Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “No, not unless you were married to a white woman.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you believed Sarah when she implied to you that she was a white woman.”

  “Well, she looks white.”

  “Thank you. I suppose that to mean I don’t look like an ourang-outang. But is it not true that you didn’t hire her because you knew that she was a negress, and you only hire whites?”

  “No, that isn’t why I didn’t hire her. I didn’t hire her because she was married, and I only hire single ladies.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because single ladies are more reliable. They don’t have husbands and children to look after, they don’t come in late and leave early.”

  “I see. So, after determining that, in your opinion, Sarah Lewis was a white woman, and that her husband was a mulatto, and therefore, in your opinion, she could not legally be married to him, did you then offer her the position?”

  Etta Pickering glared at him. “No, Mr. Parker, you may rest assured I did not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because after determining that she was living in sin with Mr. Lewis, I knew that she was a fornicator.”

  “Thank you, no further questions.”

  Mr. Fritts stood and called his next witness. “Mr. Henry Franklin.”

  Moody did not know who Henry Franklin was, but he felt Tamsey jump when his name was called. “He from a white family in Kentucky,” she said to him. “They live near us when we was on the stud farm. I don’t know what he doing here. They was a wild and cruel family, and Benjamin Franklin always said it too bad they had the same last name. They bred and sold slaves for profit, just like Massa Luce bred and sold horses.”

  This reminded Moody of the Judds, and of the poor girl they kept in a cage for breeding purposes, and he wondered if she were now safe. Alabama, Kentucky, it was tempting to think they were well out of them. Tempting, but was it a foolish thought?

  Henry Franklin took the witness stand. He was large and uncouth, roughly dressed, unshaven, and his hand, when he set it on the Bible, was thick and calloused.

  “Mr. Franklin,” Lawyer Fritts began, “you are a farmer in Adair County, Kentucky, is that correct?”

  “I am.”

  “And your farm neighbored onto the stud farm where James and Tamsey Lewis worked, did it not?”

  “Still does. My house is about half a mile from where theirs was afore they run off from it.”

  Moody looked at Tamsey. “We didn’t run off it,” she said, “we was run off it. Sabetha Franklin died and left the farm to us, but some white lawyers from Shelbyville come out and tell us we can’t own property and had to get off it. So we got off it.”

  “Did you know Sarah Franklin before they ran off?” Fritts asked the witness.

  “Yes, I knew Sarah. She used to come over to our house saying as how her born name was Franklin, just like ours, and that she was related to us through my daddy, who used to own her mother.”

  “What did you take that to mean?”

  “Well, what do you think? She was saying my daddy messed with her momma, and he fathered a child by her, and that child was Sarah.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  Franklin shrugged. “Such things happened. Daddy was a hellion, for certain. He used to go all around the county trading horses, and who knows what he got up to? Whenever he saw a child he’d pat it on the head and say, ‘You never know but what it might be one of mine.’ I used to think he just said it to rile Momma, but I suppose some of it might’a been true. Never seen him do it with a pickninny, though.”

  “Did Sarah Franklin substantiate or back up her story with any additional information about your father?”

  “Yes, she did. She did seem to know a lot about him. She said he used to come visit her momma and bring her things, and she described him pretty good. Said he was a tall man who always wore a white suit and a straw hat, and that was true. Took the laundry woman all day to get that suit white again after he come home from one of his buying trips. Sarah also remembered he wore a diamond ring on his little finger, and he did that. I got it right here,” he said, holding up his right hand.

  “Your witness, Mr. Parker,” Fritts said.

  Parker stood up and looked at Sarah as though he couldn’t bring himself to look at Henry Franklin.

  “Do you recognize Sarah Franklin as your half sister, Mr. Franklin?”

  The question seemed to shock Henry Franklin. He looked over at Sarah, who met his gaze and held it.

  “No,” said Franklin. “I didn’t know nothing about her until she come over and started making like she was one of the family.”

  “So you don’t believe her story.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I suppose she could be one of Daddy’s heifers. But that don’t make her one of the family.”

  “As a matter of fact, Mr. Franklin,” said Parker, “it does. What it doesn’t do is make her white. No more questions, Your Honor.”

