Walk Through Darkness

by David Anthony Durham

  One morning Anne’s youngest son brought him a book and a faded map of the city center. The map was about twenty years old, but he thought it might still prove useful. William thanked him, without asking how it might be useful. The young man nodded and slipped out the door, up the stairs and away into the upper house. Without opening it or reading the title, William set the book on the floor beside his bed. He had no interest in it. He did unfold the map, however, and lay it out on his cot. He ran his fingers over the creases, as if the imperfections would flaw the map’s details. He had seen maps of Britain and France long ago when he had been hired to that schoolboy, but that had been so long ago. It was hard to make sense of the flat dimensions before him, the grid pattern etched with hard edges, black ink against yellowed paper. He traced the wavering lines of the city’s two rivers and eyed the letters of street names, finding nothing familiar in any of it. He tried to twin the rectangles and squares with avenues he had walked, buildings he had looked upon, but the effort was more frustrating than anything else. Before long he folded the map and slipped it back inside the book and lay back on the cot. He tried to feign indifference, but he was not indifferent. Within half an hour he had retrieved the map and leant over it to try again.

  In the afternoons Anne always found time to come and sit with him. She chatted about the day’s events, the myriad dramas of the streets and the foibles of her own boarders, people she spoke of frankly but also seemed to have a fondness for. She didn’t ask him much of his history, but she never seemed surprised by it. She had known he was fugitive before he had admitted it. Known he had been a slave. Known he had been whipped and seemed to even know the designs of the scars on his back. And though she was ever kind, there was something disturbing in her knowledge of him and in his dependence on her.

  “You know that girl has had three babies already?” Anne asked, speaking once more of the young woman she believed to be a prostitute. “Three babies and her hardly seventeen herself. One of them came out stillborn. Other two she sent off to her family in the country. Ask me, she should head back out there herself, but she got her own mind on things. Always thinks she’s missing something.”

  She sat on the tiny stool beside the bed. One leg crossed atop the other to form a platform upon which she draped a shirt she was mending. She moved carefully with the long needle, leaning forward and straining her eyes in the dim light. William stood at the far end of the cellar, testing his legs. He paced a tight circle, lifted one knee to his chest and then the other, pressed his arms against the rough wall and leaned his weight into it.

  “I tell you what, William, you best hope that baby of yours is a boy. A boy’s a handful, but can’t hold a candle to a girl for mischief.” Her fingers paused in their needlework. She watched William squat and push himself upright. “Yeah,” she said, “you’re looking good. I might even let you out of this room before too long.”

  “I could work, you know,” he said. “I expect you’ll want some work outta me fore I leave. Just as soon start on it now.”

  Anne let her hands drop into her lap. “And why do you expect I’ll want to put you to work?”

  William, noting the tone of her voice lowered himself to the corner of the bed. “Well … All the things you done for me … Figure you’ll want something back.”

  “Did your captain want something when he helped you?”

  William cut his eyes. The question embarrassed him though he didn’t know why. “Don’t know. He mighta, but he let me go.”

  “But you think I want something from you?”

  He didn’t answer, just watched his hand where it lay flat against his sheet.

  “Think about what you’re saying,” Anne said. “There you sit before me, what, twenty-some years old? You’ve been twenty years a slave to other men. Whipped and beaten and all that comes with being somebody’s horse. You been through all that, but then you have two people do you a kindness and you don’t know what to make of it. William, all I’m doing is treating you like a human being. That captain just did the same, God bless him. You want to be free, don’t you? You want to be a man?”

  “I am a man,” William said. The words sounded strange and he wasn’t quite sure what prompted him to say them, but Anne accepted them as they were.

  “That’s right. You are. All I’m doing is treating you like one. You think on that some and you might just learn to like it. This world ain’t all evil. And I’ll tell you another thing. Ain’t one slave who’s gotten himself to freedom without help. Not one. There’s no shame in it. Just the way it is and the way it’s gonna be for a little longer. You have any other fool thoughts you want to share?”

  He did not and for a little while they sat in silence. Several times the woman flexed her fingers as if she would resume her work, but she did not. Outside a horse and wagon trundled by. They came on in a confusion of noise, whatever cargo they carried trembling like sheets of metal. The driver called out directions at the top of his lungs, as if he would command the streets and the houses and the people therein to all make way for his passing. The woman looked up at the black square of glass that marked the cellar’s one window. William paid no heed. He lowered his head and let his brow rest on the prongs of his fingertips. As quickly as it came the wagon was gone.

  “You’re not the first one who’s had a long road to walk,” Anne said. “I’m not preaching at you.” She looked at William and began to tell him a story, one that she said was from a couple years back. It was the story of a certain man who had long worked for the Underground Railroad just outside of Philadelphia. He was a faithful conductor, known by many, respected by all, who had himself come up from slavery years before, leaving behind all his people and all he ever knew of the world. That kind of work was not easy, and the man’s outspoken beliefs took a toll on his life and health. His business ventures often fell apart for no apparent reason. He was jailed more than once for suspicion of aiding a runaway. Although he was always acquitted for lack of evidence, those damp cells gave him a constant cough that marked his presence at prayer meetings. He was hounded by officials and constantly in fear for his life, for the forces of slavery led forays into the North and this man was well known to them. The fore-portion of his home went up in flames one winter evening and was only saved by a provident snowfall. His eldest son was attacked and beaten within a whisper of his death, left limping forever after and shy as a field mouse exposed to the night sky. But through it all the man persevered in his work and ideals and helped numerous souls to move deeper into dubious freedom.

