Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  And as he watched that black face disappear in the shadows behind him, along with the cold curl of the slave’s breathsmoke and the spitting-hiss of those torches outside Kings Tavern at the far edge of Natchez-Under-the-Hill, Bass figured he knew just how that felt.

  By damn, he knew how it felt to have his own world ripped inside out.

  From the Mississippi River the Natchez Trace pointed roughly in a northeasterly direction toward Tennessee for close to six hundred miles through Choctaw and Chickasaw country, ending up on the Cumberland River at a place called French Lick, in the last few years come to be known as Nashville.

  Some early-day historians were already claiming this was the oldest road in the world, originally used by the beasts to cross ridges and rivers and high-flowing streams; later followed by the Indians who came tracking those flesh-bearing animals, long, long before the Romans ever dreamed of their famous Appian Way. Here in Mississippi country it was often known as the Chickasaw Trace. The Choctaw Path was the name given to the southern end, while the new American government, which had in mind to use the road in moving its mails, gave the Trace a grand and imperially democratic title: the Columbian Highway.

  For Titus Bass and the rest who fled north into the wilderness that cold and misty night in December of 1810, there was nothing remotely grand nor glorious about the prospect of making their way on foot through the swamps and bayous, fording streams and ice-clogged rivers, ascending countless ridges and stumbling down countless more valleys, hoping they did not freeze at night, nor fall prey to any of the beasts, savages, nor white predators who murdered and robbed all along that narrow footpath pointing the way north—home.

  Indeed, more so in the latter part of the eighteenth century than now, it had acquired the reputation of a robber’s road, a thoroughfare of the hunter and the hunted, prey and predator. Thrilling stories and splendid myths had already built up concerning the gruesome exploits of famous highwaymen along the Natchez Trace. The sort of brigands who painted their faces with berry juice and bark stain to appear like rogue Indians, for just often enough had the Chickasaw and Creek in fact swept down to make their raids on the long men and lean women who plied that lonely road.

  All too often only a circling buzzard called attention to the fate of other, less fortunate travelers. Because they dared not leave evidence of their bloody crimes, some of the more barbaric of thieves ripped open the bodies of their victims, tore out the entrails, and filled the cavities with rocks to sink all evidence of their black deeds beneath the placid waters of the swamps and bayous. What with an alarming number of murders and short list of celebrated outlaws, by the 1790s the road was commonly known as the “Devil’s Backbone.”

  Most everyone on the frontier was a sojourner in those days, pilgrims all: traders and tinkers, medicine peddlers and missionaries, contract mail carriers and even an occasional settler on the tramp south to find richer soil. And always, always there were the Kentucky flatboatmen. Few if any were ever compelled to cordelle and warp their boats back up the Mississippi and Ohio, against the mighty current. Instead, with their cargo auctioned and their transportation sold by the board, the Kentuckians found themselves again afoot, staring at the prospect of a long walk home before they would begin to make plans for another float downriver.

  Even young Tom Lincoln from Kentucky had made his trip to New Orleans back in 1806, then plied his way back home on foot, vowing never to return to such a wicked wilderness. He kept his promise, found himself a wife, and began to raise a family—the father of Abraham, the hickory-thin rail-splitter.

  By the end of that first decade of the nineteenth century, the road pirates were all but a part of the past—no longer anything more than scary stories used to frighten young children in their beds on a dark and stormy night. Most boatmen returning home from their long trek downriver did so without giving a thought to any real danger from banditti. While a few took north a fat purse, most came back to the Ohio River country homesick and foot-sore. The hapless handful might well take north the bitter fruit of their bawdy frolics with the many-hued whores: blindness and idiocy for their offspring.

  That first day on the trail after leaving the fertile, loess bluffs at Natchez, Titus proved his worth to the rest by bagging a fat turkey cock then out in search of his own meal. They took turns plucking the bird then and there that afternoon beside the worn footpath, building a fire to warm their cold, wet selves as night came down and the sounds of the wilderness began to swell around them.

