Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “You a newspaper man?” he asked suspiciously. Evidently, giving James Polk’s room to a mere newspaper man was against hotel policy.

  “No, why?”

  “Because this is the address of the Register.”

  “The Register?”

  “The Knoxville Register, our weekly newspaper.”

  He left his bag in his room, went back downstairs and stepped briskly out onto Gay Street. The sky, which had been clear all morning, was still cloudless, and a sharp wind whistled down Main Street from the north. The town swarmed with early-morning pedestrians, women wearing long blue or black dresses with gray shawls pulled tightly around their shoulders, and men, most of them in slouch hats and buckskin, still managing to give the decidedly Southern impression of being engaged in gentlemanly activity. Most of the doors along the boardwalks were entrances to shops or law offices or eateries. Some concealed stairwells leading to apartments above the shops. Away from the river, everything appeared new, as though the town had been built in the past few weeks. And dusty, for wind and the lack of rain had filled the air with a coarse grit. Even horses tied to the rails had dust on their backs. He found the Register office at the corner of Main and Locust; it was in a smallish clapboard building bearing a sign above the door that read THE KNOXVILLE REGISTER, FREDERICK HEISKELL, PUB., HUGH BROWN, ED.

  The first thing he noticed about Frederick Heiskell was his beard: it grew to the edge of his lower lip, so that when he closed his mouth his whiskers merged with his mustache. Watching him talk was like seeing a forest reclaiming a pasture. Above the beard, his narrow, lined face and piercing gaze suggested a bright fanaticism. Moody had avoided such men in the war; they were the kind who rushed headlong into battle without first checking their escape routes or their ammunition pouches. You wanted such men on your side, but not in your unit. But there was kindness in Heiskell’s eyes, too. His bushy eyebrows, turned up at the ends like horns, were satanic and comical at the same time. He read Dr. Carson’s letter twice, turned it over to see if anything had been added on the other side, set the paper on the counter that divided the public third of the room from the cluttered two-thirds behind him, and leaned on his elbows with his hands folded together in an attitude not suggestive of prayer.

  “It’s Friday,” he said, “the busiest day of the week for us. We have a paper to get out. What can I do for you?”

  The space behind Heiskell was dominated by what Moody supposed was the printing press, a large, cast-iron, flywheeled contraption that looked like a spinning wheel built by someone who had never heard of wood. Around it were narrow tables laden with boxes of metal type, cans of black and red ink, torn and crumpled sheets of paper, filthy rags, paintbrushes, wooden paddles, wrenches and rubber hammers.

  To the right of the machine, under a small window through which light crept cautiously in, was a large desk at which sat a second man, presumably the editor, Hugh Brown, who didn’t look up from his work when Moody entered and appeared not to have done so for a good many years. He wore gold-framed eyeglasses and a visor, above which his head was as bald as Heiskell’s was shaggy, and gleamed through the dusty light like a round hole in a granary wall. His work seemed to consist of reading pages of writing, muttering, and then, with a thick Salem pencil and a look of utter disdain, drawing heavy lines through what he had read and writing something else above it.

  “I’m looking for a friend,” Moody said to Heiskell.

  “So are we all, Mr. Moody,” said Heiskell. “What makes you think you’ll find one here?”

  “Dr. Carson said I might,” said Moody.

  Heiskell’s eyebrows rose slightly. “What’s your friend’s name?” he asked.

  “Lucas,” Moody said.

  Heiskell frowned. “I don’t know anyone by that name,” he said. “What else can you tell me about him?”

  Moody described Lucas, putting as little emphasis as he could manage on the color of Lucas’s skin, lest Heiskell draw the usual wrong conclusion. He said Lucas might have asked about a woman named Benah. He realized he’d been expecting to walk into the office and find Lucas helping with the printing press, or sweeping the floor, that a look of pure joy would spread across Lucas’s face when Moody walked in, and they would leave together to continue the search for Benah. At the very least he’d hoped to find that Lucas had been here and moved on. So certain of this had he been that he had given no thought to what he would do if Lucas weren’t there. It would mean he must have passed Lucas somewhere along the Tennessee River.