  One day a strange man approached him and asked for his help. This man said he was a fugitive and that he was hunting help on the way to freedom. The conductor was wary of his inquiry for there was something familiar about the man, something strange in his mannerisms, in the length of his arms and the set of his jaw. He couldn’t explain it, but he almost turned the man away unaided. Almost, but not quite. He feigned no knowledge of the railroad and cautiously questioned the man. The runaway told where he was from and described his escape in such detail that it sounded credible. Then he named his parents. The railroad man just stared at him as though he were crazy, asked him was he having him on. The runaway said, “No suh. That’s the God-honest truth. Otherways he can strike me down where I stand.” God didn’t strike him down, and instead, the conductor stepped forward and embraced the man, his brother, who he hadn’t known he had until that very moment, a sibling met for the first time thirty-seven years after his birth.

  “And that’s a true story,” Anne said. “Every now and then the Lord lets some light through. It’s moments like that that get us through. We gotta remember them stories, so in the years to come when people write down our history it ain’t all the sorrows alone. You understand me? Ain’t no people in the world that can live on a diet of pain. Pain may be the bread of a slave’s life, but there’s got to be water as well. William, that man was forty-five years without a brother. But on the day that man walked in to him it didn’t matt
er. He had his brother, and you’ll have your wife. You gotta remember her, conjure her, don’t ever let her slip from mind. And you have to have the sense to just accept a helping hand when it’s offered. You hear?”

  William, without looking up, nodded that he did. Anne clucked her tongue. She lifted her work and studied it a moment, then pushed the needle into the fabric. “Now them two boys Cecil and Jack, they’re good boys but not a lick a sense between them. Don’t know why I put up with them. I tell you about the mess they got in with that preacher over on Lombard? All started when Jack seen the collection hat coming toward him …”

  On a still evening two weeks after his fever had abated, William sat in a corner of the cellar. His head lolled to one side and leaned on the unpainted bedrock of the wall. His eyes were open, staring with an unfocused gaze across the rough stone surface. The wick of his oil lamp was nearly exhausted and emitted a steady stream of black smoke, a gloom that gathered like a veil across the ceiling. He was still except for the thumb of his left hand, which caressed the tips of his fingers in monotonous rhythm, like a man counting toward infinity. It seemed he had been in this city for years, and that nothing changed from one day to the next and that all the coming days offered the same. His mind wandered of its own direction, through a maze that commingled the streets of Philadelphia with those of Annapolis, which set his bunk in the basement atop his straw pallet on Kent Island. He saw faces from that long ago time and images that left within him a longing for the certainties he had left behind. All the people and places and memories that made up his life seemed so far away now. He was now coming to realize that the risks of this venture went beyond the physical, beyond even failure at finding Dover. He was gazing at the wall beside his cot, but what he was seeing was a future lived in exile.

  He looked up when Anne walked into the room. Her mood was at odds with his. Her hair was pulled tight against her skull. But despite the attempt at maintaining her formality, humor tickled the corners of her eyes. Her gaze was quicker than usual in settling on him, warmer. She seemed ready to smile but then checked herself and frowned at the state of the lamp. She lifted the lamp from the shelf, held it close to her face and fiddled with it. “Had a visit from the coal man, Mr. Payton, this morning,” she said. “That man is something else, bringing his raggedy self up the back steps like a suitor calling on me, a flower in hand if you can believe it. And me a grown woman old enough to be a grandmother.” Her tone was lively, joyful almost, but seeing William’s glazed expression she cut her mirth short. “He brought word. Word of your Dover.”

  William stared at her. He didn’t actually question her, but Anne moved closer and proceeded as if he had. Mr. Payton had found a Carr family who lived in the fashionable area near Walnut Street. They had in their employ a young Southern Negress. This woman had returned with the youngest daughter of the family from a failed marriage to a Southern planter. He had a street name and number at which they lived, both of which Anne whispered as if fearing being overheard. Those were all the details Payton could acquire, but, Anne said, this may be the answer to their prayers. She placed the lamp back on its shelf, burning cleaner but still giving a dim light. “It’s her, William. I can feel it.”

  “Near Walnut …” he said, a phrase not a question or a statement, but something in between.

  “That’s right, rich folks up in there. But listen here. You can’t just go over there and knock on the front door like a gentleman caller. You don’t know the state of things over there. Don’t even know for sure that Dover’s there; don’t know if there’s men looking for you or what. So promise me you won’t do nothing until I’ve found out more. Payton said he would see what he could find out. Let’s wait on that.”

  “You want me to wait on it?” William asked. When the woman nodded that she did, he rose and walked the short length of the room.

