Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  Life gets stuck repeating itself from time to time, I guess. Mr. Johnson didn’t bother measuring the distance from the window to the ground this time, since the Big House wasn’t made of rubber and couldn’t have gotten much higher or lower. As for the ladder, it was locked in the First Barn and only Mr. Johnson had the key.

  Twenty-four feet from the window to the ground … Little Master Henry dead at twenty-four years old … Lily, Weaver, and some of the other slaves believed this coincidence was proof that we were finally getting some divine justice in South Carolina.

  Mr. Johnson got powerful furious at us for not knowing who did it, but he didn’t whip anybody. He was waiting to see who the new master would be before working himself up. Maybe he was frightened of the killer ghost that might be haunting River Bend, as well.

  Whatever was in his mind, I guess he started making plans right about then to leave River Bend with Mistress Holly. Crow overheard him talking about that with her not two nights after her son’s death.

  This time, South Carolina justice found a culprit, though we only knew it three days after the fact. In the story we heard, a runaway slave named Hilton had been caught by a patrol while he was fording the East Branch of the Cooper River near where it meets French Quarter Creek.

  The hounds might have lost his scent but his shoe had come off in the mud of the riverbank. You might say that his destiny got stuck with him right there. Nigger fate, my mamma used to call it – I mean, things like your shoe coming off at the worst moment. She was the one person I ever met who could spot that nigger fate the moment it targeted its falcon eyes on you.

  We heard the report of what happened from Crow, who got it from Aunt Bessie. Hilton had been dragged nearly drowned out of the river by the patrol. Finding a silver watch in his pocket, they said it must have been Little Master Henry’s. No nigger could get himself such a pretty thing without stealing it.

  After they lynched him from a big old oak tree, they cut him down, tied the rope around his legs, and dragged him by horse all the way back to Cherry Hill. They rode across five or six miles of ugly roads gouged with stones, so that by the time they discarded him in front of his poor mamma’s cabin, every last bone in his bloody face had been broken.

  I guess you could say that motherhood has got to be the bravest thing of all, since she knelt by his body and tried to put him back together.

  I can’t think of anything more evil than to do that to a man and show him to his mamma.

  Nobody in the patrol knew or cared that the silver watch had been a present from his father, Papa Lucius.

  My papa told me that men like them only listened to Hyena and did his bidding. Papa talked like that sometimes. Most folks at River Bend didn’t understand him, but I did.

  A few days later it rained all night, and Papa danced out front of the Big House till dawn. He got so sopped and tired that I thought he’d just fall right down in the mud. He closed his eyes when I held him in my arms and whispered, “I’ve got to make sure they don’t take the dances from us too.”

  We all knew there wasn’t any justice in South Carolina, but I still kept thinking there ought to be. I guess thinking like that was the root of all my problems.

  *

  After Little Master Henry’s funeral, Mistress Holly moved into her town house in Charleston and never once came back to River Bend. She didn’t invite Mr. Johnson to join her either. I guess she was fond enough of him when there was no one else nearby. Folks said that she was playing cards every night with other widows and winning enough to buy all the rum she could drink.

  Mistress Holly would die five months later, from the ague, the doctors said. But the rumors were that she just drank herself to death. I guess no one can live so very long with that much unhappiness in their heart.

  Mr. Johnson took his frustration out on us. For three months afterward we were whipped for so much as sneezing at the wrong moment. He cut stripes in me too. For the very first time. Papa was in Charleston doing marketing that day.

  Mr. Johnson must have seen my father being in town as his chance to take out all the hate he’d been collecting against me in his old pockets over the years. What got him all in a fit was me telling him that the field slaves would likely work better if their chimneys were made out of brick instead of clay.

  “What kind of nigger stupidity you spoutin’ now?” he asked me.

  “If they was made of brick, they wouldn’t melt every time it rained, and the field hands could keep them cabins of theirs heated even when it was pourin’. Maybe then they’d get themselves a full night of sleep.” My real mistake was glaring at him and asking: “You ever try workin’ sun to sun after getting only two hours of sleep, Mr. Johnson?”

