Song Yet Sung

by James McBride

  —I don’t reckon that’s true, he said. Miss Kathleen don’t hate me.

  —She’s a slave like us, Liz said. Slave to an idea.

  —What idea is that?

  —That they’re better than you.

  —I don’t think she’s that way.

  —If she ain’t that way, why you her slave, then, body and soul?

  —She can’t afford to let me go. She got no husband.

  —And you got no wife. Whyn’t you marry her?

  —Stop talking crazy! he snapped.

  —What difference do it make? she said. You don’t see the bluebirds fussing with the red ones ’cause they ain’t got the same kind of coloring. Or the red birds not singing to the blue ones ’cause they’re different some kind of way. I don’t need to go up north to be free, she said. I’m free here.

  She pointed to her heart.

  —You got a whole nest of ideas in your head, Amber said. They won’t do you no good in Maryland.

  —It don’t matter where I am, she said. I ain’t clean. I got hate in my heart. I can’t clean myself of it. I done the Devil’s work. I’m a murderer now. Hell’s what I deserve. I’m dirty. I just want to be clean when I die.

  —What do clean got to do with it! Decide when you get to a safe place if you clean or not. Ain’t no clean ’bout this place. Never was, to my knowing.

  She gazed at him a moment.

  —Why ain’t you married? she asked. Smart man like you.

  —I ain’t taking a woman till I’m free, he said defiantly.

  She smiled. You sound like a child hollering at a hurricane, she said.

  —That ain’t no way to talk to somebody risking his neck to help you.

  She gazed at him and her eyes softened, making him sorry he had talked so sternly.

  —You’re like me, she said softly. You afraid to love, ain’t ya.

  —That ain’t it, he stammered.

  —You love the North, she said. You love a place. There ain’t nothing there to love. Not today. Not tomorrow. I seen it already, seen the colored up there, in their tomorrows. You know what’s up there? Colored men walking round free as birds. They don’t love their women. They don’t love their children. They love horseless carriages. And money. And boxes of candy. Clothing. Long cigarettes. And chains. Chains of gold. They cry for their chains. They even kill for them. Ain’t nothing they won’t do for them. I don’t think you’re that kind of man.

  —You the oddest woman I ever met in my life, he said, but even as he said it, his heart felt light, for when she spoke about him being a greater man than one who chased gold, he felt a surge in his chest.

  —I just thank God I ain’t born tomorrow, she said. Ain’t no freedom in it.

  He stared into the night, afraid to trust himself to words for a moment, then leaned down next to her, their faces almost touching, his face earnest, searching.

  —You got to make a decision ’bout what to do, he said. You been here two weeks. You can’t just set here dreamin’ up funny thoughts. And I can’t keep stealing out here. It’s dangerous out in these parts now. Truly.

  Seated with her knees curled into her chest, her long arms wrapped around her long legs, she looked at him sadly.

  —You ain’t got to worry about me, she said. I ain’t gonna live long. I dreamed that too. Jesus will make my dying pillow.

  —I won’t let that happen to you, he said, and was on her, kissing her, embracing her feverishly, gripping her tightly, holding on, pouring out years of lost chances and frustration, her tears wetting his face, everything inside him bent low, kneeling cowed before the altar of God’s love and passion, which had them both. They kissed long and feverishly, and he sobbed like a child afterwards, feeling pieces of his innards breaking up and falling apart, like the raindrops splashing against the tree trunk behind him. He held her face in his hands, then rose, embarrassed, stepped out of the burrow, and stood against the stone wall, his back to the burrow. The rain had ceased, and despite the darkness he could feel the glistening wet that seemed to settle around everything. He had broken ground somehow, and the thought unsettled him.

  —What’s the matter? she said.

