by Wayne Grady
The courtroom was quiet. Moody searched the walls for a window to see out of, and finding none turned back to Tamsey, not daring to breathe. Tamsey looked down at her hands as though willing them to behave. Then she lifted her head, this time toward Leason, who held her eyes and tried to smile. Moody waited for her gaze to return to him, then he smiled, too.
“Does Brockton Temple have a theory as to who changed the wording of the will?” asked Judge Amery.
“He says it was like this when it came to him, Your Honor.”
“Well, obviously it was. I wasn’t suggesting Mr. Temple changed it.”
Fritts stood up. “Your Honor, this proves nothing.”
“I agree with Mr. Fritts,” Parker said. “By itself, it doesn’t prove anything. Calvin Luce himself might have changed it when he realized he’d made a mistake. But it is strongly suggestive of something, is it not? If Calvin Luce had made a mistake of such magnitude, surely he would have torn up the original document and rewritten it. But he didn’t. Maybe he was in a hurry. Maybe he intended to and was disturbed. On the other hand, maybe someone else, perhaps his wife, changed the will without his knowledge, before it came into the hands of Brockton Temple.”
“Why wouldn’t she simply destroy the will?” asked the judge.
“Because without a will the property would have gone to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Besides, Brockton Temple had drawn up the will, and so he knew it existed. She might have thought he wouldn’t notice such a small alteration, as he did not.”
“A lot of maybes,” said Judge Amery.
“Yes, Your Honor. But there are likely maybes and unlikely maybes, and all we can do is try to distinguish between them. With your permission, Your Honor?”
“Proceed, Mr. Parker.”
“Tamsey, it’s really your permission I should be asking for. Will you allow me one more question?”
Tamsey was still looking at Moody. “Yes,” she said.
“Was Silas Luce the father of the child you were bearing when you were in the Big House looking after his ailing wife?”
“Yes.”
“Silas Luce was Leason’s father?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Tamsey. I have no more questions, Your Honor.”
“Well, I certainly have a few, Your Honor,” said Fritts, rising to his feet.
Judge Amery glared at Fritts for a second and then turned to Tamsey.
“Mrs. Lewis,” he said, “I appreciate how hard this must be for you. Do you want a few minutes to compose yourself? Or we could resume tomorrow?”
“I just as soon get it over,” Tamsey said.
“Then get on with it, Mr. Fritts.”
“Mrs. Lewis,” Fritts began, “you said that before being moved into the Big House to look after Mrs. Luce, you were living in the slave quarters, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“With other slaves?”
“Yes.”
“With other male slaves?”
Tamsey paused for a fraction of a second. “Yes,” she said.
“How many male slaves were there at that time?”
“Not many. It was winter.”
“How many, Mrs. Lewis?”
“Maybe five or six, I don’t rightly remember.”
“Five or six males, living in the same quarters as you before you were moved into the Big House. That’s enough, wouldn’t you say so?”
“Enough for what?”
“You know what I mean. You testified that before moving into the Big House, you had already had six children, is that correct.”
“Yes.”
“All of whom were sold.”
“Yes. Massa Luce sold horses and slaves in Mississippi.”
“And you conceived those babies while living in the slave quarters, I presume.”
“Yes.”
“Out of wedlock. Without benefit of clergy.”
“Is that a question, Mr. Fritts?” the judge interrupted.
“Never mind, Your Honor. Now, Mrs. Lewis, you say you were pregnant again when you moved into the Big House, is that correct?”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said that I was pregnant when I in the Big House. I didn’t say I was pregnant before I went in there.”
“Well, were you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t become pregnant when you lived in the slave quarters, as you had six times previously?”
“No.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your Honor!” cried Parker. “Not only is that an offensively indelicate question for this witness, it’s a damn stupid one.”
“Agreed, Mr. Parker,” said Judge Amery. “Mr. Fritts, I can see where you’re going with this, and I’ll remind you again, this isn’t a jury trial. The only person you have to impress is me, and I’m not impressed by this line of questioning. Please get to the point, and leave the forensics out of it, if you will.”
Tamsey looked steadily at Lawyer Fritts.
“Mrs. Lewis,” he said, “is it not possible, in fact likely, that you became with child before you were moved into the Big House, by someone living in the slave quarters, and only discovered it after you became part of the Luce household?”
“I moved into the Big House in the fall,” she said, “when the missus first took sick, and I wan’t with child until January. I got my baby just before the missus lost hers. I remember there was snow on the ground, and slaves in the fields breaking hemp in their bare feet. Not snow like you get up here, nothing a person could get lost in, but enough that when you look out an upstairs window wondering what going to happen to you, you see black wagon tracks in the fields, and black slashes in the pastures where the horses kick the snow to get at the grass, and black lines in the laneway made by the horse and buggy when the massa come into the yard for his dinner, and black smoke rising from the chimneys on the slave quarters you wished you’d never left, because you were safe there, and now your whole life changed over again. You think you going along in one direction, you know where you are, where you belong, and then you going in a different direction altogether, and you don’t know where that river taking you. Nowhere good, probably. The child will come after the hemp cut and before the tobacco in. My life change when I left South Carolina to come to Kentucky with Massa Luce, and it change again when I came here to Indiana. But there be different kinds of change, there be change that make you stronger and change that rip you apart, and there be change that settle into you and start something growing inside you that you want to keep warm but you wish you never had. That how I know it was January when I found I was heavy with Leason, because there snow on the pastures, and I thought, I be light in September, before the snow start again, and my baby be sold by Christmas.”