  “What’s your friend done,” Heiskell asked, “that you’re looking for him?”

  “He hasn’t done anything. I told his mother I’d find him and help him.”

  “Help him do what?”

  “Get to wherever it is he’s going.”

  “His mother being?”

  Moody felt Heiskell reading his face as intently as Brown was reading his papers.

  “Someone I knew,” Moody said.

  “I see. Well, you’re welcome to wait, Mr. Moody. He may show up. But I’ve got work to do. Have a seat, if you like. I can talk and work at the same time.”

  Heiskell raised a flap in the counter and Moody stepped through into the print shop. Heiskell climbed onto a high stool set before a tilted table and began picking up tiny pieces of metal with a pair of tongs and arranging them in rows within a large, metal-and-wood frame, like a child playing with a set of blocks. Moody sat on an ordinary wooden chair that looked clean.

  “Of course,” Heiskell said, “if this friend of yours had been to see us, we would freely admit of it. Dr. Carson’s note is quite sufficient proof that you are trustworthy in that regard.”

  “If he had been through here,” said Brown, not looking up, “he’d be long out of harm’s way by now. But he wasn’t.”

  “How long should it have taken him to get here from Huntsville?” Moody asked. “He was supposed to come by flatboat.”

  “Flatboats wait until they’re loaded to the guards before setting off upriver,” Heiskell said. “He might still be in Huntsville, or he might be in Chattanooga. He might have changed his mind and gone downriver to Paducah.”

  “What about Muscle Shoals?”

  “Oh, he could have gotten around Muscle Shoals, if he was determined enough. The flatboats downriver of the shoals are still going up to Paducah.”

  “Well,” said Moody, “I think he found out that Benah was coming this way, and that’s why he asked Dr. Carson to send him to Knoxville.”

  “All we can advise, then,” said Heiskell, “is that you wait until he shows up.”

  “Is there anyone else he might have gone to for help?”

  “Well, just about anyone,” Heiskell said. He had finished filling the wooden frame and, using a rubber mallet, had tamped the type evenly flat and was tightening bolts on the side of the frame with a wrench. “We’re a forward-looking town,” he said, “with a forward-looking newspaper. We were anti-Removal, we’re still antislavery, antiwar and antitaxes. We print what we want without fear of reprisal, for the most part, unless we run an article about the appalling working conditions in the tanneries, then we hear about it, eh, Mr. Brown? Blount County, just south of here, is mostly Quakers. The rest of the town is Presbyterian. Your fugitive would find sanctuary at just about any house in the area. And we have Maryville College. Have you heard of Maryville College, Mr. Moody? Founded some thirty years ago to train Presbyterian ministers, opened with five students, one of whom was George Erskine, a former slave whose fee was paid by the Manumission Society of Tennessee. He became an ordained minister, and took his family to Africa to preach the Gospel to his own black brethren.”

  “In other words,” Moody said, “Lucas could have come through Knoxville a week ago, found help somewhere other than here at the Register, and have long since moved on. He could be anywhere by now. Would you have heard if he came through?”

  “Mr. Heiskell is a former mayor of our city,” said Brown. “Added to which, he’s the
publisher of Knoxville’s only newspaper. Not much gets by him, and what does, I catch.”

  “Then I guess I’ll wait for a few days,” Moody said. “There ain’t much else I can do.”

  “If we hear from Lucas,” said Heiskell, “we’ll let you know. Where are you staying?”

  “At the Knoxville Hotel.”

  “Can your friend read?” asked Brown.

  “Yes, I taught him myself. Why?”

  “You might place an advertisement in our newspaper,” Heiskell said. “A message, cryptic yet clear. ‘LUCAS: for news of your mother, ask for Mr. Virgil Moody at the Knoxville Hotel, No. 8, Gay Street.’ Something along those lines. In case he doesn’t come here, you understand. It will come out today. He might see it, if he’s here, or someone who knows him.”

  “Yes,” said Moody. It was something. “All right.”

  “Good,” said Heiskell. “That will be one dollar.”

  22.

