Dream Country

by Shannon Gibney

  “Walker,” she said quietly. “David Walker.”

  The young man snapped his fingers. “That’s it all right! David Walker.” He shook his head in admiration. “That’s a colored man knows how to talk, I tell you! White folks is scared of him for it too. Issuing him death threats left and right. Say he been ‘inciting the colored masses toward insurrection,’ or some other nonsense.” The young man laughed, and the girl beside him, who seemed much more reserved, cracked a smile.

  “What’s inessection?” Nolan asked, his mouth full of potatoes.

  No one paid him any mind, and the conversation took on a life of its own, bouncing from person to person, statement to statement, some of which frankly seemed wild in their implications to Yasmine. She had never seen anything like it: free and educated coloreds debating their futures. It filled her stomach with anxiety, but also something else she had never felt before and therefore could not yet describe. But whatever it was, it felt good, made her sit up and listen.

  “That Walker fellow is dangerous, make no mistake about it,” said Mr. Medger. “Talking openly and in mixed company about equality between the races. White folks ain’t trying to hear ’bout that!”

  Several women across from her, they looked like they could even be sisters, scrunched up their faces. “We been trying to only dare to say what white folks want to hear for how long now, and exactly how far has that got us?” said one of them. “Nowhere, no how. Most of us is still in chains, and those of us supposedly ‘free’ can’t get no fair wages, housing, treatment, or other kind of respect from these crackers.”

  A general murmur of assent went around the table.

  Yasmine noted that, between bites, her boys’ big eyes followed each speaker around the room. She began to relax in her chair as she realized that they were perhaps taking in their first actual political debate between educated coloreds with different views.

  “I say bring on Walker,” the woman continued. “And God bless all of you’s prepared and ready to risk everything and try to make a new start across the water.” She gestured toward Yasmine, who felt herself smile. Just a bit. “But that ain’t for everybody. The heat, the sickness, the rocking boat on them rough waters all them weeks.”

  Yasmine looked up and saw a small placard on the wall to her left. She wondered how she hadn’t seen it when they first sat down.

  Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.

  —2 Corinthians 3:5.

  Father had taught her to read long ago, along with a little bit of writing. She had never had reason to want to write anything down before, but now, she wanted a quill, some ink, and paper to record it.

  The woman next to her laughed. “You be spitting up bile the whole way there, Mildred. That the real reason you so against this whole colonizing Africa thing. Your weak stomach.”

  And soon the laughter was spreading and growing louder around the table. Beside her, the boys were laughing outright, relieved to find release after the stresses of the past few days. Even Yasmine, who couldn’t remember the last time she laughed, felt something strange in her belly bubbling up.

  Mildred waved her hand. “All right! All right! I’ll admit my constitution ain’t exactly suited to seafarin’.” Mildred glared at everyone, feigning annoyance. Anyone could see that she loved being at the center of things, even if it meant she was the butt of the joke. “You know what my constitution’s suited for? Keeping my black behind here. In my home. Away from diseased mosquitoes and angry savages.”

  Cries of “Chile . . .” went up, and a few women lifted their hands, like they were in church.

  Nolan looked like he was on the verge of saying something, but Yasmine shushed him. On her lap, Lani refused her mother’s hands feeding her and instead insisted on grabbing bits of potatoes and meat and gravy herself.

  Two of the men leaned back in their chairs, shaking their heads in disagreement with Mildred.

  Mildred went on. “Yes, home, where I was born to free folk and intend to stay that way as long as Jesus gives me bullets for that gun over there.” She gestured toward the corner of the room, where Yasmine saw a rifle standing up.

  The two women beside her started clapping. “Preach, Sister!”

  “They got more guns than we do. They always had more guns than we do, more bullets, more men to fire them. Then they got their laws, their money, their land. You know how many times coloreds stood up to them and done got themselves killed?”

  Now it was Mildred’s turn to frown. She noisily sipped her water as the man’s assertions became more and more spirited.