“Except it wasn’t.”
“No, not that time.”
Fritts remained quiet for a moment. Moody thought he was going to sit down and let Tamsey come back to her seat. But he began again: “So you’re saying…”
“I never had to do with the men in the quarters,” Tamsey said.
“And we’re to believe that?”
“I took my oath.”
“And I, for one, believe it,” said Judge Amery.
At that, a second storm broke over their heads. There were shouts of anger and peals of joy, some yelling and stamping, chairs tipped over and feet stamping on the wooden floorboards. The bailiff leaped to his feet—“Order! Order!”—and Judge Amery looked severely at Fritts. Parker was on his feet, calling for dismissal of the charges, and Judge Amery banged his gavel on the table. Everyone was already on their feet when the bailiff called, “All rise,” and Judge Amery lit a cigar.
Parker helped Tamsey off the witness stand and she made her way back to Moody. Fritts gathered his papers angrily. Leason and Sarah remained in their chairs, surrounded by the tumult, looking as though they’d just woke up. Then Parker thumped Leason on the back, an
d Moody took advantage of the confusion to take Tamsey’s hand, and she looked at him and shook her head.
When Judge Amery shouted that the defendants were free to go, Leason and Sarah stood up and looked around like children in a forest in which all the trees had suddenly turned to people. They and Parker began to make their way to the back of the courtroom, where Moody and Tamsey were still seated. Fists shook in Leason’s face, but other hands patted him on the back. Women clutched at Sarah, their hats dipping like daisies in a high wind. Etta Pickering had vanished. When Leason reached Tamsey, he put his arms around her. “It’s all right,” he said. “Lawyer Parker says we can go home soon as we get our papers.”
“I don’t care what they say,” she said to Moody, keeping her voice low. “We going to Canada soon as you get back from Georgia.”
“Until then,” said Moody, “I want you to stay here in Indianapolis with the Kästchens. Stokes, too. I don’t want you alone in Freedom while I’m gone.”
“And Leason and Sarah?” she asked.
“The whole family,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
PART FIVE
OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1850
That muddy path to freedom,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
Pegfoot going to show you the way,
Keep on movin’ the Ol’ Man say,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
1.
By 1850, the National Road had been cut, graded and macadamized as far west as Indianapolis. It was passable even when heavy, late-fall rains turned Indiana’s other roads into quagmires. Moody remembered the ribbon-cutting ceremony in June, when the governor had made the gathered newspapermen laugh by lauding the new transportation route as a means by which “a white man may now get here from Baltimore almost as fast as a nigger can from Charleston.”
October rain was a cold rain, and there was no heat in the stagecoach. He wrapped himself in Robert’s broadcloth and thought about buying a proper coat in Baltimore. Tamsey had packed him a bag of chicken sandwiches and cake for the journey, and there were taverns along the way for beer and liquor. They traveled five hours a day. He shared the coach with two commercial travelers and an elderly woman and her niece, who were visiting the woman’s son in Baltimore. The son worked for the firm of P. B. Didier and Brother, dealers in agricultural equipment and machinery. The name drew such murmurs of appreciation from the commercial travelers that the woman took from her portmanteau a brochure, sent to her by her son, and read from it aloud: “ ‘Wheat fans, corn shellers, corncob crushers, straw cutters, hay cutters, fodder cutters, steam reapers of some dozen different patterns, together with minor articles pertaining to the household; viz. churns, sausage cutters and stuffers, butter molds, apple parers, cow milkers, nest eggs, ox yokes, ox bows, ox pins, ox balls’ ” —here the niece reddened and the woman paused for a moment, then pressed bravely on— “ ‘traces, tin horns, Damerpatch’s Celebrated Yankee Wooden Rake, shovels and spades of all sizes and purposes; in fact, all kinds of garden and fruit tools, wholesale and retail.’ ”
“Won’t be needing ox yokes, bows, pins or the other now that steam’s taking over,” one of the commercial travelers commented.
“Stagecoaches neither, I guess,” said his companion. “I could’ve taken the train down to Madison and then gone by steamboat up the Ohio to Philadelphia if I wanted, except I ain’t got business in Philadelphia.”
There was some lively talk about the advantages of steam over horsepower, and of steam power over slave power, in which Moody, embarrassed by his new status as a slave owner, did not join. He felt better since Leason and Sarah had been set free, but not relieved of worry. The North was still full of catchers, legitimized by the Fugitive Slave Act. Kästchen was busier than ever, and Moody felt he and Leason should be on the river, helping. Helping Lucas, who of course was long gone by now.