  “We’re in Choctaw land now,” Kingsbury explained. “Been past some of their villages a time or two walking north. I knowed ’em to strap small bags of sand onto the heads of their babes to make ’em flat.”

  Beulah placed her hand on her forehead. “They think that makes their skulls pretty?”

  Indeed, the Natchez Trace penetrated the heart of what had once been a great wilderness ruled only by tribes warring over disputed territory. For centuries the route had been no more than a buffalo trail when the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee came to blaze their own short woodland paths that took a man from the shellfish shore of the Mississippi to salt licks of steamy woodlands, past river and stream and hunting ground until the tribes eventually joined each small section to form the great road.

  It wasn’t until their third night out of Natchez at their camp on the Bayou Pierre River that the slave finally worked up enough courage to slip up on their camp and show himself at the far edge of the firelight.

  “Figured you was out there,” Kingsbury stated in a matter-of-fact tone as the black man emerged from the shadows.

  When they all wheeled about, Titus nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden sight of the slave. Staring up at him now, just as he had gazed up at him in that cage on the wagon, Titus thought the Negro seemed all the taller. Almost like a huge, ebony monolith.

  “What the hell you doing, Negra?” Root growled, finding his voice after the fright the slave’s surprise appearance had given him.

  The man eyed the butchered carcass of a white-tailed deer, his hand across his belly. “Hungry.”

  “Ain’t got nothing for you!” Heman Ovatt snapped. “Just get on with yourself and be gone!”

  “Here,” Titus said, standing on shaking legs. “I’ll share what I got with you.”

  The others fell silent as Bass stepped toward the slave, holding out his tin cup. In it steamed hunks of venison and broth.

  Snapping that two-cornered Barcelona hat from his head, he performed a quick bow, then snatched the cup from Bass and brought it to his face, where he sucked its contents down ravenously.

  “There’s more here,” Beulah said, passing over what she had left of her portion.

  As he ate, the boatmen argued over the slave’s fate as if the man weren’t even there, or at the very least completely deaf.

  “Mebbeso we can sell him up to home,” Root suggested eagerly. “Big Negra like him—sure to fetch us a lot a money.”

  “What the hell you need with more money, Reuben Root?” the woman demanded.

  “Leastwise, it’d pay for what he’ll eat on the journey!” Kingsbury replied.

  “You all sound like addleheaded fools,” Beulah scolded. She laid a hand on Titus’s shoulder. “It’s the young’un here feeding the lot of you. Ain’t costing you a damn thing.”

  “Then I say we leave him,” Ovatt grumbled. “Can’t sell him—he ain’t gonna be worth nothing to us.”

  “Don’t you remember? We already tried leaving him,” Kingsbury said. “You see what that got us.”

  “Maybeso we can tie him up till someone else comes along and finds him.”

  “No!” Titus said a little too loudly. The other three and the slave all turned in his direction, freezing in place. “No. You won’t want that done to you. A man tied up, he can’t protect hisself from the wild critters in these here woods.”

  “Boy’s right,” Beulah agreed, rising to a crouch to ladle more of the venison soup from the brass kettle i
nto the slave’s cup. “You’ll just have to figure out something else. You fellas are so damned smart, ought’n be real easy.”

  With the way the disgruntled Root and Ovatt glared at Kingsbury as if to tell him to do something—and quick—about that sassy woman, the pilot could only shrug in helplessness.

  Bass watched the slave suck at the stew, chewing up the big morsels of meat with his huge teeth. At each gust of cruel wind which sliced through that shirt torn to ribbons, the black man shivered, doing his best to cradle the tin cup in both hands to keep it from sloshing. Not knowing what prompted him to, Titus dragged up one of his blankets and draped it around the slave’s shoulders. Those huge white eyes in that shiny black face looked up at him in the middle of chewing a bite. A look of stunned gratitude crossed the man’s face as Bass turned back to his place by the fire.

  “Then there ain’t nothing else we can do but we send him back,” Ovatt said.

  “That ain’t no better’n trying to leave him,” Kingsbury argued.

