Walk Through Darkness

by David Anthony Durham

  And yet he kept the pendant with him still. He couldn’t wear it as a necklace, for it was sure to attract attention. Instead he had sewn it into each year’s new shirt himself. In times of trouble his fingers sought it out and worked its smooth surface even smoother. Despite all his old anger, he pressed it to his chest in that decaying Pennsylvania carriage house. He didn’t believe, but neither could he let go.

  SIX Morrison was partnered with a boy from Virginia. He was no older than his midteens but he had lived a hard life already. His left arm appeared to have been snapped midway up the forearm and set lazily if set at all. It bent at an angle of a few degrees at a point in which there was no joint. If this old injury weakened him he hid it well.

  At twelve he had left his mountainous state, chased out of it by his own murderous father. Before long he had wandered the width of Maryland and across to Delaware. He got work patrolling that state’s northern border, one of the last brutal guardians of the Promised Land and good at his job. He knew only that type of work and had early found it suited him. To hear him tell it he had seen a dozen men killed. That’s white men, he said. Niggers I seen dead it would take a Jew to count.

  As Morrison and this boy went out each morning, the hound spent the days tied to a pylon near the ship. She didn’t care for this insult, but neither did she wish to explore this strange, jumbled place. The city was wholly unnatural in its shape and function. It was an olfactory confusion, scents crosshatched and chaotic and nonsensical. It was too full of mankind and too cluttered by strange machines and smelled too much of death. She had long ago decided that whoever it was they’d been searching for was beyond them. She put that mission from her mind and wished the man would do so as well. But he seemed intent to see it through.

  In the course of a week Morrison looked full in the face of misery. Though he had seen sorrowful conditions in the South and respected the North somewhat more, they were investigating jails and none of these were pleasant places. Damp, dark and chilled, stinking holes or narrow cells, sweating iron bars and walls cut from the rough bedrock of the city itself. The captives were not Negroes alone, but presented a mosaic of the city’s nationalities in microcosm. Staring into those men’s varying faces—black skin and yellow eyes, a wide forehead tanned like cowhide, a Roman nose crooked twice during its length, lips in every variety, as diverse as flower petals but in this case not nearly as sweet—Morrison remembered the fascination, the awe and repulsion of his first days in America. So different than his brother’s reaction … He tried to stop this train of thought before it took hold of him.

  He was surprised at how often the jailers seemed inclined to offer the black men up for the right price: those imprisoned as vagrants or drunkards or those without family and friends to vouch for them. It was because of this that they picked up three Negroes, soon to be heading south as returning fugitives, though in all likelihood the unfortunates had been born and raised in the free North and probably in this very city. Could they have protested they would have, but they could not and the young Virginian was happy to shut them up when they tried.

  Perhaps the worst sight came at the conclusion of the week. In a cell deep below a park in the center of the city they saw five Negro men pressed together in a tiny space. One of them was dead, held upright by the pressure of the others against him, kept warm by their bodies but dead nonetheless. Fluids had escaped from the corpse and the smell was such that the Virginian spit up chunks of his breakfast. He complained daylong about the whole experience, the taste it left in his mouth and the way his body felt tainted just for having been in the room.

  But the young man had his own leanings toward brutality. One afternoon he spotted a fine-looking mulatto girl not more than twelve and this inspired him greatly. That evening he stumbled around drinking great quantities of a liquid he called “anti-fogmatic,” though it must have been so named in irony because the effect was not at all one of clarity. He talked of what he would do to that girl if he owned her. No labor in the fields for her. None of that farmer shit. He’d screw her is all. Daylong with nary a break in the action just as long as his pecker would point. In the evenings he would prostitute her out and so finance the whole scheme.

  The Scot sat silent the whole time, around them the other men adding their own stories, each worse than the one preceding it. Morrison had known men as coarse as these his entire life. He had conducted business, hunted and drank with them. He had slept back to back with such men at times for the warmth, each asking the other to forgive the proximity and to ignore it and think nothing of it, and yet each man needing it and not simply for the heat. He had spent months enclosed in the closest of quarters, trapped by snow and cold and isolation, pushed together with what humanity he could find. Yes, coarse men had been the prime companions of his life. He regretted this, but also in his regret he remembered that he was no different than they. He had lived no model life. These men’s crimes were little removed from his own, no different in content than the wrong he did to his brother’s beloved all those years ago. He would not have behaved as he had with her if not for the contrasts in their skin. Because of that he had named her race and believed that she deserved the brunt of his anger, and his desire. He knew that his hatred of these men began and ended within him.

  Walking through an alley the next afternoon the boy expressed his wish to find the pregnant wench they were after. She would make the return trip better than the outward bound, he opined. Morrison felt hatred so sudden and complete it dizzied him. Low in his back the hunger burned and it was the hunger to voice his response in blood. His knuckles ached with the desire. He slowed his step and loosed his jaw and worked it right to left and tried to weigh his options.

