He studied faces and backs, shoulders and arms, trying to find even the slightest hint of something familiar. And, despite the strangeness around him, this was easy to do. The world and its inhabitants were full of pieces of Dover. His breath caught at the sighting of a certain hue of flesh. The image brought back a certain afternoon, when he and Dover sat together on the beach of one of the Bay’s tributaries, talking of nothing in particular, but just sharing the day, learning about each other as a couple can only do once in their time together. A profile reflected in a shop window reminded him of the nights he hid in the bushes beside the house in which Dover worked, watching for her in the windows. And symbols of a more abstract nature took hold of him, as when he caught sight of a certain woman’s hat, intricate and white and wholly unfamiliar to slaves. Dover had never worn such a hat. For that matter, he had never seen such a headdress on any black person. Yet the sight of it cut him to the core and left him breathless, shot-through with longing. Whether this longing was for something he had forgotten or for something he had never yet experienced he was unsure.
Though he moved surrounded on all sides by humanity, he avoided direct contact. He once collided with a well-dressed Negro, a man clothed in a black suit, vest and top hat, cane in one hand and some sort of ledger in the other. The man jumped back as if he had been assaulted, glaring at William with a look of loathing he had rarely encountered in other black men. The man looked him up and down, then he snatched a handkerchief from his vest pocket and proceeded to dab it across his jacket and vest. In an instant William felt himself awash in shame. He recognized all at once the pathetic sight he must be: the state of his clothes and his wild hair and speckled beard, the stains dripping from his armpits and neckline. He had never felt himself more a slave than he did in that instant, before that fellow man of color, never felt a greater need to explain himself. But the other man didn’t allow him even this. He clicked his tongue and moved past him, cane held erect in one hand as a warning.
That night he ate the last of the hard biscuits from the ship. They rattled around inside him, measuring the girth of his hunger. He huddled between crates in the lee of a warehouse, the water near enough that he could smell it in the air. He told himself again and again that Dover wasn’t far away. She was in this city. She had somehow made a home of this place, and if she had done that it couldn’t be all that bad. But each time he said this he doubted it more. As he drifted toward sleep, he was half-aware of floating out of his body and up over the city. He hovered above it, suspended in the air with a view that took in the landscape in its entirety. How painful that view, to know that Dover was within an afternoon’s walk in any direction. Or worse yet, that she strode down one street while he prowled the one just next to it. That she might sit in view of a window he passed, but that either, with their eyes otherwise occupied, might miss the other. He was so close to her, and yet he had never felt further away.
William spent his fourth city night hidden among the bracken of an alley. Rats nibbled at bits of his exposed flesh each time he stilled, keeping him balanced on a knife-edge of fatigue and pain. He rose remembering his purpose and daunted by it. He crawled from the tiny lane an earlier version of the man that had entered it. The city air was so alive with smells that his hunger took on a life of its own and became his main obsession. His stomach churned and writhed at the slightest provocation, driven to frenzy by the scent of frying meat or the dry aroma from baking bread. There was so much around him and yet it was denied to him. He could stand a few feet away from a display of apples and pears and melons. He could imagine their textures within his palms and make out the slightest designs in their colorings and feel his teeth against those auburn skins. Yet there was a barrier between him and those foodstuffs. No one needed to remind him of this. It was nothing solid, nothing tangible, but it was a wall clearly enough, and he saw it evidenced in shopkeepers’ stares, in the sharp jerks of their chins in directing him onward. He heard it in their tongues and felt it surrounding the people pushing past him when he paused. All the world was aligned against him. He knew this now and wondered why he hadn’t before. And he was so tired, his body so heavy, the air so thick. He felt himself flagging and knew he needed to ask for help, but whom or how he couldn’t imagine. Some friendly face … But had he seen one since he had arrived here? Each face was the same in that he had never seen it before. No kin to him, no one known or known of, strangers all.
By noon he found himself standing in an area of parkland, rimmed on all sides by the cobbled streets, busy with pedestrian traffic. He leaned against a tree and half-tried to blend into it, one hand massaging his temples. He didn’t notice the two women strolling toward him until they were quite close. They were both dressed formally, one white and one black, and something in the look of the two of them struck him as familiar. The white woman’s dress billowed around her with great frills and girth, and she carried a parasol for no apparent reason. The black woman walked with her hands folded across her abdomen, clutching a narrow purse in gloved hands. He listened to their voices as they approached, passed and faded. He didn’t discern any one particular word, but he noted the tones they used, the delicate phrasing of the white woman and the rich, familiar tone of the black woman. They passed within a few feet of William without ever noticing him. They carried on toward the edge of the park, leaving in their wake a scent that flooded William with an image of pale purple.
He was moving before he had thought out his plan. He mustered his energy and stepped out behind them. His head smarted at the movement, but he walked past them, out to a cross street, spun and placed himself in the path of the white lady. He lowered his head, eyes cast downward, face meek and yet anxious to be acknowledged. He didn’t move toward her, but his feet pawed the earth beneath him, like a horse nervous at the approach of a stranger. If the white woman noticed him she gave no sign. A few feet from him, she turned and smiled at another pedestrian, a man with a high black hat balanced on his crown. The two of them fell into conversation, leaving William poised in a strange pantomime with no audience.
