More than an hour later Beulah returned, the four corners of a scrap of blanket suspended over her shoulder to form a pouch. Coming awake in the dark and the cold, Titus moved with the other three boatmen into a tight circle as the woman set her bundle at her feet, then sank beside it.
Beulah pulled apart the corners, exposing two clay jugs, and said, “I got you fellas some tafia.”
Titus watched Ovatt pull the cork from one of the jugs and sniff it before turning the jug up to drink. He asked, “What’s tafia?”
“Rum.”
“But it’s better’n that Monongahela we drunk all the way downriver,” Root said, smacking his lips as he handed the second jug to Kingsbury.
“Try some,” Ovatt suggested, giving the first jug to Bass.
It truly tasted sweeter than the American backwoods rum, and well it should—as it was made of the finest sugarcane in the French West Indies.
“What else you get us?” Kingsbury inquired, fingering a slab of something dark. He brought it to his nose for a sniff.
Beulah said, “You’ll like that.”
“I bet I will,” the pilot replied, and took a bite.
“Salt meat fried in bear’s oil,” she told them. “Enough for you all to have a goodly portion for supper.”
For the most part they drank their tafia in silence, using it to wash down the seasoned meat and what biscuits she could find to purchase. At the same time, Kingsbury made it clear none of them were to drink enough to hobble them when it came time to push on through town. Overhead more clouds rolled in, shutting out the stars completely as some of them dozed on their full bellies.
It was near the middle of the night when Kingsbury tapped on the sole of Bass’s moccasin. The others were awake, dusting and shifting their clothing, shivering in the cold. Beulah stood at the edge of the brush, waiting expectantly.
“Like I told you, Hames—I figure you can keep to the edge of the woods until you get to the north side of town, where we’ll pick up the Trace.”
“There by Kings Tavern?”
With a nod she continued, “Place ain’t as dangerous as it might be. ’Pears there’s a train of slavers pushing through. They gone and chose to make a night of it at Kings Tavern.”
“Slavers?” Ovatt asked. “Jesus God!”
“Wagons and cages and such?” Kingsbury asked intently, ignoring Heman’s grumbling.
“Yeah,” Beulah replied. “The place is packed with wagons. Men was all over the yard, in and out. Though most of ’em gone inside to the fires when it got cold.”
“We’ll keep to the woods,” Kingsbury said, turning to the other three men. Then he led them out.
Snatches of wild, bawdy music joined discordant singing, the shrieks of drunken women, and the bellows of drunken men, along with the crashing of clay ware and the cracking of furniture—all a river of sound pouring from the low shanties and shacks that bordered the river itself here in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. Where they could, the five pilgrims kept to the shadows and the sodden, quieter ground along the timber.
In reaching Kings Tavern they found the low-roofed saloon and brothel nearly hidden behind the many wagons parked haphazardly in the wide, muddy yard, every tongue down and teams staked out to graze nearby.
Kingsbury halted them as they all came abreast at the edge of the timber and studied the scene. “The first step home is just on the far side of that tavern, fellas.”
“I say let’s be putting this hellhole behind us right now,” Beulah whispered.
“Me too,” Ovatt agreed. “I’d like to reach Concordia Lake afore the sun comes up.”
Looking at Root, the pilot said, “We’ll push right ahead.”
Then Kingsbury moved out of the solid wall of shadows into the cleared yard, hurrying toward the first wagon. As they did, a half-dozen dark human forms took shape from the floor of that wagon, rising one by one cautiously to peer out at the travelers with wide eyes yellowed bright as a new moon in their black faces. As the other boatmen and Beulah joined him, Hames slid down the sidewall, stepped over the long tongue, and darted to the next wagon, coming to a rest closer still to the side of the tavern. When the other four reached him there by a wagon near the back corner of the saloon, the pilot said, “Keep against the back wall. There’s a kitchen door there—but I’ll lay good money they got it closed tonight.”
“Cold enough,” Root grumbled.