  But just then the red-haired boy appeared at the far end of the alley and called to them. We got that nigger-loving captain, he said. Ya’ll shoulda seen it. Tried to act the man he did, till Humboldt put a rifle in his mouth. Fellah opened up like a London whore. Come on, got us work to do.

  The red-haired boy spun and trotted away, the Virginian close at his side asking questions, excited. Morrison watched them move away for a moment, wishing himself in the other direction but finding his feet not so inclined. Before he knew he had decided his course, he was jogging to catch the two youths. He would stay with them a little longer, friend of the devil and seeker of salvation both, if ever such a thing existed.

  SEVEN William and Redford shared a view from atop a sloping granite slab. The sky was a light, clear blue, ribbed with high clouds that seemed perpetually in the act of disappearing, though they never did so. They were different each time William looked up at them and yet the same as well, moving and yet motionless. Though they couldn’t see Philadelphia, hidden behind trees and hills and distance, columns of smoke marked it clearly enough. A haze hung above the city and gave the uneasy impression of some great calamity just beyond their sight, as if the whole place had been put to the torch and left in smoldering ruins. Between the two men lay a tablecloth fashioned from Redford’s handkerchief, spread with a small banquet of bread and anchovies and a handful of berries that he had picked on the long walk out. The free man had come up to the carriage house—flushed and out of breath from the walk—with news of new developments. He had met with a young Irish captain who had agreed to help them, and they’d as good as solidified the arrangements. The two men had shaken hands and concluded the business on the friendliest of terms, dates and times all arranged. All of this had put Redford in a fine mood, hence the picnic out in the open, a risk, perhaps, but not too great a one when weighed against the pleasures of the autumnal afternoon.

  When William asked why this captain would risk helping them, Redford disgorged a long and detailed biography of the man. He had been born and raised in Ireland. Though he had come to America and considered himself an American, he had never looked kindly on slavery. He wasn’t born into it, so he saw it with clearer eyes than most native-bred whites. As for the practical matters, he owned his own sloop and wor
ked a route up and down the Atlantic coast. He had headed South several days ago, but would soon begin the northerly leg of his journey, which ended on the soil of Nova Scotia. It was as perfect a situation as they were likely to find. Redford mumbled that there was a financial motive as well. The Irishman, it appeared, expected payment for his efforts, but considering the gamble he was taking this could hardly be begrudged him.

  William began to ask the details of this, but Redford lifted his vision above the trees and took in the vista, his mind somewhere else already. “Did you know that the first antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia?” he asked. “Many years ago, in the Revolutionary years or thereabouts. They were gradualists back then, fully in the belief that slavery would die out in due course, as man moved on to a higher spiritual plane. Even slaveholders themselves wrote such things. Jefferson did. Back in those days they didn’t mind admitting that slavery was a faulty system and that the nation would be better off without it. They just didn’t want to change it in their own lifetimes. That would be too hasty. We don’t hold such notions anymore. If change is going to happen, it has to happen on somebody’s watch, and history tells us the change is not likely to be painless.”

  An ermine appeared in the rocks a little ways below them. William watched it slip through the stones, his hunt a deadly serious matter but also somehow joyful, mischievous. He remembered, as a child, throwing stones at such a creature, an action that had been a joy then but made no sense anymore. “Ain’t painless now, either.”

  “No. No, of course it isn’t,” Redford said. “It’s a matter of sharing the pain, I guess. And then moving beyond it.” He motioned with his hands, vaguely sketching the notion of this progress. But the gesture trailed away before it was fully formed, insufficient to the task and better left unfinished. “It’s a shame that more Negroes can’t use the words of white men against them. Or even the words of other learned Negroes. If every Southern slave could read for himself narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s they’d rise up and overthrow the institution immediately. They’re kept down because their will is broken. If they could taste freedom, hear from others the true meaning of the word, then the fight would be as good as won. I honestly believe that.”

  William licked fish oil from his fingers. “Slaves don’t need nobody to tell them they slaves,” he said.

  “Well, no … I just mean that the words of fine men and women can spur others to action, put matters in a new perspective.”

  William cocked his head to the side, a noncommittal gesture. “Slaves think about being free all day every day. Each time a bird flies overhead he wonders how come that bird can come and go but not me? Each time a white child walk by going to school he wonders why my child was sold away from me? Why my body ain’t my own? Why God says he just, but then make a world like this? How come my massa says I’m a beast no smarter than a horse when we both know that no horse ever worked a tobacco field or sung a hymn on Sunday or gave birth to that same massa’s child? Slaves seen things that wouldn’t none of them tell you bout. Things that they couldn’t write down in a book cause such things never have been written down in all the time men been writing. Things that would make you look at them different. Crime been done to them, but you’d still look at them different. You think it takes a free man to tell a slave he ain’t living right? To my mind, other way around makes more sense.”

