Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V

by Orson Scott Card

  With that, Calvin drew back, expecting to return instantly to his body to speak to Honoré. He even started to speak. But his mouth didn’t move. His eyes didn’t see. He remained where he was, looking at the heartfires with his doodling sight instead of gazing out of his eyes at the street.

  No, that wasn’t so. He was vaguely aware of the street, as if seeing it out of the corners of his eyes. He could hear sounds, too, Honoré’s voice, but when he tried to listen, he kept getting distracted. He couldn’t pay attention to Honoré, couldn’t focus on what his eyes were seeing. He kept coming back here to the knots and the net, no matter how hard he tried to tear himself away. He could feel his legs moving, as if they were someone else’s legs. He could tell that Honoré’s voice was becoming agitated, but still he couldn’t make out what was being said. The sounds entered his mind, but by the time the end of a word was said, Calvin had lost his hold on the beginning of it. Nothing made sense.

  Now with sick dread he realized that Honoré’s warning had been well placed. This net was designed to catch and hold souls, or bits of souls, anyway, and keep anyone from finding them. Calvin had sent a bit of his own soul into the net, and now he couldn’t get out.

  Well, that’s what they thought. Nets were made of cord; cord was made of threads wound and twisted; threads were spun from fibers. All of these were things that Calvin well understood. He set to work at once.

  Denmark Vesey scowled at Gullah Joe, but the old witchy man didn’t even seem to notice. White men had been known to step back a bit when they saw Denmark passing by with such a look on his face. Even the kind of White men who liked to goad Blacks, like those men on the dock today, they wouldn’t mess with him when he wore that scowl on his face. He only let them push him around today because he had to show the new slaves how to keep White folks happy. But he still felt the rage and stored it up in his heart.

  Not that he felt the kind of fury that filled that net of souls hanging up not ten paces away. That’s because Denmark wasn’t no man’s slave. He wasn’t even fully Black. He was the son of one of those rare slaveowners who felt some kind of fatherly responsibility toward the children he sired on his Black women. He gave freedom to all his half-Black bastards, freedom and a geography lesson, since every one of them was named for a European country. Few of them stayed free, though, if they once strayed from Mr. Vesey’s plantation near Savannah. What difference did it make being free, if you had to live among the slaves and work among them and couldn’t leave any more than the slaves did?

  It made a difference to Denmark. He wasn’t going to stick around on the plantation. He figured out what letters were when he was still little and got hold of a book and taught himself to read. He learned his numbers from his father’s cousin, a French student who lived on the plantation to hide out because he took part in an anti-Napoleon rally at the university. The boy fancied himself some kind of hero of the oppressed, but all Denmark cared about was learning how to decode the mysteries that White people used to keep Black folks down. By the time he was ten, his father had him keeping the books for the plantation, though they had to keep it secret even from the White foreman. His father would pat his head and praise him, but the praise made Denmark want to kill him. “Just goes to show your Black mama’s blood can’t wipe out all the brains you get from a White papa.” His father was still sleeping with his mother and getting more babies on her, and he knew she wasn’t stupid, but he still talked like that, showing no respect for her at all, even though her children were smarter than the dim-witted little White weaklings that Father’s wife produced.

  Denmark nursed that anger and it kept him free. He wasn’t going to end up on this plantation, no sir. The law said that there wasn’t no such thing as a free Black man in the Crown Colonies. One of Denmark’s own brothers, Italy, had been seized as a runaway in Camelot, and Father had to lay some stripes on Italy’s back before the law would let up and go away. But Denmark wasn’t going to get caught. He went to his father one day with a plan. Father didn’t like it much—he didn’t want to have to go back to doing his own books—but Denmark kept after him and finally went on strike, refusing to do the books if Father didn’t go along. Father had him back in the fields under the overseer for a while, but in the end he didn’t have the heart to waste the boy’s talents.

