American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  “I see only three alternatives before us,” he said. “Either we turn this family away to fend for themselves and probably get caught, or we report them ourselves and have them sent back where they came from. In either case, the rumors about us may eventually stop. Or, the third… we take them in, as we did Lucindy, in which case the rumors about Greenwood are bound to escalate all the more. These are our only choices.”

  “I could not live with myself, Richmond, if we knowingly sent them back into slavery… or perhaps, as a punishment for running away, a worse fate yet. Obviously we must help.”

  “Without a doubt,” nodded her husband. “God’s people do not turn away those in need. This family is in genuine danger. We must offer them refuge. I see no other way.”

  “Nor do I.”

  The silence that followed this time was longer. Both sensed that a turning point in their lives had come.

  “How long do you think Sydney and Chigua will stay?” asked Carolyn.

  “I don’t know. I will talk to Sydney and see what their plans are.”

  “They are so delightful. It is hard to imagine a Cherokee girl captured by fellow Indians and sold into slavery as if she were black. Negro slavery is bad enough, but Indians enslaving one another!”

  “Sydney is so refined and well educated. I cannot imagine him as a slave.”

  “He could easily pass himself off as a free black. You and he could ride into Oakbriar and Denton would never suspect a thing.”

  Richmond laughed at the suggestion. “I think it inadvisable to try it!” he said. “As commissioner, Denton no doubt gets lists and updates of runaways. Two such distinctive individuals as Sydney and Chigua might actually be in more danger.”

  “Why did he offer you the job as his deputy?”

  “That is a great puzzle to me—I am certain he had something in mind. Meanwhile, what do you propose to do with our guests?”

  “I thought we should put the LeFleure family in one of the second-floor rooms, out of sight from the front of the house, and Silas in the basement.”

  Richmond nodded. “I am thinking, too,” he said, “that perhaps we need to make provision for the horse and the wind. If people are wandering about the countryside looking for us, I would rather they know where to come rather than stumbling into Oakbriar or the McClellan place asking for refuge.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that! You are right. Their looking for us in the very shadow of the home of a very unsympathetic commissioner adds all the more to the danger.”

  Midway through the next afternoon, as the new guests had settled in, Richmond went in search of Sydney, to find out more about their plans, their destination, and to see what might be the most prudent course to follow both in their protection and in getting them to the North.

  He found him alone in the library. Sydney was standing before a tall shelf, a book in his hand, obviously engrossed in what he was reading.

  He heard Richmond’s step and glanced toward him.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” said Sydney. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Of course not,” smiled Richmond. “Books are not relics to be admired on shelves, but tools to be used, mines of information and wisdom to be learned and gleaned from, treasures to be spent over and over not hidden away in vaults.”

  Sydney smiled as he spoke.

  “I delight in few things more than seeing another with his mind buried in one of my books,” added Richmond.

  “You echo my sentiments exactly,” rejoined Sydney. “Thank you so much. I have not seen such books since my father died. And to enjoy them after a bath and with clean clothes, and knowing my family safe and with friends… what can I say—I am more appreciative than words can express.”

  “We are happy to be in a position to help.”

  “When I walked in here an hour ago, I was assaulted by a thousand sensations of nostalgia—the sights, the smell of leather and paper and dust and the faint hint of mildew from some of the older volumes—there is nothing like the smell of a library!”

  Richmond laughed. “You are a lover of books indeed! It is one thing all book lovers share in common—the pleasure aroused by the tactile, evocative sensations of books on the physical plane as well as the intellectual and spiritual.”

  “How right you are. And how I have missed them. Yet standing here like this, already my years as a slave… they already begin to fade as a dream.”

  “What is it that has taken your fancy today?” asked Richmond, nodding toward the open volume in Sydney’s hands.

  “The Odes of Horace,” smiled Sydney.

  “And in the original I see. You read Latin?”

  “Only moderately. But this was a favorite of my mother’s. The moment I saw it I was immediately reminded of her.”

  The two men found chairs in a nearby nook surrounded on three sides by books, one of several such alcoves through the room.

  “How did you end up in slavery?” asked Richmond as they sat down, “after what must have obviously been an upbringing of education. And your speech, when you are not pretending to be a lifelong slave,” he added with a smile, “betrays, if my ears detect it correctly, a hint of the islands. Your name, too, I find intriguing.”

  “You are a perceptive man,” said Sydney, returning his smile. “You have indeed deduced much about my past correctly. My mother was French, born in Europe. She spoke three languages, in addition to a working knowledge of Latin,” he added, gesturing to the book in his hand. “Even in France as a free Negro, however, there were not so many opportunities as for whites. My mother worked as governess for a wealthy French couple. Monsieur LeFleure bought a sugar plantation on the island of Jamaica. My mother accompanied his family. Years later, upon the death of Madame LeFleure, Monsieur LeFleure gradually fell in love with their quiet black governess and they were married. I am their son—my father white, my mother Negro. Though I have never seen it for myself, I suppose one would say that I am entirely French, though as you noted, I still bear the noticeable accent of Jamaica.”

