“He didn’t beat you no more after that?” Oli asked.
“Naw.”
“Didn’t? What’d you spook him? Put the fear of nigger in him?”
“I said he didn’t beat me. But he got him this other boy a big slave named John, to beat me. Worked me over good. Near killed me, that beating. But when I woke up I had me a plan, and I done followed it ever since. So these here scars ain’t nothing I’m troubled about. They just the reminder of the day I got the sense beat into me and became my own man.”
He held up his hand and motioned for the bottle. When he had drunk from it again, he went on to tell of his swim across the Bay, a feat which prompted Oli to call him the swimmingest Negro he had ever heard tell of. He told of his fatigue and of the rain and of the cold. It was easy enough to share these things, but he gave only a few scant details about Dover. When he fell silent and Oli rambled on, William recalled her face and the parts of her body he knew so well. It was unbelievable that he had once held her beside him and spoken to her of the casual events of life, that he had run his fingers over her features and placed his lips against her skin. It seemed stranger still that she had invested him with some similar affection, that she had touched him and whispered in his ear and invoked him to do things to her in lovemaking that he wouldn’t have conceived of otherwise. He tried to find solace in these moments, but he only grew more uncomfortable. Perhaps things had never been as he imagined. With the alcohol slipping between the cracks in his recollections, he began to see a darker significance to all of his memories of Dover.
He recalled the first time he had ever seen her. In the August fury. He was kneeling between two rosebushes, shears in both hands, working the gardens on the edge of the Masons’ estate. The tool was too large for the close and dangerous work, and he had to crane at awkward angles to make the appropriate cuts, all the time avoiding the plants’ thorns. He was concentrating on the work, imagining perfections to the plants’ forms and trying to make them real. A woman’s voice roused him from these thoughts. She sang a tune just quietly enough so that he couldn’t pick up the words. He recognized the melody, though he couldn’t place it. It was beautiful, this voice, and unfamiliar. He stood up, but in so doing placed his back against the thorns. He cried out and lurched forward, knicking his chest. He slashed out with his arms and cut tiny cat scratches in them as well. By the time he freed himself and turned toward the woman she had stopped to stare at him. He was robbed of speech. They shared a long moment, but in the end she turned and continued on her way without having said a word to him. They never broke that silence. And try as he might, he couldn’t find any more grace or dignity in the moment. Their first meeting was painful, embarrassing. Dover had robbed him of something. She had impaled him. She had walked away with a piece of him, and he had still not recovered from the loss.
He hardly noticed when Oli handed him another bottle, a smaller one this time and more finely constructed. He took it in hand and listened as Oli told another story. He would never remember bringing that bottle to his lips. He was too full of other memories, too confused at the way the world shimmied before his eyes and too focused on the strange waves of euphoric nausea that rolled through him. He had to concentrate to single out the true Oli from the two or three phantoms that shifted in and out of sight. Though he stared hard at him, he wouldn’t recall anything different in Oli’s eyes. It was only when he felt himself losing consciousness that he realized he had consumed that second bottle on his own, while Oli drank only from the water skin.
William awoke knowing that he had been hearing the voices for some time. He had sensed movement around him. His body had been pulled this way and that, rolled and dragged and handled. But for all the motion he was only vaguely involved. The sensations were muted, distant. It hadn’t occurred to him to respond to this world until a splash of moisture on his face jolted him awake. He opened his eyes on a skewed and unfocused scene. His hands were aching and numb all at once. He tried to bring them up to his face, but his arms were yanked to a halt by chains. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t find the balance to do even that. His head was full of rocks that ground against the side of his skull at the slightest provocation, the pain of it blotting his thoughts.
The pale face of a white man came into view, lean in the jaw but heavily browed. His skin was red and peeling from the summer sun. Old pox scars were evenly spaced over his cheeks and down his neck, and he bore a dimple in his cheek that must’ve been an old puncture wound.
“You gone and slept in your own sick,” the man said. “I hate to see a grown man like that.”
Pieces of the previous day flew back to William: the other black man, the weak one who told stories, the scent of cheese, the banquet spread before him, two men atop a single pony a mirage of three faces mingling and merging, whiskey and laughter and … And they’d been found. Slave catchers had tracked them down and come upon them while they slept. The understanding flooded upon him in its entirety. They had been caught, he and the other one, the frail one, the runt with the crooked spine …
But then he realized that Oli was standing just beyond the white man, a few feet away, hat mounted once again above his mass of hair. William tried to focus on him, but his image wavered before him, real enough to render identity but no details. He was standing there, not chained at all but just standing, watching. William thought of his knife, but knew in an instant that it was gone.
“Oli, see that there’s a space for this one in the wagon.” The white leaned in closer, lowering his face down to within inches of William’s. “Sorry to wake you like this. I know it ain’t civilized, but we got some distance to cover to get us back to camp. You may be a little cloudy right now on the particulars of what’s transpiring here, but I’ll tell you this much so there’s no confusion bout it. You’re plum in the shit, boy. Hope you enjoyed your taste of liberty, cause it’s over. Finished and done with. It’s as official as Waterloo. You’re back to bondage. My nigger Oli made sure of that.”
