Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  “The second was Juda, a young girl, perhaps fifteen, hardly more than a girl. She had had a lover, a field hand, but strong and determined to somehow become skilled. When he had learned she was pregnant he had run, hoping to reach the North, to somehow find the money to send for her and the child. She had waited for him to send word—had waited for months, worried that he had been killed, or that he had forgotten her. But then she had seen him brought back, his arms and legs chained, a man on a horse dragging him through the dust on his belly, like a snake. She had seen him flogged and branded. And when he had been sent back to the fields, he had told her that he had been wrong to run, that they would live together in slavery, that their child would grow to be a strong field hand…. But when her pregnancy had at last begun to show he had hanged himself with his chains. And so she had run with Harriette Brewer. The child had been born on the journey, delivered with the help of Lydia, in a Virginia barn. She held it to her breast, a tiny, wrinkled thing, sick from exposure, its tiny lungs choked with fluid. It would die soon; she knew that, and so she had not bothered to give it a name.

  “Next was the old man. His master had called him Jacob, but that, he said, was not his name; his name was Azacca, he had been given it by his father, who had come from Haiti. He did not know how old he was, but he knew he was an old man because he had been a slave for a long time. When he was young he had learned to count to seven, and from then on he had counted up his Christmases. When he counted seven he would start over. He had started over seven times, and he was up to five and he was worried that he would not know when Christmas was, without a master to bring a trinket. If he did know, he would have another problem, because that would make seven sevens and six more and he would only have a year to learn another number, or to figure out how to keep track…. Of course, since he was an old man, he might go home first. His job had been to tend the gardens, the special ones that grew flowers and the vegetables for the master and his family. He had been very good at that, and he had liked it; he had known that he would go on doing that until he died. He hadn’t minded that—he liked the garden. But he had wanted to be a free man, and the Old Master had promised that he would be, that he would put it in his Will. But when the Old Master died the Young Master said there was nothing like that in the will. And so he had run with Harriette Brewer. But first he had plucked every flower and smashed every vegetable, and poured salt on the ground.

  “The fourth was Linda. She was young and strong, in better health than the others, not only because of her youth but because she had not run as far as they had. She was from a different plantation; she did not know where it was, but it must have been farther north, because the others had passed it, and she joined them. She had not really wanted to run away, but she had always helped those who did. She had been bringing food to the others when she had been seen by another slave, a man, who said that unless she would sleep with him he would betray her. She had said she would, to play for time, while she slipped into the fields to get her three young sons, Daniel, Robert, and Francis, and they had run away.

  “The children were already sleeping—Daniel, Robert, and Francis curled together on a sack of corn, the other three sleeping on the hard dirt floor. Two were girls. Harriette told him their names were Cara and Mara. The boy was William. He was the eldest, about ten, it seemed to C.K. And then he realized that the boy could not have been that old, because they were all Harriette’s children. He looked at her, but she turned quickly away, going silently back to the hearth, where she was cooking a mixture of the corn meal they had found in the mill with water and the little salt she had carried. C.K. said nothing. He simply took the dried beef and dried apples from his gunny-sack and gave them to her.

  “They ate slowly, dipping with hand-carved spoons into the communal pot, not rushing because they were too hungry to really feel hunger. They looked as though the food was just another meal, not their first real one in almost a day. C.K. knew what the effect of the food would be; it would make them sleep, heavy and deep. But before that they would become cheerful. He waited for that, watching as they finished the last of the corn meal and beef, and chewed on half an apple each, watching as their eyes began to take on a little sparkle, their movements a bit more life; as the children, who had at first been more than a little cranky at being roused from sleep, began to act almost as children should act; the two little girls whispering to themselves and peeking at him from behind their spoons, the three boys, inspecting him with curiosity, edging ever closer to him, before slipping away to explore the corners of the mill. The fourth boy, William, was different; he sat calmly on the floor, his attention divided between C.K. and his mother. When C.K. rose and took the pot the boy followed him outside, stood silently at his elbow while he washed the pot and filled it with water, aped his movements when C.K. stood and peered up at the sky, looking at the clouds driving northwards. But when C.K. looked down he found the boy looking not at the sky, but at him. He smiled, but the boy did not; simply regarded him silently, and then trailed him back inside, watching as he placed the pot over the fire, only sitting down again when C.K. resumed his seat.

  “When the water boiled C.K. took the jug of whiskey from his gunnysack and poured it into the kettle. He served the grog to them, one by one, using the only cup they carried. Then, when they had drunk, he stood up in the firelight and told them what they were going to do. How they would sleep for eight hours or so and then get up and make the run out of the cove while there was still darkness to hide them, and to hide their trails until the snow, driven by the south wind, drifted and covered it. How once they were clear of the cove they would simply climb the mountain, with the wind at their backs, and still in darkness. How after that they could slip into the cover of the deep woods and go north by trails he and no one else knew, how they would reach the Town the next night and be hidden and fed; how all it came down to was a simple run of a few miles to get them out of the cove, and then they would be safe. He watched their eyes as he spoke, saw the disbelief in them, the defeat, the distrust. He stopped talking then. Not abruptly, just letting it go, knowing that there was nothing that he could say to them that would really bring their spirits back to life. That would take a miracle. And so he fell silent, feeling, with sudden sharpness, the pain in his ribs, the fatigue in his muscles, the age in his bones. He sat down heavily. The others said nothing. After a while Harriette rose and went with Linda to settle the children for the night.

