"Come, Forty-seven," John said as he moved toward the girl's side.
Grabbing me by the arm, Tobias said, "Wait a minute. You ain't said what you need this nigger for. He's been on my plantation since he was baby. He don't have no healin' in 'im."
"Where I am from," John replied, rather impatiently, "we cannot heal without teaching. Forty-seven is my student. If I didn't have him I could not save your daughter."
Tobias released me and John unfolded his napkin on the bed.
Even now, over a hundred and seventy years later, in the twenty-first century, I remember the feelings I had in that white girl's bedroom. I was afraid for Eloise because she looked so drawn and deathlike. I was afraid for myself because John had made me part of his haughty procedure. And even while all that fear was in me I was aware that the
Master had lost all of his high-minded ways. He was giving in to a mere slave because that slave might be able to do what they could not. This was possibly the most important lesson John ever taught me; that our so-called masters were not all-powerful, that they were also weak and vulnerable at times. But at the moment I was too frightened to understand the significance of that knowledge.
Upon his open napkin there were various leaves, mushrooms, and twigs. There were also two smaller versions of the soft-glass tubes that he had used to heal my hands and brand. These tubes were so small that they might have been seeds.
John put his hand on Eloise's brow. Nola screamed at him to stop touching her mistress. Flore then dragged the child from the room. John was busy crumbling up the vegetation and mixing it with oil from the capsules he'd gotten from the yellow bag. Then he rubbed the paste up under her upper lip.
"What are you doin' there, Twelve?" Tobias said in a threatening tone.
"Saving your girl if you let me be," he replied.
John crushed another tube and then ran his fingers under the unconscious girl's tongue.
This intimacy was too much for the white man. He grabbed Tall John by the shoulder and threw him nearly across the room. The youth hit the floor with a loud grunt and reached back to rub his head.
I didn't know what to do. John was my friend. I wanted to protect him, but I couldn't stand up to that white man. He could have killed me with just one blow.
Tobias advanced on the prostrate boy. There was death in every gesture of the white man's body.
"Master!" Flore shouted. "Her eyes."
Tobias turned to see his girl looking at him. She held his gaze for a moment and then looked away as if something else had captured her attention. I looked in the direction of her gaze but all I saw was a bare wall.
Tears sprang to my eyes. Eloise was alive and so John and I would be spared. We saved the Master's daughter. He might even grant our freedom. Defeat and death turned around in a flash, like lightning.
"Thank you, Lord," Flore cried.
"She's cured," Tobias said.
"Not yet," John announced. "You threw me off before I could finish the treatment."
"What else do you have to do?" Tobias asked warily.
"I can only show you," said the slave in the voice of a free man.
I could see the two feelings in the slave master's face. He had never had a Negro speak to him thus. For such a slight he was duty-bound to punish the offender. But on the other hand he loved his daughter more than anything-I could see all that in Tobias's visage as plainly as I could see the fingers on my own hand.
Finally Tobias said, "Go on then."
"Come, Forty-seven," he said to me. "This is the hardest part."
Together we went back to the girl's side.
John leaned close to me and whispered, "You have to show her the way back."
Before I could ask him what he meant he took a step back and held out one hand to me while placing the other on the girl's brow.
The moment I took John's hand I was no longer in Eloise's room. Instead I found myself in a field of yellow flowers. I was naked standing next to the girl. She was naked too.
It was broad daylight above us but at the horizon (which seemed to be very far away) night had already fallen. Just at the place where the land touches the sky there hung a beautiful crescent moon. Eloise was staring at that moon. I realized that she had been gazing in that direction even in her bed. Her face was turned fully toward the eerie lunar glow.
She took a step toward the horizon.
I took a closer look at the moon, and in the dark harbor of its arc I saw the grinning skull of Death. I knew then that Eloise had been so close to dying that she had almost completed her journey when Tall John gave her the medicine.
I realized that it was my job to keep her from going toward the darkness under that moon.
But there was a serious problem. I was a black slave while she was the white-skinned daughter of the Master. I wasn't supposed to touch her even with clothes on. I wasn't even supposed to speak in her presence. I was afraid that if she became aware of me she'd scream and her father would slaughter me for molesting his child.
She took another step.
"What should I do, John?" I called out, half hoping that Eloise would hear.
But John didn't answer and Eloise moved another step toward the darkness.
The horizon seemed much closer now. Eloise was no more than a dozen paces from her death.
"Miss Eloise," I said softly.
She made no sign that she heard.
She took another step.
"Miss Eloise," I said boldly.
But still she didn't hear.
"Miss Eloise!"
She took two steps, moving faster now.
She was beginning to run toward the night.
I knew then that there was nothing else I could do. I ran after her and grabbed her by her pale shoulders. She struggled against me but I used all of the strength in my young limbs to drag her back toward the sunlit field of yellow flowers.
"Let me aloose," she cried.
But I didn't stop until we were in the light again, until there was no darkness or crescent moon anywhere to be seen.
Still she gazed toward the place where the skull-face of
Death had loomed, but I stood in front of her, blocking her line of vision.
