by Norman Lock
I slept until dark, or nearly, when I roused myself and went stealthily through the woods which, now that night had fallen, were blacker even than the moonless sky. Leaving them, I was careful to make certain no one was by the creek—called Ballard Creek—or in the narrow marsh between it and the trees. I waded into the water and, aided by the dead limb of a tree, let the current carry me downstream to Ragged Creek, a journey of not more than five miles. There I hid on one of the small pine-covered islands in the brackish marsh on the south bank of the James.
I lived on oysters, which were plentiful—their meat, a delicious buttery flavor—and clean water from a spring. I suffered neither hunger nor thirst, although I was very much afraid. Sometimes I could hear the baying of dogs, but if they had been set on me, they would be sure to have lost my scent where I had entered the creek. All the while I was on the island—six or seven days—I saw only a boy carrying an old fowling piece, going in search of ducks, and an old man pulling up sweet-flag root, an Indian remedy for fever and troubles of the stomach. If I suffered hardship, it was the clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies that hovered above the creek and marshland, especially at night. They drew blood and raised welts on my bare chest and arms. I had escaped from the stable wearing just my cotton pantaloons. Only my back was proof against the pests because of its scars, which had been laid down through the years with the patience of a woman at her needle. I thought I’d go mad with the incessant itch and the persistent buzz of flies and sizzle of mosquitoes, the clamor of marsh birds.
I don’t know when I came down with fever. I might have cured myself with sweet-flag tea, but I had no matches and would have been scared to light a fire if I’d had some. I could not get warm, though the days and nights were mild. I shook and my teeth chattered for what seemed like days, as I lay on a bed of pine boughs. I had dreams of—I couldn’t have said what. They were strange and broken. I bit down on a stick to keep myself from crying out. Awake, I felt no better. Everything around me appeared to tilt, as though I had drunk too much corn liquor. My brain felt salted—scooped out and put in brine. I had a most terrible thirst. The stink of dank mud and rotting shellfish became intolerable, making me retch. I tasted blood from the bit that had been in my mouth. I lay there without a thought for my safety—not trusting in the Almighty or in providence, for I hadn’t wits enough to trust or think or keep myself from harm. I was no better than an insensate thing—a rotting log, a cottonwood stump, a dead bird. I might have been eaten by water rats, stung by snakes, or discovered by a man hunter. But no harm befell me during that time of travail, and I thank God or providence for it.
I said that I might have been discovered by a man hunter—or a citizen of Isle of White County, Virginia, convinced that a runaway ought to be returned to his master, according to the laws of Virginia and of God, who gave the white race dominion over the black one. Instead, it was the old man, who had been after sweet-flag roots, who found me and, with his son, carried me—not to safety, for there was none for a fugitive and his abettors, but to his nearby farm. We went at night like thieves. I will not give the names of my benefactors, in case they should become known and punished for their good deeds.
I stayed in their house, sleeping in a narrow chamber hidden behind a wall. Its rough lathwork coated with plaster and horsehair reminded me of Bucephalus and the stable from which I had made my reckless escape. The old man and his son fed me broth, gave me sweet-flag and burdock teas, cared for my wound, and brought me back to health and strength.
“Why do you put yourselves in jeopardy?” I asked them one night. I was sitting in a corner of their parlor, out of sight of anyone who might have peered through the window—the glazing changed by night and candlelight into a mirror. In it, I could see the reflection of the old man’s face, gilded by firelight. “For a stranger, a runaway black man?”
They replied, at first, with a silence lengthy and deep enough for me to hear a candlewick sputter in the sconce, a pine branch crackle on the grate, the dog scratch an itch with its hind leg. The son yawned onto the back of his hand and then wiped his lips with it, as though the question had been answered long before now and could no longer worry him. For the space of that silence, the world might have been changed—slavery abolished, evil men reformed, Jesus resurrected, and the New Jerusalem established.
And then the father said, “‘But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.’”
I thought I heard his son make some small affirming noise, but perhaps it was only the house that I had heard, sighing out its contentment up in the rooftree. In any case, no more was said by them on the subject of obligation. I would think of those two men—whose virtue might have been crumbs inside the pockets of their coats for all they made of it—when Emerson asked me later what it meant to be human.
After several days had passed without misadventure or alarm, the son took me the half mile across the James in a canoe. We traveled by night, encouraged by a heavy mist that had settled on the marshland and the broad river, and landed on the far shore at Warwick, the old county seat. His father had provided me with clothes appropriate to the station of freedman, in addition to five dollars and a letter, written on good paper in a fussy hand, purporting to be an offer of employment from a draper’s establishment in Baltimore. A second letter, giving every appearance of age and handling, attested to my freeborn status. At a glance, it would allay suspicions if I were forced into the open—there to rely on my own wits.
We the Subscribers do certify that Samuel Long, a negro man, lived when a boy with Thomas Armatt in Richmond. When Mr. Armatt moved to Philadelphia, Long lived with John Cadwalder. We have always understood that he was born free and as a free man he has lived many years in this county of Warwick, in Virginia.
