Song Yet Sung

by James McBride

  song yet sung

  ALSO BY JAMES MCBRIDE

  The Color of Water

  Miracle at St. Anna

  James McBride

  song yet sung

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of

  penguin group (usa) inc.

  new york

  2008

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by James McBride

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McBride, James.

  Song yet sung / James McBride.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1766-5

  1. African American women—Fiction. 2. Fugitive slaves—Fiction. 3. Visions—Fiction. 4. Maryland—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.C28S66 2008 2007035969

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To Stephanie, my dreamer

  Contents

  the code

  patty cannon

  the gimp

  the woolman

  big linus

  lums

  everything in fives

  the sign

  eighty miles

  the woolman declares war

  the blacksmith

  discovered

  snatched by the devil

  sounding the alarm

  speak to the pot

  catching money

  spreading the word

  the double wedding rings

  the woolman meets patty

  the song yet sung

  meeting joe

  finding the woolman

  hell in spite of redemption

  liz’s discovery

  denwood meets the woolman

  showdown

  epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  the code

  On a grey morning in March 1850, a colored slave named Liz Spocott dreamed of the future. And it was not pleasant.

  She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed of Negro women appearing as flickering images in powerfully lighted boxes that could be seen in sitting rooms far distant, and colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards—every bit of pride, decency, and morality squeezed clean out of them.

  Liz had this dream in captivity, just as the flickering light of her own life was disappearing, and when she awoke from it realized with a gasp that it was some kind of apparition and she had to find its true meaning in this world before she died. This brought her more grief than her condition at the time, which was not pleasant, in that she’d been lying for three weeks, badly wounded, imprisoned in an attic on Maryland’s eastern shore.

  She had taken a musket ball to the head at Ewells Creek, just west of New Market. It was five a.m. when she was hit, running full stride on a brisk March morning behind three other slave women who had made a desperate dash for freedom after two days of keeping a hairs-breadth from two determined slave catchers who had chased them, ragged and exhausted, in a zigzag pattern through the foggy swamps and marshland that ran from Bishops Head Island up through Dorchester County. They were nearly caught twice, the last by inches, the four saved by a white farmer’s wife who warned them at the last minute that a party with horses, dogs, and rifles awaited them nearby. They had thanked the woman profusely and then, inexplicably, she demanded a dime. They could not produce one, and she screamed at them, the noise attracting the slave catchers, who charged the front of the house while the women leaped out the back windows and sprinted for Ewells Creek.

  Liz never even heard the shot, just felt a rush of air around her face, then felt the cool waters of the creek surrounding her and working their way down her throat. She tried to rise, could not, and was hastily dragged to shallow water by the other women, who took one look at the blood gushing out near her temple and said, Good-bye, chile, you free now. They gently laid her head on the bank of the muddy creek and ran on, the sound of barking dogs and splashing feet echoing into the empty forest, the treetops of which she could just make out as the fog lifted its hand over the dripping swamp and the sun began its long journey over the Maryland sky.

  Not two minutes later the first dog arrived.

  He was a small white and brown mongrel who ran up howling, his tail stiff, and ran right past her, then glanced at her and skidded to a stop, as if he’d stumbled upon her by accident. If Liz weren’t shot and panicked, she would have remembered to laugh, but as it was, sitting in water up to her waist, she felt her face folding into the blank expression of nothingness she had spent the better part of her nineteen years shaping; that timeworn, empty Negro expression she had perfected over the years whereby everything, especially laughter, was halted and checked, double-checked for leaks, triple-checked for quality control, all haughtiness, arrogance, independence, sexuality excised, stamped out, and vanquished so that no human emotion could emerge. A closed face is how you survive, her uncle Hewitt told her. The heart can heal, but a closed face is a shield, he’d said. But he’d died badly too. Besides, what was the point? She was caught.

  The hound approached and she felt her lips curl into a smile, her face folding into submission and thought bitterly: This is how I’m gonna die—smiling and kowtowing to a damn dog.

  The dog ruff-ruffed a couple of times, sniffed, and edged closer. She guessed he couldn’t be a Cuban hunting dog, the type the slave hunters favored. A Cuban hunting dog, she knew, would have already ripped her face off.

  —C’mon boy, she said. C’mere. You hungry? You ain’t no hunting dog, is you?