  “It’s the best for now. I’ll go over there myself if I have to, but you don’t know what might be waiting for you there.”

  William stood at the far end of the room, facing the window. Somebody passed by out there, a shadow darkening the pane and then moving on, not a solid being but just the suggestion of one. “You want me to wait on it?” he asked again.

  “I do. I brought you the news and I expect you’ll take my advice along with it. Tell me what you’re thinking, William, your face is a mystery.”

  He reached for a tin cup and poured water from a jar beside the wash basin. Then he set the cup before him and stood again, without ever having lifted the cup to his lips. “I don’t know what I think. I wanna hope, but I’m afraid of hope. I’m afraid of what hope is doing to me right now.”

  “I hear you,” Anne said. She rose, stepped nearer and set her hands upon his shoulders. “I just brought you good news, William. Remember joy. You just have to leave it for the morrow, you hear?”

  William thanked her, but he did not say if he heard, or if he would leave it for the morrow. He held his thoughts behind clamped teeth. As soon as the woman left him alone, he began planning.

  NINE The gift that Morrison offered the prisoner was that of a quick death, a flight straight into the arms of a colorless God. It was only right to honor the wishes of a doomed man, although the white townspeople didn’t see things in like manner. After the single rifle blast, the Scotsman made his escape by the most direct of means. He walked out. It wasn’t long before the townspeople discovered his actions. They ran the man and his hound from the town with deadly intent, a mob angry at being denied its pleasures. Morrison carried a scar above his eye from where a youth slashed him with a plow point tied to a piece of rope. It would have knocked him unconscious save that his legs kept him moving and movement kept him sentient. The hound would forever after limp on chill days, as the deep bone-bruises on her hind legs would never heal completely. She would sometimes dream of the frenzied townspeople and their reasonless rage and wake up to her own yelping. Despite the wounds inflicted upon them, the two travelers covered many miles over the next few days. The man walked in a frenzy of thought, mumbling to himself. This land contains a great evil, he would say and this troubled him, for all around were the signs and symptoms of that evil.

  He moved through the country like a child seeing it for the first time, collecting images piled one on top of another, a strange, internal collage of the world’s dramas. The black bodies of laborers in the fields shimmered in the heat of midday. A white child stood naked in the dirt beside a fence post, pot-bellied and thin-limbed, with turquoise eyes that would have been beautiful had they not been portholes to simmering belligerence. An itinerant preacher shouted the gospel from atop a crate in a town square, the gathering crowd loud in their affirmation of his words and he sweaty and red-faced from the effort of it. A humpback watched him from a storefront. When he looked too long the humpback opened his mouth and spat and asked him was he as dumb as he looked. A slave woman led her children past him on the road, one child trailing behind the other, three in a row, each holding the one before by the tail of his shirt, the one in the back naked from the waist down. This last image reminded the tracker of a picture he had once seen in a storybook, but he could not remember what book or where. He was not sure whether the storybook characters had been human or some other animals entirely. These scenes were not new to him. They were of this land and he had seen such things a million times. Perhaps, he thought, the wound in his head had weakened him, for he had known even smaller scratches to be the death of better men than he.

  The waning days of August found the tracker once more on Kent Island. He met Humboldt coming down the road. The two men stopped and looked at each other. The planter said he figured Morrison hadn’t had much luck. Morrison didn’t disagree.

  Yep, the planter said, I know you didn’t cause I got a suspicion that the boy is holed up in Philadelphia, the Godless place. I’m sailing there directly. Humboldt said that he was tired of all this shit waiting, tired of sad excuses for trackers who couldn’t find their own mother’s teat. He h
ad a lead and he was gonna follow it.

  The man began to walk away, but paused when Morrison asked if he might accompany him. Why? he asked. Did I say I was taking on hands?

  No, but I thought you might take on another gun.

  The planter thought this over. He asserted again that there would be no pay in it, but Morrison waved this away. Why you want to go so bad? he asked.

  Just like to see things completed, Morrison said.

  Yeah, I know the feeling, Humboldt said. Nigger’s not even my own property and here I am chasing him down. Sometimes it just gets personal. Come on then. He began to walk and as he did so he continued to talk, reminding Morrison that there was no guarantee of real pay for his services. He would just have to see what circumstance brought his way. To this he added one further bit of information, saying that he had been contracted by another local planter to pick up a slave wench of his in Philadelphia. He figured that at the very least they could have a bit of fun with her on the return journey. She was heavy with a pup, he said, but he kindly had an affection for women in that condition.

  Morrison, walking a half-step behind him, heard this news with a trepidation he couldn’t quite explain.

  TEN In the stillness approaching midnight William climbed the stairs of the cellar. He stood for a long time with his ear pressed to the door, listening, searching in the silence for any sound that might delay him. He found none and pushed the door open as quietly as he could. The room was a collage of lines and shadows, white walls and dark floorboards all in dimensions he was no longer used to. He took his bearings from the pathways the footfalls had made above him in the cellar. His feet, back once more in the remnants of his brogans, were louder than he would’ve liked. He fumbled for some time with the latches on the front door, but soon he was through them and out once more upon the streets of Philadelphia.