Kingsbury inched toward the front of the wagon, peering around it as a solitary, silent figure sat up inside the last of three cages that filled the wagon’s bed. Hearing the movement, seeing the huge shadow blot out some of the hissing torchlight that filled most of the wagonyard, Titus looked up, finding the slave’s hands gripping the bars of his cage, pressing his swollen, bloodied face against them.
Bass looked away, then immediately looked again at the slave. A big man from what he could see in this light. Bald-headed too. Titus’s breath caught in his throat as he stood, hearing the others shuffle off beneath the patter of the incessant, icy rain.
The slave had on only the tattered remnants of a shirt, clearly cut to ribbons across his shoulders and back by a recent whipping. Unsure at first, the big man slowly reached out one arm toward the white youngster, opening his palm. For a long moment Titus stared down at that lighter skin, then peered back at the man’s face.
“Help me, boat-man.”
Titus stumbled back. That voice: it was the goddamned Negra from Annie Christmas’s gunboat!
“Don’t you see me, boat-man?”
“I … I see you.”
“Help me. Get me away from these bad men.”
Just a quick look over the rest of the wagons in the yard filled with their cages of human chattel told Bass enough. “Y-you’re going to work the fields.”
“I dunno,” the man replied, pulling his arm back into the cage and letting his head sink between his shoulders. “Know nothing ’bout that.”
A voice rose softly from the cage next to his, and the big man whispered something in reply.
“What’s that?” Bass inquired, his suspicion aroused. “Who’s there?”
“Them others—they tell me we off to work the cotton for our new owner.”
“But you was … you belonged to Annie Christmas.”
He nodded, pressing his face close to the bars once more, one eye all but puffed shut. “White woman sold me two week ago. After big fight with you, boatmen.”
“She tell you why?”
“First she say she kill me—but she say a big man like me get her lots of money. So she sell me to work for the man who put me in this cage. Take me north to his home.”
“She got rid of you after the killing at her boat?”
He nodded, his face a dark shadow within the dancing, torchlit shadows of that rainy night. “Say I no good to her no more—no good can keep her from trouble. Annie’s whores get kill’t. She get hurt. Her man friends get killed. She say her Negra man no good no more. Wanna kill me—but she sell me. Gonna get too much money for me.”
“Titus!”
Bass turned, finding Kingsbury and the rest crouching at the corner of the tavern. The pilot hissed his name, waving him on. Titus turned back to glance over his shoulder at the man in the cage, starting to go, but got no more than a step when he turned to say something more to the slave.
At that moment an angry, frightened Kingsbury jutted out his jaw and issued his stern order, “C’mon, young’un! Ain’t no time to dawdle!”
“Wait here,” Bass whispered at the cage.
His ebony brow creased in bewilderment; then he smiled broadly and shrugged. “I h’ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
As Bass slipped in among them back in the shadows of the tavern, Root demanded, “What the hell you doin’?”
“That there’s the Negra from the gunboat,” he tried to explain with a gush, his mind whirling madly.
“Annie Christmas’s place?” Kingsbury asked.
“Yep. Said she up and sold him—”<
br />
“Leave his black ass be!” Root grumbled. “Bastard’s where he belongs.”
“Reuben’s right,” Ovatt agreed. “That skinhead savage nearly could’ve killed us.”
Bass wheeled on Heman, saying, “That’s just why he’s in that cage, don’t you see? Annie Christmas sold him ’cause he didn’t kill us like he could’ve when he had the chance. Kill’t us all, like she wanted him to.”
Kingsbury scratched a louse from his beard, brought it out, and cracked it between his fingernails. “What the hell that mean to us?”
“Let’s break him loose.” Bass suggested it, suddenly as astonished as the rest that he had even considered it, much less uttered the words.
“B-b-break that Negra loose?” Ovatt sputtered in amused disbelief. “C’mon, boy! No more of this nonsense. We gotta be walking home.”
“None of you don’t help me,” Titus argued, “I’ll do it myself—”
“You can’t do that!” Kingsbury said. “That Negra’s some man’s property.”
Titus felt himself growing angry as he asked, “Just like he belonged to Annie Christmas, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But if you’d had the chance that night, you’d gone and killed that property on the gunboat, wouldn’t you?”