  “If we ain’t gonna send him back, or leave him—I got me an idea,” Reuben declared. “I say we take him north—”

  “We ain’t taking him north!” Ovatt repeated.

  “I’m telling you we ought’n take him north and sell him!” Root declared.

  The woman settled beside the youth. “How you feel about that, Titus?”

  “Why you asking him?” Kingsbury demanded.

  “I figure the Negra belongs to Titus—”

  “That buck Negra belongs to him?” Ovatt whined.

  Reuben snorted. “Craziest thing I ever heard of!”

  Beulah paid them no heed and continued, “Belongs to Titus because Titus is the one busted the Negra free.” Turning back to the youth, she repeated, “How’s that set with you? Taking him north to Kentucky where you can sell him.”

  For some time he stared at the fire, then looked at the slave, then back to the flames again, rolling it over and over in his mind. At that moment he regretted not paying more attention to his schooling, figuring it might well have given him the capacity to resolve his dilemma. Finally, Bass said, “I ain’t got no place to take him I get back there.”

  “You got a home,” Root disagreed.

  “Not no more,” Titus said, fearful of the responsibility. “I’m going to Louisville.”

  “Take him with you,” Kingsbury said.

  Wagging his head, unable to sort it all out, Bass admitted, “Don’t wanna take no Negra slave ’long with me.”

  “Then you just sell him when we get back to the Ohio country and be done with it,” Ovatt suggested.

  “I … I don’t rightly know how I feel about that.”

  Root asked, “Ain’t your people got any slaves?”

  “No. My family ain’t never had any. Work the land all ourselves … all by themselves.”

  “Maybe they can use a slave now,” Kingsbury tried to add cheerfully.

  “Said I ain’t going back home,” Titus told them firmly. “I don’t want no slave. Can’t use him.”

  “Sell him!”

  “No!” Titus snapped at Root, his fist clenching in frustration.

  “He’s just a god-bleemed Negra—”

  “He’s a person!” Titus interrupted.

  All three boatmen erupted in roars of laughter.

  Kingsbury said, “This Negra? A person? Listen, son—that’s money sitting right there. Like a good milch cow. Or a breeding stud. Just look at him! He’ll bring you top dollar. Every planter from here to Kentucky’ll wanna get his hands on him to breed with their Negra bitches. Have ’em strong li’l suckers to do the fieldwork in the years to come.”

  “Said I ain’t gonna sell him.”

  “Then we’ll sell him for you,” Root said.

  “He ain’t yours,” Titus snapped. “He belongs to me.”

  “So what the hell are you gonna do with him?” Beulah asked.

  “I s’pose I’ll turn him loose.”

  “He’ll just follow us … till some law catches him.”

  Titus was worried again. “Then what?”

  “If they don’t kill him while’st running him down, they’ll sell him off,” Kingsbury said. “No two ways about it, the man’s going for money, even if you turn him loose.”

  “’Cept if you make him a freedman,” Beulah suggested.

  All four men turned to her, stunned. Then Titus looked at the slave. “A freedman?”

  “That means you let him go legal, so he ain’t no man’s slave no more,” she explained. “Means he’s on his own from there on out.”

  Turning now to the stranger in their midst, Titus asked in a quiet voice, “You wanna be free to go your own way?”

  He smiled. “Go with you.”

  Wagging his head, Titus explained, “No man’s slave. Go where you wanna go, on your own.”

  The yellowed eyes slowly widened, as if he were struggling to make sense of it in his mind, translating, forming words like sturdy nets to capture the concepts.

  “Me come across the big water … way down river,” he started. “Big boat. Big boat many die. Me so sick come to river. Down in Orlins Town they sell me to Annie. She learn me fix whiskey, rum, brandy too. Help Annie’s women. I not help Annie’s women, she sell me. You take me now. Me go with you.”

  “Not no more,” Titus replied adamantly. “Free man.”

  “Go home?” he asked the youth.

  “That’s across the ocean,” Beulah answered. “Too far. You can go anywhere, make a new life for yourself.”

  “Go work anybody else now?”

