here, do you?” Annette said.

  “I didn’t know how long I’d be staying in Baltimore. Tell me about yourself, Annette Morton.”

  She grinned. “You mean now that we’ve had sex three times, we should get properly introduced?”

  “Sure.”

  “There’s not much to say. I’ve got a BA in English from Morgan College. I grew up in Baltimore and am still here and work at the Enoch Pratt Library. I haven’t been shot or turned into anyone’s prostitute or been beaten up on Pennsylvania Avenue, and I do have steady employment, so you can surmise that I’m a survivor, for a black Baltimorean.”

  “How old are you?”

  “You seem to need to know, so I don’t think I’ll say.”

  “I’m more worked up over my age than yours.”

  “I’m not worked up over it, so why should you be? Don’t judge me because of my age.”

  “I wasn’t judging you, I was judging us.”

  “Then don’t judge us according to my age.”

  “How long have you been involved in the church?”

  “This feels like an interview. It’s not at all like what happens when we touch. Let’s just eat and go out for the evening.”

  I had been planning to spend a few hours digging through Mill’s boxes. I wanted to pin down some more information on Langston Cane the Second. But it could wait for a night. “Sure, let’s make it an evening.”

  Annette cracked some eggs, whisked them, and poured them into the potato and onion mixture. I sliced the baguette and made the coffee. I ran across the street again to borrow a chair from Elvina.

  A breeze ran through the kitchen. The sounds of boys playing in the street wafted in through the windows. We could hear crickets, and a couple laughing on the sidewalk below, and an ice-cream vendor ringing his bell. He called out: �
�Fudgsicles icicles popsicles creamsicles and ice cream, come get your taste of winter in the summer, come cool your mouth for just one dollar fifty.” We got up in the middle of our meal and went down into the street to meet this ice-cream vendor. He was about sixty. He wore a baseball cap. He was as black as the night.

  “You two lovebirds enjoy yourselves. You only live once. Ain’t nobody gonna bring you back ‘cause you messed up your life first time around. So, enjoy your loving, and your ice cream, too.”

  I was going to give him a five and let him keep the change. But he stopped me. “No money. Not tonight. You can buy from me another night, if I’m around and if you want to. But tonight, it’s on Old Bill. It’s good luck to give ice cream to lovers.”

  “What makes you so sure we’re lovers?” Annette said.

  “Young lady, you about the prettiest thing this side of Jupiter. It’s evening, now, and getting dark out here. If this man ain’t your lover, something’s wrong with him.”

  Annette leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. She said, “He is my lover, and he’s a good man, and there’s nothing wrong with him that can’t be fixed with a little more loving.”

  We went back inside, and stuck Old Bill’s desserts in the freezer. When we finished our meal, we strolled out into the night with the ice-cream cones. We walked south on St. Paul Street until we finished eating them, and then took a taxi downtown and spent half the night listening to jazz at Louie’s Bookstore Café on Charles Street.

  I left Annette’s place in the morning. I asked if she would like to get together soon. She said not to rush things.

  Should I call her, then?

  No. She would call me. I was thankful that I still had a lot of family sleuthing to do. I needed something to keep me from being overwhelmed with desire for Annette.

  I spent four days reading family history documents at Mill’s place, and came across a church pamphlet published at the time of the death of Langston Cane the Second. Born in Oakville in 1858, he had traveled with his mother and brothers to Baltimore around 1866. The mother died, and the brothers disappeared, and Langston was taken under the wing of a Quaker by the name of Nathan Shoemaker. He was raised by Shoemaker until he attended Storer College in Harpers Ferry. He went on to Lincoln University, married Lucinda Richards, and became a minister at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Baltimore.