Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “She was kind as the day,” said Sikey, “and tough as a turtle’s egg. A truly good woman. You was always more like her than like your daddy, which is why your daddy leaned so hard on you. Your mamma spent a lot of time in here, cutting out and sewing for the babies, always had little packages for them when they born, and extra food for they mammas. She tell your daddy, ‘Keep them off work for a week, why don’t you, let them get they strength back,’ and sometimes he did. When she passed he like a hound let loose from his chain. And then his two sons went, too.”

  “I supposed many of those babies were Casgrain’s,” Moody said, “but Reverend Ulysses suggested Casgrain’s interests lay elsewhere.”

  Sikey was quiet a moment, looking down at the paper in her lap.

  “Thomas Casgrain was no threat to us,” she said, “except with the bullwhip. And most often he only use it for show, when your daddy in residence. And mostly on the men.”

  “Did my father know?”

  “About Casgrain? ’Course he did. I think your mamma knew, too. A lot of the boy children was sold young.”

  Sikey raised her eyes again to his mother’s portrait. Moody knew it by heart, each fold of the blue gown, the white lace cap with its trailing ties, the calm gaze that beheld the beholder with confidence and a hint of rebellion. The portrait had been painted in this room, her room, as Sikey said. His oldest brother, William, the one who was killed in New Orleans, was a toddler at her knee solemnly holding a colored ball as if it were the Earth. The conch shell and sextant were behind her on the mantelpiece, the marble vases, like twin urns, on either side of them, and a tea service with its Tudor rose pattern, teapot, pitcher, sugar bowl and a single cup, on an occasional table beside her chair.

  “And the girl children?” Moody asked quietly.

  “Them a little later,” Sikey said.

  “Do you remember Annie?” he asked.

  “The Gullah girl? I do. You took her to New Orleans. I was glad to see her go.”

  “Why?”

  “She wan’t safe here.”

  “But not because of Casgrain?”

  “No.” Sikey’s fingers were tightly laced above her free paper. She didn’t look up at Moody. “But he maybe held her.”

  “For who?” Moody knew the answer now, but he wanted to hear it. “Not my brother?”

  “No,” Sikey said. “Massa John had a good wife. She married again and moved to Atlanta. Anyway, Massa John too sick at the end, even before the fever took him. And he wan’t mean that way.”

  “Did you know Annie was with child when she left here?” Moody asked.

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Sikey said, looking at him. “What happened to it?”

  “We raised him. Annie and I. He was a fine boy. His name is Lucas.”

  “He ain’t with you now?”

  “No.”

  Sikey was silent. She shook slightly, as though chilled by the way of the world, and glanced at the empty grate.

  “Annie never told me who Lucas’s father was,” Moody said. “I never asked her right out. I raised him like my own. I wanted him to be my own, to be ours. I thought of Annie as my wife, and Lucas as our son. It was easy to do in New Orleans, and easier still in Texas. But it wasn’t true. Annie never believed she was my wife, and I never believed she was my slave. She wasn’t either.”

  “No,” said Sikey. “She was both.”

  Moody closed his eyes. He felt the bullet shatter his hip, the bayonet catch on his rib cage. He waited for the pain to subside, but it worsened. The ticking of the Scottish clock was like a thousand muskets being cocked, one after another, aim taken, breath held. His brain darted about in the darkness, touching the conch, the barometer, the sextant, his mother’s portrait, the funereal urns, the dark folds in his mother’s dress.

  Sikey spoke first. “Where Lucas now?”

  “In Canada, I hope,” Moody said, his eyes still closed against the knowledge of Lucas’s paternity. “I sold him, Sikey.” He heard Sikey’s gasp. He heard Annie stirring in the wing-backed chair, her hand going to her throat, her wild hair, her eyes dull and piercing as ash. Something wrong with his arm. “I thought it was what he wanted,” he said, “to be with Benah. But I sold him.” He made a gesture with his hand, his palm up, as if to help Annie step out of the river. “And when Benah was sold, too, he ran off after her.”