The Negro woman had noticed him, however. She paused and, when the lady continued talking, she stepped back to William and looked him over. She was in later middle age, straight-backed, with wide-set eyes and a mole at the corner of her mouth. She wore a high collar around her neck, which she touched with the fingers of one hand before she spoke. “Can I ask what you were about to propose?” she asked.
William stared at the woman, momentarily losing his command of language.
The woman rephrased and repeated her question.
When he mustered the resources to speak, he said, “Do you know Dover?”
The woman frowned. She kept a little distance between them. “Who?”
“Dover. She a girl … Works for a family.”
“What family?”
“Carr. The family’s name is Carr.”
“No,” the woman said, “don’t know any Carrs.”
“You must know them.”
“I don’t know any Carrs,” the woman repeated. “Sorry.”
“Carr,” William said again, a little louder, as if her hearing was in question.
But the woman shook her head. Her lips curved in a way that were somehow refusals in and of themselves. “You might try …”
“Sure you know them. You just ain’t thinking right.” He took a step toward her, his fingers held out before him like nervous spiders, trying to spin something in the air between them. “The name is Carr. They live in Philadelphia. This Philadelphia, ain’t it?”
The woman’s eyes flicked toward the white woman, seemed to edge toward her as if they intended to slide away. “Yes, but I’ve told you …”
He knew he was losing her. His words weren’t right and he had to fix them. He wasn’t saying the things he meant to. He had to calm her down. Calm himself down and explain. She didn’t know him, didn’t know who he was or what he had been through.
“This woman don’t know you
,” he said, realizing as he mouthed the words that he was speaking them and that he hadn’t intended to. Those words were for his thoughts, and now he had to explain that to her. Where were his wits? He motioned with his hands. The woman sprung back, her whole body tense and her face cold where it had been cautious a moment before. He stepped toward her, but again she leapt back. He tried to calm her, but his voice cracked and wavered and rose higher than he intended. The woman moved away. He would’ve followed, but he became aware of the many eyes focused on him. It seemed all the city had stopped to watch him: the white woman with a gloved hand over the oval of her lips, a Negro, broad-shouldered and strong as a blacksmith, the Italian children on the stoop a little distance away, the carriage driver with his whip raised at the ready, the laborers standing with spades thrown over their shoulders, one of them with a smile wrinkling his lips. They all watched, and they all knew everything there was to know about him. They were all aligned against him.
That afternoon he stood outside a baker’s shop, staring through the dim porthole at the loaves of bread aligned there. There was an ache behind his eyes that throbbed and pounded and jiggled like his skull was a loose-capped pot of boiling water. He decided that the pain came because his eyes were famished. Eyes can feel hunger just like the rest of him, he thought. When he moved he did so without thought, leaping the four stone steps down to the entrance of the shop in one bound. But there was no grace in his movement. He landed on a crooked ankle and stumbled forward and smashed his lips against the doorjamb. He came up face to face with the baker and recognized the man’s intent. He turned as the man swung up a club. The weapon missed him by inches and splintered the doorframe in his place. He ran from there and didn’t stop moving till he had no choice for the pain in his ankle.
The fifth night he beat away a pack of stray dogs and rooted through the rubbish behind a tavern, shoveling the muck into his mouth with his fingers. In the early hours of the next morning, he knelt in a park and retched up the vile concoction. He collapsed and lay sweating from the exertion of vomiting. But he found no rest. The heat within him built and no matter how still he lay his breathing was no easier. He fell into a fitful sleep. In that sleep he dreamt, scenes that filled him with a strange nostalgia, images of his home in Maryland, of the cabin of his birth and the fields of his youth and even the island he had labored on under St. John Humboldt. He walked through mundane scenes, everyday moments of the life that had been his. He tended the Masons’ garden on a windy spring day, bees flying about him, loud and large and intent on their own work. He lifted and sorted tobacco, felt the leaves between his fingers and smelt the rich scent of it as it hung drying. He walked a landscape peopled with loved ones, his mother and her friends, Dover’s people, Kate and his boyhood friend, Webster. He spoke to these people, exchanging words that suited their surroundings, talking about work or the weather or a myriad of other things that were forgotten as soon as they were spoken. But he never got close enough to speak to Dover herself. He caught glimpses of her from a distance: her at the edge of the field, her back as she strolled down a lane, and her with a child, his child, resting on her hip, both of them with their hands upraised, waving. He watched her with a vague unease, wondering if she was concealing something with her distance, as if her behavior was the only thing he found strange in this whole world.
