Cion (16 page)

The way Birdman talked about quilts made Nicodemus fall deeply in love with his. He held it close to his chest. He vowed that he would keep it and treasure it for as long as he lived, and would of course share it with Abednego since it contained the soul of their mother. Its batting was made of the Abyssinian Queen’s old dress. As he caressed it he could feel the herbs placed in the batting to ward off evil spirits and to give it curative powers.

After they had taken a bath the stationmaster gave the boys a change of clothes and his equally ample wife fed them cheese and bread.

When Birdman took leave of them, promising to see them the next day with plans for their escape to the north, the boys were reluctant to remain at the station. It was obvious that they did not trust the stationmaster because he was white. Birdman assured them that the man could be trusted as he was a hard-core abolitionist and many abolitionists were white. Indeed, the term was associated only with whites whereas in fact blacks were abolitionists too since they were fighting for the abolishment of slavery. The boys, however, could not forget how they were betrayed by a slave hunter who posed as an abolitionist back in Virginia.

The boys were kept in the basement and were given strict instructions not to venture outside. Nicodemus was addicted to his flute, so before they went to sleep on the mattresses and thick blankets laid out on the floor for them he played it for a while. Abednego could not wait to get into the comfortable bedding after all those days sleeping rough on the road. Soon he was fast asleep and dreaming of the Abyssinian Queen singing a lullaby to the sun.

Deep in the night the boys were awoken by loud banging at the door and angry shouts demanding that it be opened forthwith. The stationmaster rushed to the basement with a lantern. “I know that voice,” he said. “William Tobias. Slave catcher from Virginia. Crosses the Ohio with impunity in search of runaways. Works with lackeys in southeast Ohio. His spies must have seen Birdman unloading the passengers…you, I mean.”

Tobias was known as a dangerous man who would stop at nothing to track down his quarry. He was running a thriving business hunting down fugitives and returning them to their owners for the reward. And it was quite substantial. One hundred dollars for bringing a slave back to Kentucky or Virginia. Two hundred if the slave had already crossed the Ohio. When he couldn’t find any runaways the unscrupulous Tobias captured free blacks and sold them to other unscrupulous slaveholders in his home state.

Tobias and two henchmen broke down the main door and the stationmaster ran up the stairs to meet the invaders before they could discover the boys.

“We know they’re here,” said Tobias.

“Yeah,” said another man. “Mr. Tobias can smell a fugitive nigger a mile away. That’s why he don’t need no dogs. He’s a bloodhound hisself.”

“There’s no one here,” said the stationmaster. “Just me and my wife.”

“And some parcel that Birdman deposited,” said Tobias. “Search the house!”

He knew already that there was a fat reward for the black boy and was eager to lay his paws on him. His men pushed the stationmaster aside and rushed into the house. “The basement,” shouted Tobias. “That’s where they gonna be.”

Nicodemus was not going to be captured without a fight. As the men rushed down the stairs he lunged at the first henchman and held his neck firmly in his grip. They rolled on the floor while Nicodemus pummeled the man’s face. At that time Abednego was lashing out with a broomstick, regretting the folly of giving the old hermit their musket. Nicodemus jumped to his feet and saw Tobias and the second henchman ready to pounce on him. He kicked the henchman on the floor very hard and was about to charge at Tobias when a shot rang. Nicodemus fell to the floor. Slowly the first henchman rose from the floor, with a smoking gun in his hand.

“You bastard!” screeched William Tobias. “You killed my five hundred big ones!”

Tobias drew his six-shooter and shot the first henchman. He and the second henchman fled and rode away on their horses, leaving their dead partner in the basement for the Underground Railroad people to worry about.

The story is told by the ghost trees that after the death of Nicodemus, Abednego found refuge in Tabler Town, long before the town changed its name to Kilvert. Nicodemus’s dying words were to urge his elder brother not to give up on their dream to follow the North Star to its conclusion, until he reached Canada. Abednego, however, decided not to proceed to Canaan, in order to be near his brother. After Birdman and the Quaker stationmaster left him in Tabler Town, he found solace in the floods that assumed a life of their own and gave him a feeling of security; in the sycamore trees whose hollow hearts hid beautiful secrets, like the heart of the tree outside his mother’s cabin; and in the sampler that constantly reminded him of the Abyssinian Queen singing to the sun.

He never got to know that the blue fly returned and hovered over her, and she died with a broad smile on her face.

And the sampler! Oh, the sampler! He would jealously guard it for it was the only memory of his brother that was left.

For the first time Abednego got to know the meaning of freedom among the tribes—the Shawnee and the Cherokee and the Powhatan—that lived side-by-side in the region. He learned about the God of the Shawnee, the Great Creator known as “Our Grandmother,” and paid his respects to Her, and gave his thanks for being brought to this beautiful place. Having been brought up by the graceful Abyssinian Queen, he found it comforting that the Creator was a woman. That was one thing the preachers of his Christian church that met in the Fairfield Farms big barn had failed to teach him.