  Moody began to feel better about Parker. He thought their whole case was based on proving that Sarah was at least mulatto, and Henry Franklin had just confirmed that. Fritts seemed to have come to the opposite conclusion, however, because when Henry Franklin had returned to his seat he stood up and addressed the judge.

  “I think we can take it as given that Sarah Lewis née Sarah Franklin is the illegitimate daughter of Sabetha Franklin and Clayborn T. Franklin, Your Honor. If this case goes to trial, I will subpoena documentation from the Franklin household in Kentucky that will attest to the fact that Sarah Franklin’s father was a white man. But that only gets us halfway there, because we still have to show that Sabetha Franklin, Sarah’s mother, was also at least half white, that is, that she was herself the offspring of one white parent. For in the words of Thomas Jefferson, Your Honor, ‘our canon considers two crosses with pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the negro blood.’ In other words, if Sarah Franklin had a white father and a half-white mother, then Sarah Franklin is a white woman. At first I thought this would present certain difficulties, seeing that Sabetha Franklin was born more than seventy years ago, before any records were kept or censuses taken. But diligent inquiry on the part of my office has brought certain factors to light that prove without a shadow of a doubt that Sarah Lewis here, née Sarah Franklin, is the daughter of a white man and a woman who was herself half white.”

  “Oh, no,” Tamsey said under her breath. Moody heard and leaned toward her. “No.” She looked up at him, her face wide with anguish. “Sabetha Franklin was half white. She used to say her mam belong to a hemp family in Kentucky, but she didn’t mean belong the way a slave belong, she meant her mam’s family was a family of hemp planters. She say her grandmother the massa’s sister who lay with a black man and had Sabetha’s mam on the wrong side of the blanket, and they sold her to Benjamin’s massa for a hundred dollars just to get rid of her. Sabetha talked about how she and me both gone to horse traders, like a pair of fillies.”

  Fritts’s voice resumed and Tamsey stopped.

  “I was eventually put into correspondence,” Fritts said, “with a senior member of the Castingay family…”

  Tamsey stood up suddenly, stepped past Muddy and hurried from the courtroom. Moody followed her. Once outside she let her breath go with a wail that turned heads on Indianapolis Boulevard. “Castingay,” she said to him, “that the name of Sabetha Franklin’s family. This ain’t going right.”

  The sun had left this side of the building, and the autumn air was cool in the shadow of the surrounding oaks. Moody took her elbow, chastely, and led her to a bench a short distance from the Masonic Temple.

  “If they can make Sarah white,” Tamsey said quietly, “what can they not do to Leason? This worse than the lash.”

  The bench faced across the commons to a corner from which the Anglican church, with its tall, white, cross-tipped spire, guard
ed the street and the graveyard behind its white picket fence. If they lynched Leason, she said, she wouldn’t bury him there.

  “Nobody’s going to lynch Leason,” Moody said.

  “There a black church in Vandalia, most of the county negroes go to it. It have its own graveyard, and I might bury him there. It hidden in a tangle of whistle thorn and Virginia creeper, but I know there a road in to it because Cecil told me he drove two small coffins in there after a fire on a sharecropper’s farm north of Spencer.”

  Moody doubted Tamsey would take comfort from a Christian burial. She would not want the kind of comfort that came from words, not after seeing what words could be made to do.

  “This come from wanting,” she said. “Wanting something tear you open.”

  “Doesn’t it depend on what you want?”

  “No. I want you, and that might kill me. Leason want Sarah, that going to finish him. Soon’s they find out what you want, they take it away.”

  “No one’s taking me away,” he said. And when she turned to him he leaned toward her, pretending to reach for his hat, and kissed her. “And Leason’s trial ain’t over.”

  His kiss frightened her so much she drew away as if stung, and looked to see if anyone had been watching. A few white men were gathered on the portico of the Temple, but they were too far away and there was a large, spreading oak between them and their bench. She didn’t look at Moody.

  “In South Carolina,” she said, “if there wan’t a good tree handy they truss a man up and lynch him down a well. Tie the rope to the crosstree and drop him down, then watch for the crosstree to bend. They couldn’t see him die but they could hear him, choking at the bottom, kicking at the sides, and when the rope stop jerking they call his wife or his mother to crank him up, because cranking nigger work.”

