Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “How Annie feel about the move?”

  “Annie? She was happy, I think. At first. But I thought she was happy in New Orleans, too, so maybe she wasn’t. I don’t know anymore. I thought she liked the way Lucas was growing into a fine, strong lad. She was a slave in New Orleans, even if we pretended she wasn’t. I thought she would like life in Texas better, where she wasn’t a slave because there was no slavery. It was hard work, but she was used to hard work. And in Texas she didn’t have to worry about Lucas so much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because even when he got old enough, he couldn’t have joined the militia. If we’d stayed in New Orleans, he could have joined the Louisiana Battalion of Free Men of Color, but there were no black troops in Texas.”

  “Would he have been a free man of color?”

  “Yes,” he said, staring into the flames, “I probably would have let him go.”

  “Why would he want to join the militia, anyway?” she asked.

  “Because I did,” he said. “Lucas would have gone to war with me if he could.”

  “To fight for slavery?”

  “Crazy as it sounds.”

  “What happen to Annie, if she was so happy?” She said it as gently as she could, but it still came out hard. He took a long look at the river, like it was a glass of whiskey and he would drink it all down before answering.

  “She drowned,” he said. “When Lucas ran off, she threw herself in the Rio Brazos and drowned. Lucas doesn’t know.”

  “And you want to bring that bad news to him?”

  The coffee was cold but they drank it. He stared into the trees and the darkness beyond the fire. Her hands started shaking.

  “If you want to keep moving,” he said, “I’ll take you to Kästchen. But maybe you want to rest up for a while first?”

  “I want to rest and I want to be somewhere safe,” she said.

  “Then I’ll take you to Freedom. You can stay in my cabin. When you’re ready to move on, I’ll take you to Indianapolis. I’d say that from now on you can relax.”

  “See?” she said. “I told you not everything you say be true.”

  17.

  After several days of seeing little more than solitary skiffs and barges and, to either side, the untracked forest, they began to encounter cleared patches of greener grass, with yellow-topped stumps and smoldering brushfires, scattered at first but gradually becoming more frequent. They passed sprinklings of small islands, some empty, others with a single log cabin and a cow or a pig in the yard. The White River was wide and sluggish at this point, as though the weight of its own silt were slowing it down. When they saw a homestead, alerted to it by a skiff pulled up into the reeds or tied to a cottonwood limb, the white homesteaders straightened from their hoeing or wood splitting and watched them go by, as if the Pelican were a strange new animal, possibly hostile to humans. Sometimes Moody waved at them, and sometimes they raised an arm or a hand in return, but there was never any welcome in the gesture. Look what the river is sending us this time, it said. Last time it was an eagle on a dead cow.

  Just before dark, when the air was beginning to cool, Moody steered the Pelican into the mouth of a creek that looked more like a tunnel through the trees, which were beginning to leaf out. Away from the river, it was too dark to see anything until he stopped at a dock with a path leading into the bush. When they’d tied up, he led them up the footpath with a lantern toward the cabin. It was a good size, he told them on the way. Three rooms, one about twenty feet square, and two that were half that. There was plenty of room, he said, but he would sleep in the Pelican until they got things figured out, and to give them some privacy. He added that Randolph Stokes next door had an extra room that Leason and Sarah could probably rent for nothing, he’d talk to him about it in the morning.

  At the cabin, he watched Tamsey standing at the door looking around, and tried to see it through her eyes. There was no back door. There was a broom in the corner to her left, and an ax and a poker leaning against the wall behind the stove. The cooking area had some knives and a heavy iron skillet. She was taking inventory of things she could use to defend herself and her family. He’d seen Annie do the same when he first brought her to New Orleans, the way she prowled about the house looking for the exits and the safe places. Tamsey surely didn’t think she would need a weapon against Moody, but maybe she did. And there was no guarantee that the next white man to come through the front door would be him.