  “That is a remarkable story,” said Richmond. “But it does not explain your slavery. Was the island raided by slave traders?”

  Sydney shook his head. “I am afraid the treachery was closer at hand,” he said. “When my father died, his two sons by his first marriage—though my father’s will was explicit in leaving his affairs in my mother’s hands—seized control of the plantation. They sold my mother and me to slave traders bound for the coast of the American south. I never saw my mother again.”

  “Sydney, I am so sorry!”

  Sydney nodded appreciatively, though the memory saddened him.

  They continued to chat. Gradually followed a lengthy discussion of many things touching on points spiritual, personal, and political, and in which both men shared more of their past lives than they would have anticipated doing with a relative stranger. Before another hour was out, both felt that they had been friends for years.

  “What about you?” asked Sydney after some time. “From your remarks about spiritual things, and what you told me about freeing your slaves, I cannot but presume you must have a story equally fascinating as mine, though obviously it has brought you along a different path to this moment.”

  “I too have been on a pilgrimage,” Richmond nodded, “though as you say, a much different one than yours. We have both sought freedom, I suppose, but of different kinds.”

  “Are not all men and women on pilgrimages of some kind?” said Sydney.

  “Hmm… a fascinating observation. Or maybe it should be said that all men ought to be. I cannot help but wonder if enough actually are.”

  “I see your point,” rejoined Sydney. “You are right. But continue—I did not mean to sidetrack you from telling me about yours.”

  “In my own case,” said Richmond, “mine has been what I would call a spiritual pilgrimage. It was my father-in-law who in a sense set the course of my search. Your quest has been to regain your freedom. Mine has been for freed
om of a different kind—freedom within myself. But I don’t want to bore you with—”

  “Please… go on.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “All right then… well, Carolyn’s father was a minister. One night I wandered into his church, as unbelieving a man as you could imagine….”

  James Waters had not seen his host for a good part of the afternoon. He had been out walking, his mind full of more unexpected sensations than he knew what to do with. Now he had returned to the house. Hearing voices coming from the open door of the library as he made his way along the second-floor corridor toward the room he had occupied during his visit, he paused briefly to listen. A vigorous discussion was clearly in progress. Intrigued, he walked to the library door and stood listening.

  “…my unbelief was not out of hostility toward God,” he heard Richmond saying, “but out of ignorance concerning who God actually was. Carolyn’s father triggered something within me to remain in ignorance no longer.”

  “How so?” asked Sydney.

  “When I walked into his church and heard him say that God knew us all personally and wanted to do his very best for us,” Richmond went on, “I knew that I had to find out if it was true.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Something about the hugeness but simplicity of the claim struck me hard. No doubt my circumstances at the time contributed to my reaction. How can one separate the emotions and the intellect?”

  Still James stood listening, filled with many mixed thoughts and emotions. Slowly he entered the library softly and continued to listen from the obscurity of a nook between two tall bookcases.

  “I had to know if such an absolute goodness was indeed at the heart of the universe,” Richmond continued. “The question was monumental in my mind. If God existed but was cruel, I had no interest in him. If God existed but was selectively loving and selectively cruel, then I had no interest in him. If God existed but his ways were ruled by rote formulas, I had no interest in him. If God existed but his means of conveying truth were dictated by the rituals and creeds of what went by the name ‘church,’ then I had no interest in him.

  “But… if God was infinitely good, and infinitely forgiving, and infinitely trustworthy, and infinitely patient with saints and sinners alike—now there was a God I could believe in! And that, in brief, was the nature of my pilgrimage.”

  “So… where did you look for the answers?” Sydney asked.

  “A shrewd and important question!” rejoined Richmond. As he spoke he glanced up and saw his other guest, where he had been inching closer as he listened, across the library.

  “Ah, James!” exclaimed Richmond. “Come… join us. We have been trying to solve the riddle of the meaning of life!”

  Sydney laughed as James approached and took a third chair. “Have you succeeded?” he asked.

  “Speaking for myself,” replied Sydney, “I am happy just to have found a place where my family can be safe. The greater meaning of life can wait!”

  All three men laughed.

  “But our host,” Sydney added with a good-natured smile, “was about to tell me—at least I think he was—how he discovered the meaning of the universe.”

  “I don’t know whether you’ve noticed,” said James, “but he has a predilection to wax eloquent about spiritual things if given half the chance.”

  Richmond roared with delight. “James, my friend, you have come to know me well!”

  “But I have not forgotten my previous question,” persisted Sydney.

  “I remain curious where you sought answers to your quest about God… and what answers you discovered.”

  Richmond grew serious and thought a moment or two.

  “In three places, I would say,” he began slowly. “I call them three laboratories where the search for truth must be carried out.”

  “And they were?”

  “The first and most obvious was in the Gospels themselves.”

  “But those are such ancient texts, written almost two thousand years ago,” interposed James.