  Moody left the Register’s office not knowing which way to turn. He wanted to press on, to hurry to the next station in the Quaker chain to see if Lucas had been there. But he realized that if Lucas had gone ahead without going to the newspaper, then going to where Heiskell would have sent him wouldn’t be much help. Three days. He would give it until Monday. If Lucas hadn’t shown up by then, he would go back down the Tennessee to look for him.

  There was no shortage of places to wait in Knoxville: saloons, ordinaries, tippling houses, hotels, whorehouses. The hotel boasted a billiards room, and in a smaller, adjoining, room he was informed by the desk clerk a weekly poker game took place on Saturday nights. “Modest stakes,” the clerk confided. “Friendly games.” No opportunity for idleness, it seemed, went uncatered to, which Moody thought was odd in a town that was half Quaker and half Presbyterian. He spent the rest of the day walking along Gay and Main Streets, looking at faces. He got to know which boards in the sidewalk squeaked, which nail heads needed to be driven in, which stores sold honest goods, which signs needed repainting, the clerks who smiled and nodded to him as he passed and the salesladies who looked through him as though he were a speck of plasma floating across their field of vision. When he reached the south end of Gay Street he continued down to the docks and talked to the men who came in on the flatboats and passenger steamers. Three or four boats had arrived since the Mary White; men emerged from the holds and the engine rooms blinking in the sudden sunlight and taking in deep drafts of air. No one had seen or heard of Lucas. He stood at the end of the longer of the three docks and gazed across the river, which was wide and deep this close to its source; watched gulls drifting in the air above the hills on the far side with their rising folds of green. Lucas could be over there. Three different rivers converged at Knoxville, and Lucas might at this very moment be following any one of them north. Moody’s task seemed hopeless. When he turned back toward town he saw Lucas at every moment, on every corner and in every shop, climbing into carriages, dressed as a white gentleman with a female servant following, or wearing buckskin and walking with a woman toward the train station. He began to feel as though he were living two lives: his own, looking for Lucas, and that of Lucas, looking for Benah. Every movement of Lucas’s life caused a corresponding movement in his. It was as though he and Lucas were twins, entangled in each other like the roots of two trees. He sensed that if he were itching to be on the move, as he was, it was because Lucas was already on the move somewhere else. He was Lucas’s shadow, and could no more move independently of the figure who had cast him than a locomotive could move independently of its tracks.

  His room in the hotel contained an ordinary table and one chair, a washstand with a looking glass, and a feather bed. Moody wondered if Polk had conceived the idea of annexing Texas while lying on the bed, as he was, staring up at the cracked ceiling, seeing in a line of broken plaster the erratic course of the Rio Grande. Had he considered then the lives to be lost, the widows and fatherless children, the destroyed villages, the hollow-eyed men? Or had he thought only about history and his place in it? Most likely he had blindly assumed, as Moody had, that doing what was good for him was good for everyone else concerned.

  23.

  On Saturday, he bought a gun. The clerk in the gun shop on Main Street tried to sell him an old pepperbox, a multibarreled monstrosity that Moody knew was wildly inaccurate and prone to explode in the user’s hand. He asked for a Colt Paterson, but the clerk said the army had bought up all Colt’s stock, and showed him instead a Collier, similar to the one he’d had before he was robbed. It was lighter than the Colt and, the clerk assured him, more accurate. He imagined Rachel watching him from farther down the counter: Why do you need a pistol, Mr. Moody? she would ask disapprovingly. He was going north, he would say; there would be bears, wolves, mountain lions. People, she said; handguns are used only against people. She followed him through the back door of the shop to the shop’s proof house, where he tested the gun’s accuracy. The kickback awakened a small pinpoint of pain in his hip, which brought a look of concern to Rachel’s face, but he placed two bullets within an inch of the target’s center. A bull’s-eye, he told her, not a man’s heart. And he didn’t buy a holster, for the Collier was a belt gun. He admitted to her, though, when he had carried it and the ammunition back to his hotel room, put them in his satchel and slid the satchel under the bed, that he felt the world right itself a little.

  Why do you need a gun to look for a boy, Mr. Moody? What are you afraid of?