  “Look here, y’all remember my great-uncle Nestor, right?”

  Nods all around.

  “He was a good man,” said Mr. Medger.

  “A fighting Christian,” said Mrs. Medger.

  “Yeah, well, his fighting ways done got him strung up.”

  Mrs. Medger gasped.

  The man nodded. “Yeah! Posse of white men rode onto his farm one night, said they were sick of him ‘stealing’ their crops, inflating the prices and all. Said they saw him making eyes at their missus.”

  Sucked teeth and shaking heads everywhere. They knew what was coming. It was all too familiar in its horror.

  The man telling the story sighed. “Well, as many of our venerable politicians have uttered, no good can come of a smart nigger. And Uncle Nestor was too smart, see? And, just like David Walker, wasn’t about to lower himself to make those white boys feel better. No, he was going to be a man. His mother had bought his freedom right before she passed, and his father had saved every cent of his hard-earned money to buy him that plot of land, and by golly, he was gonna farm it and sell the produce and feed his family well and start a colored school and make his little store the smartest thing in two counties . . . And he did. By God, he did it all.” The pride in the man’s voice was unmistakable. As was his sorrow. “Until the white folks caught wind of what he was up to, all the success he was having with all of it, his flourishing farm, his beautiful wife and three little girls. They couldn’t take that, no. A nigger in their midst doing better, far better than they, who had started off with so much more? No.” The man’s voice became small, just a little louder than a whisper, so that everyone had to lean in in order to hear the bitter end that they knew was coming. “They came under cover of darkness, like they always do, and they strung up Nestor on a huge cross in the front of the farm, for everyone to see. Then they lit him up, like Fourth of July, and made his wife and chullin watch.”

  Gasps. Hands over mouths. Yasmine felt sick. She wanted to tell their guests that she and the boys would be retiring so that they wouldn’t have to hear what came next. But she knew they needed to.

  The man’s voice broke while he told the ending, which was as much a part of their history and life on this land as the pork and grits and greens they ate. “Then they raped his wife and sold his three daughters downriver. When they was done with his wife, they carved the baby she was carrying out her womb and hung them both beside him. They lit him up, but let her and the baby stay there just so, for everyone to see how they do niggers who get too uppity.

  “I don’t know why the whole world over, there’s nothing like a black man standing up to turn white folks into monsters.”

  The silence around the table was like the chains they had seen around the necks and ankles of the slaves at the auction block earlier—it bore them down. All of them except Lani, who had quietly crawled out of Yasmine’s lap, pulled herself up on the table, and stood on her own two feet for the first time, eyes wide at all she surveyed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THEY STAYED IN THE Medger house for the next three weeks, sleeping in the small living room, the boys on the floor and Lani and Yasmine together on a cot. They spent their waking hours helping with the garden out back, cleaning, cooking, and working as ne
eded in the church. Yasmine was uncomfortable with taking advantage of strangers’ hospitality for so long, but she had to admit they had no other options. Their ship, the Nautilus, would not be leaving port until early January, and her contacts with the American Colonization Society assured her that she should use the time to prepare themselves for the long journey by sewing some additional clothing for the children, procuring farming tools and “practicing” with them, and stocking up on various other items they would want but that would be hard, if not impossible, to get in the colony—which was basically everything.

  Mrs. Medger was kind enough to give them three extra Bibles from the church, and she helped them stock up on paper, ink, and quills. Yasmine, Mrs. Medger, the boys, and the constant stream of guests at the house canned broccoli, peppers, and cabbage from the garden, and prepared salted pork and pigs’ feet. When it came time to go, Mrs. Medger insisted that they take two crates full.