The man didn’t try to make William rise. Instead, he just dragged him by his feet. William’s shirt rode up his back, the undergrowth of ferns and twigs scratching across his skin. It wasn’t a long journey, however. The wagon was near at hand. The two men hoisted him and dropped his dead weight alongside boxes and crates and a soft thing that he slowly realized was the carcass of a deer. The wagon moved off, weaving its way through the trees for a few minutes, then dropping down into a steadier route of even grooves. He realized that they hadn’t camped in the wilderness in which he had thought they had. A road ran just over the next ridge, no more than a quarter mile from where they’d slept. It was on this road they now traveled.
As the morning passed and his head cleared, William’s eyes searched the wagon for a weapon or some sort of key, anything that he might turn against his captors. He even considered the antlers of the deer itself, wondering how much force it would take to snap one off, imagining the bloody damage such an instrument could inflict. But the two men had left nothing that he could really use against them. So he devised plans wherein he used his bare hands as weapons, his fingers like prongs to gouge out the white man’s eyes, his fists like mallets to smash the bridge of that black man’s nose. But his hands were cinched so tightly together that they soon went numb. They ached with a strange, gnawing pain, and try as he might he could not free them. Each time his schemes came back to the same conclusion. It was useless. He was caught, and it was all his fault for being such a fool.
Eventually, he gave up on escape and just lay in the bed of the cart through the afternoon, on one side and then the other, then upon his back. He turned again and again from thoughts of Dover, for he felt they might drive him mad. He watched the canopy pass above, the designs cast there and the play of the light through the dusted underbellies of the leaves. One of the deer’s hooves marked the edge of his vision. It rocked in gentle circles just strong enough to upset the flies that tried every few moments to land on it. That dead limb became
an animated creature, complete of itself, its movements a diatribe directed at the sky. Occasionally, Oli’s head appeared. William knew his features, but he felt that he was looking at a stranger that somehow wore a familiar face. His hair still bunched in wild curls beneath his hat, but he didn’t smile anymore. He looked William over with the impartial eyes of a doctor checking a patient’s condition. Satisfied, the head would disappear without ever speaking.
Camp that night was a cluttered scar in the forest, a jumble of cooking supplies and stray tools. The white man built up a fire, laying a complete tree across the kindling. The green wood hissed and spat as the flames charred its midsection. Oli yanked William from the wagon and pulled him to his feet. He led him a little distance away and made him sit against the base of an oak tree. He ran another length of chain through his wrist irons, around his torso and then around the tree, securing it with another padlock. He didn’t speak through any of this, and one would barely have recognized this taciturn jailer as the same talkative companion of the day before.
William sat with the weight of the new irons heavy on his thighs. Just as Oli began to turn away, he said, “Every damn thing you said to me was a lie.”
Oli nodded and chewed this over. “Lied some, yep.”
“Were you never a slave?”
“Oh, for damn sure I was. Twenty year of my life. Mostly like I told you. A slave till Mr. Wolfe done bought me.” He glanced toward the white man. “Bought me when wouldn’t nobody else have me. Now we partners. He treat me all right. He the first one ever did.”
William stared at him, his features tense, trembling with anger. His hands itched to leap forward and pound the stupid expression off the other man’s face. He only held himself back because he knew the chains would hold fast and he would look like a greater fool for the effort.
“What you looking so evil for?” Oli asked. “We all gotta work. I just done chosen mine. You got caught up in it. It’s you own damn fault. You the one couldn’t hold your liquor.”
William spat.
The moisture fell short and Oli ignored it. “Reckon you’ll just have to go back to working for massa. Ain’t nothing you ain’t lived through before.”
“It ain’t about that! Don’t give a damn bout working. I’m talking bout something else, bout a whole life …” William caught his breath and looked down at his wrists. He blinked, and with his eyes still closed he said, “You ever think I wasn’t running from something, but to something?”
Oli watched the man for a moment before answering. “Can’t give too much thought to that. Way I see it, you’re just one nigger in a hundred. Each one of them hundred got they own woes. Each one got they own special reason why I should give a good Goddamn bout them. But how many a them would spare water for me? Tell me that. How many a them? This here’s a hard time we living in. Ain’t even the hardest if you believe the Bible. We all gotta do for ourselves. Reckon my doing took issue with your doing, but that’s the way the Lord seen fit to arrange it. Niggers could say the same bout white folks. Womenfolk could say the same bout men. That’s the way it is, and I tell you what … I’m one humble nigger. Ain’t bout to change the way of the whole world. Just staying alive. And you’re doing the same. Member who chucked the rock at who. Member which one of us done pulled a knife on the other. You memo-rate that, cause I sure as shit am gonna.” With that, he spun and strolled away toward the fire ring and the company of the white man.