He was not the only fugitive who found refuge among the tribes. The most famous was the one who gave his name to the town: Michael Tabler.

The ghost trees began Michael Tabler’s story at his father’s plantation in Ravenswood, Virginia, just across the Ohio River. Young Michael foolishly fell in love with his father’s slave, a willowy mulatto beauty called Hannah. The senior Tabler was determined to put to an abrupt stop all this madness, so he sold Hannah to some plantation far away from Ravenswood. But young Michael was just as determined that nothing would come between him and his love for Hannah. He searched for her until he found her, and then purchased her back from the new owner. He dared not take her back to his father’s plantation, so like many exiles before him he crossed the Ohio River and settled among the “Indian” tribes in Rome Township in the southeast of Ohio. He bought a piece of land, founding the village of Tabler Town, which later became known as Kilvert in its incarnation as a coal mining town.

Abednego befriended the Tablers and in later years their eleven sons, many of whom married local Native American women. He was also welcomed with open arms by a community of Africans who had settled there from Virginia over the years, some from as early as the late 1700s and others recent arrivals brought by the likes of Birdman and his fellow conductors of the Underground Railroad. Many of these Africans, all former slaves, intermarried with the Native Americans and with the Irish immigrants who had also received sanctuary in Tabler Town. A new race of people was founded.

Abednego learned that the Ottawa tribe of Ohio had a tradition of helping runaway slaves long before the Underground Railroad. So did the tribes of Rome Township. That was why he found so many black people. This confirmed some of the stories that the Abyssinian Queen used to tell about Africans who were welcomed by Native American tribes, some of them even becoming chiefs.

At first Abednego had great difficulty adapting to a life as a free man. For a long time there was a lot of anger in him at what had been done to his people. As a very light complexioned mulatto he was obsessed with blackening the race in defiance of those who had enslaved him and his mother. An Irish girl fell in love with him, but he was determined to fight against his own feelings for her, because he wanted to marry an African girl—as black as his mother. A woman who would tell stories of the old continent as the Abyssinian Queen used to do.

Love, however, had other plans for him. He fell in love with a Native American woman—the daughter of Harry Corbett, a Powhatan gentleman with vast orchards—and married her.

Orpah is obsessed with ghost trees. That’s what these designs tell me. The trees feature in them in many forms. Fine detail of the mottled bark in shades of brown and gray and green and red and blue. And in black and white. Cracked branches and hollow trunks twisted in agony. Roots exposed above the earth. Knees bent in prayer. Trees in flight. Trees in dance. Trees caught in a whirlwind. Trees in a trance. White branches spreading on a black background like the web of a demented spider. Ghost trees in all shapes and sizes, often so stylized you wouldn’t know they were ghost trees. You wouldn’t know they were trees at all. You would just feel their power from the goosebumps that run amok all over your body. At least, that’s what they do to me. Damn that Orpah with her sitar! And now these designs; all executed in wax crayons by an adept but naive hand.

It’s been weeks since I retrieved them from the ghost tree and I can’t help but look at them every day. Before I sleep I take in every detail, and in the morning when I wake up I do the same. I have not told anyone about them. Once I thought I would talk to Orpah about them when I chanced upon her in the kitchen where she was making coffee for herself. But as soon as I entered she abruptly left, abandoning the boiling water on the stove. I went after her as she fled through the kitchen door and around the porch until she disappeared into a door that I later learned was another entrance to her room. They call it the mother-in-law room because of that entrance. I had not been aware it led to her room because there is another door that opens from the passageway into her room. I stood at the door and pleaded: “Please, Orpah, I mean you no harm. I just want to talk to you about something I found.”

She ignored me. I went back to the kitchen and removed the kettle from the stove. Perhaps, I thought, I should take the drawings back to the tree. And forget about them and their creator. But I couldn’t let myself do it then. I kept on postponing. Just one more time. Let me look at them one more time. I will return them to the tree tomorrow. Just one more time. Until today. This was my last attempt at having some form of communication with Orpah. I am not going to try again.

I believe Ruth: this “girl,” she’s got issues. Mostly with me, from the way she behaves toward me. I do not know what I ever did to her. Does she perhaps resent the attention that her mother is paying me?