  While the others arranged themselves, he showed Tamsey into one of the smaller rooms at the back, the one he usually slept in, and told her she could have it. There was a double bed and a dresser and a window looking away from the river. He watched as she took the few poor things she’d saved from their trip to New Harmony out of her bag and set them on a table beside the bed: a cowrie shell, a button, her and Leason’s free papers. It felt like an invasion to be watching her, so he left and went back into the main cabin to tend the fire. Sabetha and Granville were in the other small room, arguing over whose bed was whose, and Leason and Sarah were spreading blankets on the floor by the stove, with the intention of moving over to Stokes’s in the morning. Moody sat up with them for a while, talking quietly, until their new surroundings felt more familiar to them. Before the candles burned down, Leason put two more logs in the stove’s firebox and Moody took a lantern down to the Pelican, wondering what he’d meant by getting things figured out.

  18.

  Randolph Stokes was dozing on a chair on his porch when Moody brought them over in the morning, his face upturned to the sun, an unlit pipe in one hand and an empty cup in the other. Tamsey stood beside him for a while, as if reluctant to disturb his peace, but Moody’s footstep on the porch startled him awake.

  “Brought you some new neighbors, Randolph,” he said.

  “Thought I saw lights,” Stokes said, opening his eyes. When Moody had completed the introductions, Stokes ushered them into his cabin and set them around a large, square table.

  “How long you been here now, Randolph?” Moody asked when they were seated.

  “Been here fifteen winters,” Stokes said. “Never touched a drop of liquor, never married, worked every day but Sundays from before sunup to after dark, clearing all this here land right down to the river, built this here cabin, made a nice patch for my garden, grow enough truck to feed myself summer and winter. I never have any trouble with rabbits or deer, but hawks sometimes get my chickens, and mice get into the cabin in the fall. Can’t seem to keep ’em out. I grow cabbages, turnips, potatoes, beans, anything you want. Collard greens and black-eyed peas I have plenty enough to share.”

  He crossed the room and moved the tea kettle to the middle of the stove. His cabin was about the same size as Moody’s, well kept and comfortable, and also obviously lived in by a bachelor. Everything he might use in the course of a day was close to hand, and hardly anything else. There was a shovel and a hoe leaning against the wall beside the door, a loaf of corn bread and a knife on the cutting board, a jacket slung over the back of his chair, and a fairly dirty towel on a nail beside the basin. Moody could see Tamsey wanting to get up and wash something. One of the rooms off the back he knew was used to store root vegetables and empty jars and chairs, but Stokes said Leason and Sarah could have it if they helped him clear it out.

  “That’s a fine garden,” Tamsey said. “It must take a deal of work.”

  “It does, Sister, it does, and I ain’t as spry as I used to be.”

  He had lived a contested life, he said, and the prospect of another summer alone had been weighing on his mind. “I be glad of the company,” he said. “Virgil here a good neighbor, he help me out some, but he away a lot.” He told them he was born in Halifax County, North Carolina, on a plantation on the Roanoke River that had grown everything from indigo to pigs. When Old Massa Willie was alive, Stokes had been the plantation manager, lived in the Big House, dressed like a gentleman and learned to read and write and do sums. When the old massa died, the yo
ung massa brought in a new manager, a white man from Virginia, and hired Stokes out to do labor he was not used to doing, but he did it. He gave most of his pay to the young massa, twenty-five dollars a month, but anything over that he kept for himself, and eventually he bought himself with it.

  “Working out,” he said, “building walls or digging wells, it nearly killed me. But if I worked overplus, stayed until nine o’clock doing extra chores, I could keep that extra money. It took me ten years, but then I had enough to buy my freedom.”

  “My husband did the same,” Tamsey said. “On a tobacco farm.” Stokes nodded but didn’t ask where her husband was.

  “Why’s this place called Freedom?” Leason asked.

  “When I got here it didn’t have no name at all—did it, Virgil—just the bush and this cabin and a couple others used by hunters in the winter. Virgil wasn’t here yet. When they put the post office in in Spencer, that’s the nearest town, about a half-hour ride from here, they said we all had to have a name so we could get letters. ‘I don’t get no letters,’ I said, ‘but all right, let’s call her Freedom.’ I was the only one at the meeting, so that’s what they called it.”