The wagon traveled all the next day through a poor district of ramshackle buildings. Some of the structures perched at the edge of the road as if intent on impeding the infrequent traffic. Of the ones that sat at a distance, they tended to be cluttered with abandoned implements of iron and wood, pieces of things that never formed a whole but which seemed necessary features of the homesteads. Canines roused themselves from the underbellies of shacks, lifted their heads and called out. Toward dusk they paused in a town composed of two stone buildings fronting each other on either side of the road. Wolfe climbed down and bought a few supplies in the general store. William sat in the back of the wagon, returning the hard gazes of the people who walked past. Wolfe was back in a few minutes, and they were off again at a pace brisker than before.
With the town still on the horizon behind them, Wolfe stopped the wagon, climbed down, and moved around to the rear of it. The wide brim of his hat cast his entire face in shadow, but the sunlight reflecting up from the roadside lit his features with a strange underlight. He chewed tobacco, an action that set all the sharp components of his face to motion. He waved a piece of paper before William, then motioned that he should take a look at it.
William stared at the man.
“You probably can’t read, can you?” When William still failed to respond, Wolfe sent a stream of brown spit sideways from his mouth, cleared his throat and began to read the notice. His voice was halting, although so too was the style of the notice. “Says here, ‘Runaway, from my plantation on the night of June 2, a mulatto named William, aged about 22 years, about five feet ten inches high … Had on when he went away a fancy-made cotton shirt, pantaloons and boots, some touched by the whip upon his back in due response to his overproud behavior … will make for a free state … also may try to contact a Negro woman … Twenty dollars will be given for securing the above mulatto … I dearly wish to get him again.’”
Wolfe ran his fingers across the front rim of his hat. “What I’m pointing out to you is that we got ourselves a crossroads here. Should I, one—return your ass to the care of Mr. St. John Humboldt and collect myself that twenty dollars … Normally, I wouldn’t mind doing that, but I’ve had some dealings with that man before and they left me a little sour on him. He don’t honor his word, is what I mean to say. Plus, that’s a few extra days haulage to get you there. Or should I drop you at a friend’s over in Baltimore, a slaver I do business with on occasion? He’s got a shipment heading southwest end of the week, and I bet he would pay me the same as Humboldt without causing me half the time or trouble. He would move you out so fast Humboldt would never be the wiser. What do you figure?”
“Humboldt don’t own me.”
“He don’t?” The man checked the notice from several angles. “Who does then?”
“Why you asking me? Ain’t asked me nothing fore this.”
Wolfe smirked. “Just think it a kindly gesture on my part. I have my moments, you see. Anyhow, Humboldt filed the notice. You want I should take you back to him?”
“Rather you kill me.”
The man thought this over. He shoved his fingers in his mouth and worked the wad of tobacco there. He pulled the leaves out and studied them. “Well, no, it don’t say nothing about payment for a dead nigger. That wouldn’t do me no good.” He flicked the tobacco away and spat out the remainder of the leaves. Only when he was satisfied that his mouth was clear did he again look to William. “Fine. Humboldt can go screw himself for all I care.” He crumpled the notice and tossed it into the bushes.
They camped about four miles from the town and were on the move again before sunup the next day. William slept little during the night, but in the early hours he found himself lulled by the movement of the wagon. He fell asleep as the sun rose, and only awoke when the wagon trundled to a halt. The day had grown heavy. The sky was overcast with a haze of gray that floated just above the building in front of which they had stopped. From the roadside it was an innocuous frontage of red brick, with a stone archway that at first seemed more like an alleyway than an entrance. It might have been a post office or some such structure of local government.
Oli prodded William down from the wagon. They walked through the archway and down a dark stone corridor. They passed several doorways and another branch of the hallway that was filled to the roof with clutter. They paused outside a small room in which Wolfe was already seated and conversing with two men. One of these came out and put William through a cursory inspection: eyes, teeth and breathing. A moment later he was on the move again. Another white man t
ook over from Oli. He pushed William before him to the end of the corridor, through a small courtyard open to the sky. In turn, he passed William on to another man behind a locked gate. From there, William shuffled forward into the confines that were to be his temporary home. He turned and looked behind him, as if he expected some farewell from Oli and Wolfe, but the two were nowhere to be seen.
The walls of the enclosure were some twenty feet high, rimmed across the top with shards of glass that reflected the sun in jagged, multihued shapes. All else was shades of brown: the skin of the men and women in all of that color’s various permutations, the dirt of the floor and the ragged earth tones of the captives’ simple clothing. What little shade there was to be had was cast by the eastern wall. Under this, the majority of the slaves huddled, a couple dozen in number and of both sexes. Some stood leaning against it, a few sprawled out beneath it, but most just sat within the line of its protection, watching William. Their faces were lean and sunken, hair matted and speckled with bits of dirt and twig. In these sorry details they were no different than many field hands that he had seen. It was their eyes that were different. They were eyes driven mad by the tedium of waiting, by days spent in chains contemplating a future bondage, without even the distraction of work or family or nature to ease their minds.
William stood in the center of the enclosure. The gate clanked shut behind him and a silence fell over the place, broken by the muted friction of his chains as he stood. He felt all those eyes on him. For a moment they seemed as strange and unfamiliar as the eyes of white men viewing him on the auction block. Having exhausted the bare spaces of the walls, he dropped his gaze to his wrists and the iron that bound them, as if all of his problems hinged on those links of metal.
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