She noticed me and then looked down at the flowers around her feet.
When her gaze came back to me she asked, "You're one of pap's niggers ain't you, boy?" she asked me. "The one that was spyin' on me from the barn."
She didn't seem concerned about our lack of clothes. Actually she didn't even seem to notice.
"Neither master nor nigger be," I said fearfully. I had to say it but I felt that even though the sky was clear I'd be struck down by a bolt from the white man's God.
"Where are we?" Eloise asked.
"You sick, miss," I said. "Me'n my friend Number Twelve is tryin' to make you bettah. You was walkin' in a deathly direction but I grabbed you an' dragged you back."
"Are you usin' slave magic?" she asked.
"I reckon we is," I said. "It sho seem like it."
"I hear Nola cryin'," Eloise said, cocking her ear.
I could hear it too. The soft sobs were coming from nowhere it seemed.
"Back in yo bedroom ma'am," I said. "She's back there worried that you about to expire."
"But I won't die?"
"I don't think so. Not today anyway."
"So you saved my life," she said, staring into my eyes.
"I s'pose so. You were strayin' toward Death an' we brung you back home."
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Forty-seven."
"Thank you, Forty-seven. Thank you for savin' my life."
I appreciated her gratitude but there was something else that was even more important to me. I really had saved her life. I had used my mind and my courage to brave Death and Master Tobias to do what I thought was right. These actions made me a man, and a real man, I knew, could never be a slave.
From that moment on I never thought of myself as a slave again.
Suddenly I was back in Eloise's bedroom. She was awake and staring into my eyes. She smiled and I knew that she was going to live.
"Is she gonna live, Number Twelve?" Tobias asked in a loud voice.
"Yes, sir, I believe she is."
"All right then. Mr. Stewart?"
"Yes, boss?"
"Take these two filthy niggers and throw them in the Tomb."
I felt rough hands grab me by the shoulders. Two white men ran in and knocked John to the floor.
John had a look of terror and shock on his face.
"What are you doing, Tobias Turner?" he asked with a crack in his voice.
"What I should'a done the minute you stood up an
called me by my name," Tobias said. "This is no house of abolitionists. You will pay for your crimes."
"But I saved your daughter," John said. I could hear the pain and confusion in his words.
"God saved my child," Tobias said. "And now I shall do his will by punishing you."
One of the white men hit John in the face and he fell unconscious.
"Check his pockets to see what else he stole from me," Tobias told them.
The only thing they found was the cigar-shaped sleep inducing device. Tobias took that and put it in his pocket. Then the white men dragged John from the room.
I was deeply shocked by this brutality. After all, I had just come from a bright field of beauty and saving the Master's child. But those men didn't care how I felt. The men who held me battered me around the shoulders and head and dragged me from the room.
Flore yelled out, "babychile!" and I called out for her, but to no avail.
The Tomb was a tiny shack that had once been an outhouse. It sat in the middle of the yard and Mr. Stewart used it to punish slaves without permanently damaging them. It was no bigger than a deep coffin on the inside with just enough room for a male slave or two smaller boy slaves, as we found out.
Mr. Stewart chained us hand and foot and tied us together. Then he locked the door behind us. It was dark in there and filled with biting maggots and ticks. As the sun bore down on the yard the heat rose in there until it was hotter than I had ever known.
"Are you all right, Forty-seven?"
"No," I answered petulantly. "Here I am in the jail when I should be free all'acause you had to go talkin' to that white man like he was a babychile."
"But we saved his daughter," John said in the darkness, where I was sure we'd die.
"But you a niggah, man," I cried. "An' ain't no niggah gonna ever speak to a white man wit'out givin' him his proper due."
"Neither master nor nigger be," he said in the darkness.
I wanted to strangle those words out of his throat but I knew that he was just ignorant of our ways. It had been less than a day since we had shared the dream of his land with his tiny, rainbow-colored people. But a lot had happened since then. Part of me thought that his land of Elle on the ocean named Universe was just a dream. But I knew in my heart that it wasn't, that Tall John was really from beyond Africa and had to be forgiven for not knowing that he was inferior to the slave master's power.
"Listen, Forty-seven," John said. "That's the reason I need you. I've lived among your people for many years but I've never understood their brutality. I was always on the outside passing through."
"But you been a slave," I argued.
"I always had the power to shrug off my chains and escape. I never really paid all that much attention to the people I met along the way because I was looking for you. I suppose that I always looked down on everyone I met and therefore never realized how they felt. Not until now when all of my power has been drained off to save the girl Eloise."
"That's why you need me?" I asked. "To understand how slaves feel?"
"No. Wall is coming."
"That's Mr. Pike?"
"Yes. He is a great power among his people. Much greater than I. You know how to survive against forces much greater than you. You are the teacher and I am the dunce. Without you there can be no future for anyone."
And even there, in my greatest danger, I felt the urgency in John's words.