  That was when he grabbed my arm and had the two black foremen drag me off to the whipping barrel.

  I struggled, of course, and even caught one of the foremen on the chin with my fist. But that made him throw me down in the dirt, and I broke a tooth. I spit it out at him. The other foreman gave me a kick on my backside for that and told me to just be still or he’d kill me with his own two hands.

  “For how long you gonna hurt your own people?” I asked him.

  He kicked at me again. He aimed for my head but only got my shoulder. I flapped my hand at him and shouted up at Mr. Johnson, “You gonna pay for this!”

  He just laughed and told the foremen to tie me down. I shouted for help as loud as I could. I wanted Lily, Weaver, Crow, and the others to see what they were doing to me.

  “Bite down hard, Morri chile,” Lily hollered to me as she came running.

  “T’ink a somet’in’ good,” Weaver shouted from a long ways off. He must have been running in from the fields. “You’s sittin’ in a garden, Morri girl. You’s surrounded by flow’rs.”

  I pictured what he told me, but the second stroke chased all the roses right out of me. I was nowhere but where I was. The stinging on my back felt like the skin was coming off.

  “Help!” I shouted. “Help me. God help me!”

  I squeezed my gut tight, but by the seventh stripe I’d peed on myself right good. And I was crying like a baby from the pain. Then I started whispering a verse from the Psalms over and over to myself. Just like I always do when I’m in big trouble: Since I was young have men attacked me, but never have they prevailed…. Since I was young …

  The last stroke I remembered came across the back of my neck. That one was a special gift from Mr. Johnson, I reckon. But I like to think that that mean-spirited lash started my dreams looking for a way out of River Bend. Because it was right after that day that I started seeing that northern city where the snow was always falling.

  I told my father right away about my being lashed when he got back from the city, because there was no way I could hide my wounds and the gap where my tooth was gone. But I told him I didn’t mind. It made me more like the others and I was glad for that. He paced round and round my room while I spoke, then hollered so loud for Lily that she came running in.

  “Take care of my child,” he told her.

  Lily held me back from following him outside, saying I’d only make things worse. Later, I heard from Crow that Papa stepped right up to Mr. Johnson on the piazza, shook his fist at him, and said that if he ever touched me again, his body would be feeding worms within the week.

  “I’ll neither strike you nor fire a shot,” he said. “But you will die in such pain that they’ll need to gag you so whoever the new master is will be able to sleep.”

  Mr. Johnson laughed and told Papa to shut his nigger mouth, but the truth is he never dared lash me again – at least not while my father remained with us at River Bend.

  XXXV

  Except for One Thing

  I’m going to have to tell you now about how my father ended up coming to South Carolina, since the way I see it, that sent everything else rolling toward the future that’s come to pass.

  Back in December of 1806, Papa and the Portuguese man who’d brought him to Europe w
ere visiting England. The man, Mr. James Stewart, had a meeting one morning he couldn’t miss and asked to meet my papa at two o’clock that afternoon at a home near a large palace. When Papa arrived at the place, he was shown into a small, hot room by a crooked old lady. Three white men came barging in right away and tied his wrists and ankles, then stuffed a filthy rag in his mouth and covered his head with a sack.

  When Mr. Stewart arrived, he must have been told that my father never reached there. Papa never saw him again.

  The next morning he was driven to a stinking room and tied to a wooden column. The sack was removed from his head. Slivers of light shone in through a tiny window. The floor was tilting and the ceiling was real low. Men were walking above him.

  He came to understand he was on a ship, below the main deck. It was so cold that his teeth started chattering a whole conversation.

  Two goats and a cow were put in there with him. The sailors fed him and the animals nothing but biscuits and hay. He begged to see the sun, since no one from southern Africa can stand a whole day in the dark, but they weren’t about to let him go up on deck. He drank water from the same bowl as the animals till one of the sailors felt sorry for him and gave him a jug. He slept right up close to his companions so they could keep him warm.