  “Black folk welcome here?” Tamsey asked.

  Stokes looked uncomfortable. “I wouldn’t say welcome,” he said. “I don’t go out much.”

  They settled on a price for the room, which was free if Sarah would do a little housework and Leason would tend the garden in the summer and get the firewood in the fall. “We only here for a short while,” Tamsey said, and Stokes said that the ground was already dry enough to be dug. Leason went back to Moody’s cabin to get their things. Sarah looked so pleased she didn’t seem to mind about the housework. When Stokes cut slices of corn bread, she stood up and poured the tea, and Moody realized she was staking her claim in Stokes’s cabin. He and Tamsey exchanged glances.

  They’d be all right here for a while, he thought, even when he was away for a few days. No one knew they were here, but word would soon get around.

  19.

  Moody had to take the Pelican to Spencer to pick up a load of salt for Terre Haute, and told Tamsey he would hire Leason to help him if Sarah could spare him. Tamsey went to Stokes’s to talk the matter over with Leason and Sarah, who agreed, then all three walked back down to the Pelican, where Moody, with Granville’s and Sabetha’s help, was stowing the parlor furniture in the hold. Tamsey wanted to give him Leason’s free papers in case they were stopped, and he said all right, remembering the two catchers who’d tried to stop them on the river. Personally, he didn’t think the catchers, had they nabbed Leason, would have asked politely to see his free papers. They’d have hit him over the head, searched him, burned his papers and carried him off to New Orleans. He didn’t say any of that to Tamsey. He took the papers and put them in the strongbox he kept chained to a staple in the boat’s cabin. To make room for the salt, he and Leason unloaded some of the crates of fossils, including the one containing Granville’s giant salamander skull, and took them up to the cabin.

  Sabetha asked Moody if she and Granville could read his books when he was gone, and he said, “Help yourselves. That’s what books are for.” Then Leason kissed his mother and Sarah, mussed Granville’s hair and smiled at Sabetha. Moody untied the Pelican, jumped on board, and, ducking under the branches and sparse foliage overhanging the bayou, poled them out into the current.

  20.

  Two weeks later they were back. In Terre Haute, he’d asked after Lucas with the usual result. He’d had Leason ask around, too, with the same answer each time. No Lucas, or Lucius or Rufous. No Benah. No one had even heard of New Harmony; Brother Joshua, too, seemed to have vanished. Moody regretted involving Leason in his search, as it had served only to make them both feel bad. At night, on the parlor deck, they talked about the raid, the army of catchers that might now be on the march again. Leason was certain James was either dead or captured, and more willing to admit it than Tamsey was, at least to Moody.

  “Your mother thinks you know more than you’ve told her,” Moody said.

  “I saw him go down,” Leason said. “I didn’t see him get up. But even if he’s still alive, the catchers took him.”

  Moody waited.

  “I hope the catchers didn’t take him,” Leason said.

  “He wasn’t your father, was he?” Moody asked.

  “He was in most ways that count,” Leason said. “I guess like you and Lucas.”

  Moody was taken aback by that. He’d been too tangled up in the differences to see the similarity. Whoever Lucas’s natural father was, it was Moody and Annie who’d raised him. “Do you miss him?” he asked.

  Leason raised his eyebrows and nodded. Moody read the gesture as saying something between Of course and What does that mean?

  When they were back in Freedom, Leason gave Tamsey his free papers and five dollars, his wages for the trip, and ran over to Stokes’s to see Sarah. Moody stayed with Tamsey. He told her he’d enjoyed his time with Leason. “If you stay awhile,” he said, “I’d be glad to take him on again.” After supper, Sabetha read to them about a free black child in Boston who was so clever and obedient his teacher wrote a book about him. Little Jimmy Jackson, his name was, and he could do sums and read books when he was four. But when he was six he came down with yellow fever and died, and Sabetha cried so hard she had to put the magazine down and wipe her eyes. Tamsey said the story made her think of Sabetha and Granville in the school in New Harmony, how she fretted every day she saw them walk down the road that something like that would happen to them. Sickness, or wolves, or a tree falling on them, or the school burning down. She told Sabetha maybe she could find a happy story next time. Sabetha said none of the happy stories were about black people.

