The History of Now

by Daniel Klein

  This is Sarah’s state of mind as she lies in the false bottom of the farm wagon driven by a Quaker farmer from Martins-burg, West Virginia. And this is the moment when Sarah first hears the humming sound. Her back is pressed against Nanny’s bosom, just as Nanny’s back is pressed against Isaiah’s bony chest. For a long while, the sound had been of a piece with the grind of the axle and the thud of the wooden wheels against the stony roadbed, but now Sarah is aware that it comes from Nanny’s throat. It has a melody, simple and sweet. Nanny is humming a lullaby.

  Sarah’s mother, Abbi, had never sung to her when she was an infant. In fact, Abbi had been permitted very little time to suckle her daughter or rock her in her arms. Instead, Sarah’s feeding had been left to an old woman in the women’s quarters whose milk was thin and disposition sour. No songs passed her lips. All of this may account for the depth of Sarah’s reaction to Nanny’s wordless song. Sarah’s muscles, tensed with inactivity, relax; her mind, dulled by monotony, stirs. The bounces of the wagon now comfort her with the reassurance of bass notes. Like a baby in swaddling, Sarah surrenders to the peace of immobility.

  On the eighth day of the journey, Sarah is awakened by the sound of a white man’s shout.

  The runaways have spent an unusually comfortable night in the storehouse of a Potomac River wood mill on the outskirts of Cresaptown, Maryland. The night before, their hosts, a German-born, middle-aged brother and sister who own the mill, had served them a sumptuous supper of roasted venison and sauerkraut, both items they had never tasted before. The price of feast and lodging was to listen to an hour-long Bible reading in front of the couple’s fireplace. Even if Sarah could have understood a word of the text, it would have been a small price to pay.

  The white man is shouting, “Got me a fat nigra!”

  Sarah is on her feet before she is fully conscious. She peers from her bed, a patch of straw between two stacks of planks, to Isaiah’s, the rope hammock he carries in his pack, now slung between two beams twenty feet away from her. Isaiah signals Sarah to crouch down again, but she remains standing and puts one eye to a crack in the storehouse wall. She sees Nanny outside. The woman is on her knees and there is a rope noosed around her neck. Sarah’s peephole is too small for her to make out any more than this—no other person, not even where the loose end of the rope leads.

  At the German couple’s insistence, Nanny had slept in their house. They had been troubled by the sores on Nanny’s neck and face, and by her hacking cough, so they made her a bed of pillows in front of their fireplace. Now Sarah can hear the German woman outside, pleading with Nanny’s captors. Then she hears the German woman yelp and fall silent. Only seconds after this, Sarah hears the storehouse door rattle open.

  Sarah knows the Underground Railroad’s decree that hiding is always to be chosen over running in plain sight of slave hunters. In any event, there is no other door or window in the storehouse, so she and Isaiah are essentially trapped. But neither of these facts enters into Sarah’s calculation because, in fact, she makes none: she acts on instinct, not deliberation. She runs.

  Sarah runs through the storehouse door even as two men bearing Brunswick rifles are opening it. She brushes against one of them, her thin left shoulder against his solid right arm, without missing a step. She races to the river and dives in before either of the men can load and fire. This time, instead of fighting the current, she rides it downstream out of sight.

  When the historian, Emmanuelle Jones, tried to establish the events of Days Eight through Fourteen of Sarah’s journey, she could not find a single document, not even in the journal of Sarah’s daughter, Edith deVries, a literary young woman who had appointed herself family chronicler. Not one of the Underground Railroad stations between Cresaptown, Maryland, and Hudson, New York, had records of a female, teenage, runaway slave traveling on her own during that period. But what was undeniable is that in those seven days Sarah covered close to four hundred miles. The only conclusion available to Jones was that Sarah ran the entire way, putting an astonishing sixty miles behind her each one of those days.