Oct. 7, 1834
John Littlejohn
Jacob Murrey
In Warwick Towne, my next “conductor” was a cooper. Without delay, he bid me climb into a large oak cask, where I was promptly sealed up. The alacrity with which I found myself plunged into utter darkness dismayed me, but I was encouraged by a provision of johnnycake, a flask of water, and one of wine to fortify me on my journey. The cask was soon hoisted onto a wagon, and a team of horses toiled along roads that were, by turns, rough and stony, corduroyed, and cobblestoned. I would remain inside the cask for several days, nibbling johnnycake and taking water sparingly. I had had experience of close confinement in what Mr. Jeroboam called the “little ease,” a cramped prison in which one could neither lie down at full length nor stand, and I was only slightly incommoded inside the cask, which was destined for a brewery in the North. Had its eventual contents been bourbon instead of beer, the interior would have been charred to flavor and color it. Fortunately, I was spared the irony and the soot.
In time, the wagon stopped, and from the noise of capstans, winches, gulls, and caulking hammers, I surmised that we had reached a port town. After a while, the cask was taken off the wagon and set in what I assumed was a warehouse or a shed near the water, whose dank odor reached me through the bunghole in the cask. I could hear the shouts of stevedores, draymen, and porters in the distance. Once, I overheard two men talking; they must have been standing just outside the cask. I held my breath, afraid they would discover me.
“He’s a bastard, that one.”
“He’s that, and no denying it.”
“I’d like to stick my hook in him.”
“I wouldn’t care if you did.”
“Will you go to Denis Kelly’s place tonight?”
“Oh, I should think so.”
One of the men patted the swelling side of the cask affectionately. He would have dragged me out and put his hook in me if he had known I was lurking inside. “I could drink this dry,” he said.
“It’s a grand thing to—”
They walked off, and I could breathe easier once again.
I slept poorly that night—I assumed it
was night because of the silence into which the world seemed to have fallen, disturbed fitfully by the creak of lapstrake planking and straining hawsers. By now, the air inside the cask was foul, despite the missing plug in the bunghole, through which I was able to draw breath and save myself from a faint. The smell of oak, ordinarily pleasing, sickened me, and I longed for the tang of salt water carried on a freshening wind. I attempted to distract myself with imagining what life in the North would be like for me, but I could picture little more than a street down which negroes walked in fine clothes.
In the morning, announced by the resumption of sounds peculiar to wharves, the cask was hauled—on a kind of trolley, I supposed—onto the pier, swung aloft, and let down into a cargo hold. I kept silent vigil over the dark and by now familiar mysteries of the cask, which I had come to think of as my casket. I reminded myself of the terrors and privations of the Middle Passage. What was my cramped journey next to that? In two days’ time, the schooner, whose name I later learned was Grace—as though I had been a person in Bunyan’s allegory—entered Lower New York Bay at Sandy Hook and sailed through the Narrows to New York. At last, the cask was raised from the hold, put onto another wagon, and carried along a noisy street. My dulled senses awoke to the screech of the barrel head being prized off by an iron crowbar. In a moment, I was staggering on unsteady legs, my eyes black and stinging in the weak light that fell through the dirty panes set in the warehouse roof.
“What place is this?” I asked stupidly. At that moment—so rich with possibility—I had not an inkling of my whereabouts.
“Chambers Street Warehouse,” said the man who had freed me like Jonah from the belly of the whale. “That’s the North River, which some call the Hudson,” he said, motioning toward a nearby river—what I could see of it sparkling between the masts of numerous ships docked at the bottom of the street.
I must have appeared bewildered, because the man—a teamster wearing a leather apron and cap—exclaimed, “New York City, north of the Battery!”
His irritation frightened me, and I handed him my forged papers, as I would have to any white man in authority.
“Nothing to do with me,” he said, handing them back. He must have regretted his harsh tone. I saw pity in his stubbled face, and clung—shamefully—to it. I almost wished that he would pat me on the head the way Mr. Jeroboam sometimes did when he was feeling well disposed toward his negroes. He would repent of his weakness—he considered it so—and the next day, he would repudiate his human feeling with the lash. “You’re a free man,” the teamster said, “though if I were you, friend, I’d waste no time in getting farther north. Man hunters are on the prowl, in search of runaways.”
He had called me “friend”!
He gave me a suit of “Sunday” clothes, done up in brown paper and string. In a pocket of the frock coat was the address of a lady living in Brooklyn. The “conductors” deserve hosannas and trumpets for their bravery, but they would suffer for their glory. In any case, they are of a type of men and women that does not seek acknowledgment for the good they do.
I left the warehouse timidly, like a dog that had been kept a long while in a cage. I had never before seen so many people in one place. The streets were loud with shouting and the neighing of horses, of wagons clattering over cobblestones, and the ceaseless to-and-fro of all manner of people. All was a whirl, as though I were viewing the world through Mistress Jeroboam’s phenakistoscope.
I walked across the lower part of Manhattan, until I came to a ferry slip on the East River. Shops and manufactories jammed the streets. Not even in Richmond, where Jeroboam had bought me, had I seen so many people crowding, jostling, and speaking in all the tongues of Babel. The sky here seemed far away, and I felt lonelier than I had on Ragged Island, or inside the cask—the final instrument of my deliverance. I began to shake as I had in the marsh while stricken with fever. Why had I come? I asked myself. What business can I possibly have here?