  “No,” Titus said, sensing the warmth of something spreading inside his chest. What it was, he could not put a name to. “Work for you … what, do you have a name?”

  “Hezekiah, she name me.”

  Beulah asked, “Your mama?”

  “No. My mama far away,” Hezekiah said sadly, his eyes misting as he stared off into the night. “She die when men come to village and take all people to big boat. Chains.”

  Titus asked, “Who give you the name Hezekiah?”

  “Annie give me.”

  “Then that’s what your name’s gonna be,” Titus declared. “Hezekiah Christmas.”

  A broad smile brightened the slave’s face like a crack in burnt, blackened wood. “Like Annie name. Christmas.”

  “You like it?” Bass inquired.

  “Like it, yes. Hezekiah Christmas.”

  His mind burned with possibilities as he said, “Now, soon as we get someplace where I can have folks write us up a paper says I’m freeing you, from then on you’ll be a free man.”

  “Goddamned shame,” Root grumbled. “Negra buck like him’d brung us his weight in coins, I’d wager.”

  “Just hope he ain’t gonna be trouble to us,” Kingsbury grumped.

  “He ain’t,” Titus vowed, hoping it was a promise he could keep.

  “That’s a long goddamned walk,” Ovatt said.

  “He’ll help out,” Bass explained, then looked at the slave. “Pay for his keep.”

  Hezekiah nodded, handing his empty cup to Beulah.

  “You done?” she asked.

  “More?”

  Beulah smiled and took his cup to lean over the kettle. “My, but you are a hungry one.”

  “Just look at the size of him,” Ovatt said almost under his breath. “Bet he eats as much as a goddamned plowhorse.”

  North by east they pushed on the following morning, making for the Choctaw Agency on the Pearl River,* the heart of the Choctaw nation.

  Only nine years before, General James Wilkinson had concluded a treaty between the tribes and the federal government that would allow passage through their lands. Four years later in 1805 the tribes agreed to establish and maintain a handful of settlements along the trail. While the first leg of the journey north from New Orleans to Natchez was one of relative ease due in large part to the frequent and comfortable way stations, once on the Natchez Trace, however, the “stands,” as those half-doz
en wilderness way stations were known across the next six hundred miles, were something altogether different: really nothing more than a few ramshackle cabins and tumble-down huts offering the crudest accommodations. Not a single town in all that distance. Only three Indian villages, a ferry at the Tennessee River, and two squaw men’s cabins provided the only measure of civilization and company in that wilderness.

  While the Trace did indeed serve as a mail route and was of some small military purpose for the infant nation, it remained of limited commercial importance. From the time of the Revolution until the coming of the steamboat—which one day soon would easily push its way upstream against the might of the Mississippi and the Ohio—the Natchez Trace was primarily a route for returning flatboatmen. Coming downriver, theirs had been a journey by shoal and suck and thunderous rapids. Walking north would present a man far different perils.

  “Ain’t near so bad making for home in wintertime like it is,” Heman Ovatt said at their night fire several days later. “Summer’s trip be the one what can kill a man with bad water, the fever and malaria, and all sorts of other bloody fluxes.”

  “Mosquitoes and gnats,” Reuben Root joined in. “In that sticky heat they’ll suck your blood and make you so sick you wish you was dead.”

  “Them’s the only things you don’t have to worry about come winter like this,” Beulah snorted. “But going north, you’re still bound to run into poisonous snakes—the likes of cottonmouths and copperheads.”

  “Only on the warm days,” Kingsbury advised.

  “I know ’nough ’bout ’em,” Titus replied. “Sunny days you just gotta be watchful for the places them snakes is out to lay around and warm themselves.”

  Root trembled as if cold water had been poured on him. “What I don’t like is them panthers crying in the night out there. Sounds just like a woman, wailing for help.”

  Night after night it had been the same for Titus. Awakened from a fitful sleep by the cries from all manner of shapeless creatures out there in the dark. He’d lie wide-eyed for the longest time, his back slid up to Hezekiah’s, hoping to share their warmth and Bass’s two blankets, as he listened to the night-things come into voice out there in the swamp.