The coach stopped the first night in Richmond, where he took a room in the tavern that served as the stationhouse, ate a supper of something the tavern keeper called stew, which at least was warm, and then retired to his room to avoid spending any more time with the commercial travelers. At a tiny wooden table set before the dormer window, looking down into the stable yard behind the tavern, he wrote to Heiskell about the trial. He didn’t know if Heiskell and Brown were still in the newspaper business, but writing made him feel better. Some. “It is both a victory and a setback for the equality of the races. It means the only way a black man will be accepted is by proving that he is not black.” He also wrote of his quandary regarding Plantagenet. If he manumitted his father’s slaves, paid their bonds and their passage to Canada and established them in the new Promised Land, it was going to cost money. He needed to sell the plantation and the house in Savannah to raise the capital. But he would not sell the slaves. Would the properties without the slaves sell for enough to pay for their liberty?
As the coach made its way through the cold and the rain, Moody brooded over the trial and its revelations. Tamsey’s story continued to haunt him. The thought of her being physically compelled to bear her white owners’ children sickened him, and not only because the image that had been pressed into his brain was that of the woman he now loved. It was also because Tamsey’s was not an isolated case, and he felt weakened and helpless in the shadow of such enormity, as he had after his dealings with the Judds. Casgrain had perpetrated no less a crime on Annie and others, but Moody hadn’t thought it was committed for the purpose of selling their children. Had that been his father’s secret money-making scheme all along, to allow Casgrain to “improve his stock” because lighter-skinned children sold for a higher price? And had he, Moody, known it but refused to think about it? Just as he’d refused to consider that Annie had remained with him not because she wanted to, or because she liked him, or even less because she was grateful to him, but because she had had no choice—other than the one she had ultimately taken?
The carriage rattled on, the other passengers fell into a disgruntled silence, and he tried to force himself to think about what he was going to do in Savannah. Without success.
2.
In Wheeling, he spent the evening with Lester Underhill, who was still at the Museum of Natural Curiosities despite his advanced age and diminished health. Moody arranged for the shipment of his and Granville’s fossils to the museum, and apologized for not having found a mastodon.
“Pshaw,” said Underhill. “Mastodons are a dime a dozen now. Big Bone Lick is a goddamn tourist site; they got booths set up to sell combs and bracelets made from fossil ivory. No, giant reptiles are the new thing, Iguanodons and such, at least in England. We have, alas, yet to find any here in America. We seem to have added nothing to the geological record since the formation of the Alleghenies. I wouldn’t mind if you found me a fossil reptile before I become one myself.”
“Do you still see Tim’n’Tom?” Moody asked.
“He was here not a month ago,” said Underhill. “Brought me a wolverine.”
“Is a wolverine a natural curiosity?”
“You would think it mightily so if you ever had one attached to your leg.”
“A deal of building going on around town,” Moody said. He remembered Wheeling as a bustling main street with a metal bridge at the end of it, spanning a channel of the Ohio River over to Zane’s Island, but not much else except brag and promise. Now it had hotels and saloons, factories with brick smokestacks, even a train station, although no tracks had yet been laid. Wheeling was still an industrious, if not yet an industrial, town. “Lots of work for fugitives,” he said.
“Not as much as you’d think,” Underhill replied. “It’s all Irish and German labor now, although they work for slave wages, otherwise the owners would bring the blacks back in. There’s still lots of fugitives coming through, more than ever, but without work, they don’t stay.”
“Where do they go?”
Underhill shrugged. “You’d know better than I,” he said.
He knew no
one in Baltimore, a city of nearly two hundred thousand, counting only the white population. As the train to Washington didn’t leave until the next day, he took a room on Booth Street and spent the afternoon walking up and down West Baltimore and Poppleton Streets, peering up at the tall buildings and, out of old habit, at the faces he passed on the sidewalks, thinking of Lucas. He entered a barbershop for a haircut and shave, and scanned the newspapers for coverage of the trial in Indiana without finding a mention of it. Baltimore, he learned from the barber, a man in his sixties with swollen knuckles and skin the color of burnished copper, had become a major stopping place for runaways from the Carolinas and Virginia, so many fugitives flooding the city that the old strictures of slavery had started to burst at their seams. Blacks could live with their own families, own their own houses, run their own businesses, or hire themselves out and work at term slavery, whereby they were owned for a period of time and then freed, “just like it says in the Bible,” the barber said. His name was Albert Lacoste, he said, putting his comb in his breast pocket to shake Moody’s hand. Moody asked if term slavery wasn’t a sign of progress, to which Lacoste replied, “It is—if going back to the way things was two thousand years ago is progress.” Fugitives and free blacks still feared catchers, he said, more than ever, and had to be wary of going out alone unless armed. “Look at this here,” he said, taking up a pamphlet and reading from it: “ ‘Vigilance Societies have been organized by antislavery groups to protect fugitives and freed. During the day, black workers toil at the manufactories and the dockyards, with Vigilance Society guards at the entrances, and at night the workers and their families huddle in their neighborhoods, locked in their homes.’ ”