  So when Denmark was seventeen, his father brought him to Camelot and set him up with letters of introduction that Denmark had actually written, so the hand would always match. Denmark went around pretending to be a messenger for his absentee owner, soliciting bookkeeping jobs and copy work. Some White men thought they could cheat him, getting him to work but then refusing to pay the amount agreed on. Denmark hid his anger, then went home and in his elegant hand wrote letters to an attorney, again using his father’s name. As soon as the White men realized that Denmark’s owner wasn’t going to let them get away with cheating him, they generally paid up. The ones that didn’t, Denmark let the matter drop and never worked for them again. It wasn’t so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.

  That went on till his father died. Denmark was full grown and had some money set by. No one knew his father in Camelot so it didn’t matter he was dead, as long as nobody went back to Savannah to try to follow up on something Denmark wrote in his father’s name. Not that Denmark didn’t worry for a while. But when it became clear that it was all going well, he started to fancy himself a real man. He decided to buy himself a slave of his own, a Black woman he could love and get children from the way his father did.

  He chose the one he wanted and had an attorney buy her for him, then went to pick her up in the name of his father. But when he got her home and she found out that a Black man had bought her, she near clawed his eyes out and ran out screaming into the neighborhood that she wasn’t going to be no slave to a Black man. Denmark chased her down, getting no help from the other residents of Blacktown—that was when he realized they all knew he was free and resented him for it. It all came down to this, from his woman and from his neighbors: They hated being slaves, hated all White people, but more than anyone or anything else they hated a free buck like him.

  Well, let them! That’s what he thought at first. But it grew so he could hardly bear the sight of his woman, chained to the wall in his tiny room, cursing him whenever he came home. She kept making dolls of him to try to poison him, and it made him good and sick more than once. He didn’t know a thing about poppeting. He’d spent all his effort learning the White man’s secrets and knew nothing about what Black folks did. He came to the day when he realized he had nothing. He might fool White folks into letting him keep the results of his own labor, but he was never going to be White. And Black folks didn’t trust him because he didn’t know their ways, either, and because he acted so White and kept a slave.

  Finally one day he knelt down in front of his woman and cried. What can I do to make you love me? She just laughed. You can’t set me free, she said, cause Black folks are never free here. And you can’t make me love you cause I never love him as owns me. And you can’t sell me cause I tell my new master about you, see if I don’t. All you can do is die when I make you a right poppet and kill it dead.

  All that hate! Denmark thought that rage was the ruling principle of his own life, but it was nothing compared to what slaves felt. That was when Denmark realized the difference between free and slave—freedom stole hate away from you, and made you weaker. Denmark hated his father, sure, but it was nothing compared to his woman’s hate for him.

  Of course he had to kill her. She’d laid it out so plain, and it was clear he wasn’t going to change her mind. It was just a matter of time before she killed him, so he had to defend himself, right? And he owned her, didn’t he? She wouldn’t be the first Black woman killed by her master.

  He hit her in the head with a board and knocked her cold. Then he bundled her into a sack and carried her down to the dock. He figured to hold her under the water till she drowned, then pull her out of
the sack and let her float so it didn’t look like murder. Well, he had her under the water all right, and she wasn’t even struggling inside the sack, but it was like a voice talking in his mind telling him, You killing the wrong one. It ain’t the Black woman killing you, it’s the White folks. If it wasn’t for the White folks, you could marry this girl and she be free beside you. They the ones she wants to kill, they the ones you ought to kill.

  He dragged her out of the water and revived her. But she wasn’t right after that. It might have been the blow to the head or it might have been the water she took on and the time she spent not breathing, but she walked funny and didn’t talk good and she didn’t hate him anymore, but everything he loved about her was dead. It was like he was a murderer after all, but the victim lived in his house and bore him a baby.

  Oh, Denmark, he was a sad man all the time after that. The joy of fooling White folks was gone. He got sloppy with his work, doing it late, and his customers stopped hiring him—though of course they thought it was his White master they were firing. The Black people around him hated him too, for what he done to his woman, and he had to watch all the time to keep them from getting any of his hair or fingernails or toenails, or even his spit or his urine. Cause they would have killed him with that, if they could.

