The History of Now

by Daniel Klein

  “If writing one book that about fifty people have read makes you famous,” Emmanuelle says, shaking Wendell’s hand. Then, more quietly, she says, “I’m sorry to hear about your daughter. I hope she gets well soon.”

  “Amen,” Sharon says.

  Wendell has to swallow hard before he can speak again. It is not simply Emmanuelle’s good wishes that move him, it is the fact that she knew about his ordeal at all—he, a stranger to her. “Who can eat?” Wendell says.

  “Church always makes me hungry,” Bill replies.

  “Oh yes, church and picking up the mail and watching television. Everything makes that man hungry,” Sharon says.

  “How about my place?” Wendell says. “Lila should be getting out of bed about now.”

  Wendell wants it to be a feast. Walking along Main Street with Esther beside him, he recites a list of items he wants her to pick up at the co-op: cheeses, cold cuts, jams, rye bread, bagels, tomatoes, avocados, onions, canned pineapple, bananas, coffee cake. He removes his wallet from his back pocket, pulls out all the money, and presses the bills into Esther’s hand. He has not felt so excited about the prospect of a meal in a very long time.

  The feast in Wendell’s kitchen is glorious. If any of the group had already eaten in the Zion basement, it is not evident from their appetites. At one point, Sharon asks if there is any peanut butter in the house and when Wendell produces a jar for her, she proceeds to make her specialty for Johnny, a fried peanut butter and pineapple sandwich. But by the time the sandwich is passed and nibbled down the table to the boy, only a fraction of it is left. Sharon takes orders for five more.

  Wendell asks Emmanuelle about the book she wrote and she tells him it is about life on a Gainesville, Georgia plantation in the early 1800s.

  “It’s actually about a single day in 1831,” Emmanuelle says.

  “Something special happen on that day?” Wendell asks.

  “No, that’s the beauty of it,” Bill answers for his niece. “Just a regular day in their regular lives. I’ll get you a copy, Wendell. It’s as fine a book as I’ve read.”

  “I’d like that,” Wendell says.

  Emmanuelle laughs. “Uncle Billy owns twenty of the fifty copies they’ve sold, God love him.”

  “How did you pick the day?” Kaela asks.

  “Good question,” Emmanuelle tells her. “It went kind of backwards. I knew I wanted to write about only one day when I started my research. And March 18th, 1831, just turned out to be the day with the most documents and diary entries I could find.”

  “Like bills of sale,” Sharon announces from the stove. “The master of the house bought two slaves on that day.”

  “How much did they cost?” Kaela asks. She has an instinct for quelling any potential disquiet with her earnestness.

  “Three hundred and fifty dollars apiece,” Emmanuelle answers. “They calculated it by the number of bags of rice a slave could produce in a year.”

  Kaela shakes her head back and forth. “I can’t even imagine someone selling another person,” she says.

  “Neither can I,” Emmanuelle tells the ten-year-old. “Not really.”

  Sharon’s fifth and final peanut butter and pineapple sandwich comes off the griddle. She hands it to Wendell. “Emmanuelle’s writing a new book about the Underground Railroad,” she says. “From Georgia to Massachusetts.”

  “A single day again?” Wendell asks.

  “No,” Emmanuelle answers. “I’m covering fifteen days this time. Expanding my horizons.”

  “And one of those days is in Grandville,” Esther says. “That’s why she’s coming to live here for a while. With us, actually.”

  “In your apartment?” Wendell asks. There is more incredulity in his voice than he would have liked, but he simply cannot picture another adult sharing Esther’s two-room apartment on Board Street.

  “We’re putting a bed in the kitchen,” Esther says.

  “It’s going to be cozy,” Kaela says, grinning.

  “They won’t take no for an answer,” Emmanuelle says.

  It has been decades since Wendell has had what he would deem a bona fide inspiration. He can count his inspired impulses on the fingers of one hand, starting with the one in 1957 when he stepped out of his projection booth during a Christmas week showing of An Affair to Remember and said to a lovely young woman he had not yet met, “It all works out in the end.” Wendell simply does not consider spontaneous acts part of his nature and, the 1957 case in point, he has reason not to completely trust them anyhow. But the one that seizes him at this moment, lifting him out of his chair and propelling him to the hallway where he picks up the phone, is accompanied by an unprecedented clarity of purpose.

