by John Keene
I thought to say I did spot the person who knew where to take us and put us on a wagon bound straight north along the river for Quincy, where Dr. Eells lived. We spoke in what they call our gibberish but to us it was a language full of secret keys, and that person guided us to another person, in these days despite the daily terror against us we are still free and I can tell the truth because nobody can prosecute them or punish them now, so I can say they were both colored women, the first one carrying herself in disguise like she had no home in the world and the second was clothed like a male night watchman’s assistant. The second woman guided us to the wagon that brought us to Dr. Eells. Have you ever tried to keep a small child from laughing or crying because your life depended upon it? Have you ever hid with a spouse and two children, which was actually two too many for Dr. Eells, and I had to cajole him not to turn us away, recounting at least twenty times for him how I was already manumitted but explaining the danger my wife, since that she still was, and my poor children, faced, so for a week I implored him in his attic, which is where we stayed, mostly lying down in silence until he would come to question me periodically, because the slavecatchers particularly trolled that city, which was notorious for harboring fugitives, and I was sure the people who had laid claim to Sadie and the children, along with her spurned male friend, had sounded an alarm.
I thought to recount that finally after dawn on a Sunday a white woman came to Dr. Eells’ house seeking the cargo to Elgin and points east, and Dr. Eells stowed us all under a false floor which my wife was convinced would be our coffin until I reassured her that was the only way we would be able to travel while eluding the catchers’ grasp. We traveled in that shallow grave on metal wheels for what felt like days, riding the worst roads I imagine exist in the state of Illinois, though it was not even a whole twenty-four hours, and we stopped in a roadside grove along the way for water and to relieve ourselves and eat some cold porridge with walnuts and hardtack biscuits, then returned to our hiding place and when we climbed out we were in the city of Chicago, which was an impressive sight, to say the least, far more impressive than Hannibal, though Chicago wasn’t even as pretty or built up as old St. Louis back then, and so not as impressive as it is today.
I thought to narrate that there is where we settled, and as soon as we could I made sure Sadie and the little ones each got their Certificates of Freedom from the State of Illinois, Cook County, as I got mine, making sure mine read James Alton Rivers, since I kept the name I had always been known by but added the town where I first breathed in real liberty, and since we had finally reached the other side of the big snaking muddy river which had been the dividing line our whole lives up until then, our long bondage on the one side in Missouri and that goal we sought on the other, then we crossed the Illinois River which we had reached at Peoria, and finally the forking river in Chicago which takes you out to the sea-like lake, and I didn’t feel a single shred of remorse for having dropped the name of Miss Watson, since she wasn’t no great mistress or lady anyhow. I had to learn to say Mr. James Alton Rivers instead of just Jim as white folks always called me, or Jim Watson, which everyone had taken to saying, like this Sawyer boy now, just as Sadie had to learn to say Sadie May Rivers, May the middle name she took to acknowledge the month that we arrived, though she was not so fond of the last name Rivers, and kept calling herself simply Sadie May, and Elizabeth went by Bessie Amelia Rivers, to honor her late baby sister, Amelia, who died in infancy on that farm off Bear Creek where she was born, and Johnny, whose middle name became Obi after my grandfather I never met named Obi, who was a pure African they used to say, as well as the old faith I had kept alive, even in Hannibal, was quickly saying Johnny O. Rivers without missing a beat.
I think to conclude to the Sawyer boy and Huckleberry, all adulted now, that I keep that certificate at all times and in all places against my chest in a leather pouch I bought for myself and it reads JAMES ALTON RIVERS, FREE PERSON OF COLOR, a resident or citizen of the State of Illinois, at all times in all places, and entitled to be respected accordingly, in Person and Property, at all times in all places, in the due prosecution of his—my—concerns, at all times in all places, signed with the Seal of said Court, at Chicago, on the 23rd of November in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-two, and I have carried it all the way up to and through the time I returned to Missouri, settling here in St. Louis since I was not ever going to set feet again in Hannibal if I could help it, and even when some of the Hannibal people including those LaFleurs have happened upon me down here there is not a thing they could say or do because I had the states of Missouri, Illinois and the federal government on my side, though I’ve always made sure to have an escape route and a safehouse on the other side of the river ready to flee to given the trials the courts are putting Mr. Dred and Mrs. Lizzie Scott through.
Instead I said, “I was living in Chicago for a few years then I decided to come back home. I posted my bond to stay here, have been working steadily and decided to settle down.”
“Chicago,” Sawyer said, looking at Huckleberry, “sounds like our old friend has gone and got pretty fancy on us. What do you think about that, Huck?”
“I been as far south as Mississippi and over to Louisville, Kentucky but I never been to Chicago myself,” Huck replied.
“All kinds of things going on up in Chicago,” Tom said.
“Jim ain’t said nothing about all that, just that he been there and come back here,” Huck said.
“Some go to Chicago and get ideas,” Tom said.
The angles of that face, like broken porcelain, pulled apart and recombined until I almost did not recognize him. “Well, sounds to me like Jim is keeping himself out of trouble, and the worst thing for anybody these days is getting caught up in all that trouble, getting involved with people like Lovejoy or Torrey or that new agitator writer Mrs. Stowe what likes to stir up a whole heap of trouble too.”