  Moody said maybe someday Sabetha might write one. Tamsey looked at him oddly, and not long after that he walked down to the Pelican and went to bed.

  In the morning, he and Tamsey went next door to see how Sarah and Leason were getting on. “They doing fine,” Stokes said, sitting out on his porch. “I wouldn’t go in there just now, though,” he said with a wink, and Tamsey sighed and settled herself in a chair, while Moody leaned against a post. Stokes lit his pipe. “I’ll make us some tea in a little while,” he said when it was going. “I be sorry to see you go to Indianapolis, though,” he added. “It ain’t no place for us.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Moody.

  “Dangerous.”

  “In Louisville,” Tamsey said, “I knew a man name Outlaw. He the deacon of the African Methodist Episcopal church there, down by the dockyards.”

  “I know that church,” said Moody. “I looked for Lucas there.”

  “Then maybe you saw Outlaw, a funny, twisted-up man, like a tree grown in steady wind. He had irony hair, and his arms, you could see them through his shirt, looked like they was once muscled but now was soft and folded, and deep hollows in his neck look like they would hold water when it rained. Close up I saw a slit on one side of his nose, so he a plantation slave before he was a deacon, and he grinned all the time, another sure sign, and his hands always doing something, scratching at his leg or tugging at his shirt or hitching up his britches. He had nice eyes, though, kind, and he let us stay in the church when we first got to Louisville and had no other place to sleep. He told us we be wise to stay away from Indianapolis.”

  “He say why?” Moody asked.

  “In Indianapolis, he say, you got to pay your bond, which is five hundred dollars, and then you got to get out of the state, no ifs ands or buts, or they sell you back into slavery, bond or no bond. He say they had a riot there killed twenty negroes and chased two thousand more up to Canada. Burned down they houses.”

  “They sure don’t want us in Indiana,” said Stokes. “Look at this.” He took a piece of newspaper from his shirt pocket. “I saw it in the Indianapolis paper the other day when I was in Spencer. It says here that the Indiana militia should keep out ‘all dregs of off-scourings of the slave states,’ becau
se we ‘too incurably affected with that horrible gangrene of morals which slavery engenders to be welcomed among a virtuous and intelligent people.’ ”

  “I always thought north of the river was free states,” Tamsey said.

  “They is, freer than Kentucky, anyway,” Stokes said. “Nobody own us in Indiana. It safer here than in Indianapolis, because nobody know we here. But they don’t want us to get too settled anywhere. They think it too late for us to be decent human beings after more ’n two hundred years being slaves. Decent to them, anyway.”

  “We ain’t all bad,” Moody said.

  “No,” said Stokes, consideringly, “no, you all ain’t. But enough of you is. And the cities get more catchers in them every day. This paper I read,” he said, holding it up, “says negroes is organizing vigilante parties to protect theyselves from catchers.” He shook his head. “Something bad going to happen before too long. If you folks leaving, I’d say best to go sooner than later.”

  21.

  Moody stayed for a few more days, making repairs to the cabin roof and putting in the garden. He was still sleeping on the Pelican, but going down to it later and later each night. He didn’t know how Tamsey felt about that, she gave no indication that she even noticed, and he also wondered about Granville and Sabetha. Even thinking about what might lie ahead made his pulse quicken. What he felt for Tamsey was different from what had happened with Rachel, different even from his feelings for Annie. As he worked on the roof he thought about the differences. With Annie he’d been protective; Rachel had made him querulous. Tamsey didn’t need protection, she’d made it this far without much help from him. And she didn’t argue so much as ask questions that cut into his prevarications like a bayonet through cloth. She made him feel ashamed and cowardly, and though he couldn’t say he enjoyed the feelings, they at least seemed to him to be honest ones.