  She reached into her pocket and produced a piece of wet bread, her last. The dog edged forward. Sitting in water up to her hips, she propped herself up and gently leaned towards him, her hand extended. She stroked him gently as he ate, then wrapped her fingers around his collar, ignoring the bli
nding pain in her face.

  —You shy of water? she asked gently.

  He sniffed for more bread as she calmly stroked him and tenderly pulled him into the water until he was up to his chest. She tasted warm fluid in her mouth, realized it was blood, and spat it out, edging him deeper in. A surge of dizziness came and passed. With great effort, she slowly slid backwards into deeper water, easing him in, the sound of the busy current filling her ears as it reached her neck.

  The dog was eager to follow at first, wagging his tail. When the water reached his throat he began to pull back; however, it was too late. She had him now. Holding his collar, she desperately tried to yank his head into the water to drown him, but the dog resisted and she felt her strength suddenly vanish.

  Over his shoulder, through the dim fog and low overhanging trees of the nearby bog, she could see the horses now, two of them, thundering through the swamp, the riders ducking through the low overhanging juniper and black gum trees, their coats flying outward, horses splashing forward. She heard a man shout.

  The dog, hearing the shouting of his master, seemed to remember he was a hunter of humans and attempted a clumsy, snarling lunge at her, his teeth bared. With her last ounce of strength, she shoved his head into the water, drowning him, then pushed him away and let the current take him.

  She clambered up the steep embankment on the other side and felt hooves slam into the muddy earth near her face. She looked over her shoulder and expected to see a white face twisted in fury. Instead she saw the calm, handsome face of a Negro boy of no more than sixteen, a gorgeous, beautiful chocolate face of calm and resolve.

  —Who are you? she asked, stunned.

  The beautiful Negro boy smiled, showing a row of sparkling white teeth.

  —I’m Little George, he said. He raised the barrel of his rifle high, then lowered it towards her face. Merciful blackness followed.

  They laid her in a corner of the attic and waited for her to die, but her body stubbornly refused. For days she dissolved into and out of consciousness, moaning, her nightmares filled with garish images of the future of the colored race—long lines of girls dressed as boys in farmers’ clothing, young men standing before thousands delivering songs of rage that were neither sung nor played but rather preached over a metallic bang-bang that pounded out of tiny boxes. Meanwhile, as if responding to the litany of odd images, the swelling in her head increased, then changed color from red to brown to purple to an off orange. As the days dissolved into nights and melted into days again, her head and the musket ball seemed to come together in a kind of conspiracy, each trying to outwit the other: Her face swelled here. The musket ball moved there. The face bulged there. The musket ball moved here, neither capitulating, each doing a kind of death dance, with her soul as the anxious partner in waiting, until the musket ball quit the game, pushing its way out to the surface, where it bulged just above her left eye, a grotesque, grape-sized lump. One night, lying on her back, she reached up to her left temple and felt it, just beneath the skin, and dug her fingers into the gouging mound of pus and blood until the awful gurgling mass of flesh popped open and the ball landed on the floor with a sharp ping as she passed out.

  She’d awakened to find herself vastly improved, deathly thirsty, and able to see clearly for the first time in weeks. The constant headaches had receded, and she noticed the overwhelming stench in the room. She took it to be a sign that she would live, for which she felt decidedly ambiguous.

  The next time she woke she raised her head off the floor and looked about. She counted at least twelve souls in the room, all asleep, most dressed in rags. She was chained next to a thin, white-haired, old woman, a cocoa-colored soul with a deeply wrinkled face, who woke up coughing and hacking, then sang softly:

  Way down yonder in the graveyard walk

  Me and my Jesus going to meet and talk

  On my knees when the light pass’d by

  Thought my soul would rise and fly…

  The words blew about like raindrops in the wind, floating into the attic’s rafters and beams and settling on Liz’s ears like balm. The old woman noticed Liz watching and stopped singing.

  —Lord, the woman said. I’d give a smooth twenty dollars for a sip of that water there.

  She eyed a pot of rancid-looking water behind Liz’s head.

  Liz, feeling dizzy, clenched her teeth, grimly propped herself up on her elbows, and reached for the grimy bowl of filthy water. With trembling hands, she held it to the old woman’s lips. The woman sipped gratefully, then reached over and laid a wrinkled hand across Liz’s chest.

  —Feel that, she said.

