The captain smiled and tilted his goblet. “Please, do have a drink.” He lifted William’s goblet and handed it to him. “I speak of Adam because he spoke of you. He observed you on deck, and he’s of the opinion that you are falsely accused. He says you are not a murderer, not yet at least. I would like very much to hear you speak it with your own voice. Speak to me, for the moment, as a free man. You are afloat on the sea, not bounded by the laws of your home state at present. So speak to me.”
William said nothing, just stared at the wine and the vague reflection on its surface.
“Your reluctance is understandable, of course,” the captain said. His somber expression showed that he acknowledged no humor in this understatement. “My wife always thought that I was insensitive. She said I pushed my nose where it need not be. But I have always argued just the opposite. I push my nose because I am overly sensitive. I ask questions because I have some interest in my fellow humans. Do you not think the world would be a better place if more men acted in the same manner?” He paused for an answer. When he got none he mumbled, “Not that I hold myself up as a model to other men … Do you know that we were boarded in Virginia? And again yesterday along the Eastern Shore. The first time we had no idea you were aboard, and the searchers were halfhearted in their examinations. Yesterday was a different matter. I don’t know why I did it, but I denied your presence aboard the boat. My first mate, Barrett, nearly collapsed with anger. It is fortunate for both of us that, despite his failings, he takes orders as a sailor should. And as sailor myself, I should attend my ship.”
The captain rose and dusted the seat of his trousers with his hands. He picked up the lantern and opened the door, pausing in the corridor. He glanced back in at William, who still sat with the goblet in his hands. “Soon I will ask you of Dover,” he said. “Please consider this.”
With that, he closed the door, and William was again in darkness.
THREE As the trail grew colder, Morrison began to prowl the Negro quarters of any town that had a population large enough to merit such a section. He tried as best he could to engage the Negroes, both slave and free, in useful conversation. This proved largely impossible. The black faces never lifted toward him. They stared at the ground, spoke in monosyllables and seemed to misunderstand each question he posed to them. And yet from the fringes of their company he heard them exchange a free and animated flow of words between each other. They told jokes, exchanged threats and insults, all spoken with tongues nimble as rabbits. At least, until they spotted the white man among them and fell dumb.
Morrison wanted to tell them that he had once walked and conversed and mingled in every way with people of their many colors. He would have explained that he had worked beside them in his early days in this country. He would like to have spoken to them of his brother, who had recognized the Africans’ humanity before he had and who had taught him so many things in the short span of his life. It was his brother who returned to their shared room one night with a black man’s blood on his fingertips. He had taken to night wandering, for he was finding it hard adjusting to this land and said he hated staring at the walls. Only exhaustion helped him. The best way to produce it, he found, was midnight rambling. On this particular evening, Lewis burst into the room with his hands held out before him, begging Morrison to wake, beseeching him to light the flame, light the flame. He was thick with mud up to his knees and across his chest and arms and even up into his hair. But he ignored this. It was his hands and the manner in which they were fouled that troubled him. He held them close to Morrison and asked him did he see it? Did he see the blood? Did he know that this was a land of blood, that it flowed in the streets like mud? The elder brother calmed the younger and got him to tell his tale.
It was a forlorn night, damp with the residue of spring rain. Lewis walked it alone until he turned onto a lane and saw the three men at the far end of it. He would have stopped and slipped away before they saw him, but he was propelled on by the desire not to look criminal. He quickened his pace and carried on toward them. One of them held a torch, while two others went to work on a fourth man, a Negro whom Lewis had not seen at first. The moving light of that torch rendered a scene of surreal barbarity. The black man crouched on all fours, while two of the men beat him about the head and back with short clubs. They pushed him low into the mud and stamped upon his back. They lifted him up and punched him one after the other. His blood mingled with the mud and their hands had difficulty grasping him. This drove them to new furies. One of the men hefted his rifle up to shoot him. But he changed his mind, grasped it by the barrel and swung it at full length in a wide arc. It hit the black man at the apex of its swing, the stock end catching him across the face. It shattered his cheekbone and sent his body sprawling in pursuit of his flying teeth. He lay there in that outstretched position, sinking into the mud.
As they turned to go the man with the rifle fixed his eyes upon Lewis and studied him as if noticing him for the first time. The man’s features were boyish and smooth. He nodded and half-smiled. You know what they say, he said. A nigger’s a halfpenny to kill and a halfpenny to bury. He motioned to the half-submerged form in the mud. Figure this here one’s a full cent. With that, he turned and walked away, rifle over his shoulder, pointed up at the sky, his gait loose and contented.
The younger brother stood for a long time, staring at the Negro’s form and watching the brown stuff closing around him, as if the earth were accepting back its own. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t make sense of the rifleman’s handsome face, not with the vision before him. He could find no way to explain it, no plotting for how he had stumbled upon this and what course of events had brought it about.