  When Wendell returns to the kitchen a few minutes later, he says, “I just rented the house next door. You know, the other half of this house. You can all move in whenever you want to. Tomorrow, if you want.”

  The people at his kitchen table stare back at him, not one of them speaking. Wendell catches a look of apprehension in William deVries’s eyes; the man is undoubtedly thinking that his distant cousin—a man he does not really know—has some loose screws in his head.

  Sharon breaks the silence. “Is it the same size as this one?” she asks.

  “Exactly,” Wendell replies. “A mirror image.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Sharon says. “About time, actually.”

  Esther’s face is flushed. It is clear she wants to speak with Wendell in private, but it is also clear that Wendell wants to share every facet of his inspiration with everyone in his kitchen.

  “I’m not sure I can afford it, Wendell,” Esther says quietly.

  “Oh, I’m paying for it,” Wendell says. “They gave me a whole bunch of money for leaving the Phoenix without a fuss. It’ll cover a year’s rent and then some. I don’t really think of it as my money anyhow.”

  “It’s kind of a big step to take without—” Esther begins, but she is cut off by Sharon deVries who says to her, “Sometimes you just do, and you figure out what it means later.”

  Wendell laughs. “Hell, that sounds like something you’d say, Esther,” he says.

  “Of course, it does,” Bill chimes in. “It’s some kind of female code.”

  “Will I have my own room, just like Lila?” Kaela asks.

  It is unclear to whom she is addressing her question, and it hangs in the air for a long while.

  “I don’t see why not,” Esther replies finally.

  A cheer goes up at the kitchen table that surely resonates in every empty room of the other half of the house. Upstairs in this half, Lila clamps a pillow over her head and waits for sleep to return.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  William deVries’s great-great-grandmother, Sarah, had an inborn talent for running that was already evident when she was a toddler. It is said that the first time Sarah put one foot in front of the other, she dashed from her mother’s arms out the door of the women’s quarters to a peach tree where the one-year-old jumped a foot and a half into the air to snag a piece of fruit. The story is undoubtedly an exaggeration—Sarah’s mother, Abbi, was known to the other women as Matchuba, an Ashanti nickname that means, ‘Pretender.’ But Sarah’s barefoot race against a horse-drawn wagon at a Gainesville slave auction on June 7th, 1855, is doubly documented—in a marginal note on her bill of sale to Mr. Hadley Jackson, Esq., and in the diary of her seller, Mr. Andrew Phipps. Sarah beat the horse by five feet. She was then twelve years old.

  As a result of this spectacular demonstration of Sarah’s gift, Phipps garnered the extraordinary price of $450 for the girl, a match to the $450 he won in side bets on the race. Jackson paid this premium for a reason. As owner of the largest Georgia plantation west of Atlanta and as a fastidious businessman, he kept a running inventory of his three money crops: cotton, tobacco, and peaches. With this information, plus his regular reports on the fluctuating prices for each of these crops at Port Savannah’s produce auction house, Jackson calcula
ted the most profitable days to go to market. He had already created the job of Tally Master and filled it with a quadroon house slave named Martin, but clever as Martin was with numbers and pen, his gait was slower than a mule’s. And that is why, watching Sarah outpace the horse, Hadley Jackson, Esquire created a new position—Tally Runner.

  Six days a week, Sarah ran from cotton field to tobacco field to peach orchard, and then around again and again, picking up tally sheets from the foremen, stuffing them in the cotton bag that hung around her neck, and bringing them to Martin at the Big House. She ran a good fifteen miles each working day and is said to have done the same on Sundays when she ran through the fields just for the sheer exuberance of it.

  There is only one thing that ever slowed Sarah’s pace or squelched her high spirits and that was Martin. Grandfathered and fathered by white men—a slave ship helmsman and Hadley Jackson’s younger brother, Hugh, respectively—Martin enjoyed a lofty opinion of himself and his God-given entitlements. These last included the sexual submission of any slave on the plantation who caught his fancy. Indeed, inasmuch as Master Hadley conceded Martin this indulgence, it did amount to a personal entitlement. Sarah, though scrawny, small-breasted, and flat-hipped, caught Martin’s fancy, possibly because of her sensational vitality. Almost every day after accepting Sarah’s final tally sheets, Martin led the girl to the stable where he had his way with her in a vacant stall.