  Yasmine shook her head, embarrassed by the older woman’s generosity and aware of the fact that she could never repay her. “Take it, dear,” Mrs. Medger told her firmly, as Mr. Medger and the men loaded them into the ship’s cargo hold. “You’ve earned it. And besides, I keep on hearing bits and pieces of letters some in the church get from family members who’ve made the journey. They say the first year is hard, brutal even. Planting and growing there ain’t like planting and growing here. It’ll take a minute for you and the children to get back on firm footing.” She hugged Yasmine and Lani tightly, and held her close. “Do it for the children,” she whispered in her ear then. “I know you doing it all for the children.”

  Yasmine nodded, surprised that saying good-bye to this woman who she had known for less than a month could produce such pain in her heart.

  “Mama, I don’t want to go no more,” said Little George, wiping away the tears that streaked across his cheeks. “Ain’t it all right for us to stay here now? This place so much better than Master Scott’s. No need for us to get in the ship.”

  Yasmine pulled him into her side, hugging him as they headed toward the walkway onto the ship. “My George, they so many wonders on the other side—wonders we can’t even imagine yet! Plus, we gonna have our own house, our own garden, and we gonna find us some new friends.”

  Little George nodded reluctantly, clearly trying to get on board with his mother’s plan.

  “I don’t want a new home,” Nolan said stubbornly, at her other side. “Besides, Malina says you can only ever have one home, and this is ours.”

  Yasmine laughed. “You be home when you with your family,” she said firmly, the phrase her father had told her so many days of her life solid in her mouth. “And we be with one another. Always.” She stopped to kiss the top of Nolan’s head, then turned around for one last look at the bustling port of Norfolk, at the men and women selling fish at the docks, at the filthy shipyards and the equally filthy men who built the ships that sailed in and out of port each day, at the haughty whites who knew they were better than the coloreds, and the poor whites who knew they were too. She looked, finally, at the army of coloreds walking behind their masters, walking alone to complete some mundane task, at the colored children who were doomed to follow in their footsteps and whispered, “Good-bye.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  YASMINE WRIGHT WATCHED HER only daughter take her first steps somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, still thousands of miles from the West African shore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  1828, Monrovia, Liberia

  “WELCOME TO THE LAND of liberty!” a thin, hawk-nosed white man barked at them as they stumbled out of the dugout canoe that had carried them from the Nautilus, their home for two months.

  It was mid-morning, and an army of seagulls descended from the skyline, cawing and howling in their ears. A sweet scent of flowers gullied on the wind, and the morning light was so bright it pierced their eyes and brought on headaches. Yasmine thought the beach looked more like a long bank of body-swallowing mud than the sparkling, sandy beach of rejuvenation she had been imagining.

  “Welcome!” the man continued to yell as the savages who’d paddled the canoe now dragged it across the mud and foam. “Welcome to the freedom of your homeland!” Perhaps the man was the chief colonial official of the encampment. Yasmine wasn’t sure. The fact that he took her arm, steadied her, and even kissed Lani’s sleeping head made her wonder if he had lost both his whiteness and his manhood in the bush. “You came all this way with your family, I see, to make a new life.” The man gestured to her children. “A new and better life away from that foul institution, slavery. That godforsaken hole that corrupts babes and boys alike.” He grinned at Nolan and the Georges, and Yasmine felt her stomach churn.

  “We ain’t slaves,” she said evenly.

  The man laughed too loudly. “Well, sure,” he said. “You ain’t now.”

  Yasmine shook her head. “No, we ain’t never been slaves.” She fought to keep her voice from rising. This man stirred something almost primal in her, and she had to work very hard not to bolt from him completely. He disgusted her—his fawning, especially. He looked like he had certainly become much too accustomed to the life of an untethered bachelor, with unkempt hair and an overgrown beard. And even after over a month without bathing herself, Yasmine could smell the wrongness on the man.