"Deep under the ground in your world there is a kind of metal," John continued. "It looks like green powder but when it is spun at a great speed it starts spinning on its own and goes even faster. It picks up speed more and more until finally it goes so fast that it tears apart the glue that holds the universe in place."
"And Andrew Pike want that green powder?"
"Yes. He wants to make it spin and blow up everything."
"Why would somebody wanna do sumpin' like that?"
"Because," John said, "in another place beyond the world where we see and breathe there is a river of consciousness "
"That's what you said before. But what do the countesses river got to do with green powder?"
"Not countess but consciousness psi what thoughts and dreams are made of," John explained. "You and I and all of my people and all of yours "
"You mean Champ and Mama Flore too?" I asked.
"And Tobias and Eloise," John added.
I didn't say anything but I was surprised that John saw Tobias and me as belonging to the same people as if we
were the same race. This set off a way of thinking that was more alien to me than anything I had experienced up until that point.
"So all of us are here but at the same time our idees an' our dreams is swimmin' in this river?" I asked.
"Exactly. It is in a place beyond space and time. It is another place that cannot be touched or seen or heard."
"Except if'n you spin that green powder," I added.
"No, but that's what Wall believes," John said in the dark.
"An' this Wall is also Andrew Pike?" I asked.
"Yes. His people, after they split off from our race, developed a taste for the small trace of spirit that makes its way into our bodies. They suck out the energy and souls of sentient beings for their sustenance. But they're greedy; they yearn to obtain the Upper Level where they can feast on the God-Mind."
"So all this man Pike, who really is Wall, gotta do is dig down an' git that green powder an' then everything gets blowed up?" I asked, trying to string together all he'd said.
"No," John said. "First he must acquire a machine. When Wall got here he sent off a message telling his people to send this machine from a colony they have in this galaxy. When it arrives it will be able to mine and then spin the green powder. Wall and the Calash believe that this will open the universe to their perverse appetites."
"How long before it gets here?"
"One hundred and eighty-seven years."
"We all be dead by then," I said, thinking that John and I would probably be dead before the next day dawned.
"Maybe so," John said, "and maybe not. But regardless there is another quicker way that he might attain the green powder."
"What's that?" I asked.
Listening to his story I forgot my situation. I was more worried about that green powder than I was about the bugs biting me and the heat sweating me to death.
"I came here in an extremely powerful craft called the Sun Ship," he said. "The engine of that ship can be altered to help Wall excavate the green powder. Wall must not have it."
"And you took this ship on the Universe Ocean to come here?"
"Yes."
I didn't even understand most of the words he said. But I could feel the urgency in his tone. I could feel his fear. And even though I was in dire trouble myself I worried about my friend and my world.
We stayed in that hotbox all day. After a few hours I began to swoon in and out of consciousness.
"I think I'd like to go up north now," I said to John once when I had awakened.
"I can't take us for a while," he said. "My power was greatly weakened by the healing of Eloise. I won't be able to flee or even unlock these chains for a day or two."
What could I say? He'd only saved Eloise because I had asked him to. It was my fault just as much as his th
at we were in the Tomb.
While we wasted away in the hot stench of our prison I worked my wrists around in the manacles. My sweat made the skin so slick that I was finally able to slip free.
"John."
No answer.
"John."
A slight moan sounded from where my friend lay in the pitch black of our prison closet.
"John, I got my hands free," I said. "Maybe you could too. Maybe we could get outta here an' run."
"Too . .. weak .. .," he whispered. "Too . .. hot..."
"But you gotta try," I pleaded. "If we don' get free an' run mastuh gonna kill us."
"No master...," he choked, and could not finish the admonition.
I reached out and touched his shoulder. I could tell that he was slumped backward, hanging down in his chains. This was the first time I had been with Tall John that he was helpless. I realized then that he was a person just like I was, that he could suffer and need help too.
This was yet another major moment in my young life. There I was in chains and still I was worried for my friend. I was trying to get free so that I could steal us both away from Tobias.
That's what running away for a slave was theft. Because taking myself from the plantation meant that I was taking the master's property me away from him.
Somewhere in my mind I realized that it was absurd to think that a person could steal himself. But I also knew that if I told a white man these thoughts I would be put instantly to death, so I couldn't share my rebellious ideas with other slaves.
Deep in my mind an even more radical thought had begun to form. I realized that I was free even though I was clamped in chains and locked away. I was free because I had made the decision to run away if I could. Most of the slaves on the Corinthian Plantation would never actually try to run away. They knew that they'd probably get caught and whipped or worse. And I could see that the real chains that the slave wore were the color of his skin and the defeat in his mind. Neither master nor nigger be, Tall John had said from the first moments we met. There in the worst aspect of my slavery I came to fully understand those words' meaning.
I felt the thrill of freedom in my heart. "John," I said. "John, I understand. I know what you been sayin'. I ain't got no mastuh 'cause I ain't no slave."
He sighed in the darkness but made no words that I could understand. John's weakness set off a great trepidation in my heart. I believed that only he could understand the freedom that I had just come to realize. Without him I would be as lost as he was on the ocean called Universe.
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