I boarded a ferry and made myself small in the stern amid crates and hampers of peevish chickens and hissing geese. Their clamor was answered by my own uproarious heart and by the mechanical clatter of steamboats. Black rags of coal smoke unraveled from iron stacks of packet boats, ferries, and side-wheelers crisscrossing the river. The river was brown, fast, and rolling; it made not the slightest impression of softness the way some rivers do. Instead, it made me think of rust and sheets of cold corrugated iron; I could feel its undulations underfoot.
Having docked on the opposite shore of the East River, I soon found myself at the address in Brooklyn Heights that had been given to me. I cannot be more explicit for the good woman’s sake. She was of middle age, and, by her clothes, bonnet, and quaint speech, I took her for a Quaker. She did not ask me about my life. Having just escaped bondage, I had none yet that I could call mine. I was satisfied to watch her ply the needle, read the newspaper, look down the heights at the river, and cosset a kitten, which her son had given her to lessen her loneliness. She was, she told me without self-pity, recently widowed. She practiced what the Friends call an “expectant waiting upon God.” Her house was plain, like her dress and speech. I stayed there for a day and a night. Of my brief time with her, I remember a bowl of gillyflowers, vivid and colorful—even garish amid the austere furnishings. They made me homesick. Can you imagine anything more unfathomable than the human heart?
I left that peaceable kingdom on the heights above the river early in the morning with pocket money, a loaf of unleavened bread such as the fugitive Israelites took with them into Canaan, and a small book my benefactress gave me to read during the last leg of my journey: The Florist’s Guide, by T. Bridgeman, gardener, seedsman, and florist, published in New York. I have enjoyed that little work through the years for its homely enthusiasm and observations quite in keeping with Henry’s and Emerson’s own. I recall this verse in particular:
Thine is a glorious volume, Nature! Each
Line, leaf, and page, is fill’d with living lore;
Wisdom more pure than sage could ever teach,
And all philosophy’s divinest store;
Rich lessons rise where’er thy tracks are trod:
The book of Nature is the book of God.
At the Catherine Street slip, I boarded a packet boat and watched as the Brooklyn Navy Yard at Wallabout Bay fell into the hazy distance, the reach behind us churned by our stern paddle. We traveled the East River’s tidal strait past Bushwick Inlet, Newtown, and Newtown Creek, which divides Brooklyn and Queens. With the finger of Blackwell’s Island to larboard, we steamed through Hell Gate and, at Throggs Neck, we entered Long Island Sound.
I would have been ignorant of our northerly progress if it had not been for an affable “traveler in furbelows,” as a fellow passenger said after having introduced himself. He was dressed like most who drum for business, and he had with him the usual cases of the commercial trade.
“Mine,” he said with a wink, “are not much heavier than a drawerful of ladies’ pantalets.”
Ordinarily, I would have shied from a man careless of his words, whose meaning tended to be broad, even vulgar. A slave must be guarded in his speech—silence, in fact, is the safest way to escape the rod. The drummer’s casual manner disquieted me. I might offend him by my reserve or by too great a familiarity. When he offered me a drink from the pint bottle of rye he kept in his pocket, I hesitated. Finally, I drank to his good health, careful not to wipe the bottle’s lip on my sleeve. I was glad when the conversation—it was more like a monologue—returned to the geography through which the boat was slowly passing, clouds of coal smoke billowing from the stacks.
“You can see Brown Hills,” he said, pointing with his stick southeasterly across the sound. “They seem almost to jump up out of the water at Orient, on the North Fork of Long Island.” He continued his enumeration. “Ahead is Plum Island and then Fishers Island, like a fish bone stuck in the throat of Block Island Sound. We’ll steam past New Shoreham . . . Falmouth, on Vineyard Sound . . . Cl
ay Cliffs . . . Aquinnah Cliffs . . . Nauset Beach . . . Truro . . . and Provincetown, where we’ll strike northwesterly for Boston Light.”
I watched crazed gulls hunt the white furrows of our wake as robins do earthworms after rain. The whole world is born with a hunger, I thought. We spend our lives in trying to appease it.
“We should arrive in Boston harbor in two days’ time,” said the traveler in furbelows, “provided the weather, the Atlantic, and the god of steam raise no serious objections.” He spat over the side in the direction of the wind and said, “Always spit to leeward, never to windward”—as good a piece of advice as any I have heard.
He had traveled many times on the Boston packet in pursuit of commercial buyers for his “dainties,” and knew the lay of the land. Eventually, I grew tired of his asides on the cities and towns, hotels and oyster bars between Yonkers and Commercial Street in Boston. Apologizing for deserting him at the larboard rail, which he seemed reluctant to leave, I went below into a makeshift steerage, where benches and hammocks had been provided for common travelers. My eyes ached from having stared for so long across the water, whose salt had burned my wind-chafed lips. Feeling unwell, I lay on one of the benches, afraid of presuming to occupy a hammock. I slept but saw no dreamy coastal towns pass in review while the boat headed north.