“Damn right we would,” Reuben growled.
Titus grinned a little. “Ain’t a bit of difference to my thinking ’tween you kill a man’s property, or you let it go. Either way it ain’t his no more.”
“What you’re talking about’s stealing!” Ovatt cried, and was immediately shushed by the others. Quieter, he said, “You just don’t steal another man’s Negra, like you don’t steal his horse, or his cow!”
“We ain’t stealing,” Bass protested, wagging his head, desperate for some way to make them understand. He pointed at the cage. “We’re just letting him out to go off on his own. That don’t make us thieves.”
Inching up before Bass, Beulah asked, “It true what you said about that big black Negra not killing none of you in that gunboat when he had him the chance’t?”
“Ask Kingsbury, any of ’em here,” Bass replied. “It’s the certain truth.”
She turned on the pilot. “Hames, less’n you wanna tell me that the boy here’s lying ’bout that gunboat fight—you best get ready to stop me too.”
“Stop you?” Kingsbury asked, the pitch of his voice rising. “Stop you from what?”
“From helping Titus here set that there Negra loose.”
“Jesus God!” Ovatt screeched, throwing his head back in disgust. “We can’t do this! We gotta get outta Natchez afore any folks see us and make for trouble—”
“Shuddup!” Kingsbury interrupted, slapping a hand across Ovatt’s chest as he leaned toward the woman. “Listen, Beulah. I ain’t setting no darky free what belongs to another man.”
“Don’t need you,” Beulah said. “C’mon, Titus. You got your knife?”
“Yes’m.”
“G’won ahead of me,” she directed, shooting Kingsbury a scorching look. “I’ll be on your backside all the way over yonder to that wagon.”
Bass took off, hearing her moccasins scratching the gravel and dry grass as they darted for the wagon. He ground to a halt on that fine-grained, yellowish-brown loam and glanced up at the prisoner, holding a single finger against his lips for silence.
The slave nodded, his eyes growing wide, a sliver of white evident above his chin as his lips pulled back over crooked teeth. Bass yanked his knife free from its scabbard and climbed up the hind, off-side wheel, holding on to the wagon’s sidewall to steady himself as he stuffed the knife blade into the old padlock’s keyhole. Twisting this way and that so hard he was afraid he would snap off the tip of the blade, he finally turned in frustration.
“Ain’t working!” he whispered to the woman.
At that exact moment they heard voices, low and rumbling, around the far side of the tavern. Footsteps on the loose gravel. He dropped from the wheel as the woman slid beneath the wagon bed. Crouching down beside the wagon, Titus glanced up at the slave, frantically motioning him to get down. Instead the black man stared off in the direction of the voices as they hailed one another. One set of steps moved away. And a pair of boots scuffed right toward the wagonyard.
Bass was backing slowly, slowly, still bent at the waist when the voice caught him.
“What the hell are you doing by that goddamned wagon?”
Bass stood, whirled about, realizing the knife was still in his hand. He watched the man’s eyes drop to the knife blade gleaming with a dull sheen in the flickering torchlight that continued to hiss in the falling mist. Those eyes began to smile as they climbed back to Titus’s face.
“What you figure to do with that knife, son?” He took a step closer. “Hear me talking to you? Asked you what you doing here round my boss’s wagons! Up to no damn good, I’ll bet.” Then his tone of voice changed as he tugged back at his cuffs. “Looks like I’ll just have to box your ears, boy—teach you some goddamned propers about staying away from ’nother man’s—”
He hadn’t seen Beulah roll out on the far side of the wagon, nor had he seen her creep over the tongue and around the far corner of the wagon box. But there she stood now as the white man sank slowly to the icy ground, his eyes rolling back to their whites. Titus winced, sensing how the man’s head would be ringing something fierce when he woke up, what with the wallop Beulah gave his head with that piece of firewood.
“Forget that lock,” she ordered as she stood breathing heavy over the man who had crumpled near the hind wheel. “Get on up there and break that Negra free.” Then she shot the other three boatmen a glance. “All four of you owe this here black-assed son of a savage your lives. Every last one of you.”