  “Ah,” Sikey said.

  “His mother drowned herself because of it,” he said, opening his eyes.

  Sikey bent forward and covered her face with her hands. Even his mother looked stricken.

  “Who was his father, Sikey?” Moody asked, although by now he knew. “It wasn’t Casgrain and it wasn’t John. Who was it?”

  “It was your daddy, Mr. Virgil,” she said, sitting up. “I didn’t know she with child by him, but that who it was. That who it always was.”

  Moody stood and stared unseeingly into the glass cabinet. Sextant, conch, barometer. He thought almost calmly of smashing the glass, grabbing the relics of his mother’s ruined island and hurling them out into the street, but he controlled the impulse and sat back down in his chair.

  “So Lucas,” he said, “Annie’s boy—”

  “The one you hope is in Canada,” said Sikey.

  “The one I sold,” he said, sparing himself nothing.

  “He not your son. He your brother.”

  10.

  Moody half dozed in the stagecoach, his arms folded across his chest, his hat pulled so low over his eyes he could smell his father’s hair oil on the band. It was no longer raining, but the chill had set in and he still had no winter coat. He would get one in Canada. The coach’s motion on the macadam rocked him gently against the cushioned side, and each time he felt a slight twinge in his hip, not quite enough to make him shift his position, but enough to bring his father’s hated words to mind. Nothing forgiven. He knew now that his father had been right, that forgiveness meant wiping the record clean and that could never happen. After nearly four years his wound was still there, admittedly more like a memory of a wound, bones buried in muscle, but a memory that would never leave him. With his eyes closed, he saw the Mexican boy pressing his back against the tree, his round, dark eyes in the forest’s dappled darkness, his hair straight as a waterfall, his skin the color of oiled oak. Tamsey’s skin shone in sunlight and glowed in candlelight. The boy was simply raising his right hand in salute to the Virgin of Guadalupe on his dying day. Moody had made a mistake. An irreversible, unforgivable mistake. He adjusted his position in the coach and saw Lucas sitting across from him at the kitchen table, saying he would be with Benah no matter what, heard himself saying he would not sell him, and then selling him. Everything followed from mistakes, from the fierce desire of one person to be with another. That was love, unspoken, unforgiven. He should have told Lucas he loved him, he should have told Annie, he still hadn’t told Tamsey. He felt it, held it so tightly to his chest it was like to burst out of him, and he would never be whole again without her.

  When he stepped down from the stagecoach in Indianapolis, Leason was there with the wagon and Moody was glad to see him. He placed a hand on Leason’s shoulder and they looked each other in the eye until Leason grinned and looked away.

  “Where’s your ma?” Moody said.

  “Down at the Pelican. We got everything ready. Food, ammunition. Kästchen gave us coats and a whole bale of blankets.”

  “Good. We can hunt and cut firewood along the way. There been any trouble since the trial?”

  “Nope.”

  They climbed up on the wagon and Leason took the reins. “Kästchen says he’ll buy the horses and the wagon, we can’t just leave them.”

  “Tell him he can have them, he’s earned that and more.”

  “I been out to Freedom and collected most of our belongings. Stokes coming with us, if we got room.”

  “We got room.”

  “How’d it go in Savannah?”

  “I’ll tell you when we’re all together,”
he said. “But it was good.”

  11.

  Moody watched the shoreline from the Pelican’s parlor deck, the spare trees between the water and the low limestone bluffs, the occasional openness of cleared farmland.

  “This is slow going after being on a train,” he said to Tamsey, who was sitting beside him.

  “Slow going after being in jail, too,” said Leason, who was at the tiller on the cabin roof. He was able to keep them headed downstream without help from the poles. Granville and Stokes were mainly keeping an eye out for rocks.

  Before sailing, they had lifted the stove into the cabin so they would have some heat at night, but the chairs and table were still on the parlor deck, and the thin rug that hid the bloodstain beside the hatch cover. Tamsey was humming a tune almost under her breath as she watched the way the water danced in the low evening light. Moody had come back yesterday with Leason and gone right up to her and put his lips beside her ear.

