Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  I was about to ask him delicately about the possibility of my staying at River Bend, when the door to the parlor opened and in walked a skinny lass in an old white dress. She had dark, oval eyes, and her skin was bronze-colored. In her, I could see Midnight as he had been on that wondrous day of his arrival at our home in Porto. How lithe and handsome he had been! I had an overwhelming desire to run to her. My skin was tingling with the need to ask her about her father – to speak my heart to her as well.

  Knowing that my father was responsible for the life of poverty and humiliation that this girl had inherited, my shame seemed to fix me in a snare; how could I even speak to her when she was sure to have spent her childhood cursing me and my family?

  She carried biscuits for us on a platter, though we hadn’t yet finished the previous batch or asked for more. Edward explained to me that she was always engaged in some foolery or other, like bringing in sweets when there wasn’t any need. He winked at me as though we had established an intimate complicity, then said to the girl, “Morri, I used to think you had yourself a good head on them bony shoulders, but you are one silly girl. You think you can do anything you like, don’t you? But you can’t. You’re going to see that one day, sure enough – one day soon, I reckon. Now, get your troublesome black behind out of here ’fore I box your ears.”

  “I’s real sorry,” she replied, but she did not seem perturbed by his reproach in the least.

  I, however, should have liked to crash my fist into his face, which is undoubtedly why I thought of Midnight telling me: You are just a gemsbok, so do not let yourself be provoked so easily….

  Likely mistaking me for a friend of her owner, Morri gave me a disdainful look as she turned to leave.

  I then summoned my courage and asked Edward if I might stay at River Bend for a week to draw the local birds. I held my fingers locked together on my lap as I spoke; I had noticed by now that white Southerners, like the English, regarded hand gestures as vulgar.

  “But, Mr. Stewart,” Edward said, looking puzzled, “I do not believe we could offer you the conditions you are used to in Britain. It is a modest household, as I’ve said, and my wife is away at present. I myself am only here two or three days a week. I’m quite sure you would find River Bend a most primitive place.”

  “I would need only a room and a single meal a day, Mr. Roberson.”

  “Yes, but the niggers, they are likely to be troublesome at this time of year. The hot moist summers create a sort of frenzy in them. They’d dance all night were it not for the whip.”

  “To tell you the truth, sir, I never even notice the Africans. None of their damned fool rascality will nettle me,” I said, giving what I hoped was a convincing performance.

  “Yes, I imagine you find woodpeckers and wrens more appealing,” he said, grinning.

  “Indeed so,” I said, laughing.

  Edward then scoffed at my insistence on paying for my stay, saying he’d never allow it. He called for Crow, who had waited at the parlor door, and instructed him to help me move my bags into Mistress Anne’s old room. Before heading upstairs, I went outside to rejoin Luisa. I told her that all was well and returned with her to the gig to fetch my bags. I whispered that I had seen Midnight’s daughter and that her name was Morri.

  Luisa gripped my hand, then thought better of showing her feelings. Looking around to confirm we’d not be heard, she said, “Oh, I’m so glad, John. Did you speak to her?”

  “I could not. I shall try later.”

  “You will convince her, I’m sure of it.”

  “If only I had your confidence.”

  “Confidence doesn’t cost anything,” she said with a grin, “so I’ve got bales and bales.”

  I thanked her and Isaac for their help.

  “I’ll not kiss you here,” she whispered. We shook hands. “Now, you be careful, John. I’ll leave you with what my mama used to tell me whenever I was up to something risky. I don’t rightly know what it means, but it used to encourage me.” She placed her hand against my chest and pressed. “You eat the night, child. Eat the night deep inside you.”

  *

  Later that day, I took my sketchbook outside, then rushed around the perimeter of the tea room toward the kitchen building, which was joined by a walkway to the main house. I could hear soft voices coming from inside. I knocked, and an elderly black woman wearing spectacles, in a loose white tunic, came to the door and bowed deferentially.

  She soon told me she was Lily, the cook. When I asked if there was someone who might wash and iron a shirt and trousers, she hesitated for some time, rather as though deaf. Then, when I repeated my request, she said, “I get Morri right on it, sir.”

  “And might I talk to Morri herself?”

  “Yes, you shawly can, sir. Ya jes’ wait right here, please.”

  Morri appeared after a minute or so, her eyes filled with alarm, holding one arm straight down, her other hand grasping it at the elbow. She remained two long paces from me, wary. “Morri, I have a favor to ask you,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The clothes I left on my bed are very, very soiled. Would you please make the shirt … you make it as white-white as the sky.”

  “White as the sky? I’m ’fraid I don’ und’stand, sir.”

  “I have been told that that was the color of the sky at the time of the First People.”

  She took a step back.

  “We are the First People,” I added. “You and I … and everyone else. Though that is a secret only few people know.”

  Before I could explain myself further, she fled, groping her way along the kitchen wall as though blinded.

  XLVII

  Why Can’t Midnight Talk?

  When the stranger came to the kitchen door asking for me, Lily fetched me jumping like a toad, because she couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. Sure enough, there he was at the door, all six foot of him, trying to trap me inside those blue-gray eyes of his.