  It was for this reason—and this reason alone—that Sarah crouched under a bed in the women’s quarters on a moonless March night to listen to the whispers of Agatha May, a runaway slave from Maryland. Sarah had no argument with slavery itself; not only was it the only life she knew, but as a result of her much valued skill as a runner, she had never endured a single whip lash or worn a shackle, although she was well aware of both these abominations. Like the man who regularly raped her, Sarah had come to the conclusion that she was privileged, and she was too young and uneducated to understand that privilege was a relative concept. Still, instinct abetted by physical pain told her there was one crucial privilege she lacked.

  Like Harriet Tubman, Agatha May’s friend and colleague in the Underground Railroad, Agatha spent nearly a decade sneaking back to the provinces of her escape to inspire other slaves to run away too, and then to supply her converts with leaders (known as conductors), strategies, schedules, and maps dotted with safe houses called stations. Also like Tubman, May carried a substantial price on her head, a price that would be doubled if that head was delivered on the end of a rope. (Unlike Miss Tubman, Miss May was terrified of public speaking and therefore did not make her way into history books until Emmanuelle Jones wrote about her.)

  Sarah almost did not sign on. The list of rules for passengers was far more lengthy and detailed than on the plantation itself where the single rule, ‘Do as you are told,’ sufficed. To join passage on the Underground Railroad, one not only had to pledge to always do as ordered by one’s conductor, but to hide without complaint in bat-filled caves, hollowed-out dung heaps, and freezing root cellars, just to name a few locales mentioned by Miss May. Further, no matter what circumstances arose, one was required to remain with her group of deserters, and no matter how long one was forced to go without food, any risk taken to steal same was forbidden. The punishment for many infractions was execution. This was the invariable penalty for giving in to the all-too-understandable fear of getting caught by vigilantes and whipped to the bone, a fear that led escapees to ‘escape’ back to their masters to plead for mercy. The railroad’s ultimate penalty was pragmatic: Returned runaways were repositories of critical information about the underground network. For the purpose of this penalty, all conductors carried pistols.

  But on the same day as Agatha May’s clandestine midnight visit to the women’s slave quarters on the Jackson Plantation, Sarah had been victim to a particularly sadistic assault by Martin. As usual, he had bent her over a bale of hay and mounted her from behind, horse-like, but this time as he repeatedly thrust himself into her, he slapped her flank with his open hand. Sarah yelped, a sound that only excited the man to whack harder. She screamed. Two young coachmen, both white, came running. Upon beholding the savage spectacle, they cheered Martin on, then unbuttoned their trousers and commenced to masturbate. All that saved Sarah from being raped by them too was their revulsion at the idea of succeeding a black man in her body.

  Sarah was left with a feeling she had never before fully recognized, one that pained her more deeply and lastingly than any blow to her thighs and buttocks: Humiliation. Certainly, she could not identify that feeling with any word in her vocabulary. The nature of language is that a term requires its opposite to have meaning; there can be no concept of hot without the concept of cold, so a slave, whose dawn-to-dusk existence consists of one act of subjugation after another, is at a disadvantage when it comes to identifying humiliation. Nonetheless, it was that unspeakable feeling that compelled Sarah to enlist passage on the Underground Railroad.

  The landowners of Gainesville devoted their Sundays to church, mid-afternoon family dinners, visits to sickly friends and relatives, and drinking whiskey. Thus the Sunday of April 4th, 1858 was selected as an optimum day for Sarah to take off for freedom.

  Of the three women who set off from the Jackson plantation on that day, only Sarah kept her nerve. The other two, both cotton pickers, began whispering between themselves less than fifteen minutes into the journey, and after only thirty minutes simply turned around and headed back to the safety of captivity. They had been gone for such a short time that it was highly doubtful their absence was noticed, so Sarah did not waste her breath trying to dissuade them. Better they returned now than later when they would be interrogated with a whip. And better yet, Sarah would not have to keep to their cotton picking pace any longer.