  “The others began to talk again then, but C.K. did not pay any attention to them; he stared into the fire and listened instead to the rattle of the shutters as the wind gusted outside. But then he realized that one voice was a little louder than the others. Or perhaps not louder, just more distinct. He turned then, and saw her. She had left the children and was kneeling by the fire a few feet away from him, staring into the flames as he had been, but talking softly, as though she were talking to herself, and he and the others were only overhearing. But they all heard, C.K. and the rest of them, and they listened as she told her story.

  “She told them how she had grown up favored, black, but in a place where black people had their own society, a society in which she, light-skinned and well provided for, occupied a high place. She told them how she had only known a good house and good clothes and good food and good schooling. And how one day the single, unquestionable sign of her womanhood had come, and her mother had told her what it meant. Then she had realized where the money came from, what her mother did to get it. Then she had begun to hate. To hate her mother for being a white man’s mistress, for giving herself airs to conceal the truth from the world. To hate the white man, not because he was unkind, or ungenerous, but because he made it possible for her mother to debase herself, because he took it as his right that a black woman should do that, should be grateful for his generosity, should ask for nothing more. And to hate herself. Because even though now she knew where the money came from, and why, she still took the things it purchased: lived in the house, wore th
e clothes, ate the food, went to the school, and worse, did nothing for it, not even debase herself.

  “She told them how she spent the first years after she learned the truth angry, troubled, hating more and more, hating not just the white man who came but all whites, and eventually, all men; not showing it, not even really feeling it, but rather feeling nothing, none of the stirrings that young girls are supposed to feel. Young men courted her—she was pretty and, more important, light-skinned—but found her cold. Not innocent and proper—they would have expected that—not even timid or prudish, but cold.

  “She told them how, when she was eighteen years old, still a virgin and disinterested in becoming otherwise, she discovered a kind of passion; she met a man named William Still, the son of a woman who had twice escaped slavery, once by purchase, once by flight, the second time leaving two young sons behind. She saw how Still felt guilt at not having been one of them. She admired the way he used that guilt, dedicating himself to helping those who ran away. And she joined him, seeing in the work they did a chance to pay back for the struggle she had not had. The work helped her, brought her into contact with people who knew slavery, and from talking to them, she had come to understand how her mother might prefer genteel prostitution.

  “And so, she told them, it became possible for her to know true passion, to love the man who came in the spring of 1850, offering to give Still what seemed amazing sums of money for the work of the Underground Railroad, providing Still would make efforts to foster and encourage the escape of slaves, especially women and children. Still was wary, but she saw the brilliance in the man’s plan, and the daring in it. And she saw the dedication and determination in his eyes. And so she began to work with him, to plan with him, adding her ideas of detail to his broad outlines. She worried that he would reject her, because she was a woman, and because she had not known slavery. At first he did; but not, it seemed, for those reasons. It seemed he had reasons of his own. And so she went about the community, asking about him, finding that he was a man who had come, it seemed, from nowhere, probably from slavery, and who had become a spokesman of sorts, a respected man of property, and that his wife had been killed by a white man’s hand and he had given his money away and disappeared, coming back years later with a hardened face and a wagon full of whiskey. By then he had come to accept her, to respect her, and the plans were no longer his plans amended by her, but plans created by both of them. And so it made sense that she would fall in love with him, that she would give to him the virginity that she had not so much been keeping but simply not been interested in losing.

  “The plans, she told them, grew. Their love had grown. The man went back into the hills to make his whiskey. She worked on alone, except for the rare occasions, once, twice, when he would come to her for a night, or two nights. Then they planned how, when spring came, they would make their first trip south. But the time came when she knew that was never going to happen. Because she discovered she was with child.

  “She had, she told them, cried when she knew. For by then she knew how much she needed to go, to make final payment for the debt she felt she owed. But she knew that by the time he was back it would be too late—her condition would show. But unless she went, unless she made that final payment, she would never be right for herself, or right for him. So she went alone, to steal away a few to freedom, and in doing it, buy her own.

  “But, she told them, she had been a long time paying. For in southern Virginia, on the banks of the Nottoway River, she was taken. One of the women she had exhorted to flight betrayed her and the three others she had already enticed away, and all of them, betrayed and betrayer—the woman’s master judged she had not spoken up as quickly as she should have—were sold.