  It was then that Mantis appeared to my papa in a dream. Crawling to his ear and lifting up his heart-shaped head, he whispered, “Tsamma, they will want to learn the secrets of the Bushmen. Say nothing.” He then crept off.

  So it was that Papa decided to never talk to the Captain or the crew.

  Why that insect-god left my father all alone is a question I can’t answer. Maybe he didn’t want to be trapped in the dark below deck, where the stars and moon couldn’t be seen.

  *

  This first voyage lasted two or three weeks – my father lost track of time. During storms, his desire to follow the thunder and lightning was fierce. Papa tugged at his manacles and made his wrists and ankles bleed. One of the goats licked at his wounds.

  Papa sang at night – songs he’d learned with his family in Portugal. But misery weighed him down during the day. He imagined the stars hunting his pain. And though they could find it, they had lost their aim. Their arrows missed him.

  The weather grew powerful hot. The cow and the goats were killed and cut up so that the crew could have fresh meat.

  When the ship reached shore, Papa was chained on deck to a mast. He saw a stone fort and many small houses. The Captain told him the ship was now on the west coast of Africa. If he was thinking about trying to escape, he ought to change his mind, since they would cut off his nigger balls and stuff them up his rump when they caught him.

  Africans in chains carried boxes of rum, wine, gunpowder, and cotton cloth from the ship to the wharf. Papa learned that these were to be given to the local kings in return for slaves.

  When my papa told that to me, I remembered my mamma saying that she had been traded for two yards of indigo-dyed cloth.

  That evening, Papa was chained below deck once again. Maybe fifty or sixty slaves joined him. He could not understand their language. There was no room for any of them to move. Then they got on their way again. For many weeks this time.

  Papa said what he remembered most was the thirst. It was worse than the three days he’d walked in the summer desert as a boy to escape the Dutch guns. Then he knew where to look for water, could feel it beneath his feet, resting cool in the heart of the earth.

  But even on board the ship he knew that he wouldn’t die. Because death did not ride the waves. And did not wear shackles. Any death that came for a Bushman would never ask him to stay inside a belly of wood while lightning was painting the sky the white of bone.

  The Time of the Hyena was on my papa. He had visions of the great flood that almost cost Mantis his life, when he was saved by a bee. Sometimes he spoke to Noah, who told him that this time they would not reach dry land and that all the animals would vanish from the earth. Only the fish would remain. And they would not remember the Bushmen or even Africa. All the stories of the First People would be forgotten.

  He never said so, but I think Papa must have decided at this time that if he ever had a child, he would call her Memory. Because every night he prayed that the footprints of his people would not be forgotten. He wished for a boulder where he could draw his misery so Mantis would know where he was.

  *

  When Papa’s ship anchored, he was taken by a man named Miller to a shop in a town of dusty streets. His ankles were still chained. He drank four jugfuls of water, and his belly grew so big that Miller and his three children laughed and said that he looked like he was having a baby. I’ve seen my father drink like that, after my mother died, so I know just what he must have looked like.

  If I said my papa was like every man and like none, would that make sense? He was short and yellow-brown, with tight knots of black-gray hair and slender eyes – eyes like a man from China, some folks said. Yet there was something about his face and form that was not so very odd at all – as if he was the inner form all of us shared.

  All I need to do is to stand in front of a mirror to see him clearly. Though I haven’t inherited too much of his power. And surely not his talents at healing. If I’d have had those things, then Weaver might be alive today.

  Mr. Miller noticed right away that my father wouldn’t speak. Or couldn’t. He was mighty vexed that the ship’s captain who sold the little man had not told him he was a mute.

  Papa had no idea what part of the world this Alexandria was in and what they wanted from him. He pretended not to be able to understand English. He was locked in a small room with no windows. But Mr. Miller didn’t beat him. Maybe he even felt sorry for him.