I must say a strong bond has developed between us. Ruth and me. I have become her sounding board. When she is frustrated by her children’s inertia she talks to me about it. She calls me to her table as she creates her quilts and asks me earnestly what I think is wrong with her children, after she did so much for them. Why do I think they are repaying her this way? I don’t usually have answers for such questions. It is clear to me anyway that she does not expect answers. She never complains about Mahlon Quigley even though he spends his days staring motionlessly at his garden or brooding with the other elders on the porch of the Kilvert Community Center. Instead, she would rather complain about politicians, and would ask me why I think they are all such a scandalous breed, except of course the one politician very dear to her heart. I voice my opinion only in those instances when I agree with her point of view. In all other instances, which are by far in the majority, I keep my opinion to myself. And this has earned me the honor of being referred to as a good listener by her. And of being called “Ruth’s African” by the neighborhood.

I learned of this nickname on my first visit to the Kilvert Community Center. I wandered there on my own one day when Ruth was busy with her quilting, Mahlon was tending his garden by shifting the positions of his little American flags, Orpah was buried in her room doing God-knows-what and Obed was whooping it up in Athens. I passed three brooding elders sitting on old car seats on the porch despite the chill. As I opened the door I heard one of them tell the others: “That’s him all right…Ruth’s African.” They squinted to take a thorough look at me. One gave me a toothless grin and I smiled back at them.

Inside the hall were many, probably a hundred or more, bales of clothes in black plastic bags. Two middle-aged women—one quite stout and round, the other slim and sinewy—sat on a bale each, sorting out the clothes. A young woman sat at one of the long tables in the room, punching something on the computer.

I greeted and offered to help.

“He’s Ruth’s African,” said the young woman.

“My name is Toloki,” I said. “Toloki from South Africa.”

“He’s a professional mourner,” said the young woman, flaunting her knowledge of me to the other women, who didn’t seem to grasp the significance of my occupation and to place it in the grand scheme of things.

“We hear so much about you,” said the slender one. “Welcome to the Center.”

The plastic bags reached almost to the ceiling and it was obvious that the ladies needed a hand to move them about. The young lady at the computer told me her name, and that she was a volunteer from Athens who occasionally helped with the Center’s books. The two ladies at the bales introduced themselves as Irene Flowers and Barbara Parsons. Irene was the slender one. “She’s almost eighty years, you know?” said Barbara. I could understand why Barbara took such pride in Irene’s age that she would announce it unprovoked to a stranger. Irene looked fifty-five at most. That’s why I thought she was middle-aged. I expressed my surprise at her youthful looks.

“It’s because of onion,” she said.

“She eats one raw onion every day,” said Barbara.

“Been doin’ it since I was a girl,” Irene chipped in.

I promised them that from then on I was going to eat raw onion every day, although it might be too late to save me as they could see from my battered looks. They laughed at this and flattered me, saying that I still looked handsome for my age. Of course they knew nothing about my age.

Irene’s onion was quite a coincidence. Those of you who know me from
Ways of Dying
will remember that a diet of raw onion and Swiss roll used to be a special treat for me.

“As a matter of fact I had the onion habit too once upon a time,” I told the women. “I am tempted to resume it so as to look young and beautiful like Irene.”

They laughed once more because they thought I was just joking.

The onion and Swiss roll habit is one of those things I lost when Noria—the late and lamented love of my life—became my habit.

Irene was proud to show me around as Barbara focused on sorting the clothes and pricing them. They were donated by an organization in Lancaster, Irene told me. It was going to take days to price them. Then after that they were going to have a flea market where they would sell the clothes to raise funds for the Center. The clothes that were not bought would be left outside for the poor people to take for free.

“You being from Africa and all you can choose any clothes you want for yourself,” offered Barbara. Me being from Africa and all…that reminded me of Ruth.

“I’d rather buy to support your Center,” I said. “When you’ve sorted them out and priced them I’ll come to the flea market and buy some.”

I did not mean to deprive them of the joy of dispensing some charity to an African, and I felt bad at turning down the well-meant act of generosity. However I have always paid my way through life and I was not about to change that by taking alms from my new friends. Besides, I can afford to buy my own clothes. I have good savings accumulated from the plentiful deaths that I mourned back in my country.

Irene’s tour of the Center began at the hall with five long tables for quilting, a glass-panel cupboard with quilts and other odds and ends stored in it and a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall. Today the tables were all stacked in one corner to make room for the bales of clothes. Then there were the bathrooms for males and females and a big storage area for food donations that were later distributed to the poor. But Irene’s pride was the kitchen. Here she practiced her famous culinary skills which, she said, I would experience first hand if I stayed for lunch. I was not about to turn a lunch invitation down.

Irene gave me a brief history of the Center. It was founded by her son James, who died from polio in 1978. She’d kept the Center running for the past forty or so years. She promised James that she would continue to work at the Center after his death. Although she was now a senior citizen—albeit a sprightly one—the community, especially the senior citizens and the indigent of Kilvert, depended on her for the food and clothes distributions, and for the dinners that were held at the Center to celebrate such special days as Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and for the commemoration and observance of important occasions such as Black History Month and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In recent years she had the assistance of the formidable Barbara, who was also a fund-raiser and food bank manager.