  He asked me in a real careful voice to do some washing for him – like I could refuse without risking a whipping. Then he said some peculiar things: that his clothes were very, very soiled. And that the sky was white-white. Only my papa ever talked like that.

  That sure got me muddled good. Then the obvious came to me: The bastard already had my father prisoner! This was his devilish way of telling me. Likely, he and his kind were torturing Papa in some secret location. Maybe they’d had him there for years.

  What he was doing here at River Bend, I couldn’t say. Though being a white man, he probably just wanted to see me suffer with knowing that my papa was a prisoner.

  But then why had he been asking in Charleston after my father like he didn’t know where he was? And if Papa had been captured, why hadn’t they returned him to Master Edward, his owner?

  Looking at that man standing just outside the kitchen doorway made it hard to breathe. I felt my way out of the room and ran. I didn’t know where I was heading, but I had to get out of the Big House before it choked me to death.

  *

  I dashed away as fast as I could and found Weaver fixing the chicken run. “Whoa, slow on down, girl. Wha’s goin’ on wid you?”

  “We have to cancel what we planned,” I whispered. Then I explained about the stranger who’d caught my father.

  “No, baby, i’s way too late to stop what we duhn started.”

  “I think he’s kidnapped Papa.”

  I started to cry then, because I’d been hoping so much that my father had got away and was up North. If he hadn’t been able to escape, then what chance did we have?

  “We’re going to die, Weaver! They’re going to catch us.”

  “Calm yousself, girl. Calm yousself down. Tell me wha’s goin’ on in dat head a yaws.”

  I said that I couldn’t understand why the visitor was asking about my papa when he must have taken him prisoner already. Weaver considered that while chewing on a stalk of rice, then said, “He’s gonna find out who done helped hi
m escape. Yaw papa ain’t sayin’ and he wants to know real bad.”

  That made good sense. “If he talks to you, just say you never knew my father,” I instructed.

  “I can’t likely say dat, girl. I been here all mah lahf.”

  “Then say you weren’t here the day he disappeared. You were down in Charleston.”

  “Whatevuh ya say, Morri. Where ya dink he got yaw papa?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, but I knew then that I had to find out.

  *

  I stayed away from the house for a few hours, walking in Porter’s Woods, hoping real hard that the stranger wouldn’t stay too long. If he was here when Beaufort left his signal that the boats were at the landing, waiting to take us to freedom, then we were going to have to do some big killing at River Bend. It made me sick thinking about that, and I didn’t know if I could really do it, but I figured that I’d only know for sure when the time came for me to squeeze the trigger.

  On the way back to the Big House, I stopped by to see Weaver again, and he told me he’d had a right pleasant conversation with the stranger. He’d even taken him to see the slave cabins.

  “Well, I sure as hell hope you didn’t go showing him my room. And you better not have told him anything about Papa.”

  “I didn’ say nuttin’. You in one of yaw ebil dispositions, ain’t you, chile?”

  “Well, I got a right to be.”

  I marched back to the house, determined to find out what kind of secrets this visitor was keeping. Crow told me that he was outside somewhere, so I snuck up to his room.

  I found his leather travel bags sitting on the bed. I opened them up and discovered two things that got my heart jumping: a long white feather and a homemade arrow in three sections, each fitting perfectly into the next.

  I sat there, stunned. Because the arrow was just how my papa had described the way his people made them back in Africa. The feather … well, it might have been plucked from any old hen, except that it was longer than any I’d ever seen. It made me remember that mysterious white bird Papa told me about, the one he’d tracked for years and finally caught a glimpse of over in Portugal.

  The strangeness of this man just got worse and worse, don’t you know. Because while flipping through his sketches of birds I discovered a drawing of Papa himself. He had talent, I’d give him that, assuming he was the one who drew it. He’d been able to put something of my father’s spirit right on the paper. But it wasn’t the man I’d known. Because staring at his face through my tears, I realized that this was my papa before I’d come into the world. He might have been only thirty years old. He could have outrun a deer back then.

  Not only that, but there was a note scribbled at the bottom: Why can’t Midnight talk?

  I couldn’t figure how this mud-minded slave-trader had a drawing of my papa that must have been made twenty or more years ago, maybe even before he reached River Bend. Most peculiar of all: How could he have known Papa’s name wasn’t Samuel when he lived all the way across the ocean?

  XLVIII

  A Whole House of Memories Just Got Too Filled Up

  I was wormstupid not to understand sooner that the stranger with my papa’s arrow was a little boy turned into a man and come from a long ways away. But when I did, I ran out of the house and across the cornfield and through the slave gardens and along the path to the river. I found him sitting on a rock, and he turned to me like he was scared of what I might do. Maybe he thought I had a knife.

  “You’re John, aren’t you? You’re John the gemsbok!”

  His eyes glistened and he stood up. “Yes, I’ve come from Portugal. And, Morri, you don’t know how glad I am that I’ve found you.”

  I held up his sketch of Papa. “You have his arrow too.”

  “I’ve come to find your father. And to take you home if you’ll come with me.”