Then the man moved. It was no great motion. It was little more than an exhaled breath, but to Lewis it was proof that he still lived. He pushed his way toward him through the mud. He rolled the man over, slipped his open palm beneath his neck and tried to stay his lolling head. The man opened his eyes. The bloody mud parted and two orbs of smooth moisture reflected back the starlight in the clearing sky. He looked at Lewis with an expression that he was at pains to describe. There was no emotion in it. It was not sadness or fear or resignation. It was none of these. His eyes were two questions, and Lewis knew he had failed to answer. And that was all. At some moment those questions turned to hollow notes that never changed pitch or tone but simply went on. The man’s eyes stared up at him but they did not see any longer. They did not blink and did not move. They were dead things and no longer portholes to the man’s being, the bare materials of life without the substance.
Lewis slipped away and walked home with trembling steps, sure once again that this was all wrong. This place was not their home, and yet … Mute the colors and wash them out and cast the world in a different cadence … Do that, and this country was not so different than the one that had created the brothers. And that was the thing that truly frightened him.
As he held his sobbing brother, Morrison knew that he didn’t cry simply for that unknown black man. He cried for any such moment for any person. He cried for the things we do to each other and because the eyes of that stranger in death were no different than the eyes of his loved ones. It was memories such as these that Morrison would have shared with the dark people he met now, confessions he would make to the ears of black men only. He would’ve told them of the next time his brother came home with tales of a colored person, a woman this time, a tale of joy instead of sorrow. But as he walked the backcountry roads of Maryland posing his questions, he spoke of none of these things. Such a dialogue was impossible. Words alone could not bridge the gap between him and these people. Perhaps only actions could. This was, after all, the true test of the mission before him.
FOUR When the captain returned he didn’t ask about Dover. Instead, he talked at length of the strange things he had seen at sea. He spoke of storms that in their fury beggared belief, of calms that left one feeling the world had died along with all the living beings in
it. He told of a creature from the deep reaches of the ocean, a many-limbed thing with a beak for a mouth and an eye so big around that both the captain’s palms failed to cover it. He spoke of flying fish in the Caribbean, flocks that came so thick across the deck that his men once dove for cover, fearing that the ocean was throwing up silver daggers against them. He said the sea was abundant in its bounty at times, munificent out of all reasonable proportion. But it could also be frigid and bleak, callous and utterly indifferent to mankind. It was a strange love affair he had with the sea, a lifelong marriage of sorts.
William sat listening, his fingers around the goblet, rubbing the wood of it with his thumbs. Perhaps the dark chamber that they shared helped call images vividly to mind, internal colors and motions and panoramas. Or perhaps it was the cadence of the captain’s voice, so controlled and even, words pushed like pearls of thought, things with their own undeniable life. Or maybe it was just that William’s mind hungered for distraction, for contact with another human, for dialogue, even though dialogue had gained him so little in the last few weeks. For any or all of these reasons he was entranced by the white man’s words. He lost himself in them while they were together, and they lived on when the captain departed. He saw daggers thrown up from the sea, placed his hands across that great creature’s eye, watched the sun burn its way into the rim of the world. All of this without leaving the low chamber of the ship.
Their third meeting followed much the same pattern, except that the captain tried to shift the discussion over to William. Where had he come from? Had he fled a wicked owner? Had his life been the living hell the captain imagined slavery to be? Was he true to this Dover? Was their relationship a marriage of sorts? William didn’t answer except in gestures, mute requests that he not be questioned. He wanted to listen, but he still couldn’t get himself to speak. To open his mouth was to reveal everything. It didn’t seem possible to utter words without betraying all of his troubled history. The man was asking him about the forces that shaped his life, the agony and the wonder both. There was no middle ground in talking of such things. He could give all or nothing. So he asked for more silence.
The captain turned the conversation to thoughts of his wife. She was of Irish stock, he said, so fair of complexion that her skin was almost translucent. Though frail of health and temperament, she bore him two children, a son and daughter. The son was bright, red haired like his mother and, like her, somewhat fragile. His daughter, Esther, had more of the seaman’s blood in her. She was so impetuous that she had never crawled. She had climbed up onto her spindly legs and stumbled about the world like it belonged to her. It was strange, he said, to think back to those precious moments. Painful to think of all the time he spent on this vessel, moments that would have been better spent in the company of those three loved ones.
“I remember one summer afternoon walking with Esther,” the captain said. “We’d been some time wandering the grounds of an estate in Baltimore, and found ourselves far from shelter as storm clouds began to build. To get back we decided upon a route through the woods. It was thick with bracken, thorny bushes and the like. It was difficult, and I was soon of a temper. I slashed out at the bushes, for they seemed to knit themselves against us. They snapped back at me and scratched my face and returned each of my aggressive gestures in turn. I was working myself into quite a state, beyond all reason, the sort of anger one only directs at inanimate objects. Then Esther called to me. I turned and met her gaze. She looked at me, pity in her eyes, and said, ‘Father, be courteous, or the forest won’t know you from a ruffian.’ She pushed past me and led the way forward, no curses, no slashing. She just slipped through the vegetation like one might through a crowd of civilized people. It was most remarkable, a grown man following his daughter’s lead through a wood. I thought her very wise that day, and time has not dimmed the impression. She shaped me in that moment, and I’ve never quite trod the earth in the same way since.”
