by Wayne Grady
“What?” he said.
“Those two kids in the basement,” Moody said.
“What about them?”
“A week seems a long time to hold them until you decide to let them out on bail.”
“Circuit judge sets bail, not me,” Pickering said, “and he don’t come through until the third week of the month.”
“Couldn’t you have waited until then to arrest them?”
“Could have,” said Pickering, putting down the paper. “But when a crime’s been committed, we tend to want to deal with it right away, not seven days later.”
“Hmm. Seems to me that if a crime’s been committed,” Moody said, “it was committed years ago, when they were married.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but I only heard about it this week.”
“Come on, Melvin. Those are good kids down there. Sarah’s in the family way, and Leason works for me and I need him. They ain’t going anywhere. How much is bail going to be, anyway?”
“Fifty dollars, most likely,” Pickering said. “Each.”
Moody took a hundred dollars out of his pocket and planked the amount on the counter. “There,” he said. “Let them come home with me now, and I’ll personally guarantee they’ll be back here for their trial.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
The dough around Pickering’s eyes rose a little. He stood up and came over to the counter. Moody thought he was coming to take the money, but the sheriff scowled at him.
“Pointing a weapon at an officer of the law, and now attempting to bribe him,” he said. “You got any more tricks up your sleeve?”
“Not bribe,” Moody said, “pay their bail.”
“Their bail ain’t set yet. I told you that. And when it is, you don’t pay me, you pay the county clerk. This here looks a powerful lot like a bribe.”
“How would you know what a bribe looks like?”
“I don’t care what kind of amalgamations you got up to down in Texas, Moody, but I’m here to tell you we don’t tolerate that kind of thing in Indiana. Whites and blacks together is wrong. That could just as well be you and your lady friend down there with them two fornicators, you know it and I know it, so if I was you I’d shut pan and use this money to hire yourselves a good lawyer, because you’re sure as hell going to need one after this.”
There wasn’t much Moody could do but stare him down like an honest man, which he didn’t feel he was, with Tamsey sitting outside waiting for him, so his stare-down faltered a little. He picked up the money and put it back in his pocket, and it did feel like taking back a rejected bribe. Or rescinding a bad bet.
“You’re right, Pudge,” he said as smoothly as he could manage. “We ain’t in Texas. I don’t know what you heard about it, but I left the South because I was sick of seeing people punished because they had black skin or didn’t believe in the holy institution of slavery. You know what we did to blacks in Texas when they did something we didn’t approve of? We put them in jail and left them there as long as we damn well pleased, the longer the better. Now, you tell me how that’s so different from what you’re doing here.”
Pickering looked like he was going to split open and spill grease all over the skillet. “In Texas,” he said, “after leaving your blacks in prison until they half rot, you haul ’em outside and lynch ’em. That ain’t going to happen here.”
“You’re sure about that? You read the paper this morning?”
“Not while I’m sheriff, it won’t.”
“Well, that’s a comfort to us all,” said Moody. “You faced down a lot of mobs since you became sheriff, have you?”
“They’ll get a fair trial.”
“How can they get a fair trial if it ain’t a fair charge?”
Pickering gave him a look as ferocious as he could make it. It was like being scowled at by a pork pie.
“If you got so much work to do, Moody,” he said, going back to his desk, “I suggest you go do it. And let me do mine.”
3.
For the next few days, Moody tried to avoid reading newspapers. The news kept him up half the night listening to tree branches scraping on the roof and owls screeching at each other out in the woods. Legislators calling for a higher bond for runaways. Judges sending whole families back to Mississippi. He had a stack of geology books—Buffon, Hutton, Cuvier, Lyell, Dawson—and had recently acquired a set called American Geology, by Ebenezer Emmons, the man who named the Adirondack and the Taconic Mountains. He read them into the night, absorbing almost nothing, until Tamsey complained about the lamp keeping her awake. He ended up giving the books to Granville and going back to newspapers. The news exerted a morbid fascination on him. Whenever he thought things were as bad as they could get, the next day they got worse.
For example, the hundred and fifty representatives of the Indiana legislature—including the enlightened gentleman who’d said that killing blacks was the most humane way of handling the state’s immigration problem—were going to be meeting in Indianapolis in the fall, around the same time as the trial, to revise the Indiana Constitution. The Whigs wanted public schools, they wanted public officials to be elected and they were calling for a ban on public debt. The Republicans wanted the same things, and accused the Whigs of stealing their ideas. The delegates were supposed to meet in the statehouse, but when it was discovered that the statehouse roof leaked, they debated for three days about whether to repair it in time for the convention or move the meetings next door into the Masonic Temple. When they finally decided to move, they spent another day debating whether the state should incur a public debt by paying the twelve dollars a day the Masons wanted for the use of their building. Moody read these stories aloud to Tamsey, hoping to cheer her up, but they only deepened her despair.
“You telling me,” she said, “our lives being determined by people who take three days to decide to move out of the rain?”
“Well,” said Moody, “it might not rain, you see.”
“It always rain in the fall. They going to hang my baby in the rain.”
“No, they’re not.”