  He wasted more time. He read the Register. A disagreement over taxes in the general assembly in Nashville. General Zachary Taylor defeated Santa Anna in Buena Vista. A new law school opened in Boston. Colson’s Dry Goods had received a shipment of the latest in ladies’ hats from Charleston. Miss Annabel Johnson from Baltimore was spending the weekend with her sister, Mrs. Charles Sterngood. “LUCAS: for news of your mother, ask for Mr. Virgil Moody at the Knoxville Hotel, No. 8, Gay Street.”

  But there came no knock on his door.

  24.

  On Sunday, he lunched with Frederick Heiskell at Martha’s Hearth, an ordinary located on Main Street that took its name not, as he had guessed, from its owner, whose name was Catherine Slough, but from a large portrait of Martha Washington that hung on a wall above the serving table. The first president’s wife had apparently been a well-fed woman of gentle demeanor who, except for the scalloped lace bonnet tied at the top of her head with a silk ribbon, looked very much like her husband, George. Moody wondered if the artist had begun her portrait too soon after completing that of the first president. The room she overviewed contained a dozen tables and was reached by means of a long, narrow hallway leading from the street. On the wall of this passageway hung a series of portraits of other women from the Revolutionary era: Moody didn’t know any of the names engraved on brass plates at the bottom of the portraits: Jane Mecom, Esther de Berdt Reed, Sarah Franklin Bache.

  “They all helped raise money for the cause of freedom,” Heiskell said, passing the portraits without a glance. “And they all owned slaves.”

  Seated at one of the tables, Moody told Heiskell of his conversations with men from the steamboats. Heiskell told him to be patient.

  “Time passes quickly,” he said. “We are in an age of great change. Those steamboats used to arrive carrying food and household goods, tanning supplies, paper for our press. Now,” he said, “half their cargo consists of machine parts.”

  “Lucas was on a flatboat,” said Moody, trying to keep the conversation about Lucas.

  “Same thing,” said Heiskell. “It’s the Industrial Revolution. Everyone’s getting in on it. ‘The age of steam,’ they’re calling it. A vaporish age. Steamships on the rivers, steam locomotives on the railroads, steam engines running the cotton and sawmills. Even the presses, although not ours. I don’t know what to make of it, do you, Moody? I mean, from an abolitionist’s point of view? On the one hand, steam should be the black man’s salvation. Imagine a steam-driven harvester, operated by a single man sitting atop
his automaton like a pasha on his elephant, the machine doing all the picking, sorting and cleaning in a matter of hours that now takes a team of slaves weeks. That’s what they’re promising. An end to hard labor. An end to forced labor. We’ll have to let our slaves go, wouldn’t you think?”

  Heiskell stopped talking to munch on a square of corn bread.

  “So the Register supports mechanization?” Moody asked, intrigued by the logic. “Because it will free slaves?”

  “Not necessarily. We support immediate emancipation, of course, but we recognize that it will take time to bring about the changes that need to occur before emancipation can take place. Mechanization would make emancipation happen virtually overnight, but imagine four million slaves being set free in an instant, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Nobody feeding them, housing them, clothing them. How are they going to live? Pros and cons, Moody, pros and cons. That’s what makes a good newspaper story. On the one hand emancipation means freedom—schools where black children can learn to read and write and work at a trade or a profession. And on the other hand, it could lead to hordes of starving desperadoes roaming the land, killing their former masters and taking over plantations, then villages, then whole towns, four million emancipated slaves, think of it, the army couldn’t begin to stop them, whole states going down to savagery and butchery. All it would take would be one Nat Turner. Slavery was born in violence, and it could very well end in violence. What if the negroes joined forces with the Seminoles, as some of them already have? ‘Maroons,’ they call themselves. What if France or England helped them? Supplied the maroons with arms? What then? Why, it would be the end of the Union.”

  Heiskell was a philosophical abolitionist, a man of principle who believed that, all things considered, slavery was a bad idea. Moody admired that. He himself was more practical. He just wanted Annie and Lucas back so he could free them. Maroons, though. Had Lucas joined the maroons? He’d certainly been angry enough. And he’d always wanted to be a soldier, like Moody, although he wouldn’t have fought in the Mexican War, which had brought slavery to Texas. Lucas had his own war to fight.