  Liz reached up and felt it. Cold and clammy.

  —I’m hurt inside, the woman said. Ain’t seen a drop of my own water, though.

  —Where am I? Liz asked.

  —You in Joe’s Tavern. This is Patty Cannon’s house.

  —Who’s she?

  —She’s a trader of souls.

  —Who’s Little George? Liz asked.

  The old woman stared at the ceiling silently. Her sweaty face, almost waxen in the growing light, hardened, and Liz saw a grimace settle into her lips.

  —I never lived—God hears me speak it—a sinning life, the old lady said. But if I ever get these chains off, I’ll send that nigger to his milk.

  —Be quiet, someone hissed, ’fore you wake him downstairs.

  The woman turned to Liz, staring intently.

  —You know the code?

  —What code?

  —We will rise at sunrise and rest at midnight. All that sort of thing.

  Liz looked blank.

  —I reckon not, the woman said. You was moaning so much while you slept, I reckon the Devil was throwing dirt in your face.

  —I been dreaming, Liz said.

  —’Bout what?

  Liz hesitated. In a room full of trapped runaways, where an informant would give away another’s life for a piece of bread, there was no trust.

  —You ain’t got to fret ’bout nobody here, the woman said. Her hand lifted from Liz’s chest and scratched a line in the dust of the floor, drawing a line between them.

  —What’s that? Liz asked.

  —When you want trust, scratch a crooked line in the dirt. Can’t no slave break that line and live to tell it.

  —But I ain’t a slave, Liz said.

  Around the room, she heard laughing.

  —Me neither, said a man lying in a corner.

  More laughter and tittering.

  —Pay them no mind, the old woman said. I’ll tell you what: You tell me your dream, I’ll tell you the code.

  —What I need the code for?

  —You can’t go no place without it.

  —I ain’t no place now.

  —Suit yourself. You think you gonna write yourself a pass and frolic up the highway outta here? Life ain’t that simple, and the white man ain’t that stupid. ’Course you need the code. You here for a purpose. Little George done shot you and gived you medicine and washed you. You corn on the cob to him, chocolate and pretty as you is. Death’d be a relief to you, once he’s done. He’s a thirsty camel fly when it come to women. Every woman in here knows it, she said.

  She looked away a moment.

  —Including myself, she said softly. Old as I is.

  She looked at Liz again.

  —I’d say you need the code more’n anybody here.

  —What is it, then?

  —It can’t be told. It got to be lived.

  —How so?

  —You got to speak low. And don’t mind the song, mind the singer of it. Especially the singer of the second part. Don’t nobody know that part yet.

  —What’s that mean?

  —It means what it say. If you see wickedness and snares, you got to be a watchman to the good. You got to own to your part of wrongness. That’s some it.

  —Why you talking in circles?

  —Ain’t no circle, child. You wanna know the straight way outta here? I’m telling i
t! But first, tell me your dreams.

  —Why?

  —You tell me your dreams, I’ll tell you how to get out.

  Liz lay back and stared at the ceiling. It seemed a fair bargain.

  —I dreamed of tomorrow, Liz said, carefully choosing her words.

  The room lay silent. Liz felt them listening. She saw no reason to hold back. She told the woman her dream: about black men in garish costumes playing sport games for more money than any white man could imagine; about Negro girls trading their black eyes in for blue ones; about men dressing as boys their entire lives; about long lines of Negroes marching as dogs charged and bit them; and colored children who ran from books like they were poison.

  —And the children’s music, Liz said. It teaches murder.

  The woman listened silently. Then she stretched her arms as far as her chains would allow, raised her head off the floor, and spoke to the room.

  —I knowed it was true, she said. I told y’all, didn’t I? She’s two-headed. She can tell tomorrow.

  Liz heard murmurs of assent.

  It was nearly daylight now. Through the slivers of light that peeked through the slats of the leaky roof, Liz noticed in a darkened far corner of the room, two gigantic human feet, the largest feet she had ever seen. The immense toes spread apart like oversized grapes, each toe pointed towards the ceiling. The man connected to those feet, Liz thought with alarm, was a giant.

  The woman stared at Liz.

  —Tell me about yourself, the woman said.

  Liz began to tell the woman about the web of relationships she’d left behind, the torrent of tears and abuse, the plotting and planning, the hardship of running through an unknown land to an unknown world, but the woman cut her off.