  He walked to me, slowly, tears falling down his cheeks, but looking worried, too, like he was afraid of hurting me. He hadn’t much of a voice left. “May I touch you, Morri?” he whispered.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure if I ought to trust him. He put his hands on my shoulders, then rubbed them down my arms. He was feeling the shape of me, like he was making sure I was real. He was real gentle – too gentle. It scared me.

  He smiled then, quick, and wiped his eyes. He looked older now than I’d first thought. He must have been near to thirty-five. I did some calculations in my head and that seemed about right with what Papa had told me.

  “What … what can I do for you?” I asked, real cautious.

  Then he brought my hand to his lips, kissed my palm, and closed it into a fist, like my papa used to do now and then. That convinced me more than anything else that this had to be John the gemsbok.

  “You keep that with you always,” he said.

  “I will,” I said, my feelings all tangled up and tussling with each other. I kept thinking that this was John, and I ought to trust him because my father had, but the truth was that he was a white man and I didn’t.

  *

  We sat by the river talking for nearly two hours, and I ended up telling him all I knew about my father disappearing, which was near nothing, and about Master Edward sending me away. I confused him with how quick I spoke, because my heart was hopping around with nervousness, so I had to go back and tell him how everything had started – about my father coming to River Bend and his heel-strings being cut, and the murders of Big and Little Master Henry after their terrible spells. I didn’t want to, but everything just sort of tumbled out of me, as if a whole house full of memories had just got too filled up. I even spoke about things I ought to have kept secret – like seeing Big Master Henry soaked with blood, with my empty glass of lemonade on the floor by his hand.

  John excused himself real politely and ran off a ways by the river when I told him about my father being crippled for trying to run away before I was born. I thought he was relieving himself, but then I heard gagging sounds. He called to me and asked me if the water was safe to drink, and I told him it tasted mean but didn’t do any harm. When he returned, he apologized for leaving me alone.

  Sometimes while talking to him I wondered where I was. Because it didn’t seem like this could happen at River Bend. I mean, a big tall white man listening to me as if what I said might change the world.

  When he asked me who I thought had done the murders, I said I’d suspected Little Master Henry of killing his father, but then when he’d been murdered the same way … Well, it was a long time ago and nobody knew.

  I wanted to put that subject behind us, so I asked about his journey from Portugal to South Carolina. Pretty soon, he figured out that I was mostly interested in hearing about Papa before I’d known him, so he started to tell me everything he could, which was a whole lifetime more than any white man I ever thought would remember about an African. He began with their first supper together and ended with the trip our papas had taken to England.

  Then it was his turn to get all careful. He asked me if Papa told me what his father had done to him in London. I told him what I had heard. He said that that wasn’t the way it happened, that Papa may not even have known the whole truth. Then he told me how his father had arranged for him to be kidnapped and sold as a slave to Mr. Miller in Alexandria. Before he told me, he said, “I only hope that you will not hate me when I have finished this terrible story.”

  I’m not sure what I felt after hearing it. I didn’t hate him, no. And I told him that. “If my papa hadn’t come here, I wouldn’t have been born. And he’d have never met my mamma. He loved her something fierce. I reckon nothing of the past can be changed now. So I don’t hate you or even your papa. I rightly ought to, but I don’t.”

  “Morri, how do you think good men do evil things?” he asked. “Because what I haven’t yet said about my father was that he was a generous and kind man. And I would not want you to think he didn’t love your father. I know he did.”

  I tried to think of what Papa would say but coul
dn’t come up with anything good enough. When I said I didn’t rightly know, John stood up, all determined like. “Morri, I cannot go home till I find your father – or discover what happened to him. If he is a slave somewhere, I shall buy him his freedom. But with all you’ve told me, I still don’t know where to start looking for him.”

  “I think he must be up North. You might have to go back to New York and start looking there.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “Me? Master Edward isn’t about to let me sail on up to New York just now. Maybe after supper,” I said, laughing.

  “You don’t truly think I’d leave you here now that I’ve found you? I shall offer any price to Edward for you. Though I apologize for speaking of you like that.”

  His intentions rightly scared me, don’t you know, because any day now Beaufort was going to be leaving a ribbon at our gate. Not that I could tell him that, so I said, “I can’t go with you. I have to stay here – in case my father comes back for me.”

  “But if he were, he would have by now. You said yourself that he must think you’re dead.”

  “I was just saying that because … because I get scared sometimes being here without my parents. But he’s going to come for me one day. You can be sure of it.”

  I wasn’t saying what I really thought, which was that even if Papa was alive, Master Edward had outfoxed him. My lying got all mixed up with my fear and made my voice snarl. John looked at me as if I’d put a bullet in him. Then I remembered the letter my papa had left for him. But I couldn’t very well give it to him without making him want me to go with him even more.

  “You are angry at me,” he said, like he was a little boy who’d just done something bad.

  “No, I’m not, but I can’t go with you.” I stood up, thinking of those guns hidden under the piazza. “I’ve got to get back to the house now. You don’t want to see Master Edward furious with me. He might just do something terrible this time.”