  —Everything I had and always will have, he said, is my idea to be a man. I didn’t know how to do it. My pa didn’t know how to teach me. He said the white man liked him. He was proud of that. He lived for the white man’s respect. He expected me to do the same. I loved him. Wanted to be just like him. But even if he had learned his letters and knowed how to read, he wouldn’t have been a full man. Could never be. ’Cause he lived to another man’s reckoning of himself. So what does that make me?

  He looked down at her, sitting, crouched in a ball, her long, sinuous arms wrapped around her knees, the lantern shining off her face.

  —Them dreams you got, he said, the children that’s fat and running round, killing each other. The colored men who dress up as boys, they ain’t no different than the folks round here. Some is up to the job of being decent, and some ain’t. Color ain’t got a thing to do with it. My missus runs her farm like a man and treats the colored decent, because that’s in her. Missus Gables the next farm over, she’d reach over the Devil’s back before she showed kindness to a colored.

  He glanced up at the sky, the clouds breaking up, the moon trying to peek through a break in the clouds.

  —Being decent ain’t got nothing to do with today or tomorrow. It’s either in you or it ain’t.

  He looked down to see her response. Her arms were folded across her knees, her dress clutched up tightly against her. Her face was pointed downward, so he crouched down to peek at it, to look closely at her face in the dim lamplight.

  —Do you understand? he asked softly. You got to decide which of them you gonna be and live true to it. Being a slave is a lie. Even if you like it. It don’t matter whether it’s now, or a hundred years from now, or a hundred years past. Whenever it is, you got to live in a place where you can at least make a choice on them things. You see?

  He stood waiting for her response. Instead she snapped her head up suddenly and looked at him, wide-eyed with fear.

  —Get out of here, she said. Get out of here fast as you can.

  He heard a horse cough in the distance.

  From the darkness, not more than two hundred yards off in the field, he heard a woman’s voice.

  —Evening, you black bastards.

  With a quick motion he kicked the lamp away, grabbed Liz by the hand, and pulled her over the wall, pressing her onto her stomach, both of them lying flat. The thud of horses’ hooves approached and he heard more than saw the three horses leap over the wall, so close that they could feel the whoosh of their bodies. The horses galloped wildly across the field, the riders swinging lanterns as they went.

  The two leaped back over the wall in the direction from which the riders had come and quickly walked along it in pitch blackness, blind, Amber leading Liz, feeling with his hand along the wall, not running, for he knew the sound of their feet splashing in the muddy puddles would create noise. He simply walked briskly, fear creasing his chest, running its hand along his spine. He gently ran his hand along the top contours of the wall until he found a break in it, then peeled off to the left towards the thicket that led to the bog and the logging road that led back to the house. Once he got to that logging road, there was a path off it he knew that led to Sinking Creek where he’d left Miss Kathleen’s bungy. It was the long way, but their only chance. They would not survive a straight run.

  The three lamps swung in wider and wider arcs in the field behind them, circling each other as the riders searched for them. Amber looked over his shoulder and saw the three lights reach the edge of the field where the woods met the other side. They had searched the entire field on that side and now swung back and charged the wall towards them to search the field on their side.

  Liz tried to run, but Amber pulled her back. Running would only create noise. He walked at a fast pace, but not fast enough for their bar
e feet to make noise. The lanterns rose up in the air and down again as the horses took the wall, and now they circled again, wider and wider, the horses at a fast trot, the circles of light growing wider, until a horse swept near them, the lantern light barely missing them. The horse circled again and approached, the light coming closer now.

  The two broke into a run.

  Three steps and they were in the thickets, crashing through brambles, the woods too thick for a horse to follow. Footsteps behind them gave chase, but Amber knew where he was now. He ran left, towards the bog, splashing into the tiny creek and out the other side, trotting now, feeling his way through the trees and undergrowth, through another small bog area, and finally to Sinking Creek, where the boat waited. They clambered in. Amber shoved off and let the current take them just as the three pursuers arrived at the bank, Patty holding a lantern, which shined eerily, illuminating the bottom of her dress, revealing her ankles and feet, one foot clad in a boot, the other foot bare. He saw the feet lose their footing in the mud and fall back a moment, the dress kick up wildly, then regain their footing, the bare white ankle and the boot standing ankle-deep in the mud, its owner staring into the darkness as the skiff, only twenty feet away now, invisible to all, slowly, silently made its way downstream, carried by the current.