He wasn’t sure where he walked the next day for the city seemed to have little substance. He could barely stand and his muscles ached as if his bones were beating against them. His skin seemed to crawl with a rash that turned to dust when air touched it, floating up from him and yellowing everything. His hunger was gone. He was aware of that. He couldn’t even remember food anymore, couldn’t imagine wanting to put things in his mouth. His gums were loose and bloody—in a strange way a mirror image of the world moving past him. This was something he had never noticed before. He didn’t move through the world, but it moved around him. He was the pivot point and the world was some great maze and there was a force moving it. He didn’t need to move anymore, so he sat. Then he lay. He watched the sky and then closed his eyes and watched the world as seen upon a crimson screen. He was aware that he had soiled himself, but somehow it didn’t matter anymore. God, he was hot. The world was baking. It was a furnace of red and orange and he was tired and wanted nothing more than to put that world to sleep. Let no one disturb him. Sleep was the only true good, let it come complete.
During his fitful sleep, his unconscious mind saw fantastic things. He moved from one strange reality into the next, separated by gaps of time in which he was aware of nothing save the fact of that nothingness. He found himself in amazing places but never doubted those places or questioned how he came to be there. He ran upon the bottom of the bay and did battle with marine monstrosities that he never saw completely. They were glimpses of fin and backbone and great eyes as flat as coins. Later, he prowled through the streets of Philadelphia, the buildings adrift as if floating, sliding into position before and behind him, a maze that was ever changing and incomprehensible. He watched a sky of deep maroon, the color of sumac in the fall, through which flew endless flocks of birds, tides of avian life fleeing this world in pursuit of others.
At these moments he was deep within himself and the outside world held no grasp on him. That’s why he never noticed the woman who stopped to speak to him. He didn’t remember shouting her away, nor that she returned the next morning and then again later that day. The third time she came with two adolescent boys who lifted him and carried him slung between them. William kicked at them as best he could. But he was weak and the boys were strong and soon many arms aided them. Palms touched him underneath, each contact a gentle one but so numerous that they held him above the ground and passed him along like he had no weight at all. In this way they bore him to the cave and lay him down and shut him in that quiet space and let his dreams overcome him again.
At some point Nan appeared beside him. The two of them met in the rainy woods from the first days of his flight. She sat beside him and looked at him sadly, her face the same handsome features they had always been, her hair just as long and radiant about her, the strands of white so fragile they seemed threads of spider silk. Her cheeks were wet, but whether from tears or the rain he could not distinguish. “What’s become of you?” she asked, and hearing her voice he felt a child again. He felt ashamed though he wasn’t sure how to answer her question. He said he got himself into a mess, was all, and she agreed, saying that he could say that twice and it wouldn’t be a lie either time. She asked him was he too hot and he said he was and then she had before her a gourd of water which she dragged across the wet leaves and lifted, full and cool, to his lips. As he drank she spoke to him of things left undone. The small patch of land behind her cabin went untended. It had gone wild and overgrown and that was a shame, for she always kept a fine garden, hadn’t she? That, and the roof was a mess. House never did keep the water out, looked like a blind beaver built it, didn’t it? Somebody needed to mend that roof for sure, but she was past that type of work herself. Past it for sure.
She took the gourd back from him and pressed it down into the leaves. Water seeped up from the ground and slipped into its open mouth, filling it. They both watched this. Nan looked to him as if to say there was a lesson in this. She asked, “How come you did me that way?” William knew of what she spoke and tried to explain why he hadn’t been at her burial. He was a slave, he said. He couldn’t have come no matter how much he wanted to. He had not even been told of her death until weeks afterwards. But she shook her head and he knew that those excuses meant nothing. If it had been him going into the ground she would have been there. Nothing would have stopped her, not being a slave or being a woman, not even being old. Nothing should have stopped him, either.
“Woulda been there beside you to help you on,” she said. “You doubt that?”
But he didn’t doubt it at all.
“A son always knows his momma would lay down her hide for him,” she said.
“That’s what’s wrong with ya’ll. You take it for granted. Think that’s just how a woman is gonna be. Think you can act the fool and treat her cold. Then you get ashamed of her and stop coming around to see her. Think all her stories must be nonsense cause she only an old woman sick with love. You get to figuring you ain’t gotta love her back proper. You forget she’s the one made you and start to think you done made yourself. But that ain’t true, is it? You always did love your momma, didn’t you?”
He said that he had and to prove it he began to tell her all that he remembered. He spoke of the Bible and how white men twisted it to suit themselves and how he should never trust the written word unless he did the reading himself. He had a worth that couldn’t be measured in any master’s ledger. He had dreams and thoughts that corrupt men would never understand and that he must cherish for they were the things that belonged neither to massa or to God but were his alone. He would have spoke on, for he had so much he wanted to tell her. But he felt a hand on his forehead and it stilled him. It was not his mother’s hand, for she had not moved, but it was familiar nonetheless and it was a comfort.
“Let me tell you this,” Nan said. “I still remember you on the inside of me. Understand? I remember you fore you was you, when you was an acorn inside me, back when I could cup my arms around my belly and feel you kick me from the inside. That use to please me so. You can’t even imagine,” she said. “You can’t even imagine.”
Walk Through Darkness Page 13