  “Your hair smells good,” he’d said. “I love the smell of your hair.” And then he said, “I love you.” Not loud, not even Leason and Sarah, who were right there, could hear him. It hadn’t come easy, he’d had to build up to it on the stagecoach, imagine himself saying it half a dozen ways, but he had said it. She’d looked at him and nodded. “I love you, too,” she said, and Leason and Sarah had heard that, and Granville and Sabetha, and maybe even Stokes. And then she’d said, “We better go now.”

  It was going to be a cold trip, but he expected they’d get to Canada before freeze-up. Brother Joshua had gone on ahead, sent by Solomon Kästchen, and they were to meet up with him at a place called Sandwich. Tamsey admitted to him that going to a place called Sandwich sounded good, even better than a place called Freedom. “You can’t eat freedom,” she said.

  Sarah and Sabetha were in the cabin, Sabetha reading The Scarlet Letter and Sarah knitting a blanket for the baby. He’d told them what he’d done in Savannah, and they had agreed that he’d done the right thing. Last night, when they were in bed, Tamsey had said she was glad he had given the land to his father’s slaves, but she didn’t think that was the end of it. “There one thing I learned from New Harmony, black people only own a thing until some white man want it.” He had agreed. He didn’t claim to have started any big movement, he said, but he still felt he’d done the right thing.

  “You did,” she said.

  Sailing downstream was easier. It would be harder when they reached the canal and turned north to Terre Haute, and harder still when they got closer to the Great Lakes. But as Tamsey said, “Everything hard,” and he’d seen that even after saying it, she’d kept going.

  Tamsey was still humming as she watched the land go by, and Moody suddenly thought it sounded familiar.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “What what?”

  “That song you’re humming.”

  “The Drinking Gourd song?” she said, smiling. “We nearly at the end of it.”

  It was the song he had heard Annie singing to Lucas. Tull must have been tone deaf. “How does it end?” he asked her.

  “When the little river meet the great big ’un,” she sang softly, “follow that muddy path to freedom. Something like that.”

  AUTHOR‘S NOTE

  For the first forty-six years of my life, I thought I was white. Then, at the age of forty-seven, I discovered that I was half African Canadian. My father, who was born to a black family in Windsor, Ontario, in 1925, was light skinned enough to pass for white, which he did. I was raised white. My father never told anyone that he was black—not his wife, my mother, or me, even when I presented him with documentary proof that his family, and therefore he, and therefore I, were black.

  In my novel Emancipation Day, I presented a main character who was very much like my father: Born into a black family in Windsor, Jack Lewis passed for white when he joined the Canadian Navy in 1943, which at the time did not accept blacks (that policy changed as the war progressed and more cannon fodder was needed). He was posted to Newfoundland, where he met and married a white woman, Vivian Fanshawe, without telling her of his racial background. Like my father, he could have stayed in Newfoundland after the war, living as a white man, but when the war ended, he brought his young bride back to Windsor, where she met his family. Even when she confronted him with what she saw to be the truth, he denied it, telling her that no matter what color his family was, he himself was white.

  The tension in the novel (and, according to my mother, in my parents’ marriage) began to peak when Vivian became pregnant. She was obviously worried that the baby she was carrying would be black, especially when Jack told her that if it was, he’d know it wasn’t his.

  Two of the questions explored in the novel are questions I would have asked my father if he’d lived (he died in 1999, my mother three years later), and had he admitted to me that he was African Canadian: Why did he bring his wife back to Windsor after the war, knowing that she would quickly realize he’d lied to her about his race? And did he himself believe he was white, or did he know he was a black man pretending to be white? They are both profound questions, getting as they do to the psychological heart of passing, but I still don’t know the whole answer to either of them. But, as Alice Munro has said, fiction isn’t meant to answer questions, only to explore them.