  His son Egypt got to be four years old and Denmark prenticed him to a Black harness maker. Had to do all kinds of pretending, of course, that it was a White man who owned the boy and wanted him trained to be useful on his plantation, and it cost nine pounds a year, which was most of what Denmark was earning these days, but the paperwork went well enough, and even though Egypt was treated like a slave, he was learning a trade and there’d come a day when Denmark would tell him the truth. You free, boy, he’d say that day. Egypt Vesey, no man owns you. Not me, not nobody.

  When Egypt was gone, the last light went out of the boy’s mama. The day Denmark saw his woman drinking varnish, he knew he had to do something. Stupid as she had become, she hated her life and hated him. He agreed with her. Maybe he hated himself even more than she did. Hated everything and everybody else, too. It was chewing him up inside.

  That was when he met Gullah Joe. Joe came to him. Little Black man, he suddenly appeared right in front of Denmark when he was in the dirt garden peeing. He wasn’t there, and then he was, holding a crazy-looking umbrella all a-dangle with strange knots and bits of cloth and tin and iron and one dead mouse. “Stop peeing on my foot,” said Gullah Joe.

  Denmark didn’t have much to say. Piss just dried right up when Gullah Joe said so. Denmark knew he must be the witchy man they were always threatening him with. “You come to kill me, witchy man?” Denmark said.

  “Might,” said Gullah Joe. “Might not.”

  “Maybe you best just do it,” said Denmark. “Cause if you don’t, what if I kill you?”

  Gullah Joe just grinned. “What, you hit me with a board, put me in a sack, drown me till I can’t walk or talk right?”

  Denmark just started to cry, fell to his knees and begged Gullah Joe to kill him. “You know what I am! You know I’m a wicked man!”

  “I’m not God,” said Gullah Joe. “You gots to go see him preacher, you want somebody send you to hell.”

  “How come you talk so funny?”

  “Cause I not no slave,” said Gullah Joe. “I from Africa, I don’t like White man language, I learn it bad and I don’t care. I say people talk real good.” Then he let loose a string of some strange language. It went on and on, and turned into a song, and he danced around, splashing up the mud from Denmark’s pissing all over his bare feet while he sang. Denmark felt every splash as if he’d been kicked in the kidneys. By the time Gullah Joe stopped singing and dancing, Denmark was lying on the ground whimpering, and there was blood leaking out of him instead of piss.

  Gullah Joe bent over him. “How you feel?”

  “Fine,” Denmark whispered. “’Cept I ain’t dead yet.”

  “Oh, I don’t want you dead. I make up my mind. You be fine. Drink this.”

  Gullah Joe handed him a small bottle. It smelled awful, but there was alcohol in it and that was persuasive enough. Denmark drank the whole bottle, or at least he would have, if Joe hadn’t snatched it out of his hands. “You want to live forever?” Gullah Joe demanded. “You use up all my saving stuff?”

  Whatever it was, it worked great. Denmark bounded to his feet. “I want more of that!” he said.

  “You never get this again,” said Gullah Joe. “You like it too good.”

  “Give it to my woman!” cried Denmark. “Make her well again!”

  “She sick in the brain,” said Gullah Joe. “This don’t do no good for brain.”

  “Well then you go on and kill me again, you cheating bastard! I’m sick of living like this, everybody hate me, I hate myself!”

  “I don’t hate you,” said Gullah Joe. “I got a use for you.”

  And ever since then, Denmark had been with Gullah Joe. Denmark’s money had gone to supporting both him and Gullah Joe, and to accomplish whatever Joe wanted done. Half Denmark’s day was spent taking care of new-arrived slaves, gathering their names and bringing them home to Joe.