I remained silent, thinking I should tell these two that two years ago, I consulted the omens and auguries, which told me that I should head down to St. Louis, perhaps continuing on to Kansas or Oklahoma territory, so I said goodbye to my children, promising I would write them every other week and send money for food and books and clothes, and goodbye to Sadie May, who could move to Timbuctoo with her new lovers for all I cared so long as she did not take my children there. I left Chicago first thing in the morning to walk back and hitch my way to my native state, though this time with my papers on me, saying James Alton Rivers, free in all places and at all times, determined nobody, LaFleur or anyone else, was going to put me under bond. Eventually I reached the city after crossing around the Indian mounds in Cahokia and lodged with my half-brother Ezekiel, who had been manumitted and left Hannibal first second he could, running around with the last name Carillon after the family that had held him, though I eventually convinced him to change it Rivers too. Through him I secured a job cleaning up and doing repairs on a tavern building owned by an older gentleman named Mr. Wallace Wallace, who had gained his freedom in the 1830s and was said, because of his silver eyes, to be the unacknowledged son of one of the oldest families in the county. Soon I was running that tavern since Mr. Wallace Wallace had so much other business, involving numbers and cards and palliatives, and sometimes ladies and studs, to attend to. There was a good number of those white men in the city who liked the delights that Mr. Wallace Wallace provided, but you always have to be careful when you get too deep in the cut with those kinds of folks, because you can turn up like Mr. Wallace Wallace, with his silk ties and ruby studded pocketwatch and silver eyes and pearl-handed pistol, wh
ich he did not hesitate to brandish if needed, floating face down in the Des Peres River, with no cut at all.
You could say Mr. Wallace Wallace left a welter, I want to tell these two, if you are trying to be both cruel and truthful, but he had fathered a number of children by different wives and girlfriends, some free and some still in bondage, some on the Missouri side and some over in Brooklin, right next to East St. Louis, and I heard tell that he had left another brood all along the river far north as Minnesota from the time he gained his papers up till now. As it was, I spoke to several people of the kind who could resolve the question of the building’s title while I took to running the tavern, though I had to finagle to get it into my name. As soon as I did I sold it to a white man who planned to tear it and every other building on the block down so he could throw up a warehouse, since in those days white people from every corner of their world, some from all across the free states and some from the Southern states, some from Ireland and some from Germany, were showing up as if the wind brought them, and they like to make money and take care of each other and that tiny tavern was in their way. I took the money, which was more than a servant’s wages, and bought another tavern cheap from a man leaving for Kansas, even closer to the river near the railroad tracks on Sycamore, from the roof you could even see Duncan’s Island where they carried out executions and lynchings. Ezekiel painted the sign with my name on it, Rivers Tavern, and I got down to business, always making sure that I watered down the liquor and allowed few tabs or overnighters, borrowing only when absolutely necessary, and I eventually found myself and Ezekiel a pistol each, mine nesting in the back of my trousers, to ensure nobody rolled us, though I regularly paid off the police and a representative of my ward’s alderman every other Thursday, always in the morning and a few cents more than they asked for, which meant I never had any trouble, no trouble at all.
For all my success in business, I have never had any luck with women, which I would never dare share with these two, and the first one I took up with in St. Louis, just to have a woman more so than I really liked her, had something going with another woman at the same time. I broke it off but she sent the second woman to come talk to me, saying they could make accommodations if I could. The way it happens in the Bible the man would take several wives and not the other way around, but this woman, Augustine, had a way about her that could bend you to her will. The woman who came calling, with her tight curls and skin as black as mine and her limp, was named Louisa, and I ended up moving in with the two of them and Augustine’s two girls who were halfway to adult age and not so amenable to their mother’s guidance, especially since she was too caught up with her own business, a sure disaster when dealing with young people. Louisa was interested in learning about healing and reading the signs, and after a while I found myself growing quite fond of Louisa herself, and she confessed she had told Augustine she’d better keep me on as soon as she laid eyes on me, so she could get to know me, with my shoulders of coal and hairy legs and skillful way around a bar and a ledger book, and I found myself taken with this short skinny woman with skin the color of midnight and lips always parted as if posing a rhetorical question and her love of books, midnight eyes, and that leg broken during her bondage and never properly set, and that was how all that began. Still I warned her we ought to be careful, not just because of Augustine, who it turns out had other things happening on the side herself and was fine to let us have our own, but with her girls, and because of the law which saw fit to jail or send people down the Mississippi who didn’t follow the rules and conventions. Louisa, in her fashion, said several weeks later, having joined me in running the tavern, don’t worry about all that, we live in a frontier area, nobody cares about what we’re doing, and if the law comes we can always flee west and request to live among the Indians, and there’s nothing the law could do to us then.
Instead I said, “My business, Huckleberry, is just working hard and living my life, and I don’t know nothing about no Lovejoy or Torrey”—though I knew good and well who they both were, what free man didn’t know the names of the abolitionist heroes—“or the Mrs. Stowe lady”—and who in the last year hadn’t ever heard of her or her book?—“and I haven’t ever even considered going west.”