  Also amazing is how Sarah found her way to the Hudson, New York station. It can be guessed that Isaiah told her about it, along with a description of other safe houses, at the beginning of their journey. But Sarah could only have had the crudest of maps in her possession if, indeed, she had any at all, and she had only the sun and stars to orient herself. Yet it is known with documented certainty that in the early evening of April 18th, 1858, Sarah arrived at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Timothy Wilson at the top of Prospect Street in Hudson. Dr. Wilson, an atypical combination of abolitionist and atheist, noted in his diary that the young Negress was thin to the point of emaciation, but when he listened to her heartbeat and lungs, and palpated her abdomen and back, he concluded that she was in excellent health. He also wrote that unlike most runaways who had stopped at his house, Sarah was vivacious, engaging, and in high spirits, her only complaint being that the evening chill “frustrated her blood.” It was for this reason that the prospect of continuing further north into even colder climes distressed the young woman, and it is why Wilson and his wife encouraged her to make her way across the New York State border to western Massachusetts where the weather was more moderate than in Canada and where enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act had become so lax it bordered on nonexistent.

  It is the fifteenth day of Sarah’s odyssey. With a white-capped mountaintop as her guidepost, she is loping eastward. Her pace is less hurried than it has been all week, in part because her stomach, unaccustomed to accommodating anything more than wild berries and fern shoots, is crammed with the previous night’s dinner of lamb chops and potatoes, but also because she knows she is nearing her journey’s end. This knowledge is both consoling and melancholy-making: she has almost run her course.

  Reaching the crest of a muddy hill, she sees a farmhouse and barn. As she comes closer to it, she makes out a man just outside the barn who is shoeing a horse. He is tall and has a broad face with African features and a head of African hair, but his skin is light brown, fairer even than that of the quadroon tally master on the Jackson Plantation. In only a few minutes, Sarah will meet this man and learn his name, Hans Freeman deVries.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Hector could never forget the bone-chilling winter winds that blew through their house in Puerto Alvira. The family would huddle together under an alpaca blanket, their teeth chattering as they tried to assuage the gods by singing, “Con El Viento A Tu Favor.” But the bite of those winds was nothing compared to the brain-numbing cold of the air conditioning in the Golden Glades Inn in North Miami, Florida. It is here where Hector works one hundred hours each week, ironing sheets and pillow cases in the hotel laundry by day, and sorting and carting garbage in the hotel’s basement by night. Even as he works up a sweat at his tasks, the relentless refrigerated current deadens him. There are days when, stepping out onto the loading dock to grab a smoke and a can of beer, he reflexively shies away from the sunshine as if he is a petrified cave dweller.

  For his labors, Hector is paid two hundred and thirty American dollars each week, well below the minimum wage for legal workers, but nonetheless equal to five hundred thousand Colombian pesos, enough to feed and house his family in Bogotá. For twenty of those two hundred and thirty dollars, Hector’s supervisor in the laundry arranges for the money to be wired to Hector’s mother.

  Hector keeps only one hundred dollars a month for himself. Like many of the other boys, he scavenges his meals from the dumped leftovers of the Golden Glades’s two restaurants—actually the leftovers left over after the bus boys upstairs have picked out the choicest bits, whole shrimp and scallops and chunks of swordfish that the gringo vacationers have forsaken in order to reserve room for the house specialty, key lime pie. Still, Hector dines quite grandly on half-eaten shrimp and scallops and chunks of swordfish that he first washes in a sieve under a spigot in the garbage room. Bite by bite, it is a richer diet than he has ever consumed, and as
a result he has added more than five pounds to his thin frame in only a month. He sleeps in two three-hour shifts, wrapped in a blanket on the floor of the laundry where the overhead fluorescent lights are never turned off. The personal money he permits himself is spent on cigarettes and beer.

  Hector aches with homesickness. Although he hears and speaks his native language all day long—albeit usually with Mexican, Chilean, and Argentine accents—it has begun to feel foreign to him. The Spanish words are the same, but the objects and feelings to which they are applied are different: the beverage they brew in the upstairs kitchen does not taste like café, even if that is what it is called; and the contempt he and his coworkers feel for the hotel guests is hardly captured by ‘desprecio’—that term ignores the bitterness that underlies their feeling. Even the Latin American music that blares nonstop from speakers in both the laundry and the basement alienates him. Although the CDs are the same ones he, Mano, and Sylvia listened to in Bogotá, here the singers sound mocking, as if their recorded voices were more alive than Hector’s own as he listlessly sings along while he works.