It was as if they had felt the shaming sting in her harsh whisper like an indictment of their equivocation, maybe even their cowardice. Ovatt, Root, and Kingsbury joined Bass in clambering up beside the cage.
“Get me two big rocks,” Kingsbury ordered.
“You gonna smash it?” Reuben asked as he climbed down to gather up the stones from the wagonyard.
“Break it clean off,” the pilot answered. When the other two had a large rock held beneath the lock, Kingsbury raised his stone and brought it down with a loud, metallic crash.
“Jesus God! We’re gonna get caught for stealin’!” Ovatt cried.
“They’ll stretch our necks, Kingsbury!” Root gasped.
“Just hold that goddamned rock right there!” he demanded, bringing his stone up once more and down even more savagely.
The padlock fell free of the hasp with a clatter of metal on wood. Titus lunged between them, dragging the bolt from the hasp and yanking back the narrow cage door. Back in the corner, the slave hesitated.
“C’mon!” Titus yelled, reaching in to pull the black man’s arm.
Quickly the big man ducked, sweeping up his black Barcelona hat before turning his shoulders to slip sideways out the cage door. As he squeezed past, Titus saw the long bands of welt and bloody crust striping the slave’s back, visible only through the tatters and tears of what had once been a shirt. Those swollen wounds stood out in bold relief against the darker satin finish of the skin.
And numbers. A whole shitload row of numbers tattooed right on the goddamned back of that Negra’s shoulder.
Kingsbury was pulling on Beulah’s arm, urging her away from the wagon. Ovatt and Root were, already halfway back to the corner as Titus heard a groan from the ground. The black man leaped from the wagon and sprinted past Bass. Titus turned, watching the white man groggily pick his face out of the gravel, swipe the tiny stones and mud from his cheek, then shake his head.
Bass brought the stone down on the back of the man’s head with a crack loud enough that it seemed to echo from the wall of the tavern. Like an anvil the slaver dropped onto the gravel and icy mud with a grunt, arms sprawled, and lay still, his chest slowly rising and falling.
Bass stared a moment
at the man, then looked at the others frantically signaling him on. Dropping the stone beside the slaver as if it had suddenly grown too hot to hold, Bass darted at a crouch for the shadows. When he reached the group, he felt his right hand yanked up, gripped as if between two fine-grained slabs of second-growth hickory, and squeezed in a vise as it was pumped. The others stepped back as the slave brought Bass’s arm up and down, up and down.
“Just like white men do, this shake,” he said, beaming. “Me thank. Me thank, so shake with you. You make me not go to Miss’ippi.”
Kingsbury came between them, gently prying Bass’s hand from the slave’s. “That’s fine now. Shoo, boy. Just be on your way.”
“I go your way,” he said, turning back to gaze at Bass.
“Oh-h-h-h, no, you ain’t!” Root snarled.
“Just tell him you gotta be on your way, Titus,” Ovatt implored.
“We … I gotta be going,” Bass said.
The bald-headed slave remained steadfast, reaching out for Bass again. “Me go with you.”
Kingsbury clamped his hands around the black man’s wrists, saying, “We ain’t going to Nawlins.”
“Good.” And he jutted his chin. “Never like Nawlins no good.”
“And where we’re heading, we sure as hell can’t take you!” Ovatt added.
“G’won, now,” the pilot demanded. “You’re free, and you better be long gone afore that white man comes to with a lump on his head and finds you gone.”
Kingsbury grabbed Titus by one arm, the woman taking the other as Ovatt and Root led the way, all of them looking back over their shoulder at the big black shadow standing there at the corner of Kings Tavern as they hurried into the brush and timber for the trailhead of the Natchez Trace.
Bass watched the man’s eyes as he hustled off, how red-rimmed they were despite the blackness of the flesh. Then he realized that the Negra had to have his own feelings. Likely he had cried in anger and frustration at first, what with being sold off and put away in that cage like he was. Then those tears eventually changed to slow, sad ones as he felt his world closing in, and him shut off from the rest of it, torn away from friends and family, separated from everything he had come to know and understand over his short time in this white man’s world.
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