Song Yet Sung

by James McBride

  She heard the tread of footsteps behind her and turned, startled.

  It was her eldest, Jeff Boy, a towheaded, freckled youngster.

  —What is it?

  —Can Amber help me with the corn? I can’t plant all that corn by myself.

  —Get Mary to help.

  —She’s busy washing Jack and Donnie.

  —Where’s Wiley?

  —Gone to town, where you sent him.

  She sighed and lifted her bucket towards her face, checking to see if the water was clear.

  —Let’s fetch him, she said.

  They strode into the tobacco house. Amber was in a corner, slicing tobacco leaves with his short-handled axe.

  —Amber, she said, can I speak to you a moment?

  —Surely, ma’am, he said easily, grinning.

  She dismissed her son. She waited until the boy was outside, then closed the shed door.

  —There’s a chicken missing from the henhouse, she said.

  Amber smiled and shrugged. You sure? he said. You know that brown one, he hides behind the box in the corner sometimes.

  —He’s not hiding, she said. There was one missing last week too, she said.

  A frown creased Amber’s face.

  —Must be a fox about, he said. I can trap him if you want.

  Kathleen eyed him closely.

  —I thought you were ill yesterday, she said. He had complained of illness and stayed inside all day, yet she had seen him weaving a basket behind his cabin and returning from walking in the woods that led to Sinking Creek.

  —I’m feeling better, thank you, he said.

  —Were you playing ill?

  —No, ma’am. I had a bout of the piles. Comes and goes. Don’t know what it is. Mary said she was gonna fix me up some vinegar and jimsonweed tea. That’ll cure it.

  —Are you going to the dance with the Gables Negroes this Saturday?

  —Well, I’m still not feeling too spry, Amber said. Depends on if you need me here. I’m not up for dancing just yet. Still feeling kinda light.

  —I don’t need you. What about that girl you were courting. From the Gables? She’s a nice girl. Of age. I can write you a pass.

  Amber smiled and tilted his head.

  —Oh, you know me and her is…He paused. Well, I’ll put it this way. I asked her. I said, Is you towel that’s spun, or a towel that’s woven? If it’s spun, it means she’s free and not spoken for. But she wouldn’t say.

  For the first time, Kathleen noticed how handsome Amber had become. He was twenty-three now. Standing in the tobacco shed, looking at him holding the axe, she saw the ripple of muscle beneath his worn sleeves, the sweaty neck, the reedy hands, the chest that filled his shirt. He had become, she realized, an attractive colored man before her eyes, soft-spoken and pious. He had often accompanied her and her late husband to church while Nate, Mary, and Wiley attended their own colored services. Amber seemed to enjoy the ministry of the new Methodist minister that was all the rage in Cambridge. His polite manner had earned him praise from several other slave owners. Her late husband had even made several tentative deals with other slave owners to have first crack at buying whatever young Negro girl Amber found suitable. They planned to borrow the money, because the cost of buying slaves these days was prohibitive. But Amber seemed to tarry on the issue of marriage, which made him suspect. Slaves that did not marry tended to run off. And Amber was of marrying age.

  —You ought not to wait on her to give you the go signal, Kathleen said. No young lady is going to say, I want to marry you. You got to do the talking.

  —Yes ma’am, I’ve thought on it quite regular, Amber said. The book of Job do say, He that will go forth must multiply, don’t it.

  That, too, gave Kathleen pause. She had wanted to teach Amber his letters, but her late husband stopped her. Still, he had the presence of mind to scrawl markings and pictures in the dirt to remind him of various Bible passages she had read to him. Everything he did, she realized with what amounted to alarm, screamed runaway.

  She leaned against a large pole of the shed and said softly, You thinking of running off, Amber?

  He appeared startled and then looked down. She watched his face closely. Every eye blink, grimace, she knew, would mean the exact opposite of what he said. She was prepared to disbelieve him no matter what he uttered.

  —I done something wrong? he asked.