  Amber could hear them panting but knew they were unable to continue the chase, for the banks on either side of them were too steep and thick with woods and rocks for them to follow. He hoped for the love of God that Patty was as cheap as he’d heard—indeed, their lives were dependent on it—for most experienced slave traders would not draw iron and fire at a Negro, no matter how enraged they became, for a dead Negro was worthless. On the other hand, Patty was not just any slave trader.

  Through a cone of silence, Amber heard Patty call out.

  —You niggers made me lose one of my boots.

  From the bank, he heard the sound of two men laughing.

  snatched by the devil

  The rain had come to the Land just when the Woolman had expected it would. All the signs had been there. Two days ago there were two stars within the circle around the moon. That indicated two days before bad weather arrived. He burned the time hunting, fishing, gathering supplies to fight, and sharpening his knives on stones. On the morning of the second day he departed the Land. By afternoon he’d reached the white man’s land to begin his war.

  Even as he approached he could sense the white man was on the alert. The Land screamed its warning, every smell, tree branch, sound, and birdcall indicating that alarm was in the air. At the old Indian burial ground, he discovered fresh horse tracks all over the Indian field, even at the hollowed-out oak, where he’d watched the colored girl hiding. He had tracked her there easily when she first arrived but had not bothered with her. He was actually a little frightened of her. She had helped his son, surely, but she had magic, a power that was unseen, and for that he feared her. It did not escape him that she might put forth her powerful magic against the white man, or perhaps even use it to his favor. But like most things in the wild, she was, he decided, not entirely predictable. Besides, she was gone. The human footprints in the swampy field around the giant oak tree indicated that someone had moved around the hollow in haste. Perhaps the white man laid a trap for her there.

  He did not need to check the field further, to lightly finger and sniff the white man’s tracks along the wall and at the burial mounds to know the white man was present. He moved out of the Indian burial grounds towards Sinking Creek and spotted them almost instantly, from a distance: three people on horses, one of them a woman, perhaps the same three who had surprised him at the farm. They moved as all white men did, loudly and in packs, with their horses struggling through the bog, the horses up to their knees in swamp and muck, gingerly picking their way through the mud to find dry land upon which to lay their feet, the horses leading the men rather than the other way around. The Woolman watched them at a safe distance, satisfied. Out here on the bog, the tables would be turned. The fight would be fair. They had their shooting rifles and sniffing dogs and horses. But horses were useless in the fog that laid its hand gently across the Land each evening, and dogs could not follow in the tight, high grass of the marshes where he poled his skiff through five-foot-high grass without being seen; the bullets of their guns could not bend around the twisting tree branches and thick woods where he’d plant himself. He would overpower them one at a time. Their number made no difference to him.

  He watched them for several minutes, then backed away from the bushes and headed east. They were of no immediate concern. His trail and an easy jog would take him past them in minutes. He planned to strike elsewhere.

  Several months ago he’d watched a white man of the Sullivan farm sail off in heavy weather past Cook’s Point with a colored slave in tow. He’d read the dark, angry clouds that hung over the bay as the oyster boat disappeared. He’d huddled in his lair later that afternoon as the terrible squall roared overland. He watched for several days, and as expected, the white man and his slave never returned. Like most things he witnessed, watching in silence and without judgment, the Woolman felt neither sympathy nor anger at their misfortune. If the white man wanted to oyster in that kind of weather, that was his business. Life was neither fair nor unfair, neither cruel nor uncruel. Rather it was a tangible, real thing, precious, and not easily affordable. To waste it needlessly, the Woolman thought, was foolish. After all, the man had a son.

  Three of them.