  Hector is alone among his fellow workers in grasping that their netherworld is the underside of the real world. Yes, his colleagues know los otros are always there, eating, dancing, swimming, and fucking above them. They even understand that their own sweat makes the gringos’ revelries possible; that is the prime source of the contempt they feel for the gringos. But only Hector can see that the world above them is the real one. It is not simply sunshine and money that makes that world genuine, it is los otros’ power to define what reality is.

  Hector’s awareness of this allows rays of North American consciousness to gradually penetrate his shadow world. Looking out the laundry window, he sees Americans romping and teasing one another by the pool. In the pockets of their soiled clothes, he finds their notes and letters. On the loading dock, he hears their chatter. From these clues, he pieces together their world. He perceives that autonomy has a different meaning here than in Colombia. He senses that personal identity is a fluid thing, not fixed the way it is at home. And he has even begun to lay hold of that quintessentially North American preoccupation: how one feels as compared to how one wants to feel. Hector wants to feel like a human being again.

  Jesus, a Mexican in the garbage room, knows a way out of the Florida darkness. It is north. Over a thousand miles in that direction lies a place named Connecticut where an illegal can earn as much in two days as he can in a week in a Miami hotel. The work is hard, but it is outdoors, and the workers live in real houses with beds and doors and kitchens. Jesus even knows how to get there: in the back of a moving van driven by an American black man. The fare is three hundred dollars, but there is also a price for Jesus’s arrangements—three hundred dollars more. Hector, of course, cannot put together that sum, not with ninety percent of his wages going straight to Colombia. Jesus says the truck is leaving in three days, with or without Hector.

  Hector is no stranger to the urgency of deadlines, and when it comes to improvising ways to make money, he has an impressive record for a man his age. But here in North Miami, his imagination is tested. Even if he had the time, making music in the streets is a high-risk enterprise, especially for illegals—a city ordinance prohibits public solicitations and any illegal picked up for breaking this law is immediately turned over to the I.N.S. Also, handsome as Hector is, there is no shortage of more experienced and better-dressed Latin gigolos in the hotel’s barroom. Through a process of elimination, Hector is left with burglary.

  As it happens, the laundry room offers some fine opportunities for an intelligent thief. For starters, a cursory glance at the supervisor’s clipboard informs him which rooms are occupied and for how many days. More tellingly, guests who use the laundry for their personal clothes are clearly richer than those who do not, and guests whose clothes include linen suits and silk blouses must surely have more money than those who send down acrylic blazers and rayon shorts. Most importantly, the chambermaids who exchange soiled bedclothes for those that are freshly laundered and pressed, possess passkeys. These maids make an appearance in the laundry room every morning between nine and eleven.

  Unlike most of his coworkers in the laundry, Hector has not established a running flirtation with any of these women. Some of them have looked his way, of course—despite his pallor and spiritlessness, he is still an unusually attractive young man. But along with so many other parts of his constitution, the air conditioning has deadened his playfulness, possibly even his libido.

  But now Hector has a motivation more compelling than sexual desire. He chooses his maid not by the sparkle in her eye or the turn of her calves, but by her obvious insecurity. Her name is Miriam, and she has pocked cheeks and a mountainous behind. When she enters the laundry, Hector rushes to hand her the stack of folded sheets he has just ironed. Addressing her by name, he tells her she looks happy this morning.

  Hector’s experience with middle-aged tourists in Bogotá has taught him that most plain women recoil at being told they are lovely or sexy—they are much more sensitive to bogus flattery than better-looking women. But to say they look happy even if they do not—indeed, especially if they do not—lifts their spirits and melts their hearts. They are thrilled and encouraged by the very possibility of being happy—and happy-looking. So it is with Miriam. Hector arranges to meet her on the loading dock at her eleven-thirty break.