“In Granville’s school in New Harmony,” she said, “they had a map of the world hanging on the wall at the front of the classroom. Imagine that, a map of the whole world. All the countries different colors, and the oceans blue in between them. Granville show me Africa, and when I saw it I couldn’t look at it. You ever see the shape of Africa, Muddy?”
“Yes. I always thought it looked like a side of beef.”
“To me it look like a man hanging from a tree. He got a quilt over his head and his elbows tied together behind his back, and his broken neck hanging over to one side. I still can’t get that picture out of my head. Africa a hanged man with a sack over his head and a rope tied around his middle.”
A week after their arrest, Leason and Sarah were released on bail. Fifty dollars each, which Moody paid to the county clerk. Back in Freedom, the couple retreated to their room in Stokes’s cabin and didn’t come out for two days, as if they were in hiding. Tamsey said she’d seen the same thing with abused horses. The only thing to do, she said, was to wait it out. Stokes agreed.
“They come out when they hungry,” he said, and sure enough, the evening of the second day they emerged as if nothing unusual had happened, saying they were starving, Sarah was going to make pancakes and did anyone else want some? Stokes said he had some maple syrup somewhere.
Moody noted that it was the Fourth of July, which put an edge on their celebrating. There was some strained talk around the table as they ate their pancakes. Tamsey tried to talk Leason and Sarah into letting Moody take them up to Michigan and across to Canada in the Pelican. “Everywhere north seem safer than here,” she said when there was no response from Leason or Sarah. “They say they’s no slavery in Canada, and not no slavery like they have no slavery here, which is just no slavery on paper. Canada the land of milk and honey, if you like your milk frozen and honey you got to cut with a knife. We never
should have stopped here.”
Leason reached for Sarah’s hand as if he’d warned her there would be this talk. “We ain’t worried about this thing, Mam,” he said. “This just Etta Pickering making sure we don’t buy a house next door to hers. When she finds that a house ain’t even for sale she’ll probably drop the charges.”
“It more than that,” Tamsey said. “Don’t think it ain’t.”
Moody said they should listen to Tamsey. “We could be in Terre Haute in a week,” he said, “and from there we’d take the Wabash up to the new Illinois and Michigan Canal and all the way to Canada.”
“How long that take?” asked Tamsey.
“A month, six weeks. We’d there by the end of August,” he said. “Your child could be born in Canada.”
But Leason said no, not with Sarah in her state. “What if we’re caught? What will they do to us? Would Sarah have her child in a prison?”
“You already caught,” Tamsey said, “and we know what they want to do to you.” Which made Moody wonder if someone had been reading the newspapers to her. “If you don’t want to go with Muddy, you can let Quaker Kästchen put you on the Underground Railroad.”
Sarah rose from the table and went into their bedroom. Leason looked after her, and then at Moody.
“We ain’t going nowhere,” he said, “until this baby is born.”
Moody had to agree with him. He wished Lucas had said the same thing.
4.
They met with Cliff Parker almost every day, sometimes with Sarah and Leason, sometimes just Tamsey and Moody. He told them that, legally, he couldn’t advise the couple to skip bail.
“On the surface of it,” he said, “it’s such a ridiculous charge that fleeing it would be seen as an admission of guilt.”
“There must be something deeper to it,” Moody said when Leason and Sarah had left the office, “something we don’t understand yet. No one looking at Sarah for two minutes would think she was white.”
“She don’t think so,” said Tamsey.
“And anything that obvious is hard to prove,” Parker said.
“What that mean?” asked Tamsey. “You mean you can’t prove that tree out there ain’t a mule?”
“Exactly,” said Parker. “You know it’s a tree, I know it’s a tree, but what do you do if everyone else suddenly starts calling it a mule?”
“You go to Canada.”
“You wouldn’t get far,” Parker said. Moody remembered saying the same thing to Lucas, and how far did Lucas get?
That night, after he put his book down and before he blew out the candle, he and Tamsey lay awake and talked, keeping their voices low. They knew they were taking a chance by sleeping together, but they couldn’t stop themselves. It wasn’t only the physical act, it was these late-night talks that he valued. Their days were in such turmoil, and the trial was getting closer. Tamsey told him she felt as though Leason and Sarah had had a terrible accident, like a snake bit them, and told him a snakebite story her Mam had told her from Africa. “Or it like a fire burn their house down,” she said, “or Sarah lost her child, and there be no way we could help them.” He savored that “we.” They were all, even Moody, being swept along by a powerful current and no one knew what was at the end of it. She said she’d spent most of her life fighting upstream, and now she was being told to sit back and let the river carry them along.
“You watch a catfish working upriver against a strong current,” she said, “and you see how it use the water, how strong and alive it is in its proper element, and how the fight make it stronger. But anything being carried downstream be tumbled and tossed in the water like a dead thing.”
Sarah, who Tamsey had watched grow up, had thrown herself and Leason into this river. Had they been safer in the South? he asked her. No, she said, in the South she’d be cutting Leason down from a tree by now.
“There no sense to what happening,” she said. “How can even a lawyer argue what is impossible to reason out?”
“Parker says the only way the State can win this case is to prove that black is white. That’s like proving two and two ain’t four. It can’t be done.”