  “Tamsey,” Moody said. “No one’s going to lynch Leason.”

  “I know,” she said, looking at him. “They’ll take his wife away from him, and his unborn child, and they’ll cut him up and put him on the road and make him run until he can’t run no more. Like Lucas, Moody, just like Lucas.”

  “No!” Moody said, too loud. He checked his voice. “Nobody did that to Lucas but me. It was me made Lucas run. It was me killed Annie. I won’t let that happen again.”

  She looked at him with such pity in her eyes it made him sob. “You poor man,” she said, touching his cheek. “You can’t stop this.”

  Just then, Stokes appeared at the courthouse door and called to them. “Come in here! They found Sarah white.”

  Moody and Tamsey sat together for a moment, then Tamsey stood and Moody followed her to the courthouse steps. He was barely able to breathe.

  “Lawyer Parker didn’t have nothing to say?” she asked Stokes.

  “He agree with Fritts. Something’s up, I don’t know what it is.”

  “I know what it is,” Tamsey said. “Sarah joined up with Lawyer Parker and Lawyer Fritts to rid herself of Leason.”

  “No, Tamsey,” said Moody. “You can’t believe that.”

  “Leason holding her back. Now she with child she wants quit of us. We a shame on her. She want to raise her child white, send him to a white school, get him a white job. You heard what she said.”

  “She’s as frightened as Leason is,” Moody said. “I believe she’s only now realizing the full import of what she started when she applied for that job.”

  “She didn’t start it.”

  As they turned to go back inside, one of the men who had gathered on the portico came over to them and removed his hat. Moody recognized him as the reporter who had spoken to Granville the day before, at the Constitutional Convention. Burke, of the Sentinel.

  “Hello again,” said Burke. “An interesting development, don’t you think?”

  Moody introduced the reporter to Tamsey and explained that she was the mother of one of the defendants, to forestall Burke from saying anything worrying about the trial’s outcome. Instead, Burke’s interest in Tamsey increased, and he took out his notebook and pencil. Tamsey started toward the courthouse.

  “I’ve just come from the Constitutional Convention across the way,” Burke said quickly. “I think you’ll find what they’re deciding over there has a great deal to do with what is being decided in here.”

  Tamsey hesitated at the door, and Moody turned to the reporter. “In what way?” he asked.

  “They’re fixing to do everything in their power to ban negroes from entering the state,” Burke said. “Everything in their power. They’ve raised the bond to a thousand dollars. No exceptions.”

  “That for fugitives,” Tamsey said. “How many times I got to say this? Leason and Sarah ain’t fugitives.”

  “I think the wording’s going to be, ‘blacks and mulattoes,’ Mrs. Lewis. They ain’t making fine distinctions anymore. Since President Fillmore signed the Compromise, there’s been a general purging of the state. Blacks and mulattoes can’t own property. Can’t vote. Can’t go to public schools. Can’t testify in court.”

  “Catchers still have to bring a person before a magistrate, do they not?” asked Moody. “They have to prove that the person they’re trying to kidnap is a runaway slave.”

  “Yes, they do,” agreed the reporter. “And the magistrate has to decide if that person is a runaway or not.”

  “That’s something, is it not?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. But the only evidence’ll be the catcher’s word. And the magistrate will be paid by the case: he’ll get ten dollars for every black or mulatto he sends out of the state, and five dollars for every one he allows to stay in.”

  “The state has always tolerated illegal kidnapping by catchers,” said Moody. “All this means is that kidnapping has been made legal, even profitable. Doesn’t seem like much of a compromise, does it?”

  As Burke wrote Moody’s words in his notebook, Tamsey put her arm through Stokes’s and hurried through the entrance into the courthouse.

  “You two seemed pretty friendly out there,” Burke said to Moody. “What is your relationship with Mrs. Lewis, if I may ask? Just so I get it right.”

  Moody looked at the portal through which Tamsey had disappeared. He longed to say that he loved her, that she was his wife, that he was going to do everything in his power to keep her safe. But he also knew that not saying that was the best way to keep her safe.