  Up from Freedom began to form in my mind when I traced my father’s family back to 1835, when Thomasina Grady and her three children arrived in Spencer, a small town in southwestern Indiana close to the White River, which continues east to Indianapolis. There is a small town near Spencer called Freedom. Thomasina and her children were listed as “mulatto” in the 1840 census, and the owners of a small farm not far from the village of Freedom. In the basement of the Spencer courthouse, I found something else: a document from 1850 giving the outcome of a trial involving my great-great-grandparents, Leason and Sarah Grady. They’d been arrested for “fornication,” which meant they’d been living together as man and wife without having first been married.

  At that time, it was illegal for a black person to marry a white person, and Leason and Sarah were arrested because the State claimed that Sarah was a white woman, and therefore could not legally be married to Leason, a black man. As I read the account of the judgment (there was no transcript of the actual trial), I fully expected to find that the couple had been acquitted when it was proved that Sarah was in fact black. But I was wrong: Leason and Sarah were acquitted because their lawyer proved that Leason was in fact white.

  This evidence that my father’s family was legally white floored me almost as much as had the original evidence that they were black. Except in this case, I knew it wasn’t true: every other document I was able to find subsequent to 1850 still listed the family as either black or mulatto: Leason and Sarah’s son, whom they named Andrew Jackson Grady, my great-grandfather, and who arrived in Windsor, Ontario, in time for the 1881 census, is listed as black. As are his children, one of whom was William Henry Grady, my grandfather. In 1920, William Henry married Josephine Rickman, and on their wedding certificate, in the box asking for “Nationality,” they were both listed as “Coloured.”

  When the designations “black” and “white” can be reversed in a court of law, and then reversed again on marriage and death certificates, using those designations as racial signifiers is meaningless. Or rather, they have only the meaning that social custom at the time requires them to have. They are labels of convenience, or inconvenience, depending on whether we want to embrace similarities or dwell on differences.

  Whatever the truth of my family’s racial heritage, the outcome of the trial was that when the Fugitive Slave Act passed in the United States in the fall of 1850, allowing slave catchers to cross the Ohio River into Indiana to retrieve runaway slaves and drag them back to their Southern masters—and requiring Indiana citizens, sheriffs and judges to help them do so—my family had papers stating that they were white. I have no idea where Thomasina was before arriving in Spencer—there is a record
of a Tamsey Grady marrying a man named James in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1829, and Tamsey is a reasonable diminutive of Thomasina—but whether they were free blacks, freed blacks or runaway slaves I don’t know. But I do know that they were not white.

  In Up from Freedom, I have imagined Tamsey’s journey from slavery in the South to Freedom, Indiana. I have also imagined Virgil Moody’s journey from being a reluctant slave owner in Texas to a willing partner in Tamsey’s bid for freedom in the North. As a person who is both black and white, I thought I could explore the tensions and accommodations that inevitably exist between Tamsey and Moody as they learn to live harmoniously together. I wondered if they were the same tensions and accommodations that existed in my father when he had passed for white. And then I thought that since the United States itself is a confusing blend of black and white, the same tensions and accommodations could be found in that complicated and restless Union. Like my own family, America is more white than black, but since recent surveys have suggested that up to 80 percent of Americans are at least 5 percent black, there are a lot of couples in the United States like Leason and Sarah. White on paper, but something entirely less determinant beneath the skin.

  Wayne Grady

  Kingston, August 2018

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel began to form in my mind in 1998, when I traveled to Spencer, Indiana, where my great-grandfather, Andrew Jackson Grady, was born in 1850. In the basement of the Spencer courthouse, I met Roger Peterson, a retired University of Indiana history professor who had devoted his retirement years to sorting out the mountain of town and county records that had accumulated since the early 1800s. Roger had gathered the Grady papers in a file—land purchases, road contracts, marriage licenses, and a brief account of Leason and Sarah Grady’s trial for “Fornication,” also in 1850. May every family seeker have a Roger Peterson in their life.