  She had been taken, she said, to Alexandria, and brokered by the firm of Franklin & Armfield, and later transported to New Orleans, where she was purchased, at a premium because of her light skin, by a young blade, the son of a rich planter, who wanted her for a concubine. But she escaped that fate by avoiding the consummation until her pregnancy was impossible to ignore, and then telling the young man and his father that the child was fathered by a man as black as the ace of spades. Neither of them believed her. But they dared not take the chance that a light-skinned woman, known to be the concubine of a planter’s son, would produce a dark child. And so they put her to work in the fields.

  “And then, she told them, she had paid the price in truth. She learned what it meant to be a slave: to rise in darkness and go to bed in darkness, to have the entire daylight of her life the property of someone else; to buy nothing, not only because she had no money, but because it was against the law for her to carry out even so simple a transaction; to hide her knowledge of reading and writing, to stand and listen to the master and his son, using words she was not supposed to know, discussing her fate and not be able to show anything; to do exactly what she was told in the way that she was told, to forget she knew better ways; to eat coarse food and drink brackish water; to beg permission to void her own waste; to see the man who had wanted to make her his plaything approach on horseback and, even though she had thwarted him, to lower her eyes and look only at the mud on his boots; to accept, when he chose, for no better reason than that he chose, the sting of his crop.

  “That, she told them, had not been so bad. But in time she gave birth to her child, and then she really came to understand what slavery meant. Because there was nothing she could do for him. She could nurse him and protect him, but only so long as the Master willed it. She realized that she was her son’s only protection, and that her only protection was to appear to accept slavery.

  “And so she had adopted the poses of slavery. Covered the light in her eyes with drooping lids, the intelligence in her mind with halting speech, the aching in her soul with loud professions of belief in the tenets of the perverted Christianity that was fed to the slaves like corn meal and fat meat. She accepted her role: she was a woman and a slave, and such women take men and bear children, breed for Massa; she took a man and had two girls, covering the longing in her heart with the pumping of her thighs. And as a reward for her diligence, she was taken from the fields and placed in the house.

  “That, she had said, had been her downfall. Because she looked back at the fields and was thankful to the Master for taking her from them; in feeling that, she accepted his right to put her where he chose. And as soon as she did that, she became truly a slave. She found her new role, her new status, obscenely comfortable. She gave her mind only to the care of the Master’s house and the children that were, in reality, the Master’s property, and she gave thanks each day that he did not sell them, or her, or her man. She stopped longing for a life of freedom and for the man she had left, not because she had forgotten either, but because she had forgotten herself; she had forgotten how to long for anything. She went through her days, doing her tasks without hatred, without bitterness. She no longer needed to hide anything, because there was nothing in her to hide.

  “And then one day the Master had died. That was not a terrible thing, but it made a difference. Because now the son was the Master. She saw him eyeing her, knowing that he did not desire her as he once had, but that he still hated her. And she saw him eyeing her son, the child who, by his lightness of skin, signified her triumph of deception.

  “And so, she told them, she had begun to reject slavery. It had not been easy. For she was surrounded by people, black and white, who thought of things a certain way. The wrong way, she knew, but she had forgotten what the right way was, was not sure that she had ever known. And so she began to practice. She practiced remembering all the things she had allowed herself to forget: her mother, the life she had led, the man she had loved. She was unfaithful to the man who, in normal society, would have been her husband, not with her body, but with her mind, thinking, when he came to her, of the other man, trying to remember how he had touched her, what he had said to her, what he had wanted of her, thinking of it as infidelity because fidelity was a con
cept denied the slave. She went through each day outwardly unchanging, doing exactly what she was told to do in exactly the way she had been told to do it, but thinking what she would have done, how she would have done it, had it been her choice. She practiced defiance, putting dirt and bits of soap and manure in the food she cooked for the whites, thinking of things to say to them that could have been taken two ways. At the same time, she worked at appearing the model slave, better than before, anxious to please, bright and cheerful, but she worked at not believing her own deceptions, at keeping close to her mind and heart the things she really thought and felt.

  “It had, she told them, taken months to throw off the servile habits of action and thought. And as she pushed those habits away from her she came to appreciate more the other slaves, those who had been born into slavery, who had never known anything else, to realize how difficult even the smallest act of defiance must have been for them; not so much to do it, but to simply think of it. She began to listen to the others talking in the evening, not passing the time as she had before when she was thinking as a slave, but listening to them, searching among them for the strongest, the most determined, those who might run with her. When she found them she encouraged them, allowed them to encourage her. She needed them. Because she was still not sure she could do what she had set out to do.

  “But one night she had become sure. It was a midsummer night, she said, bright and clear, and she had been sitting in front of her cabin, her head tilted back against the logs, looking up in the sky, trying to recall the things she had learned about navigating by the stars. She had gone through the constellations, naming them, remembering their mythical significances: the Scorpion; the Twins; the Goat; the Archer; the Great Bear, the Small Bear…and then she saw, not a constellation, but a single star. The North Star. Saw it not twinkling fitfully but shining bright and clear and steady. And then she knew she could do it; all she needed was the will.