  “And alive with power for any and all who would search for God and discover him in their words,” rejoined Richmond. “But mind you, I say in the Gospels themselves,” he added, “not in their interpretation. Many seek to interpret them whose minds are clouded by the fogs of doctrines passed down to them by generations of unbelief within the church, but not actually found within the Gospels at all.”

  “Unbelief… within the church?” said Waters, his voice betraying confusion.

  Richmond nodded. “The church, or should I say, what is called the church, is the prime repository of unbelief in the world.”

  “How can you possibly say such a thing?” now asked Sydney. “I have not been a churchgoer myself, though many of the slaves where we came from were highly religious. But I do not understand what you mean. How can the church, which supposedly exists to promote religion, be a storehouse of unbelief?”

  “Because some churches, as I have subsequently found, attribute to God characteristics that are the most glaring of falsehoods.”

  “A strong statement.”

  “Worse still, they not merely encourage people to believe these falsehoods—a thing that ignorance alone might possibly account for—they go further and insist that their members believe them, and call those who question them unbelievers in danger of the fires of hell.”

  James nodded as he listened. He knew exactly the mentality his host was speaking of, though could not help being surprised at hearing him speak of it in such seemingly critical tones.

  “The worst of it,” Richmond went on, “is that these tenets of false belief are nowhere to be found from the mouth of Jesus in connection with his Father. Thus some in the church perpetuate from generation to generation what can only be called unbelief in the true Fatherhood of God.”

  “You astound me, Davidson,” laughed James. “My, but you are plainspoken!”

  Richmond nodded with a thoughtful expression. “Perhaps I am too much so. But I wander from Sydney’s question. The other two places I sought to understand God were in the universe and within my own heart.”

  “Two very different places, it would seem,” said Sydney, “for the prosecution of your inquiry.”

  “Not as different as you might think,” rejoined Richmond. “And intriguingly, when the evidence from these two laboratories is analyzed, it yields a similar mystery that only the gospel explains.”

  “Linking the three laboratories of your search for truth.”

  “Precisely! In both the universe and within myself, I found the same puzzling dichotomy that has plagued man from the beginning of time—that which has been the mystery of the universe and has caused man to reject the idea of a good and loving Fatherhood—namely, the dichotomy between good and evil.”

  Now it was Sydney’s turn to express astonishment. “That is remarkable,” he said. “It is precisely that very question that has been gnawing at me for months as I have observed the diverse people we have encountered along the way of our journey. It is so clear that people are filled with both good and evil at the same time.”

  “It is a question that has puzzled philosophers, I presume, since people first began to look up and wonder where they came from. In the world there are beauty and ugliness, ecstasy and pain, happiness and sorrow, life and death, love and war, gorgeous sunsets and destructive hurricanes. And that same puzzling dichotomy, as you say, Sydney, exists in my own heart… in the heart of every man—a longing toward good, yet a propensity to do wrong… a reaching toward the right and noble and true, which is in constant conflict with a nature of selfishness. The problem of good and evil is foundational to much that man struggles to understand.”

  “You are so right,” said Sydney. “Wherever one looks, one observes a fundamental war between opposites. What can account for it?”

  “Indeed, what a puzzle it is. Yet in the gospel we find the answer to the riddle. God is the good, sin is
the bad.”

  “Is that not too simplistic, Richmond,” said James, “to explain all the cruelty and pain we see about us?”

  “Perhaps in its very simplicity we discover the meaning we seek. Yes, it is a simple explanation, though also profound. Once I saw it in all its simplicity, the mystery of the universe for me was solved: everywhere and in everything, there is a live heart of goodness throbbing with love for all creation.”

  “A poetic and beautiful description,” remarked Sydney.

  “Yet,” Richmond went on, “that creation, as typified in no other place so perfectly as in the heart of man, has gone bad—it has turned its own self-will in on itself.”

  “How so?” asked Sydney. He had never heard the ideas of Christianity explained with such clarity.

  “We were created for a purpose we have failed to fulfill,” answered Richmond. “We are not at peace with the essential nature of our beings, with the essential nature of creation. We are out of step. Thus exists the divine and universal tension in all things.”

  “But why did the universe go bad?” asked Waters.

  “Because God created it with the potential to do so built into it—the supreme expression of his love. It is called free will, the capacity to choose goodness, or reject it.”

  “Ah, now you’re going theological on us!”

  “I’m sorry. I did not mean to do that. All I meant by bringing free will into it was to say that every time any one of us makes a choice, from the simplest to the most profound, we become the living evidence, so to speak, both of God’s existence and of his love.”

  “And that is at root of the distinction I have noticed—is that what you would say?” asked Sydney.

  Richmond nodded. “Our power to choose between right and wrong,” he said, “between good and evil, is the greatest evidence of the love at the heart of creation. And when beings with the power to choose exercise that power by choosing to relate themselves in obedience to their Father-Creator, then will all again be right with the universe. To the degree each of us begins to engage in that yielding in our present lives does that eternal coming right begin to take place.”