The women told me that the Center had known some glorious days. At one time it was even the southeast Ohio headquarters of the North American Indian Council, serving people of Native American descent in a ten-county area. Unfortunately a few years back it lost its federal funding, and now it had to struggle to raise funds for its survival. But Irene and Barbara would not let it die without a fight.

I have since become a frequent guest at the Center, and sometimes I assist with minor repairs. Or even with cleaning up and mopping the floors. This does not sit well with Ruth. It had become a source of pride to have an African of her own. Hence her jealousy and injured pride when I befriend others, such as the women of the Kilvert Community Center.

Much as I am Ruth’s African to the people of Kilvert, I have earned the ignominy of being “my mama’s lackey” to Obed, who feels I owe my loyalty to him and not to anyone else since he was the one who discovered me.

He has obviously not given up on me though, and still hopes I will one day redeem myself as his role model and “African shaman.” He still discusses with me some of his hare-brained schemes for the betterment of himself and the rest of mankind. Each day there is a new scheme. I know even as he outlines it that he will not pursue it to its conclusion but will replace it with a new scheme the next day. He dreams these schemes up when he is asleep at night. Some evenings he goes out to have a great time in the bars of Athens with Nathan and comes back in the wee hours of the morning. Even when he is hungover the next morning he will invariably have a new scheme.

Most of these schemes involve some form of dabbling in the occult, which he claims is from his Native American heritage, or on one or two occasions from some African heritage I had never heard of. This does not surprise me one bit because I have observed that people of African descent in America often create African heritages that no one in Africa knows about. There are some who are descendants of kings and queens who existed only in the collective imagination of their oppressed progenitors. I also know that there are many rituals and traditions long dead on the mother continent, that were preserved and transformed and enriched by the slaves to suit their new lives in America. I therefore cannot claim that just because I have no idea of Obed’s African mysticisms they are not drawn from practices that once existed in Africa. And of course Africa is very big and there are many things I do not know about the hundreds of cultures on the continent. Perhaps my search for mourning should have started there—from one country to another. But then the sciolist had other plans for me. I will still do it. One day I will do it.

There is always a strong profit motive when Obed dabbles in the mystic. Like when he took up hand trembling, which was one scheme that endured for some time.

I discovered his hand trembling practice by chance when I heard the women at the Center gossiping about it. In the middle of December with all the chill and snow Obed had set up a tent near the pool at the Federal Creek and was telling fortunes. Gullible people were actually paying him money for it.

I decided to go down to the Federal Creek to see for myself. And indeed there was Obed standing over a fire outside a green tent.

“So you heard about it, homey?” he asked with a broad smile. “Am a hand trembler. Didn’t tell you about it ’cause I wanted to refine my skills first. You ain’t the only one who’s got powers of them shamans no more, homey.”

I didn’t know what the heck hand trembling was all about and why it got him so excited. He was going to make a lot of money foretelling people’s futures, he said. At that moment a curious elderly man walked down to the creek, for he had heard in the village that there was a new shaman camped at the Federal. He was surprised to find that it was none other than the wayward son of Mahlon Quigley. Obed tried to convince him this was serious business. It was nothing to joke about. He had received a calling in his dreams from his Native American ancestors and he was now a true hand trembler.

“Don’t be silly,” said the man. “Your ancestors ain’t no Navajos. They’re Cherokee or Shawnee or Powhatan.”

“Shawnee,” said Obed. “They ain’t no Powhatan or Cherokee.”

“Hand trembling is a Navajo thing, man, and ain’t no Navajos here,” said the stubborn man. “It ain’t Shawnee. It ain’t Cherokee neither. It ain’t nobody’s around these parts. And it ain’t nothing to play with.”

“It don’t matter no how,” said Obed. “Shawnee…Navajo…same difference ’cause they all Indians. It’s an Indian thing, that’s what matters, and I am a freakin’ Indian.”

He then offered to demonstrate to the skeptic how skillful he was as a hand trembler. He asked the man to blindfold him, which he did with his blue bandanna. He then asked us to hide something and he would tell us exactly where it was. He went inside the tent while I hid my belt in a shrub some distance away from the tent. I actually made sure that the hiding place was behind large boulders out of the tent’s view. I took a circuitous direction to return to the tent. Obed came out of the tent with a beaded container, from which he sprinkled some yellowish powdery stuff he claimed was corn pollen on his left hand. As soon as he did this his hand began to tremble. He clapped his hands and both of them vibrated and it seemed as if they were forcing him to go in a certain direction, which was of course a beeline to the shrubs behind the boulders. Still trembling, the hands led him to the belt.