  —Not at all.

  He blew out his cheeks.

  —All I got is right here, he said slowly. My sister needs me. Wiley needs a man now.

  He looked away, then glanced at her, nervously fingering the large tobacco leaf in his hands.

  —Truth be told, before he died, Marse did say when I got be twenty-five, he would consider letting me buy myself. His word was always good. I was hoping…I been meaning to ask you ’bout it. If you would still honor that promise. If you can.

  —And then what would you do?

  —Build me a boat. Take a wife. Get work oystering. Maybe take Jeff Boy fishing. He’s my fishing buddy, y’know.

  She stifled a smile, relieved. She’d forgotten how close Amber was with Jeff.

  She rose.

  —The way dirt is rising and falling round here, I might lose this place in two years, she said.

  —You’ll have it if I’m here, missus, God willing.

  —All right, then, she said. If I still have this place in two years, I’ll honor Boyd’s word.

  He smiled uneasily.

  She nodded at the door.

  —Jeff Boy wants you to help him plant the corn, she said.

  —He does, does he? Amber chuckled. She watched him place the axe on a shelf and move towards the barn door.

  —You ain’t got to help him unless you want to, Kathleen said. I reckon you might want to go ahead and see about trapping that fox. But that can wait till Wiley gets home if you want, she said.

  She chided herself for her indecision. If Amber wanted to trap the fox, let him. She hated handling the coloreds. It was the hardest part of working the farm alone. Her ambiguity on slavery, she felt, was affecting everything she did. One minute she gave an order, the next she withdrew it. A man, she thought, would not show ambiguity in dealing with the coloreds. He would be firm with them. He would be solid and say, Do this, or Do that, and even if it was wrong, play it with a straight face—as if the colored didn’t know better. The whole business, even as she turned the thoughts in her mind, gave her a headache and made her feel foolish. She reddened for a moment. Amber seemed not to notice.

  —Jeff and me, we’ll do it together, he said.

  He headed out. She followed him. A large sliver of light burst into the dark tobacco shed as Amber pushed the door open to find a grinning Jeff on the other side.

  —There’s a fox about, he said. You wanna help me trap it?

  The boy’s face broke into a grin.

  She watched them slowly walk up the slope towards the tiny cornfield that lay just beyond the house, Amber leading, the boy following. She saw Amber wait for the lad to catch up, then tenderly lay a hand on the boy’s head.

  She decided that she had placed too much thought on nothing. Running a farm was hard. She picked up her bucket to head inside as a strong gust of wind blew across her face. She unconsciously, instinctively, turned her head to check her bearings out of habit, a waterman’s wife, to note the direction of the wind. It was blowing out of the northeast, from the direction of Pennsylvania.

  How close it all seemed.

  Just eighty miles.

  With a worried glance at the storm clouds gathering in the sky over the bay, she picked up her bucket and headed towards the house.

  the woolman declares war

  From the woods just beyond the cornfield of Kathleen Sullivan’s farm, a pair of eyes followed the movements of the white woman as she made her way into her cabin. He’d been watching her, along with her slave and son, for several hours now. He had silently slipped into the high grass near the edge of
the cornfield when the woman and her slave stepped into the shed, leaving the boy alone to toss rocks into the stream next to the cornfield. But just as he was about to leap for the child, the door of the smokehouse opened and the two adults emerged again, so he had slipped back beyond the tree line into the grove of pine trees, concealed in the thick bushes, lying flat on his stomach so they wouldn’t see him.