Tamsey said she wished he hadn’t said that. “They ain’t nothing can’t be done,” she said.
5.
One afternoon in August, when just Moody and Tamsey had made the trip into Spencer, Parker asked Tamsey about her mother. “Do you remember her at all?”
“She sold when I still a child,” Tamsey said, looking at Moody.
“Tell me what you know about her,” Parker said.
“Why? This about Sarah?”
“I want to know as much as possible about everyone involved.”
“How my mam involved?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I need you to tell me about her.”
“All right,” she said.
Moody remembered how reluctant Annie had been to talk about her mam. His own mother had died when he was a child, and he’d thought then that Annie’s was the same reverence for a parent she had barely known, a desire to keep an imagined past intact. But with Tamsey it was more than that.
“We was together for a time, in South Carolina. Mam lived in the nigger house and I was brought inside to work in the Big House, I don’t know why. Old Massa Lockhart still alive then. He took a shine to me, I guess.”
Parker wrote something down. “Do you remember Massa Lockhart’s first name?” he asked her.
“Massa Reuben. The old slaves call him that. My mam call him that. I call him Massa Lockhart.”
“Where in South Carolina was this?”
“On the Queen Bee plantation,” she said. “That all I know of it.”
“Please go on.”
“I was fetching table linen from the icebox in the cellar when I learned my mam was sold. It was early spring, when the first quail call, but it still cold in the shade, the crocuses all up but not the daffodils. The Queen Bee a big, white house, it seem a mile long to me, with three big chimneys, one at each end and one in the middle where the kitchen was, and fires kept in all three of them. I was humming a tune to myself because there were spiders in the cellar and I always been afraid of spiders. My mam used to tell me stories about Aunt Nancy. One of the laundresses told me to stop sounding so happy, ’cause my mam been sold. I started to cry right away, and ran upstairs and out to the nigger house and my mam not there, and Tilly drag me back up to the Big House and scold me for not getting the linen, and then she set me to cleaning candlesticks, I guess to take my mind off my mam.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. One year pretty much like another back then.”
“How old were you?”
“Old enough to know how babies made, too young to have them.”
Parker stopped writing. “Thank you,” he said. Moody stood up and went to look out the window. “Anything more?”
“My mam come to see me at night sometimes,” she said, “after she sold, so I guess she wan’t sold far. She sit with me almost till morning, sing to me, show me how to sew, or tell me Aunt Nancy stories until I fell asleep.”
“Aunt Nancy?” Lawyer Parker said. “You had an Aunt Nancy?”
“Aunt Nancy the spider in the stories. He make the world and all the people in it.”
“I thought God made the world.”
“The Lord made Aunt Nancy first. Aunt Nancy like the Lord’s overseer, only he on the slaves’ side, so maybe he more like a driver.”
“Do you remember anything else about your mother?”
“Cliff,” Moody said from the window, “why are you so interested in Tamsey’s mother? Ain’t it Sarah you need to know about?”
“We’ll get to her,” Parker said. “But I need as full a picture of everyone as I can get. We don’t know what the prosecution might bring up.”
“What you mean?” Tamsey asked.
“If there’s anything to what Sarah says,” Parker said carefully, “we need to explore other lines of defense.”
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Moody returned to his chair. For the first time since the arrest he was beginning to worry that the trial would be more complicated than he thought.
“When I was older,” Tamsey said, “I learned she was on the tobacco plantation down the road from the Queen Bee, place called Harrington House. I saw her working in the fields when I went into town with Old Massa Lockhart. She always look up when I passed, like she knew it was me in the wagon. She didn’t call or wave, not with Old Massa there, but she watch and watch until we out of sight.”
“What color was she?” Lawyer Parker asked.
“Well, I can’t rightly say. I can see her standing in the field, shading her eyes, with her hand. She the color of gold-leaf tobacco after it been cured.”
“Do you know who your father was?”
“Nobody knows who they father is.”
“All the same, do you have any idea?”
“No.”
Parker wrote, and she watched the papers pile up on his desk.
“And what about Leason? Who was his father?”
“Like I said.”
“Where were you when he was born?”
“I was with Massa Lewis then, in Adair County, Kentucky.”
“Lewis. You mean Luce? That’s the name on your free papers.”
“He a horse trader. He taught us to trust the Lord but to avoid walking behind a horse. He got kicked in the stomach by a horse when he checking its coffin bone, and he died two weeks later. He free Leason and me in his will, so I guess you could say that horse freed us. We got our free papers from Lawyer Temple in Lexington. I walked all the way there with Leason on my back and no free papers.”
“All right,” Parker said, writing. “Now, what about Sarah? Let’s start with her mother.”
“Her mother was Sabetha Franklin, wife of Benjamin Franklin. They was friends of ours in Kentucky after we freed. I named my Sabetha for her. They both freeborn blacks. Sarah a freeborn black, too, never mind what she say about being white. The Franklins owned a livery stable and stud farm near Shelbyville, and we worked on the farm for a time. Leason still just a baby when we went there. Sabetha Franklin a small woman, but strong as mule gut and awful kind to us. She took us in off the road after we freed.”