  The man laughed an awkward, hiccupping laugh. “Well, you’se lucky then.” He paused. “I mean, luckier than most coloreds who make their way all the way to these parts. They a bit more familiar with the sting of the lash, I reckon.” He laughed again. “Then again, they got a bit more they running from. Willing to shoulder the hard rock of this place ’cause even through all the struggle and turmoil, it’s a mite bit better from where they come.” The man whistled, looking them over again, like he was appraising them. “But you ain’t look like that at all. No. Even after months of sea, you all look like you mighta come from someplace not so hard as that. Which, come to think of it, in a place like this, might be a disadvantage, really. ’Cause you all come to a new home that’ll suck the very marrow out them growing baby bones.” He reached for Lani’s too-thin stick of a toddler leg and gave her a toothless smile. She responded by squealing in delight. Yasmine grimaced and took a small step away from the man. He had clearly been corrupted by the savagery of this land.

  Yasmine took a look around the peninsula that they had abandoned Virginia, the Medger house, and the Scott plantation for. Cape Mesurado was a towering mound of rock, clay, and sand above them, rising higher in the sky than many of the buildings she had seen in Norfolk. The Atlantic Ocean slammed onto the coast with a deafening crash that she wondered if she could ever get used to. There was an enveloping mist that seemed to cover everything, and standing pools of water weaved in between the rocky edges of the coast, with mosquitoes buzzing above them. But it was the ubiquitous and uncontrollable green that unsettled her the most. She couldn’t even explain why, which was even more troubling. The sheer audacity of the leaves, branches, mangrove swamps, flora and fauna of all types could not be undone. Houses would be built, roads made, brush cleared, but there was a certain wildness that the land would never yield.

  And then there were the savages; the ship captain had called them “Kru.” They had come up beside them, in thin dugout canoes of some sort as they entered the harbor. They had the blackest skin she had ever seen and faces permanently marked with blue. (“Mama, we get new faces like that, now that we here?” Big George had asked her excitedly, as they prepared to board the boat.) These Kru wore long tan robes, bracelets, and other jewelry. There was raw power in their command of each stroke, and they looked into the eyes of the colonists fearlessly, shouting to the crewmen in a guttural and clipped language. The hawk-nosed white man saw Yasmine staring and whispered violently in her ear. “Like staring in the face of some terrifying nothingness, some yawning void, isn’t it? But then, the real stupefying thing is that you strangely drawn to it. A f
earful sensation, ain’t it?” Yasmine recoiled and wiped the man’s spit from her cheek. Lani began to fuss.

  You said you wanted freedom, James whispered in her ear. But you weren’t prepared for this much. She sucked her teeth and hushed him away. Listen, you long-dead husband. Unless you fixing to take up a hoe or a pistol in the name of your family, you best go ’way. Mercifully, he was silent after that.

  Yasmine pulled Nolan and Little George to her and glanced behind her, to make sure that Lani was still safe on her back.

  “Mama, they black, like us,” Nolan said, his eyes growing bigger by the moment.

  Little George snickered. “Boy, they ain’t coloreds. What you got up in that big head of yours—peanuts?”

  Nolan glanced hatefully back at his big brother. Their relationship was changing so rapidly with each passing day that Yasmine couldn’t keep up. One moment they were the best of friends, sharing food and jokes, the next they were at each other’s throats. The one constant seemed to be their baby sister’s unflinching attention.

  “They blacker than them blue-black boys Ol’ Master Scott got working in the fields back home, and they ain’t never seen no Uncle Sam,” said Little George.

  Nolan pulled back and peered at them more deliberately this time.

  “They home is in the jungle, and they live in trees,” Little George continued. “Probably got no idea what real civilization is. Just look at them.”

  So Nolan did just that, slowly taking in the widespread bare feet, long legs, and broad chests. “Mama,” he whispered in her ear. “What’s wrong with them?”

  Yasmine frowned. Nothing on the ship, at the colonization society meetings, or in Norfolk had prepared her to answer questions like this. She shook her head, at a loss for words. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”

  Nolan, being a normal six-year-old, did not let this go. His small brow furrowed. “But . . . ,” he sputtered, “I thought you said they’d be black. You said, back home, that where we were going was covered in black people everywhere. You said they were free too. But these people ain’t black.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Who knows what they are.”