Huckleberry nodded, but Sawyer was watching me closely. He said nothing for a while, until I moved to take my leave and walk away. As soon as I stirred he laughed, more a cackle than an expression of humor, leaned close to me and said loudly, as passersby looked on, “You’d better watch yourself, Jim, you hear me? Good thing we know you but you walking these streets like they belong to you, and they don’t to no nigger, no matter what some of you might think these days, so you watch it, cause the time’ll come when even the good people like me and Huck here have had enough.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder as he said this, and I thought to cock him cold in his wire-lipped mouth, but I did not want to do anything to lose my tavern or my freedom, so I said, “I hear that, Tom,” and he said, losing his laugh, though Huckleberry was almost smiling now, “You call me Mr. Tom Sawyer, Sir, old man,” and I said, “YesMissTomSawyerSoilMan,” so fast it wasn’t clear whether I’d left out the “Mr.” or the “Sir” or added the “Old Man,” and he looked hard at me, almost smiling, reminding me in a firm, cold voice, “Boy, I’m warning you, you had better watch yourself.”
Huckleberry seized my hand, clasping it so tight he brought back in a quick flood of feelings those years with the Widow Watson, and whispered as if he wanted only me and not his friend to hear, “You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is about ready to break wide open, and I sure don’t want to see you get swallowed up.”
I told him I would not get involved in any such things, though I was going to do whatever I wanted within reason especially if it was going to ensure that no other person would ever be enslaved, and not a single thing except maybe death was going to swallow me up or see that happen to me, certainly nothing involving him or that other one. I offered the two my good wishes and farewells, not moving yet watching as they walked away, Sawyer’s head and arms gyring like a nickelodeon picture, Huck nodding but never glancing back, until they vanished into the horizon near Mill Creek.
I never came across either one of them over the next few years, not even once, then the war began so perhaps both had moved away to some other place, Sawyer to Nevada or Oregon, where some of the local people were heading, Huckleberry to Kansas, or perhaps they had already headed off to fight on the Confederate side. There was a pressing question about which way Missouri would go since Governor Claiborne had sided with the insurrectionists, then General Lyon came and the Germans faced down and fired on the insurrectionists, all those scrubby Dutch with their rifles from the federal arsenal, though nobody I knew could believe white people would fire on other white people en masse like that. But they did and that was only the opening of the war here, as well as the sum of the fighting, at least for the people who stayed in St. Louis. By this time Johnny O. had come to live with me, and at first didn’t take so well to Louisa, though he stayed with us for about a year, finding work down on the levee with all the steamboats bringing goods to provision the troops, and in his off-time studied the healing arts with me when I wasn’t working the bar. He fell in love with a girl who was still bound to a family out in Bellefontaine, so I gave him money to go back to Chicago, so she could become free and they could marry. He left late one night and I was wrecked to see him go, but he wrote to tell me that after being stopped by the river patrols they got through, and he wrote me letters every other week, like I used to do with his sister and him, pro
mising he was going to come back and fight.
Right around the middle of the summer of 1863 the army announced that we could sign up, at the Schofield Barracks, and though I was over 40 now, 46 to be exact, I felt it was my duty to contribute directly to the struggle, though I was sure they would say, Mr. Rivers, you are far too old, but rumor was an old black man had been the first casualty when the battles began in Washington, so if he was willing and able to serve why couldn’t I, and I walked over there anyhow. Louisa protested my decision but, without conceding that what I was doing was right, agreed to stay in town and run the tavern while I was gone. It tore me apart to say goodbye to her, us never having left the other’s side since we had taken up house together, but I knew both from all the signs at my disposal and deep in my core that at war’s end I would walk through that tavern door and see her standing there.
They took me and we, the First Missouri Colored Troops, men mostly young but some old from in state and some from points north, west and south, mustered out not long thereafter, and I will tell the reporter about all of this, about each battle from the time we crossed the Meramec, then headed to Helena, and the entire journey, with every battle and firefight all the way down to Texas, but only once I have finished telling him about the second time I saw that face, which was after we had already reached Los Brazos de Santiago, near Brownsville. Have you ever noticed how on the decisive day the light comes through the trees a certain way, how the patterns of the future reveal themselves as a ghost language and you got to do more than just pay attention but use all the knowledge and wisdom you have ever gained to interpret it? Because I had been studying on just that when Sydnor, from my company, ran right up to me hollering, all out of breath, “Colonel talking about how despite the cease-fire we might scrap it up one more time with the rebels,” repeating himself until Bergamire and the rest of them closed his trap with their glares. I listened to him since the light that morning was not shining like on the morning that I chose to cross the Mississippi with Sadie May and the children all those years before, the sun’s beams not drawing a path to the shore, not touching and catching and caressing the bluewood branches there in Texas just so, though in Hannibal it had been crab apples and cherries, the gleaming dressing the leaves with its omens and auguries, printing clues in shadowed patterns in the grass and soil you just needed to discern if you could, because the real test is always to go beyond mere guessing to following the map the world around you sets forth.