The ship creaked in the silence following the man’s story. William shifted where he sat, rotating his wrist so that the iron lay against a different portion of his skin. He realized he had forgotten his chains for a few moments. Strange, for he had rarely ever done so before. He had even slept with the knowledge of his bondage in his dreaming mind. But here, for a few moments, the captain had lulled him into forgetting.
The tallow candle sputtered and smoked as it neared death, and the captain leant forward to light another, a small nub left over from the previous day. “A man who doesn’t know the joy of fatherhood is a poor man,” he said. “A man who has not been challenged by fatherhood’s trials is a weaker man than one who has. I learned from my children, much more than I ever wished to. They are all three years dead now. My wife, my son and daughter … all taken by consumption. They were taken when I was at sea. Consecrated and given over to the Lord while I sailed a favorable wind up from the Sea Isles. To me they are remembrances. To me they are as they were, as I would have them be. This is my grand delusion, but I learn from it still. I never asked you, do you have any children?”
William thought the question over before deciding to answer. He ran his fingers over the coarse, damp grain of the wood below him. “I don’t know,” he said, just three words but enough for him to know that he had committed himself.
The captain looked puzzled, but only for a second. An expression of embarrassment washed across his features. “I understand. I forget the barbarities of slavery.”
William knew that he didn’t understand, and it suddenly mattered to him that he did. “What I mean to say is I might have a baby now … I mean, I ain’t seen Dover to know.”
Ridges stood out on the white man’s forehead. He touched his bulbous nose with his fingers. He looked ready to inquire further, but he didn’t. It was just this silence that encouraged William onward. He didn’t look at the white man. He tilted his head and kept his eyes on the shadowy beams above them, but when he spoke he did not hesitate.
“That’s why I ran off,” he said. “Found out she was carrying my baby. She woulda been carrying it for months before I heard of it. When I found out nothing was the same, couldn’t never be the same again. I had to get back with her. Couldn’t just go on living. That’s why I ran, Captain. I didn’t do it just for my own sake. I sure didn’t kill nobody. I’m just trying to get back with Dover and that child.” He paused and inhaled a long breath, as if he hadn’t done so since he began speaking. He could hear the yells from the men on deck, strange for he had never heard them before. “I dream of her all the time. Every time I close my eyes, seems like. It almost don’t seem right … How much I think bout her.”
“That’s love,” the captain said.
William glanced at him, trying to read the man’s face but finding it no different than before. He didn’t address the comment directly. “In them dreams she sometimes carrying our child. But them times she always at a distance. The far side a field. On the shore when I’m in a boat. That type a thing. I never have seen that baby’s face. Seen the shape of it, but never have looked on it properly.”
“And do you want to see that young one’s face?”
“More than anything else that’s what I want.” He hadn’t known that he believed this before he said it. The words almost surprised him, how easily they slipped out of him, how fully formed and undeniable. Yes, he yearned to reunite with Dover. Yes, he hungered for freedom, for vengeance. But these paled in comparison to a bone-deep longing that he couldn’t explain, that began and ended and went on forever in the possibility of that child. To look upon that face, to kiss that face and to know that child was he and Dover made immortal, to see that child walk and to hear it speak the wisdom of innocence: these were all the things he wanted. He had never known it as completely as he did at that moment. “It’s a hard thing to reckon on,” he said.
“Yes, it will be that,” the captain said. His gaze drifted away from William and hovered somewhere in the space between them. He wrapped his fingers around the wine goble
t and lifted it, testing its weight and the give of his wrist in supporting it. “I have been wondering if you would tell me something of your plans? How would you make a life for yourself if your labor was to be your own? The land to which you were running is a much freer one than the one you came from. But it is not without its share of snakes as well.” The captain changed position and drank the rest of his wine. “What do your people think of Northerners?”
William picked up his own goblet when the other man slapped his down. As if prompted by the question, he took a quick sip, choked on it and spent a moment coughing. “I … I don’t know, suh.”
“Sure you do. Have you not passed all your life thinking about it?”
William made as if to drink again, but thought better of it. Despite himself, he came close to answering the man. It was hard to refuse his questions. He almost responded that yes, every slave child hears of the free North, hears tales of the white people called “abolitionists,” a word they all knew but rarely said aloud, and never within the hearing of white men. But what are they other than distant notions that the childish mind conceives of fanciful images? Perhaps they glow with a light of holiness that no Southerner has. Perhaps they float above the earth and look sadly to the south. Perhaps they have wings. He had imagined them as all of these things. Yet he had met more than one Northerner in his life, and they had seemed no different than any other white men. They ate the same food and shat the same stink, and more than once a visiting businessman had bedded down with one of the house servants and spent his lust the same as any Southerner. He had no delusions about Northerners, but he didn’t try to explain this to the Northerner questioning him.
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