  The colored slave and the dog at the farm where he’d nearly been caught two days ago had been a hindrance. But the colored man was gone—he’d watched him leave by bungy—and he had brought a special gift for the dog. The boy from the farm would be his, and perhaps his mother too. And when the white man came to ask for their return, he would somehow say, Give me back what is mine, and I will return what is yours.

  He was not worried about the two Negroes who were left behind to protect the white family, the nearly man-size Negro boy and his mother. The Woolman had never met a Negro who was not afraid of him. That was something his mother had taught him long ago. They can’t stand freedom, she said. It blinds their eyes. If you open the gate and show yourself, the first one will run and the rest will follow. He expected the Negroes at the white man’s farm to do likewise when he came to wage war. If not, he would deal with them harshly.

  The rain had stopped by the time he arrived at the edge of the cornfield, and the sun had finally peeked out from behind the clouds to give a halfhearted nod to the western sky before going to bed. He stood amid the thick woods behind the grove of pine trees near the cornfield and surveyed the farm below. Evening was coming. Avoiding the three white people on horses had used precious time. The sun that had finally peeked out from behind the clouds had already begun its downward descent, and the warm April breezes had the sting of winter’s edge still on their breath. It was going to be a cold night. Already he could see smoke curling out of the cabin’s chimney. He considered turning back and trying again the next day, but as he watched the white man’s cabin he spotted one of the remaining Negroes in the house, the man-size boy, emerge and disappear on the far side of the house on the Blackwater Creek side, out of sight. He crouched and waited.

  He did not have to wait long. A few moments later the white boy and his dog stepped out from the cabin. The boy and dog entered the tool shed, then came out, the boy holding a hoe. They headed towards the cornfield.

  The Woolman crept back again to the thicket, carefully moved to his spot in the grove of pine trees, and burrowed himself in his hole again, covering himself with pines, branches, and leaves. Moments later the boy walked through the gate to the cornfield, followed by the dog, which suddenly halted in the gateway.

  The dog turned its head and lifted its nose.

  The Woolman, lying flat on his belly, his eyes perpendicular to the ground, frozen in place, watched closely as the dog turned its long face to the wind, sniffing.

  The dog veered aw
ay from the cornfield and trotted up the slope towards the Woolman. The Woolman stayed where he was, motionless, his eyes not blinking, staring straight ahead at the dog’s feet as the animal approached.

  He waited until the dog was right in front of him, then slowly raised his silent, unblinking gaze to meet it. The dog barked once. The Woolman slowly reached out, holding a piece of muskrat. The dog ventured closer and sniffed it. The Woolman held the meat out a bit farther.

  The dog took a tentative bite and Woolman had him by the neck. He pulled the dog’s head into the hole towards his own face.

  Out in the cornfield, Jeff Boy heard Lucky bark, looked up the slope towards the grove of pines, and saw the dog disappear into what appeared to be a rabbit hole, his tail wagging, then suddenly out of sight.

  —Lucky! he called out.

  The boy trotted towards the grove, took a tentative step towards the spot where the dog had disappeared, and watched in shock as the earth rose and what appeared to be a hideous piece of earth, tree, hair, and arms charged him.

  The boy’s bloodcurdling shriek lasted no more than a few seconds, but the cries were so piercing and frightful that they echoed over the calm trickling waters of the Blackwater Creek and the rocks and crevices that abounded nearby, so that everyone within the house and outside of it stopped what they were doing.

  Wiley was whittling a piece of timber on the bank of Blackwater behind the house when he heard it. He dropped his knife, stood up, trotted to the side of the house, and walked towards the cornfield. The sun was making its final descent into the bay beyond and shone directly in his face. He walked briskly, his hand over his face, shielding his eyes, peering into the field and beyond it, but saw nothing. As he passed the front door of the house, his mother, Mary, and Miss Kathleen ran out the front door, their heads turning in all directions, followed by Miss Kathleen’s two smaller boys.