  “You’re saying that liberty is nature’s true state,” Redford said. He began in his usual tone, but midway through the sentence seemed to regret it. “Which I agree with fully. I do … We just have a different way of saying it.”

  “A nigger way and some other way, I guess.”

  Redford fingered the short hairs of his chin beard, tugged at them, let go and tugged again. “Don’t think that white men are devoid of generous thought. They don’t show it as often as they write of it, but there are many white abolitionists. And there are men like Captain O’Neil. It’s just unfortunate that such noble work depends to a large degree on money. Financing, that’s the thing. Captain O’Neil is a good man, but he still wants to see a profit out of this. A flat rate for ten of you. He’s agreed to that and I’ll be sure to deliver, but still it’ll take some work.”

  “What?” William asked. “You say ten?”

  “Yes, well, O’Neil is working with a number of others. That’s how I first came to know him. You must know you’re not alone in wanting freedom. I was asked to help some others and I’ve agreed, two who call themselves brothers and a complete family.”

  William rose and strode away a few steps. He snapped one of his hands into a fist and pulled it back as if he might punch the air before him, but was waiting for just the right provocation.

  “There are two girls among the family, no higher than your waist. What else could I do?” William didn’t answer and Red-ford went on, saying it wouldn’t be cheap, but they could share the expense. True, ten penniless slaves were no richer than two penniless slaves were, but this way he could ask for help from others. It made the whole venture that much more legitimate. Having said this, he fell silent, his lips twitching as if they might talk on but unable to come to agreement. William hadn’t changed position, still his back turned to Redford and not a word from him. “You would’ve done the same.”

  “Don’t know that I would’ve,” William said. “Can’t just trust people like that, no matter how they look coming to you.”

  “True enough. All people come bearing secrets, don’t they?” He let this question sit a moment, his voice betraying, for the first time, an anger of its own. He unfolded the newspaper that had thus far sat silent beside him, opened it to a certain page and smoothed over an article there. “Take a look at this. You’re a famous man, of sorts.”

  William didn’t look as requested. He swallowed and opened his eyes and set them on the distance.

  “I noticed this some time ago,” Redford said, “though I didn’t make the connection immediately.”

  He read the article aloud. It told a tale that was not new to William: of the coffle heading south, of the revolt and shedding of white blood, of the escape, one and all, of the slaves from their bondage. Apparently that white boy had ridden all the way to Richmond and there told a story of a mass uprising. He made it seem that all the slaves had sprung free from their chains at once, all twenty empowered by the same murderous intent and he only escaping through tremendous effort. Fourteen of the twenty slaves were caught in the first three days, another two by the end of the week. Saxon and the little man had ridden south and made it as far as the Sea Islands of Georgia. Why they went there instead of toward freedom would remain a mystery. They were leapt upon by a band of no less than thirty men who had tracked them for some time. They were beaten beyond recognition, gutted and decapitated. Saxon’s head was sent back to the Baltimore-based slavers, where it was posted upon a spike overlooking the holding pen. There it rotted in the sun: reminder, threat and promise all at once. The remaining two were still being hunted.

  As William listened to this he thought of Dover and in thinking of her his eyes moved slowly toward Redford. At first, he had thought Redford’s features were weak, washed out, like no one part of him had been formed with any character. But now he saw that there was something handsome in the sum of these parts. None of his features shouted to be noticed, but together his curving forehead and small nose and clipped chin made for a well-formed whole, for a beauty that was vaguely feminine. He was suddenly aware of why Dover might find him attractive, and it was this that he was thinking about. He felt distant from the incidents the man read about. They belonged to another lifetime, and though they burdened him they did so with the weight of ghosts.

  “So, you were there, weren’t you?” Redford asked.

  William didn’t answer, but in his silence there was somehow an affirmation. Both men recognized it.

  “I see.” Redford cleared his throat and folded the paper into a small, neat square. “And did you take part in it? I mean, did you �
� take part?”

  “I didn’t kill no one if that’s what you asking.”

  Redford didn’t say whether that was what he was asking. “But you were there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What difference it make?”

  “Consider it. Here I am trying to help you, trying to win your freedom, drawing on the good faith of many people, while you’re hiding things from me.” He held up the paper and jabbed a finger into it. “Says here you’re a killer, a white-man killer. You don’t think that makes a difference? They think you killed one of their own. They’ll hunt you down. They’re hunting you right now. There’s not even any guarantee that Canada will keep you, not if someone accuses you of the murder of three white men.”

  “I said I ain’t killed no one.”

  “Yes, you said that. But they think you did. You’re hot property, William, and I should’ve known from the beginning. My life is on the line here too. Or did that not occur to you? Have you any other surprises for me? Anything else you haven’t seen fit to tell me?”

  “Naw.”

  “Dover know about this? I didn’t want to ask her till I spoke to you.”

  William shook his head.