  “A friend,” he said quietly. “She’s a close friend who’s going through a difficult time.”

  16.

  Moody took his seat beside Tamsey, this time with Granville and Sabetha on his right, and Stokes and Brother Joshua on Tamsey’s left. It was as if they were lining up for a skirmish. There was a restlessness in the room, people checking their timepieces, looking under their chairs for their hats, clearing their throats, as though they considered the trial over but for the sentencing. Fritts made a show of packing up his papers and looking at his watch. Pudge Pickering stood ready to escort the defendants, now the prisoners, out of the courtroom and back to jail. But Parker was on his feet, and Judge Amery was listening to him, and the room hushed again, if a little impatiently, to learn what was coming. If this were to be a tragedy, they were settling in for the final act.

  “Now that we have established the racial origin of one of the defendants,” Parker was saying, “it remains to do the same for the other, for Leason Lewis.”

  “Your Honor,” Fritts said, standing at his table. “It’s as obvious as the nose on Mr. Parker’s face what color Leason Lewis is. To belabor the point is a-wastin’ of the court’s time.”

  “It may be obvious to you, Mr. Fritts,” said Judge Amery, “but the law is blind. Mr. Lewis’s race is still to be established. You may proceed, Mr. Parker.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. I will remind the court of Mr. Fritts’s words, when he quoted the great statesman and slave owner Thomas Jefferson: two white crosses and a third cross with any degree of whiteness, however small, makes a person white. If a person has one white parent, one white grand
parent and one half-white or even quarter-white or even one-eighth-white great-grandparent, all on the same side of the family, then, by law, that person is legally white. I intend to prove that that definition pertains to Leason just as much as Mr. Fritts here has shown it pertains to Sarah.”

  A murmur spread through the courtroom, especially among the reporters, as though a swarm of bees had gotten into the room. Tamsey groaned and shifted uncomfortably in her seat beside Moody.

  “You’re going to show that Leason Lewis is white?” said Judge Amery.

  “I am, Your Honor.”

  “No,” Tamsey said, so low that Moody barely heard. “He can’t. Not that, too.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “First of all, I will show the court a document proving that Leason’s mother, Thomasina Lewis, was the daughter of a white planter named Reuben Lockhart, and a woman named Betsy, a slave on the Queen Bee plantation, owned by Lockhart, in South Carolina.”

  “What documents could possibly prove that?” Fritts asked indignantly.

  “Reuben Lockhart’s diary,” said Parker, “which after his death was published and a copy of which I have right here.” He held up a slim, leather-bound volume. Moody could see gold leaf on the edges of the pages, and gold lettering on the cover. “ ‘Memoirs of a Carolina Planter,’ ” Parker read aloud, “ ‘by Reuben J. Lockhart.’ ”

  “And Lockhart confesses to fathering children on his female slaves?” asked Judge Amery.

  “He rather boasts of it, Your Honor.”

  “Does he mention the defendant’s mother in particular?”

  “He does. Shall I read you the relevant passage?”

  “You may spare us, Mr. Parker,” said Amery. “But hang on to it, in case we go to trial. What other delights have you got for us?”

  “As I said, it now remains for us to show that Leason himself is half white.”

  “And how do you intend to do that?”

  “I intend to call Leason’s mother, Thomasina Lewis, as a witness.”

  The murmur in the room, which had begun with the disclosure of the diary, now became a rumbling, as if a storm had come down from the hills, or a posse of catchers were riding hard on a dry road. There was some yelling, some ugliness, among the white spectators. They jumped up and shook their fists at Parker as though they’d been cheated and wanted their money back. A few turned to look at Tamsey, others sat in their seats looking puzzled. Moody knew too much about plantation life to be shocked by Parker’s revelations, but these Northerners were catching their first glimpse into the world they would send these fugitives back to, and they were not grateful for it. Tamsey kept her eyes straight ahead, ignoring the crowd. Moody didn’t know what to do to help; whatever happened next, whatever she was going to be asked to do, it wasn’t going to be good for her. She knew it, and she was preparing herself to do it.