  The whole idea of taking names came from Denmark’s woman. Not that she thought of it. But when Denmark rented the warehouse and brought Gullah Joe and the woman both to live there, Gullah Joe asked her what her name was. She just looked at him and said, “I don’ know, master.” It was a far cry from what she used to say to Denmark, back before he made her stupid. In those days she’d say, “Master never know my name. You call me what you want, but I never tell my name.”

  Well, when Gullah Joe asked Denmark what the woman’s name was, and Denmark didn’t know, why, you might have thought Joe had eaten a pepper, the way he started jumping around and howling and yipping. “She never told her name!” he cried. “She kept her soul!”

  “She kept her hate,” said Denmark. “I tried to love her and I don’t even know what to call her except Woman.”

  But Gullah didn’t care about Denmark’s sad story. He got to work with his witchery. He made Denmark catch him a seagull—not an easy thing to do, but with Joe’s Catching Stick it went well enough. Soon the seagull’s body parts were baked, boiled, mixed, glued, woven, or knotted into a feathered cape that Gullah Joe would throw over his head to turn himself into a seagull. “Not really,” he explained to Denmark. “I still a man, but I fly and White sailor, he see gulls.” Joe would fly out to slaveships coming in to port in Camelot. He’d go down into the hold and tell the people they needed to get their name-string made before they landed, and give it to the half-Black man who gave them water.

  “Put hate and fear in name-string,” he said to them. “Peaceful and happy be all that stay behind. I keep you safe till the right day.” Or that was what he told Denmark that he said. Few of the arriving slaves spoke any English, so he had to explain it to them in some African language. Or maybe he was able to convey it all to them in knot language. Denmark wouldn’t know—Gullah Joe wouldn’t teach him what the knotwork meant or how it worked. “You read and write White man talk,” Gullah Joe said. “That be enough secret for one man.” Denmark only knew that somehow these people knew how to tie bits of this and that with scraps of string and cloth and thread and somehow it would contain their name, plus a sign for fear and a sign for hate. Even though he couldn’t understand it, the knotted name-strings made Denmark proud, for it proved that Black people knew how to read and write back in Africa, only it wasn’t marks on paper, it was knots in string.

  Besides gathering the names of the newly arrived slaves, Denmark helped collect the names of the slaves already in Camelot. Word spread among the Blacks—Denmark only had to pass along a garden fence with an open basket, and Black hands would reach out and drop name-strings into the basket. “Thank you,” they said. “Thank you.”

  “Not me,” he would answer. “Don’t thank me. I ain’t nobody.”

  Came a day not long ago when they had all the slave
s’ names, and Gullah Joe sang all night. “My people happy now,” he said. “My people got they happy.”

  “They’re still slaves,” Denmark pointed out.

  “All they hate in there,” said Gullah Joe, pointing at the bulging net.

  “All their hope, too,” said Denmark. “They got no hope now either.”

  “I no take they hope,” said Gullah Joe. “White man take they hope!”

  “They all stupid like my woman,” said Denmark.

  “No, no,” said Gullah Joe. “They smart. They wise.”

  “Well, nobody knows it but you.”

  Gullah Joe only grinned and tapped his head. Apparently it was enough for Joe to know the truth.

  There was one person who wasn’t happy, though. Oh, Denmark was glad enough to have a purpose in his life, to have Black people look at him with gratitude instead of loathing. But that wasn’t the same as being happy. His woman was still before him every day, lurching through her housework, mumbling words he could barely understand. Gullah Joe saw that his people weren’t unhappy anymore. But Denmark saw that the happiest people were the Whites. He heard them talking.

  “You see how docile they are?”

  “Slavery is the natural state of the Black man.”

  “They don’t wish to rise above their present condition.”

  “They are content.”

  “The only place where Blacks are angry is where they are permitted to live without a master.”

  “The Black man cannot be happy without discipline.”

  And so on, throughout the city. White people came to Camelot from all over the world, and what they saw was contented slaves. It persuaded them that slavery must not be such a bad thing after all. Denmark hated this. But Gullah Joe seemed not to care.

  “Black man day come,” said Gullah Joe.

  “When?”