  One day my father made it understood with his hand signals that he wanted a pen and paper. In his careful handwriting, he wrote out the name of his family in Portugal and their address. For an hour he worked on a letter, explaining how he’d been captured and put on a ship. He handed what he wrote to Mr. Miller, giving all his hopes to him.

  Mr. Miller was pleased that the little Negro was able to both write and understand English after all. But he must have burned the letter, because no one ever came from Portugal to find Papa.

  When Mr. Miller’s daughter Abigail got real ill, Papa wrote a note asking to be allowed in the workshop where the apothecary made his medicines. There, he mixed a tea to take away her fever. Mr. Miller made Papa drink it first to be sure it wasn’t poison. After it helped Abigail get better, Papa began to spend all of his days and nights in the shop, sleeping on the floor in a back room, helping his new owner, learning what American herbs, barks, and roots could do. The power of doing useful work slowly freed him from Hyena.

  After two months he was rewarded by being allowed to go out on his own on Sunday afternoons. He wrote again to the Stewart family and stole a stamp from his owner, but he never learned whether they got the letter. No one from Portugal ever wrote back to him.

  On his outings, Papa used to stand at the port and gaze out to sea. He thought of escaping but knew he had to wait for word from Mantis, who would tell him when to go.

  *

  Yellow fever struck Alexandria a hard blow in the spring of 1807, and Mr. Miller got it real bad. Nothing Papa tried could cure him. He’d been a widower, so Papa was inherited by his young children. Their guardian, Mr. Miller’s brother, sold him to a vicious slave-dealer by the name of Burton.

  Along with other Africans, Papa was taken by ship to Charleston, where he was auctioned at market. His purchaser was Big Master Henry, of course, who always said he bid one hundred dollars for the little nigger because just looking at him made him laugh.

  *

  Papa finally showed everybody he wasn’t mute after he saw my mother for the first time. He told me that the moment he got a glimpse of the depth in her black eyes and that long ostrich neck of hers, he saw Mantis coming back to him. I guess she was the sign he’d been waiting for. So he courted Mamma with swamp
lilies and other flowers that he’d pick for her on Sundays.

  *

  As time went by, Papa earned Big Master Henry’s trust and was allowed to go to Cordesville and Charleston with Wiggie the coachman or even all by himself. He’d collect salt and oyster shells from the beaches, buy medicines, and do marketing for the household. On these trips, he had lots of chances to meet freed blacks who might have helped him escape. But the reason he didn’t even try to leave was me and my mother. Then when she died, just me.

  Like I said, Big Master Henry never once let all three of us out of River Bend together. I sometimes thought that Papa ought to make a break for it just the same. Other times, I was so scared he’d leave me behind that I’d run as fast as I could after his coach as it rumbled toward the gate.

  *

  Then, on Sunday the Twenty-First of January, 1821, he did vanish. There wasn’t anything strange about that day, and, except for one thing, nothing unusual happened that whole week.

  That one thing was the visit a few days earlier of a tall brown man – a mulatto, we reckoned. He had short black hair, stiff as a porcupine, and a gold ring in his ear. I’d never seen a pirate before. I imagined that was what he was. Now, what a pirate would be doing visiting River Bend I couldn’t say, but I hoped he was looking for some helpers. I knew my papa and I would have left with him if he’d asked.

  Little Master Henry was two months in his grave by then, and Cousin Edward Roberson was running things for Miss Anne, who had inherited the plantation when Mistress Holly moved out.

  We never liked Cousin Edward. We called him Edward the Cockerel, since he was all puffed up about himself, in the best family tradition.

  To give you an idea about Edward’s mud-mindedness, let me just tell you that when he first arrived he was convinced that “the sable savages” in his possession would work harder without their gardens. Not that he had the courage to tell us himself that he wanted us to destroy our gardens. No, ma’am. Instead, Mr. Johnson lined us up one morning at dawn and told us to dig up all the plants and bushes and herbs and cover them over with soil.