  It didn’t matter. Had Kathleen, Amber, and Jeff Boy stood five feet from him, they would not have seen him. The Woolman was so practiced in the habit of standing in one place, frozen, for hours at a time before springing on his prey, that even the most practiced hunter would pass him unwittingly. Standing frozen was more than second nature to him. It was a way of life. He always trusted the notion of patience. It was how he believed the world worked. Everything, he was sure, had already been decided, so moving against it was like moving against the tide of the Chesapeake, or against the dark swirling waters of the Sinking Creek, which surrendered its treasures to him regularly and naturally. Be silent. Wait. Waiting was how he had saved himself when he first found himself alone in the wild nineteen years ago. He was a tiny boy then, his memories like the winter breath of the Chesapeake that blew against his broad, uncovered shoulders: chilly, not warm, but manageable. He had come to the Land with his mother. It was she who had taught him to hunt, to stand frozen for hours at a time until the prey wandered close, then spring forward to move against it. It was she who taught him to watch the wildcats stalk their prey, how they lay hidden, silent, always downwind, pouncing when the prey wandered close. But he had wandered away one morning and returned to the cove of rocks where they lived and found her asleep in death. He sat with her for a week, eating berries and waiting for her to awaken, until, amazingly, the Land came to him: turkey buzzards, swamp rats, even otters, those that feed on the dead, and with them came those that feed on the scavengers of the dead: wild boar, wildcats, even bear. Cold and hunger drew him to action. He learned to hunt while guarding his mother’s corpse, and from that day forward learned that patience was more than virtue. It meant survival.

  He had few memories of the white man, and what memories he did have were not pleasant. Most of what he knew about the white man he’d learned from his own woman, who ran off from them and whom he’d found wandering the Land years ago. It was she who taught him the little bit of speech that he knew. It was his woman who taught him nature’s ways, who birthed his son, and whose body lay buried near the garden at the rear of the cabin where he lived—the same cabin where fever had reduced her to the same state of sleep in which he’d found his mother. Woolman accepted her death in sorrow but did not protest. All matters in life, he was certain, were already decided. There was nothing to do but accept. He’d had that belief all his life.

  But recently, matters had come to a head that helped him change that belief. The Land that was always so silent, so giving, so free, so full of destiny, dignity, gaiety, and life for all living creatures who inhabited it, had come alive with a new kind of noise. The white man’s world was spreading, encroaching. There were hunters, trappers, fishermen, and even Negroes stalking the Land. Several days ago he’d seen a giant Negro wandering, moving through the Land at night, uncertain and clumsy with the panicked, desperate speed of a runaway. He followed the giant as he moved through the Land out of curiosity, and watched him depart with real sadness, stumbling off into his destiny, the Woolman leaving him to his fate. He would have liked to meet the giant, to wrestle him, to test his mettle against him, for he had yet to gaze upon a man who equaled him in speed or strength. But the giant, Woolman realized, was too large to risk friendship upon. The giant was just that. A giant. Woolman was afraid there might be a race of men just like him. To risk drawing their ire did not seem wise. Besides, the Woolman had his own problems now. His own freedom was suddenly in question. The life he had known for many seasons had suddenly vanished. The white man had taken his son.

  The Woolman was not quite sure what had happened to his son. He had taken the boy into a new area to hunt, an area that was not quite crowded with movement and noise as the Land had become. He had turned his head for a moment and the boy had vanished. He searched frantically and found him in some kind of trap, next to a young colored woman who was wounded in her head in some fashion. The Woolman had lain in wait because he had learned through painful experience that where there was one colored in the woods, there were bound to be white men not far off. The fact that the woman was beautiful was immaterial. She was a stranger, and he was, at essence, shy and distrustful. His son was already trapped. Perhaps he would be next if he dared venture closer. So he waited, frozen, hiding in plain view, invisible to the woman, watching, waiting for the right moment to step into the clearing, kill her, and take his son home.

  But she had not behaved as he had expected. He’d watched her close her eyes, kneel in prayer to create a magic spell, then fashion a device using tree branches that she bent in magic fashion to free his son. She had stopped the bleeding of the boy’s wound, then gently bathed him and cleansed the wound. For that reason he did not kill her when she fled but rather followed her, leaving gifts of gratitude before returning to fetch his son and take him home.