  She ran. She loped invisibly between rows of six-foot-high tobacco bushes, breathing steadily through her broad, dilated nostrils. At the five mile mark, where the first tobacco wagon road intersected with the crop line, she stopped, rolled up the hem of her ankle-length skirt, tucked it into the waistband, and ran on, leaning so far forward that her pumping arms almost grazed the ground. With her long-muscled legs unfettered, she moved faster and even more effortlessly.

  The sun is high and blistering hot by the time Sarah reaches the banks of the Chattahoochee River. It is the first natural body of water she has ever seen and she gazes across it with a mix of wonder and apprehension. She is to meet her conductor and other members of her group on a glittering outcropping of white feldspar on the far side of this river. She can make out that distant meeting point, but she cannot imagine how she will get there. She gazes to her right and to her left along the near riverbank, searching for a place where the water ends and the banks merge, but there is no such place in sight. For all Agatha Mays’s detailed rules and instructions, she had not taken into account the fact that Sarah does not know how to swim, has not, in fact, ever seen anyone swim.

  Sarah stands still, shading her eyes with one hand. She imagines flying across the river on the back of the osprey she sees gliding in the air above her. Then, on the back of the brown pelican she sees gliding on top of the water just below her. Swirls and bubbles follow that water bird. Sarah observes its water-churning web feet.

  Sarah has a visceral understanding of propulsion. As naturally as she knows that bracing her hand over her eyes shades them from the sun’s rays, she knows the soles of her feet drive her forward by pushing against the ground. Living inside her body informs her of the physics of the world. And so it is that an illiterate fifteen-year-old, one generation away from a landlocked mountain village in Africa, conceives of a way to propel herself in water. In effect, Sarah invents swimming.

  But her invention lacks refinement—in particular, a method and rhythm for breathing. Also, she has not figured on the river’s current that pulls her one foot downstream for every two feet she advances toward the opposite shore. Nonetheless, flailing and paddling, sputtering and choking, Sara
h makes her way across the Chattahoochee River. Then she runs along the shore to the designated meeting point.

  Her conductor, a mulatto named Isaiah, is waiting for her. His first words are to tell her she is a terrible swimmer, that all her splashing and splattering could have been spotted by any slave hunter within five miles. And that there were a hundred more rivers, lakes, and ponds between here and their final destination, Toronto. When Sarah explains that it was her first attempt at swimming, he rolls his eyes and, speaking to a phantom who apparently resides on his left shoulder, says, “Who chose this godforsaken child?”

  It is sunset before the two of them are joined by another runaway, a rotund woman who had been nanny and wet nurse on the Cornelia Plantation in Absalom. She has no name other than Nanny. Like Sarah, she had taken off with another slave who changed her mind before reaching the boundary of their plantation, so instead of a party of six, they are a party of three. “But one can’t swim and the other can’t walk faster than an ox,” Isaiah intones to his shoulder-top alter ego.

  Isaiah leading, they make their way to Chattahoochee Ridge where they camp at the mouth of a cave that stinks of bat droppings. They barely talk, which suits Sarah fine, but their torpid pace is already vexing her. Her muscles ache from braking back her natural sprint. This ain’t runnin’ away, it’s strollin’ away.

  In the ensuing six days, they zigzag north on Indian mountain trails, along riverbanks, across lakes and ponds, and today, traversing West Virginia, in the false bottom of an undercarriage of a farm wagon. Above the runaways is a load of cow manure, the cargo of choice of Underground Railroad voluntaries because of its natural resistance to inspection by slave hunters and militiamen alike.

  Not only does the acid odor of the load stream into the passengers’ hidden compartment, but yellow drops of its sweat dribble through the floorboards onto their faces. What is more, their heads are only inches away from where the wagon’s axle connects to the wheel, and the relentless rasp of this imperfect connection drills into their ears. Sarah is resigned to all of these torments, but lying immobile on her side, unable to crook a joint or animate a muscle for hours on end, drains her spirit to the point where she can no longer remember the reason she fled the plantation, a place where she ran free all day.