  In preparation for his assignation, Hector performs a simple, preliminary theft: He steals the key to the employees’ shower off its hook on the wall. In size and general shape, this key is similar to the passkeys the maids carry in their apron pockets. He also unearths his cuatro from its hiding place under his locker.

  On the dock, Hector serenades Miriam with “Amor Sin Medida.” In his mind’s ear, he can hear Sylvia’s delightful descant dancing around the melody. It is for this reason he chose the song: his tender feelings for Sylvia show in the gaze he casts at Miriam. The girl is efficiently wooed. He has no sooner finished the chorus when he sets down his instrument and kisses her. For a moment, her warm lips excite him—his senses have been dormant for so long this little awakening feels sublime. But this is no time for sensuality. As he kisses her, he touches her blouse, then lets his hand slip from her breasts to her belly, and there, with the dexterity of an illusionist, he dips his fingers into her apron pocket where he exchanges the shower key for her passkey. He finishes the trick with an inspired flourish—pressing through the fabric of her apron into her crotch. Miriam bites his lip and pushes him away, flushed and happy. She says she has to go back to work. Hector says he will see her at the afternoon break.

  As they saunter back inside, Hector hears a snicker behind them. He turns his head. About thirty feet away at the outdoor bar, two hotel guests in swimming suits grin back at him. The fatter of the two pumps his eyebrows and smacks his lips while the other mimes applause, a show of appreciation for Hector and Miriam’s titillating sideshow. Whatever misgivings Hector may have harbored about stealing from innocent gringos instantly dissolve.

  Taking the fire stairs, Hector goes straight to the hotel’s fifth floor. He has chosen this floor because only six of its rooms are occupied, making it less likely that he will encounter any guests or hotel personnel in the corridor. Furthermore, three of those six rooms are occupied by owners of linen suits. Hector is carrying several freshly ironed pillowcases, the magician’s diversion. He listens at the door of Room 505, hears voices whispering inside, and moves on. At Room 511, he listens again. Nothing. He raps lightly. No response. He inserts the passkey, lets himself in, and closes the door behind him.

  The room has already been made up, a good sign—no maids will be barging in. He goes to the desk by the window where he opens and closes all the drawers. Nothing there other than the hotel directory and a copy of Scuba Diving Magazine. Same for the drawers of the bed tables. He goes to the closet. There are more sport coats, trousers, and evening dresses here than the couple could wear in several w
eeks. Hector pats every pocket. Not a thing. He is about to leave, but decides to scan the bathroom first.

  On the shelf above the sink is a leather toiletry case. He probes inside it: several vials of pills; razor blades; Q-tips; a folded envelope. Hector lifts out this last item and opens it. It contains nine one-hundred dollar American Express checks. Hector slips the checks in his pocket. He almost laughs at the ease of it. At the door, he takes a deep breath and readjusts the expression on his face so that once again he is just another listless Latino.

  He is almost at the door to the stairwell when the couple from 505 exit their room into the corridor. Hector stiffens; he fusses diligently with his load of pillowcases. The man glares at Hector while the woman stares anxiously at her feet. Once more, Hector’s experiences with women tourists in Bogotá hotels inform him: The jittery woman obviously just had sex with someone other than her husband. No threat to Hector from them. He steps into the stairwell, smiling. It is his lucky day.

  Hector is sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner in the back of the van named, ‘Mayflower.’ There are seven other men in here, all of them brown-skinned and Spanish speaking, but not one of them is Jesus. That fellow makes more money flitting from one bottom-end Miami job to another, drumming up passengers for his human transport business, than he would make as a day worker in Connecticut, and with half the strain. Hector had intended to deposit a hundred dollars in his farewell note to Miriam, a gesture of appreciation and remorse, but Jesus quashed that plan. He took all nine hundred dollars worth of Hector’s stolen traveler’s checks, claiming a three hundred dollar fee for the risk involved in cashing them. So Hector just wrote to Miriam that he would think about her. He did not mention the passkey he lifted from her, the one that he hung on the wall hook outside the employee’s shower just before he walked out of the Golden Glades Inn for the last time.