  But when his boy came home he worsened. His leg healed but a fever had set in. He needed more help. In desperation, he decided to take his son to the white man. His memories of the white man were terrible, but his woman, before she died, had tried to convince him that all white men were not evil. She tried to make him carry her to them for their medicine when she’d become ill, but he was afraid. She took to her death sleep without protest, for she understood him. But for his son, who had seen only eight dry seasons, he had no choice. He decided to try her way. It was a mistake.

  He had taken his boy to the white man’s biggest village. He had seen a group of white men standing together. He had approached stealthily and laid his boy on the ground, then hid, hoping they would see his wounded son and help him. But instead the men spotted his boy and rushed at the child. There was some confusion. One of them grabbed his son from the others. From his hiding place, the Woolman could not know that the man who grabbed his son was a kind doctor, insisting on helping the boy. He did not understand that the men were arguing over the boy’s status, some insisting the boy was a slave and a runaway, others, including the doctor, declaring his son was free and willing to fight over it.

  Their argument ended when Woolman burst out of his hiding place and ran towards them. The white men turned to look at him and the confusion on their part turned to alarm, then fear, for their eyes fell on a colored man who had walked the bog and swamps of the eastern shore and not seen civilized man for the better part of nineteen years, half clothed, ripe and muscular, black as ebony, with pearl-white teeth, his sculpted body shaped and chiseled by years of hunting and living free, his hair grown wild and woolly. Several staggered back in fear. But others reached for their weapons and ran to fetch their dogs.

  Woolman stopped short before he reached them. He saw the fear in their faces, the blend of fright and horror that would very soon transform itself into blind hatred. It was a moment that he remembered from his own childhood, and the roaring rage that lived behind that blind hatred grasped his heart with the grip of a thousand men and he could not help himself. He stopped in his tracks, turned, and ran. He ran like he’d never run before, through blind alleys, over cobblestone streets, over fences, down alleys, crashing through piles of discarded oyster shells and furniture, the white man on his heels. He tripped over wood planks and slid through mud; through backyards and stables he ran, past barking dogs and frightened livestock. The whites were frantic to catch him, and if it hadn’t been early morning with much of the town asleep, he wouldn’t have gotten away.

  As it was, he barely escaped, stumbling through a confusing array of yards, filthy alleyways, mounds of oyster shells and piles of shucked clam shells, over dirt paths till he somehow reached the safety of the thick wooded swamps outside Cambridge City. Once he hit t
he swamps, where he knew every birdcall, thicket, tree, creek, and canal, he was safe, and moved with the silent speed and surety of the wildcats he admired. They had no chance to catch him then. He ran into thickets where their horses could not run, on thick legs built strong from years of running; he fled through thick, six-foot-high grass that rose out of marsh water four feet high, the water too deep for their horses and dogs to follow. He ran barefoot, through the mud and mire of the bog, as if his feet were webbed and had wings on them.

  He made it safely back to his hollow in the Land. But he was alone. His son was gone. A prisoner of the white man.

  Sitting in his cove, Woolman mulled his future with deep bitterness. He had gone to the white man for help. Instead of helping him, they had declared war on him. He would return the favor. He would take one of theirs. And if possible, exchange it for the return of his.

  Lying on his stomach in the thick swampy woods outside the Sullivan farm, he watched the white boy and colored man as they entered the cornfield. He waited for several minutes and then moved so he could see them at the end of the row, the boy tossing the seeds, the man following behind him with a hoe, covering the seeds with freshly dug earth. When they moved to another row, Woolman followed, working his way along the thickets that shielded him from view. When they reached the edge of the cornfield, there was no cover, the land having been cultivated, but he had already worked that problem. By night he dug a small trench near the base of the shallow roots of the pine trees and covered it with branches, pine needles, and thick brambles. Now, in broad daylight, he slowly emerged from the cover of the thickets, walked slowly through the grove of pine trees, and slipped into his hole headfirst, so that his head faced the cornfield. He lay there beneath a few pines and branches, frozen, just a few feet from the two, close enough to hear the pitch of their voices.